The parent post is so unconventional as to seem irrational at first-...
Unconventional?!? This guy is parroting the same line that comes up a dozen times in every slashdot story that deals with the issue. It's not insightful, it's just karma whoring.
Yeah, I would say that's reasonable. If you're not paying your taxes, then you're ripping off all the other taxpayers. Why should we subsidize your hobbies?
Most people can't handle a car that stays on the ground. I shudder to think what would happen if personal airplanes became common for commuting.
Fortunately, this looks more like a half-assed grab for investment money than anything else. I rather doubt we'll ever be seeing one of those things barrelling through the sky. The future of transportation is improved mass transit, not flying cars.
... it actually talks about the 2.4 maintainer being retiscent about adding new features to 2.4, not the developers...
It's not like the maintainer is just there to type "patch -p1 new_feature.patch". He is tasked with studying everything going in, making sure that it works together, and distributing a kernel that meets the users' needs. He has decided (appropriately, in my opinion) that people's needs will be best served by refraining from adding lots of new stuff to the 2.4 kernel. If you want new features, you ought to upgrade -- that's what the 2.6 kernel is for. This really shouldn't present all that much of a problem -- upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6 is rather easier than the 2.2 to 2.4 migration, and all evidence is that the early 2.6.x kernels will be somewhat better than the early 2.4.x kernels.
Nobody can control when or where they will get calls.
This is the mentality that makes me hate cell phones. Yes, you can control when you get calls. You turn off the phone when you are in a situation when taking a call would be inappropriate -- in a restaurant, a movie theatre, a meeting, or whatever. If you fail to do so, you deserve to have your phone taken away and destroyed. You should count yourself fortunate that you only get dirty looks.
This case needs to be talked about rationally and I think Groklaw (and in a way Slashdot) are providing a forum for this.
Really? So where is slashdot hiding the rational argument? All I see is hundreds of comments where people repeat exactly the same things that have been said in every other story on SCO for the last six months. (And yet, they still get moderated as "insightful." Do people even understand what that word means?)
They can post whatever stories they want, but don't try to pretend that SCO stories are anything but an easy way to generate extra page views. There's been no intelligent analysis or debate here since the whole thing started.
only 75% of which are free (as in speech), and 95% of those 75% being crap.
There was a time when the "1000 Game" shareware cds did well enough. There are plenty of open source games that are better than those games. Finding enough interesting and fun games to fill a CD would be easy enough.
It would be rather nice to have them collected on CD, along with all the libraries that they require. It's fun to browse happypenguin occasionally and try out a few new games, but far too often I take a look at the installation notes, realize that I would need to download and install ten different libraries to play the game, and promptly delete it. If somebody was to do that legwork for me, they would have a product worth marketing.
And what exactly is a "fair price" for prescription medication?
One which doesn't account for the cost of research and development of new drugs, of course.
Re:IT *WAS* sold on E-Bay - Today!
on
Project Plex-Box
·
· Score: 1
Well, according to the item description, which you apparently didn't read:
Yep, you got me. When pulling data out of the original article, it would help if I did more than skim...
Re:IT *WAS* sold on E-Bay - Today!
on
Project Plex-Box
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well, according to the item description, which you apparently didn't read:
XBox Game System - $200
Plexiglass - $25
Neon Light - $10
Presumably, that's pretty close to the true values. (It looks like you can get a new XBox on sale at Amazon for $180, and I imagine you might get a bit better if you shop around, but $200 is probably about right.)
So he made $70 for his labor. Unless he was really quick, it probably wouldn't be a good idea for him to quit his day job.
So that you can see what others thought of it and debate interesting points of what you saw with others. Here, for example, on/.
When was the last time interesting points were debated on Slashdot? Last I checked, the level of debate on the LOTR movies was "Jackson suxxors!" "The movies r0x0r my b0x0rs!" "Gollum should get Best Actor!"
It is if you're an elitist snob who wants to follow the crowd of rebels who make fun of "society." If subtitled anime was the norm, and dubbed anime wasn't mainstream, these same people would be coming up with nonsense reasons why dubbing is better than subtitling.
The major components of a Unix system are a kernel and a C library - Linux is only one of those.
Yes, if you define "Operating System" in such a way as to artificially give GNU software extra representation, of course you can "prove" that a Linux system is completely dependent on GNU.
Of course, most of the rest of us realize that the term "operating system" includes hundreds of programs from different sources, and find it ridiculous that RMS thinks we should single out and pay tribute to his own project because of some vacuous claim of indispensibility.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't take too long to move 1e24 kg of mass, even if only moving a million kg at a time.
Let's see. Pretend that we could move 1 million kilograms of material every day. (That is, to say the least, a ridiculously optimistic assumption.) 1e24 kg / 1e6 kg = 1e18 loads. Divide by 365 to get a total of about 2.75e15 years. That's roughly... 200,000 times the age of the universe, assuming my numbers (and yours, since I used them) are correct. Of course, this also assumes that there is 1e24 kg of material that is worth bringing back to earth. I find that to be doubtful, to say the least.
Oh, just as a quick fact, it looks like it takes roughly 3 billion joules (about 785kW*h) to move one kg out of the moon's gravity well and bring it to earth. (Assuming, of course, that you can just allow the load to drop to earth after pushing it to the point where it will fall. Anybody want to check my math?) So we're talking about expending 785 million kilowatt-hours for each daily load back to earth -- and, of course, it gets worse when coming from other places.
This topic comes up any time space mining is mentioned, for the same reasons. You simply don't understand how freakin' enormous the earth is. No amount of mining will ever be able to effect the orbit of the planets. In the cosmic scale of things, our Martian diamond mines will be completely irrelevant.
Bringing back moon rocks was not mining. By saying that space mining is feasible, they are saying that it would be feasible to get raw materials from sources in space. Economics is part of that.
for instance, when I search for a news item it not only pulls up related stories, but throws in a few unrelated stories, so I don't have to go search for those too! It also seems to organize stories within subcategories by threes for no apparent reason, so I get a false sense of organization. ...You are aware, aren't you, that Google News is exactly the same way, right? It's an impressive piece of work, but even google doesn't get its news 100% correct.
I thought that it was interesting to note that, out of the entire article, the only software that the author would like in his "ideal" desktop that I use myself is apt. (Which arguably has nothing to do with the user experience, anyway -- as long as package management is done right, the user shouldn't care.)
This is, of course, the reason why none of these "perfect desktop" distributions will take off. I consider myself a pretty typical home Linux user, and I have completely different needs than addressed in the article. Picking a set of apps and decreeing them to be components of this ideal distribution might work in some instances -- for instance, in order to have uniformity through an entire organization -- but I can't see it working out for home users.
Slashdot Mirror
After five seconds of googling: "Latin tu quoque, you also".
For anything of this nature, Latin should always be your first guess.
The parent post is so unconventional as to seem irrational at first-...
Unconventional?!? This guy is parroting the same line that comes up a dozen times in every slashdot story that deals with the issue. It's not insightful, it's just karma whoring.
Yeah, I would say that's reasonable. If you're not paying your taxes, then you're ripping off all the other taxpayers. Why should we subsidize your hobbies?
If you thought that Michael comment didn't belong, you just haven't been reading the stories he posts.
Cool, so when can we expect to start seeing these?
Presumably after somebody gives a slashdot subscription to somebody who isn't in the teenage geek demographic?
Most people can't handle a car that stays on the ground. I shudder to think what would happen if personal airplanes became common for commuting.
Fortunately, this looks more like a half-assed grab for investment money than anything else. I rather doubt we'll ever be seeing one of those things barrelling through the sky. The future of transportation is improved mass transit, not flying cars.
... it actually talks about the 2.4 maintainer being retiscent about adding new features to 2.4, not the developers ...
It's not like the maintainer is just there to type "patch -p1 new_feature.patch". He is tasked with studying everything going in, making sure that it works together, and distributing a kernel that meets the users' needs. He has decided (appropriately, in my opinion) that people's needs will be best served by refraining from adding lots of new stuff to the 2.4 kernel. If you want new features, you ought to upgrade -- that's what the 2.6 kernel is for. This really shouldn't present all that much of a problem -- upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6 is rather easier than the 2.2 to 2.4 migration, and all evidence is that the early 2.6.x kernels will be somewhat better than the early 2.4.x kernels.
Nobody can control when or where they will get calls.
This is the mentality that makes me hate cell phones. Yes, you can control when you get calls. You turn off the phone when you are in a situation when taking a call would be inappropriate -- in a restaurant, a movie theatre, a meeting, or whatever. If you fail to do so, you deserve to have your phone taken away and destroyed. You should count yourself fortunate that you only get dirty looks.
This case needs to be talked about rationally and I think Groklaw (and in a way Slashdot) are providing a forum for this.
Really? So where is slashdot hiding the rational argument? All I see is hundreds of comments where people repeat exactly the same things that have been said in every other story on SCO for the last six months. (And yet, they still get moderated as "insightful." Do people even understand what that word means?)
They can post whatever stories they want, but don't try to pretend that SCO stories are anything but an easy way to generate extra page views. There's been no intelligent analysis or debate here since the whole thing started.
Open Source and Free Software are examples. There is lots of confusion about both.
There would be a lot less confusion if certain parties would stop trying to redefine the English language with regards to those words.
only 75% of which are free (as in speech), and 95% of those 75% being crap.
There was a time when the "1000 Game" shareware cds did well enough. There are plenty of open source games that are better than those games. Finding enough interesting and fun games to fill a CD would be easy enough.
It would be rather nice to have them collected on CD, along with all the libraries that they require. It's fun to browse happypenguin occasionally and try out a few new games, but far too often I take a look at the installation notes, realize that I would need to download and install ten different libraries to play the game, and promptly delete it. If somebody was to do that legwork for me, they would have a product worth marketing.
And what exactly is a "fair price" for prescription medication?
One which doesn't account for the cost of research and development of new drugs, of course.
Well, according to the item description, which you apparently didn't read:
...
Yep, you got me. When pulling data out of the original article, it would help if I did more than skim
Well, according to the item description, which you apparently didn't read:
XBox Game System - $200
Plexiglass - $25
Neon Light - $10
Presumably, that's pretty close to the true values. (It looks like you can get a new XBox on sale at Amazon for $180, and I imagine you might get a bit better if you shop around, but $200 is probably about right.)
So he made $70 for his labor. Unless he was really quick, it probably wouldn't be a good idea for him to quit his day job.
So that you can see what others thought of it and debate interesting points of what you saw with others. Here, for example, on /.
When was the last time interesting points were debated on Slashdot? Last I checked, the level of debate on the LOTR movies was "Jackson suxxors!" "The movies r0x0r my b0x0rs!" "Gollum should get Best Actor!"
It is if you're an elitist snob who wants to follow the crowd of rebels who make fun of "society." If subtitled anime was the norm, and dubbed anime wasn't mainstream, these same people would be coming up with nonsense reasons why dubbing is better than subtitling.
So removing libc breaks the OS. So what? That doesn't make it any more important than any of the other programs that I rely on.
The major components of a Unix system are a kernel and a C library - Linux is only one of those.
Yes, if you define "Operating System" in such a way as to artificially give GNU software extra representation, of course you can "prove" that a Linux system is completely dependent on GNU.
Of course, most of the rest of us realize that the term "operating system" includes hundreds of programs from different sources, and find it ridiculous that RMS thinks we should single out and pay tribute to his own project because of some vacuous claim of indispensibility.
Let's see. Pretend that we could move 1 million kilograms of material every day. (That is, to say the least, a ridiculously optimistic assumption.) 1e24 kg / 1e6 kg = 1e18 loads. Divide by 365 to get a total of about 2.75e15 years. That's roughly
Oh, just as a quick fact, it looks like it takes roughly 3 billion joules (about 785kW*h) to move one kg out of the moon's gravity well and bring it to earth. (Assuming, of course, that you can just allow the load to drop to earth after pushing it to the point where it will fall. Anybody want to check my math?) So we're talking about expending 785 million kilowatt-hours for each daily load back to earth -- and, of course, it gets worse when coming from other places.
This topic comes up any time space mining is mentioned, for the same reasons. You simply don't understand how freakin' enormous the earth is. No amount of mining will ever be able to effect the orbit of the planets. In the cosmic scale of things, our Martian diamond mines will be completely irrelevant.
Bringing back moon rocks was not mining. By saying that space mining is feasible, they are saying that it would be feasible to get raw materials from sources in space. Economics is part of that.
In other words, the experts disagree with you.
Not at all. The key difference is that space mining might not prove fruitful, whereas we already know that social security will not prove fruitful.
for instance, when I search for a news item it not only pulls up related stories, but throws in a few unrelated stories, so I don't have to go search for those too! It also seems to organize stories within subcategories by threes for no apparent reason, so I get a false sense of organization.
...You are aware, aren't you, that Google News is exactly the same way, right? It's an impressive piece of work, but even google doesn't get its news 100% correct.
I thought that it was interesting to note that, out of the entire article, the only software that the author would like in his "ideal" desktop that I use myself is apt. (Which arguably has nothing to do with the user experience, anyway -- as long as package management is done right, the user shouldn't care.)
This is, of course, the reason why none of these "perfect desktop" distributions will take off. I consider myself a pretty typical home Linux user, and I have completely different needs than addressed in the article. Picking a set of apps and decreeing them to be components of this ideal distribution might work in some instances -- for instance, in order to have uniformity through an entire organization -- but I can't see it working out for home users.
Unfortunately, gravity might take its course and drop it on a city somewhere.
A large part of the reason why they want to destroy it on their own terms is so that they can control what happens.
The defense budget is the odd-man-out when compared to other budgets.
Yeah. We actually get tangible benefits from the money we put into the defense budget. Unlike Social Security.