To me freedom means "do whatever you want with it,"
That's exactly the freedom the GPL guarantees. The GPL guarantees that every user of the software will have the freedom to do whatever they want with it. The only things prohibited by the GPL are actions that remove the freedom of others.
Those individual's who are affected may sue through the courts and this will cause the company to loose money and so eventually market forces will cause company's to pay attention to safety.
Unless the rich and powerful companies in question have bribed their legislators to provide immunity to lawsuits under the guise of "tort reform". Or in jurisdictions where judges are elected, they may have heavily funded the campaigns of judges who they know value corporate profits over human life. Even if the victims of corporate crimes prevail in court the damages are going to be a small fraction of what the company earned by cutting corners, which provides no incentive at all to behave better.
It's always "tough on crime" for the poor, and "tort reform" for the rich.
SPSS and R are very good at statistical analysis. Quantrix, MapleSoft, IBM Algorithmics, and other software is for financial data modeling. None of those is particularly appropriate for sharing data in a useful format with peers. Excel is.
R is extremely appropriate for sharing data in a useful format with peers. It's completely free for one. But more importantly, it saves every single step of your analysis. Send someone an Excel file, and who knows what they've done to the data. Send someone your R project directory and they can see exactly what you did.
The problem with sending R files to your peers isn't that the R files aren't useful. It's that your peers aren't.
It's a useful antidote to the mass psychological amnesia that is perpetually recurring. "Our new investments our safe and returns will never fall" inevitably leads to "what perfidy caused this?" The cycle has been repeated in remarkably similar ways for nearly a millenium now.
Are you suggesting that perfidy did not cause this?
It ends with government balancing budgets(austerity),
This is your mistake, conflating balancing the budget with austerity. The budget has been balanced before, and it was not due to austerity. What actually balances budgets is a booming economy, which is exactly what austerity will prevent.
A static amount of gold doesn't mean a static value of gold. Increased population leads to increased demand which leads to increased value. Feeding twice the amount of people on the same amount of gold means that the cost of a unit of food has halved. Falling prices is deflation.
Manual categorization is essential if you are really working. The start menu only becomes unmanagable if you rely on installation utilities to set it up for you. The only way to be sure you can access what you need when you need it is to put it where you want it.
I won't be replacing my PC with a phone any time soon either. But my mom could replace her PC with a phone or tablet today and lose nothing. Most people are more like my mom than they are like you or me.
A $200 pocket phone still cannot do a lot of things a full desktop PC could do a decade ago.
Only because the software isn't there. And fixing that is only a matter of time.
I would say "Most people's needs are minimal." The distinction is very important. Most people have some computing needs that cannot be met by touch-only input and a slow processor (i.e. smartphone and/or tablet).
For typing, you can use a bluetooth keyboard. The CPU is really only a bottleneck on things like video compression, compiling source code, or mining bitcoins. Not things most people need.
I think the percentage of people who can meet all of their computing needs with a smartphone and/or tablet, and who will not ever need a notebook or desktop computer, is still low enough that calling Microsoft Windows dead is just silly.
You're right, in that that percentage is low. But it's getting higher and higher at increasing rates, and there's no indication that that trend will reverse.
It is. What bothers me is that they can't even promise feature parity with X. If X forwarding sucks because modern X apps don't use the primitives available, reimplement forwarding with better primatives. Don't just throw your hands up and port a Microsoft solution.
And then there are weird choices like client side window decorations, and window managers you can't change without recompiling the compositor.
You've got 2 gigs of RAM instead of 1 or even 512mb. You've got hardware accelerated video playback. You've got voice recognition that actually works. You have GPS, accelerometers, and a camera all built in. You have network access through wifi, the cell network, and bluetooth. 2003 wishes it had all that.
Your $200 pocket phone can do a lot of things that it couldn't do a decade ago
A $200 pocket phone can do a lot of things a full desktop PC couldn't do a decade ago.
it will always trail behind what is possible with more dedicated hardware
If commodity hardware does everything I need, why do I care what is possible with dedicated hardware?
It can't even compete with a standalone digital camera, yet (unless your needs are very minimal -- just for snapping pictures of your drunk idiot friends at a frat party or something).
It automatically assumes that FTL drives are not only possible
No it doesn't. Von Neumann probes traveling at sub lightspeed and replicating exponentially could have traversed the galaxy in less time than it takes life to evolve on a bare rock.
the majority of people don't want to use X because of its performance limitations.
What performance limitations? I have a beautiful hardware accelerated desktop that responds instantly every time. I can run cross platform 3d games at the same speed on both Windows and X. What does Wayland actually do for me?
People who use X for features that Wayland does not support are the minority. A very vocal minority. This minority wants to impose its will over the majority.
Yes, we're the minority who actually use our computers to do complex and important things. If all you do is watch youtube, you don't need network transparency. But a UNIX display system should cater to power users. That's why we use UNIX in the first place.
I love how the whole GPL has breed a user base that has contempt for the developer base.
What has bred contempt for the developers is the developers contempt for their users.
I'm surprised it took this long for someone to notice this, and that it was an AC, who hasn't been modded up at all. Whatever your feelings about cell phone jamming, "forfeiture" is a legal fiction. The FCC can either prosecute these companies and prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, or they can flout the rule of law and engage in thuggery. They chose the latter.
Lies. There's nothing wrong with X that can be attributed to the protocol. It's the Xorg codebase that's gotten unwieldy. Wayland throws the baby out with the bathwater.
That's really bad. With SSH, I can log in, cd to the directory I need to be in as if it were local, and run the app as if it were local, and it "just works".
With this setup, it looks like I'm going to have to ssh into the remote machine, cd to the directory I need to be in, copy down that path, then run 'which' and copy down that path. Then I need to leave my ssh session, and construct an invocation of freerdp that includes both the paths I copied down before.
The great thing about X forwarding is that from the user side it works almost exactly like local apps do. Opening a terminal on a local machine and running a GUI app is nearly indistinguishable from opening a terminal, running ssh -X, and running a GUI app. xfreerdp totally fucks that workflow.
or it would be, if all desktop/apps were composed of pure vectors and not contain bitmap images.
Vectors are getting more and more common. SVG is used for just about everything in KDE 4.
if you want to use X today with todays' highly graphical desktop environments
I just want to use X with highly useful applications. I could not give a shit if the desktop environment was highly graphical. That's the problem with Wayland. They put eye candy above powerful features.
I think you'll be surprised at the performance of RDP, but we'll wait and see what happens with Wayland's RDP when someone makes some benchmarks.
My prediction is that they'll conveniently forget to include NX in those benchmarks.
To me, the question is what Microsoft will do with Win 9 (or whatever it will be called).
What could they do with Windows 9 that would make it better than Windows 7?
If they'll fix the user interface, I'll probably skip 8 and upgrade to 9 at some point.
Isn't Windows 8 just Windows 7 + metro? If they "fix" 8, then 9 is just a rerelease of 7.
Currently I'm assuming the latter. I'm stuck on Win 7 for atleast one more year (due to external forces), but after that I'm planning to install Mint unless Microsoft surprises me by creating a worthy successor.
Why not try it now? Install Mint in virtualization, and full screen the thing. You'd be surprised at how little you actually need Windows for.
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To me freedom means "do whatever you want with it,"
That's exactly the freedom the GPL guarantees. The GPL guarantees that every user of the software will have the freedom to do whatever they want with it. The only things prohibited by the GPL are actions that remove the freedom of others.
Those individual's who are affected may sue through the courts and this will cause the company to loose money and so eventually market forces will cause company's to pay attention to safety.
Unless the rich and powerful companies in question have bribed their legislators to provide immunity to lawsuits under the guise of "tort reform". Or in jurisdictions where judges are elected, they may have heavily funded the campaigns of judges who they know value corporate profits over human life. Even if the victims of corporate crimes prevail in court the damages are going to be a small fraction of what the company earned by cutting corners, which provides no incentive at all to behave better.
It's always "tough on crime" for the poor, and "tort reform" for the rich.
So the perpetrator was either immeasurably stupid and thoughtless
Do you really think that is implausible?
SPSS and R are very good at statistical analysis. Quantrix, MapleSoft, IBM Algorithmics, and other software is for financial data modeling. None of those is particularly appropriate for sharing data in a useful format with peers. Excel is.
R is extremely appropriate for sharing data in a useful format with peers. It's completely free for one. But more importantly, it saves every single step of your analysis. Send someone an Excel file, and who knows what they've done to the data. Send someone your R project directory and they can see exactly what you did.
The problem with sending R files to your peers isn't that the R files aren't useful. It's that your peers aren't.
It's a useful antidote to the mass psychological amnesia that is perpetually recurring. "Our new investments our safe and returns will never fall" inevitably leads to "what perfidy caused this?" The cycle has been repeated in remarkably similar ways for nearly a millenium now.
Are you suggesting that perfidy did not cause this?
It ends with government balancing budgets(austerity),
This is your mistake, conflating balancing the budget with austerity. The budget has been balanced before, and it was not due to austerity. What actually balances budgets is a booming economy, which is exactly what austerity will prevent.
A static amount of gold doesn't mean a static value of gold. Increased population leads to increased demand which leads to increased value. Feeding twice the amount of people on the same amount of gold means that the cost of a unit of food has halved. Falling prices is deflation.
Manual categorization is essential if you are really working. The start menu only becomes unmanagable if you rely on installation utilities to set it up for you. The only way to be sure you can access what you need when you need it is to put it where you want it.
For starters, nested folders are gone.
It worked so well on the start menu, I hear Microsoft is bringing this to the file system too.
Modern news channels are the five worst things that happened to the world today.
I won't be replacing my PC with a phone any time soon either. But my mom could replace her PC with a phone or tablet today and lose nothing. Most people are more like my mom than they are like you or me.
A $200 pocket phone still cannot do a lot of things a full desktop PC could do a decade ago.
Only because the software isn't there. And fixing that is only a matter of time.
I would say "Most people's needs are minimal." The distinction is very important. Most people have some computing needs that cannot be met by touch-only input and a slow processor (i.e. smartphone and/or tablet).
For typing, you can use a bluetooth keyboard. The CPU is really only a bottleneck on things like video compression, compiling source code, or mining bitcoins. Not things most people need.
I think the percentage of people who can meet all of their computing needs with a smartphone and/or tablet, and who will not ever need a notebook or desktop computer, is still low enough that calling Microsoft Windows dead is just silly.
You're right, in that that percentage is low. But it's getting higher and higher at increasing rates, and there's no indication that that trend will reverse.
It is. What bothers me is that they can't even promise feature parity with X. If X forwarding sucks because modern X apps don't use the primitives available, reimplement forwarding with better primatives. Don't just throw your hands up and port a Microsoft solution.
And then there are weird choices like client side window decorations, and window managers you can't change without recompiling the compositor.
You've got 2 gigs of RAM instead of 1 or even 512mb. You've got hardware accelerated video playback. You've got voice recognition that actually works. You have GPS, accelerometers, and a camera all built in. You have network access through wifi, the cell network, and bluetooth. 2003 wishes it had all that.
Your $200 pocket phone can do a lot of things that it couldn't do a decade ago
A $200 pocket phone can do a lot of things a full desktop PC couldn't do a decade ago.
it will always trail behind what is possible with more dedicated hardware
If commodity hardware does everything I need, why do I care what is possible with dedicated hardware?
It can't even compete with a standalone digital camera, yet (unless your needs are very minimal -- just for snapping pictures of your drunk idiot friends at a frat party or something).
Most people have very minimal needs.
It automatically assumes that FTL drives are not only possible
No it doesn't. Von Neumann probes traveling at sub lightspeed and replicating exponentially could have traversed the galaxy in less time than it takes life to evolve on a bare rock.
Bitching at Wayland devs has turned "not planned, out of scope" into "working RDP implementation available". It seems to be fairly effective.
I don't get all the hate Wayland gets.
I don't get all the hate Xorg gets.
The developers of X don't even like X.
The users of X like X just fine.
the majority of people don't want to use X because of its performance limitations.
What performance limitations? I have a beautiful hardware accelerated desktop that responds instantly every time. I can run cross platform 3d games at the same speed on both Windows and X. What does Wayland actually do for me?
People who use X for features that Wayland does not support are the minority. A very vocal minority. This minority wants to impose its will over the majority.
Yes, we're the minority who actually use our computers to do complex and important things. If all you do is watch youtube, you don't need network transparency. But a UNIX display system should cater to power users. That's why we use UNIX in the first place.
I love how the whole GPL has breed a user base that has contempt for the developer base.
What has bred contempt for the developers is the developers contempt for their users.
I'm surprised it took this long for someone to notice this, and that it was an AC, who hasn't been modded up at all. Whatever your feelings about cell phone jamming, "forfeiture" is a legal fiction. The FCC can either prosecute these companies and prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, or they can flout the rule of law and engage in thuggery. They chose the latter.
I fail to see how Wayland, or any open source software can be "shoved down" your throat.
If software you need depends on Wayland, then it is indeed being shoved down your throat.
Lies. There's nothing wrong with X that can be attributed to the protocol. It's the Xorg codebase that's gotten unwieldy. Wayland throws the baby out with the bathwater.
That's really bad. With SSH, I can log in, cd to the directory I need to be in as if it were local, and run the app as if it were local, and it "just works".
With this setup, it looks like I'm going to have to ssh into the remote machine, cd to the directory I need to be in, copy down that path, then run 'which' and copy down that path. Then I need to leave my ssh session, and construct an invocation of freerdp that includes both the paths I copied down before.
The great thing about X forwarding is that from the user side it works almost exactly like local apps do. Opening a terminal on a local machine and running a GUI app is nearly indistinguishable from opening a terminal, running ssh -X, and running a GUI app. xfreerdp totally fucks that workflow.
or it would be, if all desktop/apps were composed of pure vectors and not contain bitmap images.
Vectors are getting more and more common. SVG is used for just about everything in KDE 4.
if you want to use X today with todays' highly graphical desktop environments
I just want to use X with highly useful applications. I could not give a shit if the desktop environment was highly graphical. That's the problem with Wayland. They put eye candy above powerful features.
I think you'll be surprised at the performance of RDP, but we'll wait and see what happens with Wayland's RDP when someone makes some benchmarks.
My prediction is that they'll conveniently forget to include NX in those benchmarks.
I'll start by saying that every UI model we have today sucks. Some sucks less, and some sucks more, but everything has some degree of sucking to it.
It's been said that the nipple is the only truly intuitive user interface.
To me, the question is what Microsoft will do with Win 9 (or whatever it will be called).
What could they do with Windows 9 that would make it better than Windows 7?
If they'll fix the user interface, I'll probably skip 8 and upgrade to 9 at some point.
Isn't Windows 8 just Windows 7 + metro? If they "fix" 8, then 9 is just a rerelease of 7.
Currently I'm assuming the latter. I'm stuck on Win 7 for atleast one more year (due to external forces), but after that I'm planning to install Mint unless Microsoft surprises me by creating a worthy successor.
Why not try it now? Install Mint in virtualization, and full screen the thing. You'd be surprised at how little you actually need Windows for.