>when the US went into the security council they already knew they wanted the war
Care to back that up? What President Bush actually said was that he wanted regime change, not disarmament. Then he backed off that and said that proactive cooperation with inspectors would be enough. All along he said that war was a last resort and that either Saddam stepping down or Iraq voluntarily disarming and proactively cooperating with inspectors would be enough. Read the speeches, that's what he said. If you don't believe it, provide some proof that he wanted to go to war.
>Furthermore they aren't interrested in bringing democracy to the country but have other goals (whatever they might be)
Such as? Got any proof? The two main arguments are "it's an oil grab" and "it's a Zionist plot to conquer the Middle East". Saddam already was selling us oil at below market prices as a part of UN sanctions against him. If they start selling oil to us at market prices it will cost the U.S. MORE. IF we wanted to just cut a deal with him for extra low prices we could do that too. As for the Zionist conquest theory, I'm not even going to argue againt that; it's nothing but a ploy to gain support from fundamentalist Muslim conspiracy theorists.
>Chirac and others took the US Government by it's word ("We want to find WMD") and tried to find them.
Chirac said that under no circumstances would the use of force be appropriate, and they would oppose any resolution setting a deadline. That eliminated any incentive for Saddam to disarm or truly cooperate with inspectors. France also opposed a stronger inspection regime than the one led by Hans Blix, again weakening inspections.
That cliché ignores the fact that terrorists murder civilians in order to create fear, while freedom fighters attack military or strategic (infrastructure) targets. There's a huge difference between murdering random people by putting bombs in public trash cans (as the IRA did in London), and guerilla forces ambushing military targets.
Actual terrorists like it when people elevate their cowardly murder of civilians to the same level as guerilla military action. Oppressive governments like it when people believe that revolutionary attacks against military or strategic targets is as cowardly and evil as terrorism.
The Israelis (claim to) go after only suspected terrorists; they don't just blow up random civilians. The Palestinians blow up random civilians. That makes Israel a brutal and oppressive police state, but probably not a terrorists. OTOH, whether the Palestinians who the Israelis round up are just random civilians, and how the Israelis go about hunting them down, is a matter of dispute. If Israel rounds up random civilians that it has no conclusive evidence against (other than "they're young pissed-off Muslims from Palestine who resisted arrest / threw rocks at us") and breaks down doors and makes a ruckus just to scare Palestinian civilians into not fighting back, that's pretty close to terrorism.
But my point is, terrorism IS NOT a synonym for freedom fighting. It's just that the enemies of freedom fighters want you to think they are as evil as terrorists, while terrorists want you to think they are as honorable as freedom fighters. Don't be misled.
This is easily explained away by the cop-out of Holy Mysteries.
If religious doctrine or a holy text doesn't make sense or is provably false in the real world, it's because "God Works In Mysterious Ways." Don't think, just BELIEVE. It makes you easier to control.
Thou Shalt Not Kill... except in the case of witches. Or Sodomites. Or adulterers. Or if you made a deal with God like Jephthah did, and it involves killing your daughter in order to have holy assistance in killing your enemies. Or any other time that God, or more accurately, a Duly Authorized Representative of God, tells you to kill. Remember, according to the Bible, the homosexuals in Sodom deserved to die, because the duly appointed representatives who wrote the Bible say that God said so, yet the (also homosexual) *pedophiles* called Catholic priests don't. Why? Because they're... guess what... duly authorized representatives! Mass murder via suicide bombing is insane, but if your Duly Authorized Representative tells you it'll give you an express pass into heaven, it makes perfect sense. What's that? Other duly appointed representatives of the same God and the same holy book disagree? Well I guess they're not duly appointed representatives then are they?
Q: How do you know that they're a duly authorized representative of God? A: Because they said so. Q: How do you know that you should believe them? A: Because they're a duly authorized representative of God! Q: Why should you accept such a circular argument? A: Because you gotta have faith, brother!
And don't forget to make a charitable donation! "I'm asking for hands to be uplifted just a moment. God, the Holy Ghost, is calling out to embrace you. I want you to reach into your hearts, and pocketbooks, and take his hand." Mindcrime!
(P.S. in case anyone reading this somehow gets the idea that I am in favor of suicide bombing terrorists, or holy wars, or murder in the name of God or the execution of homosexuals, I'm not, and you're a dork for even thinking that. It's called SARCASM.)
Because of faith! Baja California dirt isn't GOD'S SPECIAL DIRT.
Peace is not as important as being the A#1 special people that God (not their fake gods, our God, dur!) said in his special book (not their fake books, our Special Book, dur!) with all its contradictions and provably false statements (not their nonsensical contractions and provably false statements, but our Holy Mysteries, dur!) were allowed to live on our special dirt (not their fake special dirt, our special dirt, dur!).
If the heathens lay claim to our special dirt, obviously that's because their fake gods' fake holy books' nonsensical contradictions and provably false statements mistakenly said that it was their special dirt. Obviously they're wrong. Never mind the fact that they say the exact same thing about our clearly valid claim to our special dirt.
> While saddam has taken part in ethnic cleansing in the past, he hasn't done anything like that in over a decade....because American troops have been there enforcing the no-fly zones, and keeping Saddam's forces out of the north and south of Iraq where that ethnic cleansing took place.
>And they were terrible to women.
Two words: "rape teams". You know, the ones that would kidnap Iraqi women, gang rape them on videotape, and send the tape home to their parents. Are you saying that's not being terrible to women?
>Iraqis have 'economic freedom' in that they, including the women, can do whatever they want as long as they don't directly oppose the government.
So, is saying "Saddam Hussein sucks" direct opposition? Is refusing to vote for Saddam Hussein direct opposition? Is having a satellite dish direct opposition?
It doesn't seem to me like you've got a very clear picture of what has been going on in Iraq over the last decade or so.
> If I shake my Rio500 a little, it loses an internal connection and reboots.
Mine does that too sometimes. It's because of the battery shifting around. If you bend the negative battery contact out a bit (so it pushes harder against the negative terminal of the battery) the problem is greatly reduced. Still, if you slap the unit hard enough, the weight of the battery against that contact is enough that is pushes it down, and the positive terminal of the battery loses contact with the positive contact of the Rio. If this is really a problem you could probably wire something up, such as a spring on the positive terminal side, or a much stronger spring on the negative terminal side, so that this never happens. Based on the other ultra-small MP3 players that I've seen, I like the Rio 500 better.
As for Rio Audio Manager, I agree, it fairly well sucks. I use a Mac with my Rio 500, and for Mac OS 9, the copy of SoundJam MP that came with the Rio worked well for me. Under Mac OS X, iTunes supports the Rio 500 out of the box (rumor has it that iTunes is just a SoundJam derivative) and works well.
My only gripe with the Rio 500 is that I wish that songs copied to it faster.
The referenced article is interesting at first, but there are just too many easy parallels. Halfway thru the article I started wondering if the author was going to say that Hitler's dad had previously been president, or that his brother (a governor of a swampy southern German province) rigged the election in a furor of hanging chads.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Those who make up historical accounts to convince us that we are in danger of repeating something that never really happened are propagandists.
No, it's not a Java exploit. It's a Windows Scripting exploit, meaning that even if you have Java turned off, but have Active Scripting (JScript/VBScript) enabled, you're still vulnerable. Of all things, it's a buffer overflow... in a SCRIPTING language.
"The Lockergnome one" isn't specific enough. You're looking at only one of the Lockergnome MS vulnerability stories from that day. There are 3 stories about the IIS/WebDAV vuln and only 1 about the IE vuln ("Microsoft Warns Windows Users About Flaw"). Sad that there are 2 vulnerabilities reported on in one day, but...
So, if you like storage systems that can hold >1024 TB...
does that make you a "peta-phile"?
Yuk yuk yuk.
Re:Big advantages for developers
on
Virtual PC 6 Review
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think he probably started with "I want to / already own a Mac but I have to develop for Windows" and used that to rationalize away the performance penalty.
I guess if he were cross-developing somehow, either by using a cross-compiler or a portable programming environment, that wouldn't be too painful - edit on MacOS, compile on MacOS, test on Windows - but if he was just running Windows full screen and doing all his development in there, he was either being disingenuous or ignorant.
Disingenuous, if he were so bullheaded that he HAD to have a PowerBook just to make himself feel kewl even though he really needed to live in Windows all day. Seriously, buy a freaking $400 used Thinkpad on eBay, stick a big Apple sticker on it, and get over yourself. It doesn't make you more l33t to boot into MacOS X just to boot into fullscreen Win2K immediately afterwards; it makes you a dork.
Or, maybe he was just ignorant, because there are plenty of solutions that give you the same functionality (such as VMWare, Ghost, or GoBack) without requiring a PowerBook (whose price performance just ain't in the same ballpark as an x86 laptop, and never has been) and without having to run everything in emulation (slowing it down even more).
Do a little bit of digging into the history of auto makers; the constant micro-updates of body styling is pure marketing. It's not misdirected efforts to innovate; it's a very deliberate, time tested marketing technique.
There are quality improvements being made; as other posters have said, compare a 2000 model to a 1990 model to a 1980 model... wear aside, the engineering quality of virtually every component is steadily improving. Complexity is up too, but if you want airbags, seatbelts that lock only in a crash, antilock brakes, traction control, cleaner emissions, and better fuel efficiency, you need some microprocessors. I drive a 1995 model year car now, and I remember my 1980 model year car. It's laughable to say that in 15 years there wasn't any real innovation. People now don't need a car that goes 1000 times faster than a 1988 model year car, or that has 1024 times as much trunk space, but that makes sense in the computer market, so that's what we got. With cars we got improved safety, fuel efficiency, increased power, handling (especially on slippery pavement), and improved reliability. Airbags are smarter and safer now than when they first came out, and in some cars there are side-cushion airbags. That's innovation on top of innovation. Forget about navigation systems and Java cars and heads up displays; the basic car systems are way way better.
But, there is definitely a lot of changing stuff (I like the taillights example) just to change it, so that you can still sell a 2003 car when it's basically the same as the 2000 model, and so you can sell lots of expensive repair parts instead of giving OEMs an easy time tooling up to make repair parts or allowing owners to hunt in junkyards as easily.
Cars in general are a monumental scam, and not a new one, and not a secret one.
Isn't it ironic that in a community of command-line using, code-writing, keyword-searching geekazoids, so few seem to give a damn about typos? You'd think that folks would have been indoctrinated to respect precise spelling and typing and punctuation and capitalization by now, and that the typos would come from the pointy-clicky Word users who are used to having to click on big buttons and having red squiggles tell them when their atrocious spelling has reared its ugly head once again.
Unfortunately, in most cases (although not in this case) with MS bugs, a simple "is this port open" scan wouldn't cut it since so many services are piled on top of the Windows Networking stuff that lives on ports 135/137/139. You'd need to run a more sophisticated security scanner along the lines of nessus, which is entirely reasonable to expect that someone would do.
I wish ISPs would do this too. "Your DSL will be cut off on 2/15/03 if you don't plug this hole." Or, "close your open relay or we'll block port 25 incoming to your connection. But I guess it's cheaper to consumerize it all - block ports 25 and 80 for all customers and tell the clueful to go somewhere else because their.0001% minority isn't worth the effort to support.
According to this, it was actually more like 25% that voted for GW Bush, ~26% voted for Gore, and 48.7% that DID NOT VOTE AT ALL. So 75% of voting-age population did not vote for the person who became president.
Yeah but buyers can count the number of items on a feature list; they can't look inside and see better components and they tend not to have the opportunity to try before buying. So it's easier to just add features and say "this one is better because it does X".
Are the 50 users also developers? Perhaps there are hidden support costs being borne by the engineering dept as the developers fix Linux problems themselves while the Windoze lusers just call the help desk. I'm totally guessing of course.
>perfection is the enemy of good enough, and right now, BitKeeper's >license is good enough for the kernel folks
Exactly. So there isn't as much reason to work on a free alternative (and the casual observer may assume that BitKeeper's license is nicer than it is since Linus has chosen to use it), so the problem is self-perpetuating. Sorta like CVS: it has problems, but it's good enough for many projects, so lots of folks won't bother to make anything better.
Usually "don't let the best be the enemy of the good" means, "get something imperfect accomplished, then improve". BitKeeper exists. A *finished* free alternative does not. So in this case the good is the enemy of the best - since we have something imperfect, there is much less momentum to get something better accomplished. Linus may not have had much of a choice (use BK vs. suffer massive productivity loss due to CVS limitations) but from RMS's perspective, if we'd stop compromising our integrity in the short term, in the long term we wouldn't need to. He's being an idealist but we need those, in order to counterbalance the suboptimization that comes from pragmatism.
When people with guns come and take you off to jail, or force you to give up money to pay a fine, software licenses become very real. Ask Mr. Skylarov. He wrote some software and was thrown in jail. Similarly, viruses cause real monetary damage even if all they do is twiddle bits and cause electrons to move around.
Ones and zeros can have a very real effect as well. If it were your credit card info, SSN, pictures of you naked, pictures of you passed out drunk with somebody's schlong hanging out of your mouth... you wouldn't be so quick to say that bits have nothing to do with ethics and morals.
Slashdot Mirror
>when the US went into the security council they already knew they wanted the war
Care to back that up? What President Bush actually said was that he wanted regime change, not disarmament. Then he backed off that and said that proactive cooperation with inspectors would be enough. All along he said that war was a last resort and that either Saddam stepping down or Iraq voluntarily disarming and proactively cooperating with inspectors would be enough. Read the speeches, that's what he said. If you don't believe it, provide some proof that he wanted to go to war.
>Furthermore they aren't interrested in bringing democracy to the country but have other goals (whatever they might be)
Such as? Got any proof? The two main arguments are "it's an oil grab" and "it's a Zionist plot to conquer the Middle East". Saddam already was selling us oil at below market prices as a part of UN sanctions against him. If they start selling oil to us at market prices it will cost the U.S. MORE. IF we wanted to just cut a deal with him for extra low prices we could do that too. As for the Zionist conquest theory, I'm not even going to argue againt that; it's nothing but a ploy to gain support from fundamentalist Muslim conspiracy theorists.
>Chirac and others took the US Government by it's word ("We want to find WMD") and tried to find them.
Chirac said that under no circumstances would the use of force be appropriate, and they would oppose any resolution setting a deadline. That eliminated any incentive for Saddam to disarm or truly cooperate with inspectors. France also opposed a stronger inspection regime than the one led by Hans Blix, again weakening inspections.
That cliché ignores the fact that terrorists murder civilians in order to create fear, while freedom fighters attack military or strategic (infrastructure) targets. There's a huge difference between murdering random people by putting bombs in public trash cans (as the IRA did in London), and guerilla forces ambushing military targets.
Actual terrorists like it when people elevate their cowardly murder of civilians to the same level as guerilla military action. Oppressive governments like it when people believe that revolutionary attacks against military or strategic targets is as cowardly and evil as terrorism.
The Israelis (claim to) go after only suspected terrorists; they don't just blow up random civilians. The Palestinians blow up random civilians. That makes Israel a brutal and oppressive police state, but probably not a terrorists. OTOH, whether the Palestinians who the Israelis round up are just random civilians, and how the Israelis go about hunting them down, is a matter of dispute. If Israel rounds up random civilians that it has no conclusive evidence against (other than "they're young pissed-off Muslims from Palestine who resisted arrest / threw rocks at us") and breaks down doors and makes a ruckus just to scare Palestinian civilians into not fighting back, that's pretty close to terrorism.
But my point is, terrorism IS NOT a synonym for freedom fighting. It's just that the enemies of freedom fighters want you to think they are as evil as terrorists, while terrorists want you to think they are as honorable as freedom fighters. Don't be misled.
This is easily explained away by the cop-out of Holy Mysteries.
If religious doctrine or a holy text doesn't make sense or is provably false in the real world, it's because "God Works In Mysterious Ways." Don't think, just BELIEVE. It makes you easier to control.
Thou Shalt Not Kill... except in the case of witches. Or Sodomites. Or adulterers. Or if you made a deal with God like Jephthah did, and it involves killing your daughter in order to have holy assistance in killing your enemies. Or any other time that God, or more accurately, a Duly Authorized Representative of God, tells you to kill. Remember, according to the Bible, the homosexuals in Sodom deserved to die, because the duly appointed representatives who wrote the Bible say that God said so, yet the (also homosexual) *pedophiles* called Catholic priests don't. Why? Because they're... guess what... duly authorized representatives! Mass murder via suicide bombing is insane, but if your Duly Authorized Representative tells you it'll give you an express pass into heaven, it makes perfect sense. What's that? Other duly appointed representatives of the same God and the same holy book disagree? Well I guess they're not duly appointed representatives then are they?
Q: How do you know that they're a duly authorized representative of God?
A: Because they said so.
Q: How do you know that you should believe them?
A: Because they're a duly authorized representative of God!
Q: Why should you accept such a circular argument?
A: Because you gotta have faith, brother!
And don't forget to make a charitable donation! "I'm asking for hands to be uplifted just a moment. God, the Holy Ghost, is calling out to embrace you. I want you to reach into your hearts, and pocketbooks, and take his hand." Mindcrime!
(P.S. in case anyone reading this somehow gets the idea that I am in favor of suicide bombing terrorists, or holy wars, or murder in the name of God or the execution of homosexuals, I'm not, and you're a dork for even thinking that. It's called SARCASM.)
Because of faith! Baja California dirt isn't GOD'S SPECIAL DIRT.
Peace is not as important as being the A#1 special people that God (not their fake gods, our God, dur!) said in his special book (not their fake books, our Special Book, dur!) with all its contradictions and provably false statements (not their nonsensical contractions and provably false statements, but our Holy Mysteries, dur!) were allowed to live on our special dirt (not their fake special dirt, our special dirt, dur!).
If the heathens lay claim to our special dirt, obviously that's because their fake gods' fake holy books' nonsensical contradictions and provably false statements mistakenly said that it was their special dirt. Obviously they're wrong. Never mind the fact that they say the exact same thing about our clearly valid claim to our special dirt.
> While saddam has taken part in ethnic cleansing in the past, he hasn't done anything like that in over a decade. ...because American troops have been there enforcing the no-fly zones, and keeping Saddam's forces out of the north and south of Iraq where that ethnic cleansing took place.
>And they were terrible to women.
Two words: "rape teams". You know, the ones that would kidnap Iraqi women, gang rape them on videotape, and send the tape home to their parents. Are you saying that's not being terrible to women?
>Iraqis have 'economic freedom' in that they, including the women, can do whatever they want as long as they don't directly oppose the government.
So, is saying "Saddam Hussein sucks" direct opposition? Is refusing to vote for Saddam Hussein direct opposition? Is having a satellite dish direct opposition?
It doesn't seem to me like you've got a very clear picture of what has been going on in Iraq over the last decade or so.
> If I shake my Rio500 a little, it loses an internal connection and reboots.
Mine does that too sometimes. It's because of the battery shifting around. If you bend the negative battery contact out a bit (so it pushes harder against the negative terminal of the battery) the problem is greatly reduced. Still, if you slap the unit hard enough, the weight of the battery against that contact is enough that is pushes it down, and the positive terminal of the battery loses contact with the positive contact of the Rio. If this is really a problem you could probably wire something up, such as a spring on the positive terminal side, or a much stronger spring on the negative terminal side, so that this never happens. Based on the other ultra-small MP3 players that I've seen, I like the Rio 500 better.
As for Rio Audio Manager, I agree, it fairly well sucks. I use a Mac with my Rio 500, and for Mac OS 9, the copy of SoundJam MP that came with the Rio worked well for me. Under Mac OS X, iTunes supports the Rio 500 out of the box (rumor has it that iTunes is just a SoundJam derivative) and works well.
My only gripe with the Rio 500 is that I wish that songs copied to it faster.
Mr. Troll Sir, please go back to FuckedCompany where you belong. You'll get a lot more of the anti-arab racist responses you're trolling for there.
MOD PARENT UP.
The referenced article is interesting at first, but there are just too many easy parallels. Halfway thru the article I started wondering if the author was going to say that Hitler's dad had previously been president, or that his brother (a governor of a swampy southern German province) rigged the election in a furor of hanging chads.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Those who make up historical accounts to convince us that we are in danger of repeating something that never really happened are propagandists.
No, it's not a Java exploit. It's a Windows Scripting exploit, meaning that even if you have Java turned off, but have Active Scripting (JScript/VBScript) enabled, you're still vulnerable. Of all things, it's a buffer overflow... in a SCRIPTING language.
r e/ 2003-March/004574.html
http://lists.netsys.com/pipermail/full-disclosu
"The Lockergnome one" isn't specific enough. You're looking at only one of the Lockergnome MS vulnerability stories from that day. There are 3 stories about the IIS/WebDAV vuln and only 1 about the IE vuln ("Microsoft Warns Windows Users About Flaw"). Sad that there are 2 vulnerabilities reported on in one day, but...
So, if you like storage systems that can hold >1024 TB...
does that make you a "peta-phile"?
Yuk yuk yuk.
I think he probably started with "I want to / already own a Mac but I have to develop for Windows" and used that to rationalize away the performance penalty.
I guess if he were cross-developing somehow, either by using a cross-compiler or a portable programming environment, that wouldn't be too painful - edit on MacOS, compile on MacOS, test on Windows - but if he was just running Windows full screen and doing all his development in there, he was either being disingenuous or ignorant.
Disingenuous, if he were so bullheaded that he HAD to have a PowerBook just to make himself feel kewl even though he really needed to live in Windows all day. Seriously, buy a freaking $400 used Thinkpad on eBay, stick a big Apple sticker on it, and get over yourself. It doesn't make you more l33t to boot into MacOS X just to boot into fullscreen Win2K immediately afterwards; it makes you a dork.
Or, maybe he was just ignorant, because there are plenty of solutions that give you the same functionality (such as VMWare, Ghost, or GoBack) without requiring a PowerBook (whose price performance just ain't in the same ballpark as an x86 laptop, and never has been) and without having to run everything in emulation (slowing it down even more).
Do a little bit of digging into the history of auto makers; the constant micro-updates of body styling is pure marketing. It's not misdirected efforts to innovate; it's a very deliberate, time tested marketing technique.
There are quality improvements being made; as other posters have said, compare a 2000 model to a 1990 model to a 1980 model... wear aside, the engineering quality of virtually every component is steadily improving. Complexity is up too, but if you want airbags, seatbelts that lock only in a crash, antilock brakes, traction control, cleaner emissions, and better fuel efficiency, you need some microprocessors. I drive a 1995 model year car now, and I remember my 1980 model year car. It's laughable to say that in 15 years there wasn't any real innovation. People now don't need a car that goes 1000 times faster than a 1988 model year car, or that has 1024 times as much trunk space, but that makes sense in the computer market, so that's what we got. With cars we got improved safety, fuel efficiency, increased power, handling (especially on slippery pavement), and improved reliability. Airbags are smarter and safer now than when they first came out, and in some cars there are side-cushion airbags. That's innovation on top of innovation. Forget about navigation systems and Java cars and heads up displays; the basic car systems are way way better.
But, there is definitely a lot of changing stuff (I like the taillights example) just to change it, so that you can still sell a 2003 car when it's basically the same as the 2000 model, and so you can sell lots of expensive repair parts instead of giving OEMs an easy time tooling up to make repair parts or allowing owners to hunt in junkyards as easily.
Cars in general are a monumental scam, and not a new one, and not a secret one.
No, he misspelled Stalin.
Isn't it ironic that in a community of command-line using, code-writing, keyword-searching geekazoids, so few seem to give a damn about typos? You'd think that folks would have been indoctrinated to respect precise spelling and typing and punctuation and capitalization by now, and that the typos would come from the pointy-clicky Word users who are used to having to click on big buttons and having red squiggles tell them when their atrocious spelling has reared its ugly head once again.
Unfortunately, in most cases (although not in this case) with MS bugs, a simple "is this port open" scan wouldn't cut it since so many services are piled on top of the Windows Networking stuff that lives on ports 135/137/139. You'd need to run a more sophisticated security scanner along the lines of nessus, which is entirely reasonable to expect that someone would do.
.0001% minority isn't worth the effort to support.
I wish ISPs would do this too. "Your DSL will be cut off on 2/15/03 if you don't plug this hole." Or, "close your open relay or we'll block port 25 incoming to your connection. But I guess it's cheaper to consumerize it all - block ports 25 and 80 for all customers and tell the clueful to go somewhere else because their
>I'm sorry I have nothing really insightful to say.
/.!!
OMG, that's probably the first time anybody has ever admitted this on
Of course not. No one does.
It's worse than you think.
According to this, it was actually more like 25% that voted for GW Bush, ~26% voted for Gore, and 48.7% that DID NOT VOTE AT ALL. So 75% of voting-age population did not vote for the person who became president.
Hooray for democracy!
Yeah but buyers can count the number of items on a feature list; they can't look inside and see better components and they tend not to have the opportunity to try before buying. So it's easier to just add features and say "this one is better because it does X".
Price out a 1.5GHz P4 with 512MB RAM, it's well under $800. Big deal.
ROTFL! That was a good one.
For a moment there I thought that you were saying that politicians in Europe were selfless civil servants without a fib nor a dirty past among them.
Parent is correct but forgot to include the URL:
m
http://www.snopes.com/college/pranks/trained.ht
Are the 50 users also developers? Perhaps there are hidden support costs being borne by the engineering dept as the developers fix Linux problems themselves while the Windoze lusers just call the help desk. I'm totally guessing of course.
>perfection is the enemy of good enough, and right now, BitKeeper's
>license is good enough for the kernel folks
Exactly. So there isn't as much reason to work on a free alternative (and the casual observer may assume that BitKeeper's license is nicer than it is since Linus has chosen to use it), so the problem is self-perpetuating. Sorta like CVS: it has problems, but it's good enough for many projects, so lots of folks won't bother to make anything better.
Usually "don't let the best be the enemy of the good" means, "get something imperfect accomplished, then improve". BitKeeper exists. A *finished* free alternative does not. So in this case the good is the enemy of the best - since we have something imperfect, there is much less momentum to get something better accomplished. Linus may not have had much of a choice (use BK vs. suffer massive productivity loss due to CVS limitations) but from RMS's perspective, if we'd stop compromising our integrity in the short term, in the long term we wouldn't need to. He's being an idealist but we need those, in order to counterbalance the suboptimization that comes from pragmatism.
Troll...
When people with guns come and take you off to jail, or force you to give up money to pay a fine, software licenses become very real. Ask Mr. Skylarov. He wrote some software and was thrown in jail. Similarly, viruses cause real monetary damage even if all they do is twiddle bits and cause electrons to move around.
Ones and zeros can have a very real effect as well. If it were your credit card info, SSN, pictures of you naked, pictures of you passed out drunk with somebody's schlong hanging out of your mouth... you wouldn't be so quick to say that bits have nothing to do with ethics and morals.