Let us debate them. But don't throw an "all" around, that's no information
>
Minimum wages have existed in Mexico since the 30s and inflation has varied widly since then
Minimum wages are not the issue, but their populist usage. Brazil had its first big bout of inflation when minimum wages were severely raised. That had two immediate effects: prices raised because of excess demand (more salary) and lack of offer (no investment, because of the risk), and many workers were fired and couldn't find a regular job instead. To this day in Brazil there are a great many people who can't get a regular job, because it is more expensive for the employers. Other Latin American countries have similar situations, some better, some worse.
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would it be that incompetent basic administration of the treasury was to belame instead?
Considering that the government is the biggest employer, and that social security payments are usually linked to the minimum wages, populist usage of them do constituture incompetent administration of the treasury.
But usually it is not only incompetent administration of the treasury that causes inflation, but expansion of liquidity. Obviously, if the government raises minimum wages too much it will need to expand liquidity thru printing of money...
Anyway your counterargument is invalid, because my argument was not only about Mexico or some specific inflation bout, but the economic effects of populist acts of the government, ceteris paribus.
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Any way, even unpalatable types can do things that in the long term benefit the people they govern.
And that is my point, that if this measure doesn't have enough popular support, it may become dead letter and even ignite a backslash agains free software. Thus a long term would be denied to the measure, which otherwise is good in principle.
I'm amazed my maturity interests you, but I am 30, have a job and a family, and have had some pretty good education, including some reading in Philosophy. Now on to the debate.
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Think for a moment about who you're freeing.
The users, and in the measure in which government has grown dependent on Informatics, the people.
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Most corporations are given the right to modify programs to fit their individual needs.
No, they aren't. I work at a big European telecom operator, and we have neither the Microsoft source code nor the Amdocs (our billing system vendor) one. Now, I think it is self-defeating proposition to run a business without the source code to one's core system, as is a billing system to a telecom operator. But the incredible thing is that MBAs think it is good. No need to tell you how much shareholders' money is wasted.
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The average consumer doesn't know source code from techno-bable. They couldn't change or modify their programs any way.
The main purpose of source code is not modifying it, but avoiding proprietary lock-in. Please educate yourself.
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now stop fighting the licence war
If we allow everyone to hoard software and claim it's free or open or standard, like Apple and the Unix vendors and Microsoft all have done, we loose our freedom again.
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make your products useable.
That needs efforts currently wasted on useless forking, semi-free code and proprietary systems interoperability.
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So then why are people complaining when Apple and other companies release the sorce to programs?
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You can't have consensus because different people want different things.
Yes, but most forking is not because of different, valid goals: it is because of bad technical decisions (for instance RPM as a dpkg fork), proprietary licensing (for instance the original TrollTech Qt licensing) or just the not-invented-here syndrome.
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Freedom and Security are on to ends of a scale. There has to be a balance. Complete freedom means no security, complete security means no freedom, but you have to provide a reason.
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Safety, if M$ Office breaks, theres technical assistance for them.
There isn't. There is no warranty, there is no security, there is no source code to fix things. There are thousands of people who know a little about MS Office, but no one has the source code. The end result is that people learn to live with brokenness in proprietary programs, while with free software it can always be fixed.
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Ease of use, most OSS software is nice sometime seven great once it's running, but getting it up and running is a pain.
This is being addressed by several distributions. Rome wasn't built in one day.
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Extra steps, as nice as the OSS office suite is, the users still have to select M$ Office format to save their documents so everyone else can read them.
This is because MS Office documents are proprietary. If they were open standards, there would be no need of converstion. But still, if things are saved in XHTML, PDF, RTF and the like, MS Office users can read them.
I don't know why I loose time trying to teach people who can't to their homework reading.
First, Venezuela is currently in political and institutional turmoil. The current president, Hugo Chavez, is a caudillo: this is the Spanish word for a paternalistic dictator or local boss, in effect a feudal lord. Even if he came to power by elections, it was an anger vote against corrupt politicians. Hugo Chavez is a Colonel who previously had attempted a military coup d'etat, so he's no leftist or democratist, only a populist with muddled ideas.
This move, and other similar ones, come from the traditional latin institution of the canetada: this is the Portuguese word for a law that tries to change reality with little practical consequence, sometimes even making situation worse. Other examples are strict labour laws that drives workers into illegal semi-employment, minimum wages that serve only to cause inflation that makes workers lives' even worse than before, and so on.
Since the Roman-type "objective" law is encroaching into the anglo-saxon consuetudinary Common Law, this has been known to happen in the US too, like the POSIX and FIPS SQL standards validating systems from Microsoft and Oracle that were rigged to pass the tests, but are nowhere near open.
From the article, a Colombian drug cartel uses IBMAS/400 mid-range EBCDIC systems, incorrectly called mainframes. Hey, you can't get much more proprietary than that! At least they are dumping some of their dirty money into a supporter of GNU/Linux, half-hearted as IBM's free software instance is no, wait, IBM does software patents, so they are evil!
Suddenly, open source geeks who care about source, not necessarily freedom, discover the world is a complex thingie.
I sure would like to buy a PowerPC computing preinstalled with Debian from Europe, but I fear Swiss taxes and the cost of transport would kill the deal for me...
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if the so-called "community" would spend less time playing wannabe lawyers arguing about licensing minutiae
We care for freedom, including yours. Because no one can be free in a slave society. If you want to be enslaved to proprietary software, unable even to read your documents without paying a license to a corrupt, greedy corporation, your problem.
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The users you need to attract have never heard of Richard Stallman, buy shrinkwrapped software (including Linux, if and when they do use it), and judge an OS by the quality and range of applications available to run on it.
It's very difficult to produce quality software when you have to spend most time reverse engineering proprietary file formats, APIs and protocols, and hardware interfaces.
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Endless iterations of the same traditional Unix toolset
Forking is a real problem. GNU GPL is a good antidote, but not enough if people don't agree on what they want. Stop whining and help build consensus.
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tools for the server side, and attempts to mimic Office and the Windows interface, won't cut it. Be imaginative.
What's the problem with server side? People need servers. The world isn't made only of desktops.
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attempts to mimic Office and the Windows interface, won't cut it. Be imaginative.
Why be imaginative? People need a migration path, including an at least partially familiar interface.
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When I've tried to explain Linux to people who make corporate buying decisions
Try understanding free software next time. Linux yet another Unix kernel clone is pretty interesting. But you will never understand freedom if you ignore basic realities about society and the market, like suits usually do.
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Why buy a cheap knock-off when the real thing is available?
Because it's not a cheap knock-off, but frequently better than the original. And because the original is proprietary. What's the price of freedom?
BTW, no need of buying. Use Debian and buy services instead.
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refrain from the usual/. insults to users as too stupid to know what's good for them
Few people now what's good for themselves, because few people are both wise and informed enough. Learn History if you think otherwise.
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In reality, they decide your future.
We are building a new future. Please get out of the way, troll.
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Oh and if you're interested in the Christian Science Monitor. (As in why should I read a "Christian" newspaper.... go here before you complain about this news source.
Well, first I would explain your quotes on Christian by remembering all readers that Christian Science is not Christian nor Science, but a mistaken self-assigned name for a gnostic heresy.
I have never been able to find a real free TP monitor.
I see everyone going nuts for application servers, but the fate of most of them is to suffer under high loads. I've never seen any of them incorporate the lessons learned by hard experience during 30 years in the TP monitor field.
This to me seems like the whole OO and Web fads: everything has to be OO and HTML and HTTP, and XML too. But few people learn the fundamentals. So they go and build beautiful applications on Java, HTML, MySQL, without ever realizing its unreliability or all the duplication of effort necessary. Or the risks for lack of scalability.
This is yet another thing the proprietary world gets not so bad as the free software world. For example, BEA's WebLogic Enterprise actually embeds the Tuxedo core to provide TP monitor services; they call it BEA Engine.
In Brasil, diamonds are considered extremely over and kitsch in anything but night jewellery, the kind used at big-time, no-more-than-two-at-a-year parties. No one would ever use them at a simple dinner, or graduation party. Only at night marriages, official receptions and the such.
For engagement and marriage rings, simple gold is more elegant, at most a combination of different colours of gold mine is a three-rings entwined imitation of classical Cartier design, each ring of a colour: white, yellow and red gold. At most people will use wrought gold: with forms of entwined elephants, or with braille codes, or whatever. But still the most elegant is simple, plain gold.
Just think if she would like to be more elegant than her kitsch friends dumped by ads but make sure she get the idea.
About ethics, just remember that bad as mining is, having no job is far worse.
Whomever complains about dependencies is still in RPM Dark Ages, having not seen yet the dpkg light as witnessed by apt and dselect.
Seriously, it is just another case of a half-baked industry standard namely, RPM long surviving its own due lifespan, thus becoming a hindrance to the whole industry and giving a bad name to GNU/Linux.
Ironic that RPM was just a stop gap before dpkg was finished, or perhaps a bit of Not Invented Here syndrome.
It's just another GNU/Linux system as far as booting goes: yaboot on NewWorld Macs and quik or BootX on OldWorld ones. Same software available and compatible, etc. Just that you get Debian's sane policies, over-the-Net installation of 8K packages, seamless upgrades, security updates, 11 platforms - including M68K pre-PPC Macs & Amigas -, localization, free software emphasis etc.
Actually Commercial Ingres was a fork from University Ingres, and further down became Ingres II.
Illustra is a direct descendant of either Postgres or one of its descendants.
But because the source code is BSD licensed, it's very probable that Illustra, Ingres II or whatever have code in them from other than their direct ancestors.
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What exactly is hindering a wider acceptance of SAP-DB
Take a look at data types in SAPdb. While they have, for example, date and time types that Oracle lacks, they are implemented as especialization of totally unrelated character strings. This is an ugly hack.
Now contrast that with PostgreSQL's data types. Elegance speaks for itself.
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PostgreSQL costs just a little less than Oracle to buy
Well, considering PostgreSQL is free, a whole lot less sorry for being picky, but it occurred to that some people might be lost in the irony.
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PostgreSQL was one of the first kids on the GPL block.
PostgreSQL was never GPL'd. Not even copyleft, but just a plain free software license, can't remember if derived from BSD or MIT X. If one wants copyleft, SAPdb is the only choice now.
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context switching between two threads is at least four times more expensive on a Pentium4 (and that's before trying to optimize the Itanium context switching code)
Interesting, thanks for the info! Do you have any idea about how this aspect of IPF compares to typical RISC systems, like Sun SPARC III and IBM POWER64?
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those people that know more than you know more than the highly-paid, best of the best cabal of chip engineers at Intel?
What does being highly-paid tells, except that the employee happen to make his employer feel his indispensable?
"Chip engineers at Intel" were never "best of the best cabal". This were Digital Alpha, HP PA-RISC - most of them left already in the DEC and HP organizational culture debacle to join, among others, AMD -, IBM Power and assorted others.
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desktop CPUs make up a very small percentage of total CPUs shipped
I know, but I do not care about the embedded market. The general computing market is the one who has a direct impact on the culture and the technology trends, since it subsidizes development of chips that, when miniaturized and their investment amortized, become the next generation embedded processors blueprints.
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your argument that RISC is bad
I never uttered that argument, because I believe RISC is the past and the foreseeable future. I did say that EPIC is bad, and I did imply VLIW is good only in a limited scope, but then VLIW and EPIC are not RISC.
First, Itanium is the marketing name for the processor. The architecture is IPF, or IA64.
Second, it's anything but pure. It also has an IA32 (i386) compatibility mode, that kills any die size benefits of a new architecture, at least for the next few generations until IA32 really dies.
Third, even when it gets rid of IA32 compatibility, IPF may still be a pig: many people who know more about this issue than me consider it to be too complex and full of bad trade-offs, essentially stretching a good idea (VLIW) too far (EPIC).
There is the argument that RISC architectures are essentially better. Too bad IBM can't find its way to the general market, Motorola has only proprietary Apples as its venue, Sun falters in execution and forfeited popularisation, and Digital was killed by elitism.
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Let us debate them. But don't throw an "all" around, that's no information
Minimum wages are not the issue, but their populist usage. Brazil had its first big bout of inflation when minimum wages were severely raised. That had two immediate effects: prices raised because of excess demand (more salary) and lack of offer (no investment, because of the risk), and many workers were fired and couldn't find a regular job instead. To this day in Brazil there are a great many people who can't get a regular job, because it is more expensive for the employers. Other Latin American countries have similar situations, some better, some worse.
Considering that the government is the biggest employer, and that social security payments are usually linked to the minimum wages, populist usage of them do constituture incompetent administration of the treasury.
But usually it is not only incompetent administration of the treasury that causes inflation, but expansion of liquidity. Obviously, if the government raises minimum wages too much it will need to expand liquidity thru printing of money...
Anyway your counterargument is invalid, because my argument was not only about Mexico or some specific inflation bout, but the economic effects of populist acts of the government, ceteris paribus.
And that is my point, that if this measure doesn't have enough popular support, it may become dead letter and even ignite a backslash agains free software. Thus a long term would be denied to the measure, which otherwise is good in principle.
That's it. You don't grok free software. It is not the same thing philosophically.
I'm amazed my maturity interests you, but I am 30, have a job and a family, and have had some pretty good education, including some reading in Philosophy. Now on to the debate.
The users, and in the measure in which government has grown dependent on Informatics, the people.
No, they aren't. I work at a big European telecom operator, and we have neither the Microsoft source code nor the Amdocs (our billing system vendor) one. Now, I think it is self-defeating proposition to run a business without the source code to one's core system, as is a billing system to a telecom operator. But the incredible thing is that MBAs think it is good. No need to tell you how much shareholders' money is wasted.
The main purpose of source code is not modifying it, but avoiding proprietary lock-in. Please educate yourself.
If we allow everyone to hoard software and claim it's free or open or standard, like Apple and the Unix vendors and Microsoft all have done, we loose our freedom again.
That needs efforts currently wasted on useless forking, semi-free code and proprietary systems interoperability.
They didn't. Apple released under a quasi-free license mostly that was already available under a really free license.
No, because it is not free.
Yes, but most forking is not because of different, valid goals: it is because of bad technical decisions (for instance RPM as a dpkg fork), proprietary licensing (for instance the original TrollTech Qt licensing) or just the not-invented-here syndrome.
Go educate yourself about risks and security. Usually free software is more secure than equivalent proprietary software.
There isn't. There is no warranty, there is no security, there is no source code to fix things. There are thousands of people who know a little about MS Office, but no one has the source code. The end result is that people learn to live with brokenness in proprietary programs, while with free software it can always be fixed.
This is being addressed by several distributions. Rome wasn't built in one day.
This is because MS Office documents are proprietary. If they were open standards, there would be no need of converstion. But still, if things are saved in XHTML, PDF, RTF and the like, MS Office users can read them.
I don't know why I loose time trying to teach people who can't to their homework reading.
Some information for non-Latin Americans.
First, Venezuela is currently in political and institutional turmoil. The current president, Hugo Chavez, is a caudillo: this is the Spanish word for a paternalistic dictator or local boss, in effect a feudal lord. Even if he came to power by elections, it was an anger vote against corrupt politicians. Hugo Chavez is a Colonel who previously had attempted a military coup d'etat, so he's no leftist or democratist, only a populist with muddled ideas.
This move, and other similar ones, come from the traditional latin institution of the canetada: this is the Portuguese word for a law that tries to change reality with little practical consequence, sometimes even making situation worse. Other examples are strict labour laws that drives workers into illegal semi-employment, minimum wages that serve only to cause inflation that makes workers lives' even worse than before, and so on.
Since the Roman-type "objective" law is encroaching into the anglo-saxon consuetudinary Common Law, this has been known to happen in the US too, like the POSIX and FIPS SQL standards validating systems from Microsoft and Oracle that were rigged to pass the tests, but are nowhere near open.
That single phrase is the foundation of education, which unfortunately has been phased off in favor of schooling and training.
Have any sources, preferrably URLs, for that?
From the article, a Colombian drug cartel uses IBM AS/400 mid-range EBCDIC systems, incorrectly called mainframes. Hey, you can't get much more proprietary than that! At least they are dumping some of their dirty money into a supporter of GNU/Linux, half-hearted as IBM's free software instance is no, wait, IBM does software patents, so they are evil!
Suddenly, open source geeks who care about source, not necessarily freedom, discover the world is a complex thingie.
I sure would like to buy a PowerPC computing preinstalled with Debian from Europe, but I fear Swiss taxes and the cost of transport would kill the deal for me...
We care for freedom, including yours. Because no one can be free in a slave society. If you want to be enslaved to proprietary software, unable even to read your documents without paying a license to a corrupt, greedy corporation, your problem.
It's very difficult to produce quality software when you have to spend most time reverse engineering proprietary file formats, APIs and protocols, and hardware interfaces.
Forking is a real problem. GNU GPL is a good antidote, but not enough if people don't agree on what they want. Stop whining and help build consensus.
What's the problem with server side? People need servers. The world isn't made only of desktops.
Why be imaginative? People need a migration path, including an at least partially familiar interface.
Try understanding free software next time. Linux yet another Unix kernel clone is pretty interesting. But you will never understand freedom if you ignore basic realities about society and the market, like suits usually do.
Because it's not a cheap knock-off, but frequently better than the original. And because the original is proprietary. What's the price of freedom?
BTW, no need of buying. Use Debian and buy services instead.
Few people now what's good for themselves, because few people are both wise and informed enough. Learn History if you think otherwise.
We are building a new future. Please get out of the way, troll.
...if so-called "users" wouldn't forfeit their freedom for a dish of lentiles.
Well, first I would explain your quotes on Christian by remembering all readers that Christian Science is not Christian nor Science, but a mistaken self-assigned name for a gnostic heresy.
Second, why would I trust a publication by a religious organization based on bad philosophy over publications by corrupt corporations? I mean, what's the difference? Even idealistic publications have problems to get things right.
APSL is really quasi-free.
What about TP monitors?
I have never been able to find a real free TP monitor.
I see everyone going nuts for application servers, but the fate of most of them is to suffer under high loads. I've never seen any of them incorporate the lessons learned by hard experience during 30 years in the TP monitor field.
This to me seems like the whole OO and Web fads: everything has to be OO and HTML and HTTP, and XML too. But few people learn the fundamentals. So they go and build beautiful applications on Java, HTML, MySQL, without ever realizing its unreliability or all the duplication of effort necessary. Or the risks for lack of scalability.
This is yet another thing the proprietary world gets not so bad as the free software world. For example, BEA's WebLogic Enterprise actually embeds the Tuxedo core to provide TP monitor services; they call it BEA Engine.
In Brasil, diamonds are considered extremely over and kitsch in anything but night jewellery, the kind used at big-time, no-more-than-two-at-a-year parties. No one would ever use them at a simple dinner, or graduation party. Only at night marriages, official receptions and the such.
For engagement and marriage rings, simple gold is more elegant, at most a combination of different colours of gold mine is a three-rings entwined imitation of classical Cartier design, each ring of a colour: white, yellow and red gold. At most people will use wrought gold: with forms of entwined elephants, or with braille codes, or whatever. But still the most elegant is simple, plain gold.
Just think if she would like to be more elegant than her kitsch friends dumped by ads but make sure she get the idea.
About ethics, just remember that bad as mining is, having no job is far worse.
He complains a lot about dependencies.
Whomever complains about dependencies is still in RPM Dark Ages, having not seen yet the dpkg light as witnessed by apt and dselect.
Seriously, it is just another case of a half-baked industry standard namely, RPM long surviving its own due lifespan, thus becoming a hindrance to the whole industry and giving a bad name to GNU/Linux.
Ironic that RPM was just a stop gap before dpkg was finished, or perhaps a bit of Not Invented Here syndrome.
It's just another GNU/Linux system as far as booting goes: yaboot on NewWorld Macs and quik or BootX on OldWorld ones. Same software available and compatible, etc. Just that you get Debian's sane policies, over-the-Net installation of 8K packages, seamless upgrades, security updates, 11 platforms - including M68K pre-PPC Macs & Amigas -, localization, free software emphasis etc.
I will buy the first SCSI, silent RISC machine with digital video interface I can buy for less than CHF10K or US$5K with Debian preinstalled.
Actually Commercial Ingres was a fork from University Ingres, and further down became Ingres II.
Illustra is a direct descendant of either Postgres or one of its descendants.
But because the source code is BSD licensed, it's very probable that Illustra, Ingres II or whatever have code in them from other than their direct ancestors.
No one can ever make it proprietary. That is, availability assurance.
Take a look at data types in SAPdb. While they have, for example, date and time types that Oracle lacks, they are implemented as especialization of totally unrelated character strings. This is an ugly hack.
Now contrast that with PostgreSQL's data types. Elegance speaks for itself.
Well, considering PostgreSQL is free, a whole lot less sorry for being picky, but it occurred to that some people might be lost in the irony.
PostgreSQL was never GPL'd. Not even copyleft, but just a plain free software license, can't remember if derived from BSD or MIT X. If one wants copyleft, SAPdb is the only choice now.
Interesting, thanks for the info! Do you have any idea about how this aspect of IPF compares to typical RISC systems, like Sun SPARC III and IBM POWER64?
What does being highly-paid tells, except that the employee happen to make his employer feel his indispensable?
"Chip engineers at Intel" were never "best of the best cabal". This were Digital Alpha, HP PA-RISC - most of them left already in the DEC and HP organizational culture debacle to join, among others, AMD -, IBM Power and assorted others.
Sim, yes, oui, ja, da, hai
I know, but I do not care about the embedded market. The general computing market is the one who has a direct impact on the culture and the technology trends, since it subsidizes development of chips that, when miniaturized and their investment amortized, become the next generation embedded processors blueprints.
I never uttered that argument, because I believe RISC is the past and the foreseeable future. I did say that EPIC is bad, and I did imply VLIW is good only in a limited scope, but then VLIW and EPIC are not RISC.
First, Itanium is the marketing name for the processor. The architecture is IPF, or IA64.
Second, it's anything but pure. It also has an IA32 (i386) compatibility mode, that kills any die size benefits of a new architecture, at least for the next few generations until IA32 really dies.
Third, even when it gets rid of IA32 compatibility, IPF may still be a pig: many people who know more about this issue than me consider it to be too complex and full of bad trade-offs, essentially stretching a good idea (VLIW) too far (EPIC).
There is the argument that RISC architectures are essentially better. Too bad IBM can't find its way to the general market, Motorola has only proprietary Apples as its venue, Sun falters in execution and forfeited popularisation, and Digital was killed by elitism.