yeah, and tomorrow the earth will melt and we'll all die in a horrible mess, crying about how useless we were and all we did was whine, whine whine.
alternatively, some people might come up with a good idea and, most likely, ignore people like you that have nothing constructive to say and get on with the job at hand.
it wouldn't be an issue if America didn't exhibit occasional imperialistic behaior.
this is exactly what Browne is advocating: military withdrawl from foreign lands.
I'm sure other countries would feel a lot less threatened by a country that can defend itself well but that rarely shows military might outside its borders.
... the federal government outdoes itself on the 'fucking-with-the-american-public' front. well outside the bounds of any constitutional powers provided to it.
yet another reason to vote Libertarian, don't you think? how many more reasons do you need?
Nowhere in the text is the possibility that the customer might want to install a legal, free operating system mentioned.
No, but it doesn't mention that the customer might want to cover themselves in lemon curd either does it?
More to the point, it doesn't say that you should only sell Microsoft operating systems preinstalled. Just a "licensed, preinstalled operating system" which in my book includes free ones too.
he said he ran NT 4.0 on the machine in questions, NOT WORD. There's a HUGE difference (literally).
One is a rather nimble operating system with an extremely lightweight GUI (compare others with similar functionality).
If you want to run Word you should check the system requirements on Word's box - i'm pretty sure it's greater than those on the NT4.0 box.
You don't complain when it takes 20 minutes to start X on your wrist watch, do you?
Windows 95 wasn't allowed to ship until it ran almost as fast as OS/2 and Win3.1 on a 4Mb machine and faster on 8Mb.
i'm not sure of their official position but i would imagine that the libertarians are firmly in favor of the protection of intelectual property rights for exactly the same reasons as the socialists are against such protection - property being the basis for a capitalist economy and intelecual property being the basis for the new economy. without such protection you no longer have a market (since nothing has any tradable value) and therefore nothing upon which to build an economy...
i believe that there was a 'userfs' module that supported things like this. read-only, though.
i use a product on windows called ZipMagic which supports read/write operations on.ZIP files at the file-system level. it even works in a command prompt - really smart stuff.
You need administrative privileges to install drivers or overwrite system DLLs in Windows 2000.
give me root on a linux box and i'll do the same. win2k will try to fix most accidental deletes for you. However, if you say "Yes" to installing crap software from 3rd parties you're asking for it. If you installed an RPM whose setup included the step rm -fr/lib/modules, you'd be screwed. You'd probably blame the RPM producer, too. Or maybe you'd blame linux for letting you do that. Or maybe you'd just think for a moment before thinking you had a clue about what you're talking about.
The install for PC Anywhere installs a video driver. I believe that old versions of the PC Anywhere video driver would cause Win2K to crash.
Remember: drivers aren't protected by the operating system. Since you need Administrator privileges on Win2k to install drivers it's just as easy to do this sort of thing on linux.
I don't think this could be farther from the truth.
Since Open Source emphasizes the common good over the individual it could be decribed as Socialist.
Since Libertarianism emphasises the individual (and this includes the individuals that own stock in corporations) over the common good, it is the opposite of Socialism.
Leagalizing drugs will make it only easier for crackheads to sell their drugs on our streets, and to children.
Surely if they were legal there wouldn't be any need for dealers to sell on the streets. Sales could be controlled in much the same way as alcohol or tobacco today. Anyway. If you want more, try this.
Libertarians also seem very anti-religious and intolerant of it.
I don't know where you get this idea from?
Libertarians uphold everyone's freedom to believe whatever they want. Here's a quote from the Libertarian party platform:
Freedom of Religion
We defend the rights of individuals to engage in (or abstain from) any religious activities that do not violate the rights of others. In order to defend freedom, we advocate a strict separation of church and State. We oppose government actions that either aid or attack any religion. We oppose taxation of church property for the same reason that we oppose all taxation. We oppose the harassment of churches by the Internal Revenue Service through threats to deny tax-exempt status to churches that refuse to disclose massive amounts of information about themselves.
We condemn the attempts by parents or any others -- via kidnappings or conservatorships -- to force children to conform to any religious views. Government harassment or obstruction of religious groups for their beliefs or non-violent activities must end.
Now, the only reason that i can think of that one could think that this was in any way against realigion is if if you thought that your religious beliefs gave you some mandate to oppress others. There are many countries in the world in which this is the case. America is one. Obviously some are more opressive than others, but still, people all around the world, in every country are oppressed because of their religious beliefs. Divine mandate has caused more hate than any other cause.
The quote, above, makes it pretty clear, i think, that the Libertarian party believes that it is not the government's job to legislate on issues of religion. It is up to the individual to decide what they believe in and respect that equal right of others.
> any sort of gross violation of personal freedoms, rights, safety, environmental derstruction, is okay
Wow, you seriously misunderstand the libertarian ideal. Personal freedoms are the single most important things to libertarians, bar none. Given that one's actions do not infringe on the equal rights of others one is free to do what one wants.
From the Libertarian Party's Statement of Principles:
"We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives, and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to live in whatever manner they choose."
The problem with most party's platforms is that in order to carry out their policies they have to treat one group of people differently from another group for whatever reason. This is discrimination (by definition), and this is exactly the kind of thing that went on in Germany in the 20s & 30s, and disturbingly more and more of it is going on in America today. The libertarian platoform tries to end discrimination of all kinds by reducing the legislation that we have today that makes it necessary.
Environmental destruction is not okay. And no libertarian will tell you that it is. But what they will tell you is that we don't need a band of federally mandated, gun toting (errr) agents going around the country being both authoritarian and innefective.
If you wish to be treated, by the government, differently than someone else, for any reason, then you should not consider voting Libertarian, for that is the antithesis of their goals. If you wish the government to use its overwhelming force on your behalf by means of discrimination then, as they say, on your conscience be it. Sleep well.
I'm a non-mouser also. Well, apart from Quake, moving windows about and browsing.
I can't believe that more people don't use the keyboard for simple things like opening/closing windows, bringing up the start menu, or equivalent, launching your web browser at your favourite search page, navigating directories in 'explorer', clipboard, menus, errr menus. Excuse me for a moment:
When you go to your favourite bar, do you: open the door, go to the bar, sit down, stand up, wipe the vomit that you've just sat down in off your butt, ask for the beer menu, wait for the menu to appear, look up and down the menu a few times wondering where the beer you want is, get bored and start staring blankly at it and daydream about how nice it would be to be drinking a nice cold one right now, wake up from your dream realising that you've been staring at what you're looking for for an eon, select your beer, the thought of which has, through all the frustration, become a little less appealing. ?
No, of course not!
You walk in to the bar, make eye contact with the barman who acknowledges your entrance through the crowd with a knowing smile like you were the last to leave last night. Before you know it your pitcher and 2 glasses are speeding their way to you in the very capable hands of Alice, the new bar maid, who just happens to have finished her shift. Yum!
Okay. I don't know about you, but i've been using these computer things for a while. When i need to do things that i do quite alot, like setting breakpoints, stepping, rebuilding, saving, browsing etc... I tend to learn the key shortcuts for those things (how's about Ctrl-Enter in IE's address bar), and after a while they become subliminal (or Windows-D ?), i don't have to think about which keys to press, like i don't have to think about spelling 'ls' or 'more' i just think and it appears. this will never be the case with the mouse. first of all you have to move your hand from the keyboard. then there's the follow the stupid pointer around the screen while reading text, recognizing/interpreting icons etc... I think the most important advantage that WIndows has over other windowing environments in the accessibility front is the fact that there's a single set of richly-features common controls and dialogs that can be easily extended by developers. This encourages applications to use common metaphors that users are familiar with. Like, for example, what does ctrl-shit-end do in your text control? It's not perfect by any means, but at least it's not like X where we have a zillion different widget sets each with completely different behaviors and quirks. I like to keep my quirks to a minimum thanks.
In my book the one thing that killed the Macintosh's usability was the fact that every single box shipped with a mouse. Windows didn't have this luxury and so the apps were, and still are, much more accessible from the keyboard. The Mac did have standards, though, for most things. Most X apps wouldn't know a keyboard shortcut if you, well, if you wanted one...
I just got one of those Microsoft keyboards with the row of programmable blue buttons across the top. It's key.
No, this isn't interesting. It's just another knee-jerk response to a perfetly reasonable idea.
Nobody's telling anybody to do anything or forcing you to do anything or enforcing any rules. What they are doing is starting to put some ideas down in some sort of standard so that those people who want to can conform to it and state this fact. A standard isn't a regulation, it's just a flag you can wave that says "we do stuff this way".
the bad thing, of course, is that the standard turns out to be a pile of shite, nobody ends up using it, a whole ton of time spent is wated and we all go back to square one a little bit wiser.
the main point here is that nobody's pointing a gun at your head. literally. this means you have the choice whether or not to even think about this. you could, for all the rest of us care, switch off your computer and climb the nearest mountain, meditate on how misguided your life has been up til now, fast by way of repentance and starve to death, lonely and unloved.
the rest of us, however, will go on and enjoy a new era of cooperation between application developers on Linux. something that's been way too long in the making.
it will be a good thing, or it won't be a thing at all. stop being such a bloody pessimist.
(disclaimer: i worked at microsoft from 1993 to 1998 and was a member of the VJ1, 1.1 & 6.0 teams, so although the content of this message may be somewhat factual, it's probably not of any interest to you (for exactly that reason). please stop reading now. goodbye.)
Here's how it works:
Microsoft makes money. They make lots of it. They have to, they're a business. Get over it.
They make their money by selling Office (mostly) - and Office runs on Windows (mostly).
They like people to write programs for Windows (and Office, mostly) because that means Microsoft doesn't have to write all the programs (yet) in order for people to want to buy Windows, and Office (mostly). They make more money, everyone's happy (mostly).
It's called developer relations. And they're pretty good at it (mostly).
Well, they started with Basic, and they're still at it - VB is the most widely used programming environment worldwide. And it runs on Windows and does Office and more recently it does Web & server stuff, too. More importantly it does COM, and it makes it really easy, which is key because then 3rd party developers can get in on the deal: more software, more windows, more office, more money.
So what's the problem? Why do they need another language? Well, basically, basic sucks ass. The COM stuff is cool, and the IDE is great for rapid application development, but the language bites (although it's geting better now) and the windowing libraries are looking rather dated. The learning curve for C/C++ is too high, pascal's a good option that delphi did well but Microsoft was happy with the way that VB was going.
Then came Java. Arguably the whole cross-platform package that Sun provided was a really good idea (mostly). There's was one problem - no Windows, no Office, no money. But java's a really nice language. Close enough to C++ (syntactically) to please the C++ crowd, easy and rich enough to please the RAD people, and designed (unwittingly) to be the perfect language to deal with COM objects. Lightbulbs went on. At least, they did for those bright enough to have them. And they went away and wrote a Java VM that not only ran java code pretty-damn-quickly (tm) but did ActiveX, J/Direct and the rest as well. This pissed off the cross-platform crowd much like the spaniards did the catholic church a while back. Anyway: McNealy, Sun, Lawsuits, history. Now java (the language) is only good for one platform: the java platform. No Windows, Office, money. Next.
Take a bunch of smart people (possibly the same ones), the same kind of cool bytecode, JIT compiling, garbage collecting, ActiveX integrating technology, stick a language around it that you don't have to shit bricks of gold for everytime you think about how cool it would be if you could only do... HERETIC!
On top of that put Win32, DCOM/COM+ (and therefore Office, Backoffice, 3rd party components, IE, the lot), whatever NGWS turns out to be and whatever other tricks they come up with and you've got a pretty good bed on which to conduct your sinful developer relations away from the prying eyes of the inquisition. If you like that kind of thing, that is.
Any language will do. Java did quite nicely thank you very much. But then again, so did hand operated looms (mostly).
Personally, I'm waiting to see the VS7 debugger...
Slashdot Mirror
... and then he dropped the stupid crown they'd given him and walked off the pitch.
alternatively, some people might come up with a good idea and, most likely, ignore people like you that have nothing constructive to say and get on with the job at hand.
Troll/Insightful, take your pick.
this is exactly what Browne is advocating: military withdrawl from foreign lands.
I'm sure other countries would feel a lot less threatened by a country that can defend itself well but that rarely shows military might outside its borders.
a bytecode that can acommodate many languages (new and old, not just Java),
a runtime and set of libraries that can be used by any one of these supported languages,
is designed to be cross-platorm,
and then submit it to a standards body (ECMA, for example) instead of keeping it propietary (like Java, for example).
While they're at it, why not allow support for prevalent technologies such as:
XML/XSLT
SOAP/WSDL
Multi-tier web applications
hand-held devices
Doh!
yet another reason to vote Libertarian, don't you think? how many more reasons do you need?
No, but it doesn't mention that the customer might want to cover themselves in lemon curd either does it?
More to the point, it doesn't say that you should only sell Microsoft operating systems preinstalled. Just a "licensed, preinstalled operating system" which in my book includes free ones too.
Now where did i put that jar...
One is a rather nimble operating system with an extremely lightweight GUI (compare others with similar functionality).
If you want to run Word you should check the system requirements on Word's box - i'm pretty sure it's greater than those on the NT4.0 box.
You don't complain when it takes 20 minutes to start X on your wrist watch, do you?
Windows 95 wasn't allowed to ship until it ran almost as fast as OS/2 and Win3.1 on a 4Mb machine and faster on 8Mb.
could it be your hypocrisy?
i use a product on windows called ZipMagic which supports read/write operations on .ZIP files at the file-system level. it even works in a command prompt - really smart stuff.
err... they banned DeCSS, why not MP3?
Oh... hang on...
Place your right hand on the manual and repeat after me: "I swear by the GNU Copyleft License..."
Well, all he needed was a box of cereal, right?
There is no objective morality.
give me root on a linux box and i'll do the same. win2k will try to fix most accidental deletes for you. However, if you say "Yes" to installing crap software from 3rd parties you're asking for it. /lib/modules, you'd be screwed. You'd probably blame the RPM producer, too. Or maybe you'd blame linux for letting you do that. Or maybe you'd just think for a moment before thinking you had a clue about what you're talking about.
If you installed an RPM whose setup included the step rm -fr
Remember: drivers aren't protected by the operating system. Since you need Administrator privileges on Win2k to install drivers it's just as easy to do this sort of thing on linux.
Did you try the LKG boot option?
err... net group can only be run on a domain controller.
Since Open Source emphasizes the common good over the individual it could be decribed as Socialist.
Since Libertarianism emphasises the individual (and this includes the individuals that own stock in corporations) over the common good, it is the opposite of Socialism.
Surely if they were legal there wouldn't be any need for dealers to sell on the streets. Sales could be controlled in much the same way as alcohol or tobacco today. Anyway. If you want more, try this.
I don't know where you get this idea from?
Libertarians uphold everyone's freedom to believe whatever they want. Here's a quote from the Libertarian party platform:
Now, the only reason that i can think of that one could think that this was in any way against realigion is if if you thought that your religious beliefs gave you some mandate to oppress others. There are many countries in the world in which this is the case. America is one. Obviously some are more opressive than others, but still, people all around the world, in every country are oppressed because of their religious beliefs. Divine mandate has caused more hate than any other cause.
The quote, above, makes it pretty clear, i think, that the Libertarian party believes that it is not the government's job to legislate on issues of religion. It is up to the individual to decide what they believe in and respect that equal right of others.
Wow, you seriously misunderstand the libertarian ideal. Personal freedoms are the single most important things to libertarians, bar none. Given that one's actions do not infringe on the equal rights of others one is free to do what one wants.
From the Libertarian Party's Statement of Principles:
The problem with most party's platforms is that in order to carry out their policies they have to treat one group of people differently from another group for whatever reason. This is discrimination (by definition), and this is exactly the kind of thing that went on in Germany in the 20s & 30s, and disturbingly more and more of it is going on in America today. The libertarian platoform tries to end discrimination of all kinds by reducing the legislation that we have today that makes it necessary.
Environmental destruction is not okay. And no libertarian will tell you that it is. But what they will tell you is that we don't need a band of federally mandated, gun toting (errr) agents going around the country being both authoritarian and innefective.
If you wish to be treated, by the government, differently than someone else, for any reason, then you should not consider voting Libertarian, for that is the antithesis of their goals. If you wish the government to use its overwhelming force on your behalf by means of discrimination then, as they say, on your conscience be it. Sleep well.
I can't believe that more people don't use the keyboard for simple things like opening/closing windows, bringing up the start menu, or equivalent, launching your web browser at your favourite search page, navigating directories in 'explorer', clipboard, menus, errr menus. Excuse me for a moment:
When you go to your favourite bar, do you:
open the door,
go to the bar,
sit down,
stand up,
wipe the vomit that you've just sat down in off your butt,
ask for the beer menu,
wait for the menu to appear,
look up and down the menu a few times wondering where the beer you want is,
get bored and start staring blankly at it and daydream about how nice it would be to be drinking a nice cold one right now,
wake up from your dream realising that you've been staring at what you're looking for for an eon,
select your beer, the thought of which has, through all the frustration, become a little less appealing.
?
No, of course not!
You walk in to the bar, make eye contact with the barman who acknowledges your entrance through the crowd with a knowing smile like you were the last to leave last night. Before you know it your pitcher and 2 glasses are speeding their way to you in the very capable hands of Alice, the new bar maid, who just happens to have finished her shift. Yum!
Okay.
I don't know about you, but i've been using these computer things for a while. When i need to do things that i do quite alot, like setting breakpoints, stepping, rebuilding, saving, browsing etc... I tend to learn the key shortcuts for those things (how's about Ctrl-Enter in IE's address bar), and after a while they become subliminal (or Windows-D ?), i don't have to think about which keys to press, like i don't have to think about spelling 'ls' or 'more' i just think and it appears.
this will never be the case with the mouse. first of all you have to move your hand from the keyboard. then there's the follow the stupid pointer around the screen while reading text, recognizing/interpreting icons etc... I think the most important advantage that WIndows has over other windowing environments in the accessibility front is the fact that there's a single set of richly-features common controls and dialogs that can be easily extended by developers. This encourages applications to use common metaphors that users are familiar with. Like, for example, what does ctrl-shit-end do in your text control? It's not perfect by any means, but at least it's not like X where we have a zillion different widget sets each with completely different behaviors and quirks. I like to keep my quirks to a minimum thanks.
In my book the one thing that killed the Macintosh's usability was the fact that every single box shipped with a mouse. Windows didn't have this luxury and so the apps were, and still are, much more accessible from the keyboard. The Mac did have standards, though, for most things. Most X apps wouldn't know a keyboard shortcut if you, well, if you wanted one...
I just got one of those Microsoft keyboards with the row of programmable blue buttons across the top. It's key.
Nobody's telling anybody to do anything or forcing you to do anything or enforcing any rules. What they are doing is starting to put some ideas down in some sort of standard so that those people who want to can conform to it and state this fact. A standard isn't a regulation, it's just a flag you can wave that says "we do stuff this way".
the bad thing, of course, is that the standard turns out to be a pile of shite, nobody ends up using it, a whole ton of time spent is wated and we all go back to square one a little bit wiser.
the main point here is that nobody's pointing a gun at your head. literally. this means you have the choice whether or not to even think about this. you could, for all the rest of us care, switch off your computer and climb the nearest mountain, meditate on how misguided your life has been up til now, fast by way of repentance and starve to death, lonely and unloved.
the rest of us, however, will go on and enjoy a new era of cooperation between application developers on Linux. something that's been way too long in the making.
it will be a good thing, or it won't be a thing at all. stop being such a bloody pessimist.
There are some very interesting insights into his work on Unix & C.
Specifically:
The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System
and
The Development of the C Language
If you're reading these slashdot articles you should be reading these papers instead!!
Also check out "The Unix System" by S.R.Bourne.
i thought i told you to stop reading already.
Here's how it works:
Microsoft makes money. They make lots of it. They have to, they're a business. Get over it.
They make their money by selling Office (mostly) - and Office runs on Windows (mostly).
They like people to write programs for Windows (and Office, mostly) because that means Microsoft doesn't have to write all the programs (yet) in order for people to want to buy Windows, and Office (mostly). They make more money, everyone's happy (mostly).
It's called developer relations. And they're pretty good at it (mostly).
Well, they started with Basic, and they're still at it - VB is the most widely used programming environment worldwide. And it runs on Windows and does Office and more recently it does Web & server stuff, too. More importantly it does COM, and it makes it really easy, which is key because then 3rd party developers can get in on the deal: more software, more windows, more office, more money.
So what's the problem? Why do they need another language? Well, basically, basic sucks ass. The COM stuff is cool, and the IDE is great for rapid application development, but the language bites (although it's geting better now) and the windowing libraries are looking rather dated. The learning curve for C/C++ is too high, pascal's a good option that delphi did well but Microsoft was happy with the way that VB was going.
Then came Java. Arguably the whole cross-platform package that Sun provided was a really good idea (mostly). There's was one problem - no Windows, no Office, no money. But java's a really nice language. Close enough to C++ (syntactically) to please the C++ crowd, easy and rich enough to please the RAD people, and designed (unwittingly) to be the perfect language to deal with COM objects. Lightbulbs went on. At least, they did for those bright enough to have them. And they went away and wrote a Java VM that not only ran java code pretty-damn-quickly (tm) but did ActiveX, J/Direct and the rest as well. This pissed off the cross-platform crowd much like the spaniards did the catholic church a while back. Anyway: McNealy, Sun, Lawsuits, history. Now java (the language) is only good for one platform: the java platform. No Windows, Office, money. Next.
Take a bunch of smart people (possibly the same ones), the same kind of cool bytecode, JIT compiling, garbage collecting, ActiveX integrating technology, stick a language around it that you don't have to shit bricks of gold for everytime you think about how cool it would be if you could only do... HERETIC!
On top of that put Win32, DCOM/COM+ (and therefore Office, Backoffice, 3rd party components, IE, the lot), whatever NGWS turns out to be and whatever other tricks they come up with and you've got a pretty good bed on which to conduct your sinful developer relations away from the prying eyes of the inquisition. If you like that kind of thing, that is.
Any language will do. Java did quite nicely thank you very much. But then again, so did hand operated looms (mostly).
Personally, I'm waiting to see the VS7 debugger...