Normally I don't mind RMS spouting off about something when he has a decent leg to stand on or is using his own forum. In this case, he really doesn't.
First, he didn't seem to choose the right forum to speak in. A listserv for kernel development is not the correct space to bring political speach into. RMS's post was very possibly off topic to the list.
Second Linux is not his project, and he is not managing it. Torvalds has expressed his opinions on the Free Software movement. He doesn't believe in Free Software as an all important political idea, thus he has not don anything wrong by using Bitkeeper. Torvalds chose Bitkeeper, and that's what the project uses. Period.
RMS should attempt to open a serious technical discussion directly with Torvalds. RMS should say "What do you need?" and then deliver it. Or RMS should violate the license in a clearly absurd manner and let Bitkeeper take him to court to test the validity of the license.
I'm pulling much of this from memory of the flames over the 10.2 upgrade price. I'm relatively new to the Mac world (since Jan '02) so I can't speak from personal experience.
Many people pointed out that:
- 10.0 was a full price product. - 10.1 was a free upgrade ($20 for shipping) to 10.0 - 10.2 was a full price product.
They pointed out that Apple has a history of charging for every other point one upgrade. They speculated 10.3 would follow the pattern and be a free upgrade. Of course the question is, do you have to have 10.2 installed for the upgrade version to work?
As a user of 10.2, it's worth it. It's smoother, faster. Quartz Extreme greatly lessened the load on my TiBook. The anti-spam support in Mail is easily worth $40 (119 messages filtered in the past four days). Other updates and additions to Terminal, Finder, and the OS in general quickly make up for the other $90.
I remember that summer when the media gave so much attention to the project. Even my grandmother was excited about it. I'm sure it paled in comparision to the first moon missions, but I remember people being excited about the landing. CNN even showed live coverage.
NASA would win a the hearts of the public (and Congressional support) if they could pull off one of these popular missions every two or three years.
I switched from Linux to OS X last Jan. I completely agree with you: Slashdot is carrying way too many front page Apple stories.
90% of the comments are rehashes of the one button argument, people disappointed by their Mac OS 2.1 experience, and some idiot saying proclaiming Unix users can't use the Apple keyboard. The only productive Apple stories on/. are under the Apple section. Really, apple.slashdot.org or macslash.com would handle this question much more effeciently.
That little bit of semantic engineering that shrtens the name to Linux is newspeak. In this case it's not for some nefarious purpose.
By your own admission, those of use who say Linux do so out of ignorance or pragmatism, therefore calling the OS Linux is not newspeak. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "newspeak" as "Deliberately ambiguous and contradictory language used to mislead and manipulate the public." No one is deliberately trying to mislead or contradict.
'Linux' as applied to the entire OS may be a misnomer though. It depends on your political stance.
Personlly I see RMS and the FSF's attempt to change the popular name to 'GNU/Linux' as newspeak because they are doing it to move forward their agenda.
The truth is the OS's popular name is 'Linux' and that's not going to change just as the no one's going to change the name of Glaucomys volans from 'flying squirrel' to 'gliding squirrel'. It's a misnomer, deal with it.
The new facilities, which supplement the company's main distribution facility in San Jose, CA, are located in the Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Seattle and Washington, DC, metropolitan areas.
That's four distribution centers on the East Coast since June.
I live in rural western Virginia. Netflix takes 3 to 4 days to get a DVD to me. With the 4 movie plan I could watch 12 to 14 movies a month assuming I watch them on the same day they arrive.
I've wanted to get a tat for awhile, but decided against it until I found with meaning--boy would this be the meaning I've been searching for!
My advice - design one with meaning, but not too much. It's only a mark and won't reveal as much about you as you might think. People will read their own stories into your tattoo(s), which usually is a good thing.
Really, relax about it. You will have it the rest of your life which is all the more reason to *not* put too much meaning into it. Meanings, beliefs, and perceptions will change as you grow older.
Instead, might I suggest getting something that marks this part of your life. Then in a few years, get something else. Read up on 'travel marks' to get better understanding of tattoos in Western culture. (I'm assuming you're Western from how you talk about Bush and your first tattoo.)
We're talking about software to monitor employees so the employee's rights and expectations are not irrelevant at all. Companies have a right to monitor employees, and employees have a right to privacy. Neither of the rights are absolute, so there must be a balance. The software greatly shifts the balance to favor the employer, though, and that's what most people are getting upset over.
Aside from the above mentioned 9th Amendment, don't forget that the government is supposed to work for you. Ideally, you tell them what to do instead of them telling you. The fact that the 2nd Amendment still exists should be proof that 'we' tell them what to do.
You should also look into the history of labor relations. We, the workers, have had to fight to be treated like humans and the eight hour work day. We shouldn't let management chip away at what we have.
Their computers wasting cycles without an employee using it.
Their network sitting idle without employees working.
Their time wasting without employees.
Their money not growing without employee talent.
You forgot that a business without an employee goes nowhere, and an employee is a person who deserves more respect than a little bit of bandwidth.
I'm a human being and deserve some respect - respect for life outside of work, respect for privacy, respect for talents. When they prefer to use iron fisted policies that treat me as a simple machine in the system, I no longer feel the need to respect their corporate secrets or work hard.
It's a pretty easy equation. Respect me and acknowlege I have a life, and I'll respect the company and want to help it grow.
I mean goddamn, I've worked shit jobs for rednecks who understood that treating employees like shit gets you nowhere.
My TiBook is from last Jan. $129 is worth it. Under 10.1.5 my load numbers ran between 1 and 2 most of the day (lots of IE windows, lots of Terminals, Fire, RealPlayer/WM Player/iTunes going, CoolCam, Eudora). Since installing it yesterday, my load has gone down to the 0.2 - 1 range. I'm assuming the power management has improved because the battery lasted almost six hours under normal use. Used to last barely three and a half.
Mail.app has improved greatly. After almost a decade of using Eudora, I think I'm going to switch.
Finder is an order of magnitude faster, including sorting by file type in list view.
Sherlock 3 kicks ass. I've already decided to go see Sunshine State at a local theatre because of the preview. Previously, I had regretted ever opening Sherlock because it crawled and didn't offer anything useful. 3 is much, much different. It isn't something I'll use every day, but when I use it I've no doubt it will come through.
It sounds like you might have an interesting point, but you need to flesh the idea out some more.
Are you trying to say that the people switching to a proprietary platform that runs a mix of OSS and closed source software are betraying the ideas of OSS and GNU? I'd agree that running OS X goes against the ideas of GNU but not OSS. Does anyone know RMS's views of OS X? I'd guess he believes it's anathema to his beliefs.
As a user of OSS in the real world, I truly believe in the marriage of closed source and OSS that OS X has acheived. The freedom and effeciency of working on one platform that has Word (needed because the bosses use Windows), IE, Moz, Eudora, bash, vim, ssh, apache, php, and mysql has simplified my life by several fold. I'm down to one computer from three, no more KVM switch, no bitching about Windows, no fidgeting with Linux.
Yes, you can find alternativeOSS software that can read and edit Word docs (I always found them to be unreliable). Yes, there are good mail clients for Gnome/KDE but they all have an unfinished feeling. I believe OSS does an excellent job writing editors and servers. They even have come a long way on the desktop. OSS is not the only solution, though. Commercial software has successes, and you only limit yourself when you say you won't use them.
I was going somewhere with this, but got sidetracked.
To be glib, if OSS and GNU are about freedom of software, then what about my freedom to use both on one platform?
In your first post you said you sold the laptop after several days. No offense, but any major platform switch should be given several weeks at least. You can't expect to sit down and be proficient.
Second, do you have and did you take advantage of Mac using friends? Or a Mac user group? They probably could've pointed you towards fixing some of what you perceived as shortcomings.
Switching between an app's windows (including iconified windows) is usually done with Apple-~. This is a standard key combo, though Mozilla may not follow (Mozilla's fault, not Apple's).
For IM'ing you should've tried Fire. Connects to six of the major IM networks and has aliases.
The editors should gladly fix mistakes in the posted articles just as they gladly praise companies and groups who quickly release bug fixes. Afterall, an error or typo in a write up is an bug and leads to user error and misunderstanding.
How much do we Slashdotters need to complain to our vendor before they'll address these known bugs?
Okay, I am getting tired of seeing obvious typos and grammatical errors here. So many Slashdotters feel they are more intelligent than the average user and the unwashed masses, yet the editors and the submitters can't properly proof read stories. The editors can't even be bothered to edit a story after a major typo or when posters plainly point out an article is flat our wrong.
While I'm complaining about Slashdot, when did qualitative kharma replace quantitative kharma?
(If this post contains errors, feel free to point them out. I don't care about grammar in comments. My main concern is decent English in the article write ups.)
Now I know that the South has it's fair share of backwater far right conservatives, but don't lump all of the South in with them
Al Gore's from Tennessee. Bill Clinton's from Arkansas. Billy Carter's from Georgia. Doug Wilder, former gov of Virginia, was the first elected Black governor in the US.
Sure, we also gave the nation Ollie North, Jesse Helms, and Jerry Falwell.
So think of the South more as a region of extremes instead of Bible toting gun weilding conservatives.
*Texas is Texas. It does not count as a Southern state any more than Oklahoma does.
Amazon has always been honest about why they were loosing money. There invested in advertisement and infrastructure. They grew the company with the money coming in.
As far as being cheap, I'm a user and had preordered from Apple. Fifty dollars is a decent night out or a few more shares of AAPL. I'm not cheap, but I'll take advantage of it.
Slashdot Mirror
A man's accomplishments do not put him above critique, questioning, or insult.
Normally I don't mind RMS spouting off about something when he has a decent leg to stand on or is using his own forum. In this case, he really doesn't.
First, he didn't seem to choose the right forum to speak in. A listserv for kernel development is not the correct space to bring political speach into. RMS's post was very possibly off topic to the list.
Second Linux is not his project, and he is not managing it. Torvalds has expressed his opinions on the Free Software movement. He doesn't believe in Free Software as an all important political idea, thus he has not don anything wrong by using Bitkeeper. Torvalds chose Bitkeeper, and that's what the project uses. Period.
RMS should attempt to open a serious technical discussion directly with Torvalds. RMS should say "What do you need?" and then deliver it. Or RMS should violate the license in a clearly absurd manner and let Bitkeeper take him to court to test the validity of the license.
I'm pulling much of this from memory of the flames over the 10.2 upgrade price. I'm relatively new to the Mac world (since Jan '02) so I can't speak from personal experience.
Many people pointed out that:
- 10.0 was a full price product.
- 10.1 was a free upgrade ($20 for shipping) to 10.0
- 10.2 was a full price product.
They pointed out that Apple has a history of charging for every other point one upgrade. They speculated 10.3 would follow the pattern and be a free upgrade. Of course the question is, do you have to have 10.2 installed for the upgrade version to work?
As a user of 10.2, it's worth it. It's smoother, faster. Quartz Extreme greatly lessened the load on my TiBook. The anti-spam support in Mail is easily worth $40 (119 messages filtered in the past four days). Other updates and additions to Terminal, Finder, and the OS in general quickly make up for the other $90.
Ummm... It's an article about an O'Reilly book. That's an advert for O'Reilly really.
'sides, like the reply above me, this *is* the Apple section. Don't visit a Ford dealership if you're looking for a Chevy.
I remember that summer when the media gave so much attention to the project. Even my grandmother was excited about it. I'm sure it paled in comparision to the first moon missions, but I remember people being excited about the landing. CNN even showed live coverage.
NASA would win a the hearts of the public (and Congressional support) if they could pull off one of these popular missions every two or three years.
Wish I had some mod points for you...
/. are under the Apple section. Really, apple.slashdot.org or macslash.com would handle this question much more effeciently.
I switched from Linux to OS X last Jan. I completely agree with you: Slashdot is carrying way too many front page Apple stories.
90% of the comments are rehashes of the one button argument, people disappointed by their Mac OS 2.1 experience, and some idiot saying proclaiming Unix users can't use the Apple keyboard. The only productive Apple stories on
That little bit of semantic engineering that shrtens the name to Linux is newspeak. In this case it's not for some nefarious purpose.
By your own admission, those of use who say Linux do so out of ignorance or pragmatism, therefore calling the OS Linux is not newspeak. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "newspeak" as "Deliberately ambiguous and contradictory language used to mislead and manipulate the public." No one is deliberately trying to mislead or contradict.
'Linux' as applied to the entire OS may be a misnomer though. It depends on your political stance.
Personlly I see RMS and the FSF's attempt to change the popular name to 'GNU/Linux' as newspeak because they are doing it to move forward their agenda.
The truth is the OS's popular name is 'Linux' and that's not going to change just as the no one's going to change the name of Glaucomys volans from 'flying squirrel' to 'gliding squirrel'. It's a misnomer, deal with it.
I've wanted to get a tat for awhile, but decided against it until I found with meaning--boy would this be the meaning I've been searching for!
My advice - design one with meaning, but not too much. It's only a mark and won't reveal as much about you as you might think. People will read their own stories into your tattoo(s), which usually is a good thing.
Really, relax about it. You will have it the rest of your life which is all the more reason to *not* put too much meaning into it. Meanings, beliefs, and perceptions will change as you grow older.
Instead, might I suggest getting something that marks this part of your life. Then in a few years, get something else. Read up on 'travel marks' to get better understanding of tattoos in Western culture. (I'm assuming you're Western from how you talk about Bush and your first tattoo.)
We're talking about software to monitor employees so the employee's rights and expectations are not irrelevant at all. Companies have a right to monitor employees, and employees have a right to privacy. Neither of the rights are absolute, so there must be a balance. The software greatly shifts the balance to favor the employer, though, and that's what most people are getting upset over.
Aside from the above mentioned 9th Amendment, don't forget that the government is supposed to work for you. Ideally, you tell them what to do instead of them telling you. The fact that the 2nd Amendment still exists should be proof that 'we' tell them what to do.
You should also look into the history of labor relations. We, the workers, have had to fight to be treated like humans and the eight hour work day. We shouldn't let management chip away at what we have.
Their computers wasting cycles without an employee using it.
Their network sitting idle without employees working.
Their time wasting without employees.
Their money not growing without employee talent.
You forgot that a business without an employee goes nowhere, and an employee is a person who deserves more respect than a little bit of bandwidth.
I'm a human being and deserve some respect - respect for life outside of work, respect for privacy, respect for talents. When they prefer to use iron fisted policies that treat me as a simple machine in the system, I no longer feel the need to respect their corporate secrets or work hard.
It's a pretty easy equation. Respect me and acknowlege I have a life, and I'll respect the company and want to help it grow.
I mean goddamn, I've worked shit jobs for rednecks who understood that treating employees like shit gets you nowhere.
Wish I had mod points to give away. Pretty amusing post.
p0rn in the coffee shop!
the park
my lawn
p0rn everywhere!
My TiBook is from last Jan. $129 is worth it. Under 10.1.5 my load numbers ran between 1 and 2 most of the day (lots of IE windows, lots of Terminals, Fire, RealPlayer/WM Player/iTunes going, CoolCam, Eudora). Since installing it yesterday, my load has gone down to the 0.2 - 1 range. I'm assuming the power management has improved because the battery lasted almost six hours under normal use. Used to last barely three and a half.
Mail.app has improved greatly. After almost a decade of using Eudora, I think I'm going to switch.
Finder is an order of magnitude faster, including sorting by file type in list view.
Sherlock 3 kicks ass. I've already decided to go see Sunshine State at a local theatre because of the preview. Previously, I had regretted ever opening Sherlock because it crawled and didn't offer anything useful. 3 is much, much different. It isn't something I'll use every day, but when I use it I've no doubt it will come through.
Another Amen...
FedEx delivered my copy early today. Just booted it back up and was looking forward to intelligent comments about other's first impressions
Suggestions:
Find a friend with a Windows box.
Find a local Mac User Group.
Go to an Apple store, if one is close.
Though I'd wait to look at 10.2 instead of 10.1
It sounds like you might have an interesting point, but you need to flesh the idea out some more.
Are you trying to say that the people switching to a proprietary platform that runs a mix of OSS and closed source software are betraying the ideas of OSS and GNU? I'd agree that running OS X goes against the ideas of GNU but not OSS. Does anyone know RMS's views of OS X? I'd guess he believes it's anathema to his beliefs.
As a user of OSS in the real world, I truly believe in the marriage of closed source and OSS that OS X has acheived. The freedom and effeciency of working on one platform that has Word (needed because the bosses use Windows), IE, Moz, Eudora, bash, vim, ssh, apache, php, and mysql has simplified my life by several fold. I'm down to one computer from three, no more KVM switch, no bitching about Windows, no fidgeting with Linux.
Yes, you can find alternativeOSS software that can read and edit Word docs (I always found them to be unreliable). Yes, there are good mail clients for Gnome/KDE but they all have an unfinished feeling. I believe OSS does an excellent job writing editors and servers. They even have come a long way on the desktop. OSS is not the only solution, though. Commercial software has successes, and you only limit yourself when you say you won't use them.
I was going somewhere with this, but got sidetracked.
To be glib, if OSS and GNU are about freedom of software, then what about my freedom to use both on one platform?
h@oblems with how you went about the switch.
In your first post you said you sold the laptop after several days. No offense, but any major platform switch should be given several weeks at least. You can't expect to sit down and be proficient.
Second, do you have and did you take advantage of Mac using friends? Or a Mac user group? They probably could've pointed you towards fixing some of what you perceived as shortcomings.
Switching between an app's windows (including iconified windows) is usually done with Apple-~. This is a standard key combo, though Mozilla may not follow (Mozilla's fault, not Apple's).
For IM'ing you should've tried Fire. Connects to six of the major IM networks and has aliases.
The editors should gladly fix mistakes in the posted articles just as they gladly praise companies and groups who quickly release bug fixes. Afterall, an error or typo in a write up is an bug and leads to user error and misunderstanding.
How much do we Slashdotters need to complain to our vendor before they'll address these known bugs?
Okay, I am getting tired of seeing obvious typos and grammatical errors here. So many Slashdotters feel they are more intelligent than the average user and the unwashed masses, yet the editors and the submitters can't properly proof read stories. The editors can't even be bothered to edit a story after a major typo or when posters plainly point out an article is flat our wrong.
While I'm complaining about Slashdot, when did qualitative kharma replace quantitative kharma?
(If this post contains errors, feel free to point them out. I don't care about grammar in comments. My main concern is decent English in the article write ups.)
Now I know that the South has it's fair share of backwater far right conservatives, but don't lump all of the South in with them
Al Gore's from Tennessee.
Bill Clinton's from Arkansas.
Billy Carter's from Georgia.
Doug Wilder, former gov of Virginia, was the first elected Black governor in the US.
Sure, we also gave the nation Ollie North, Jesse Helms, and Jerry Falwell.
So think of the South more as a region of extremes instead of Bible toting gun weilding conservatives.
*Texas is Texas. It does not count as a Southern state any more than Oklahoma does.
that the company that invented the concept of "We don't see a need to ever turn a profit" is using it as a loss leader means nothing
"Amazon Posts First-Ever Profit" is the link when you search Google for "amazon.com projected profit".
Amazon has always been honest about why they were loosing money. There invested in advertisement and infrastructure. They grew the company with the money coming in.
As far as being cheap, I'm a user and had preordered from Apple. Fifty dollars is a decent night out or a few more shares of AAPL. I'm not cheap, but I'll take advantage of it.
Hurrican level winds? Are you using an english windsock to measure the speed? ;)
Where to you live in Denmark? It sounds like a great place that I'd like to visit just to experience the wind.
It's only been updated six times. Not bad for a cook book that's been around since 1931.
Supposedly the 1997 revision introduced more ethnic cuisines to reflect their grow in popularity since the previous revision in 1975.
La Technique by Jacque Pepin is also good for basics.