Well, I see your point, and kind of agree for the most part. The thing is that the article talks about the US. In the US you are _supposed_ to provide for yourself, and any other support from society is supposed to be heretic. This is the _efficient_ way of running a country.
(I know it's not like that in practice, but the mainstream idea seems to go like that)
I don't know which gadgets you are talking about. As far as I'm concerned, old stuff doesn't get dropped. It happened to me a lot, lack of upgraded drivers, when changing OS, mainly due to manufacturer going out of business, or dropping product lines, but no in Linux, mainly because drivers crawl into mainstream Linux, and the manufacturer no longer has full control and responsibility over the driver. Usually, just recompiling the driver just works(TM).
Even if that _were_ the case (which it is't), Dell computers would stay supported by Canonical at least as long as there is Canonical. It's cheap to support a couple of hardware drivers that already work and are integrated in mainstream Linux, and it makes PR sense. Anyhow, it wouldn't be that hard for any individual to keep them maintained, at that point.
As a former potential H1B inmigrant, I mostly agree with you. Everything you say _is_ true. You are only missing the part that it's too late now.
In my case, now I have a much better job than what I could hope for in the US, but in different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Of course, that is a plus, if you are a Latin American, because working in the US would imply being treated as a second class criminal periodically. I lie to think of me as a productive memberof society, though.
For other people I know, and I'm talking about the most capable people in software consulting I know, similar things happen. Some of them are working for companies in Mexico, Panama, and enjoying a great standard of living. Those of them who stayed home have good wages, mostly working for companies that export software and software services to the US and Europe.
And there's also Europe. They have historically paid a lot less than the US, but a weak dollar has changed that, and they have nice places to work, and laws that protect the workers. And there are social issues with immigrants, but the governments doesn't see you as a second class citizen.
I can see that, as Latin America is rising, Asia is rising, too. So, the only ones who actually want to move to the US are low wage workers. Theones who can choose, just have better choices. I think now it's getting late for the US to start attracting talent. They are not that attractive anymore.
you still have a choice of wifi manufacturers, ethernet cable manufacturers and implementors of internet protocols, I think you are confusing standardization and monopolization, they're two entirely unrelated concepts.
Thank you Captain Obvious for stating the obvious!!
What I mean is that the equality relationship is not true for all cases, period.
I mean that choice is not better, in general. For most things, people want/need a good standard. For some other things, choice is good. But I see that "choice=good" line, and it's just wrong. Lots of retards keep repeating their mantras here "choice is good", "competition is good", like they were true. _useful_ choice is good, _good_ competition is good. There is such a thing as a harmful choice, or bad competition. They are not the answer to everything, only to a lot of things.
Alright. I understand you think so. I just disagree. Nuclear war could have been pretty bad for the ecology, but nowhere near half the people in the planet would get killed. In that kind of scenario, the soviets _could_ see an opportunity to rebuild everything like a marxist utopia. Remember they already had bunkers, they didn't have to die themselves.
The fact that you are writing that states that they have a great respect for the value of human life. In the cold war, the URSS had enough nukes to add glass parks in every US city. If they didn't care for human life, they would have taken the chances they had. The guy making the decision would not be affected, anyway. And they had more territory, so in an all out nuclear war, realistically they would end up losing less than the US. Specially if you take into account that their regime would allow them to keep more control over their own people, a nuclear scenario could be seen as a win, if you didn't care about killing millions of people.
However, you've got to look at the context. Firstly, Microsoft are more concerned about the system being stable on the sort of hardware bought by businesses - half-decent quality PCs and servers - and these tend to use relatively conservative hardware which has decent drivers.
Secondly, a bit of history - while the idea of true microkernels with practically every driver being a true userland process is not new, the performance penalty they introduce (which is less of an issue on modern hardware) was considered unacceptable when the NT kernel was first designed - and the kind of overhaul that would be necessary to change this is something Microsoft have historically shied away from.
Well, we know that MS marketing department is to blame for a lot of issues with the system, but from the outside, they are just a company that provides bad solutions to problems.
I know that the fact that microkernels seem to be hard is an issue, too. There are different ways to make your system reliable, and I understand why they didn't choose any of them.
Anyhow, being run by marketing, selling proprietary software, or lacking knowledge are excuses, but not good reasons not to provide a reliable platform.
But also they answer for the drivers, so a "bad driver" issue is actually a kernel issue. I don't understand why "bad drivers" are not supposed to be the responsibility of MS. It's possible to design a system resilient to that kind of failure. The Linux solution for having good drivers (maintaining them themselves), seems to be working just fine, though.
You say that as if I implied that subverting copyright was a bad thing.
I agree that copyleft licenses respect copyright law. Maybe the term "subvert", as in "overthrow from the base" was too hard. The GPL, as a copyleft license, is a way to fight the effects of copyright from the inside, using copyright against itself to fight its harmful consequences. That is what I meant by "subvert".
And remember that nobody has a right to control who copies their works. Published works belong to the public domain, period. There is copyright, but that is a temporary monopoly on distribution granted by most states, meant as an incentive for people to give works to the public domain, not a right at all.
I don't understand that. What is so wrong about having an agenda? Having a hidden agenda _might_ be a bad thing, in a perfectly free society.
I think modern people despite so much politicians that they even renounce to their duty to be political themselves. People are supposed to have political ideas. It's a good thing, not a bad thing.
When people do not have and agenda, they lack depth in their political decisions, and only think day to day stuff, what doesn't seem wise to me.
There are lots of better solutions. My favorite is to decrease wattage, it's just simpler. Passive heatsinks are good, too. Liquid cooling not involving water is used, too.
The problem comes when you want to define "better". We have lots of engines that are better than the internal combustion engine, but in that case, "better" depends on so many things, that nobody agrees to choose a replacement.
Grep is a good tool for that job , because it's more reusable, and you can keep using it even if you change programs. You can just have a small shell script that takes a search criteria, and egreps all the log file collections sequentially, reformatting xmls as needed. Then, an extension could be written to use it, but it's useful to have it stand alone, so you don't need to open a program to use it, maybe you can just have it as a global command, or as a part of another program too. That's the beauty of the unix way, do things in small chunks, and then combine them.
You fail it. The guy just said he doesn't like participating in modern capitalism. And using the same system to subvert it is a valid way to do it. The GPL does so with copyright, and succeeds, as an example.
I kind of agree with your last paragraph, although I am more radical against "intellectual property" stuff.
This started LONG before NAFTA...what was their excuse then?
Maybe you need to understand the role the US played in the development of some Latin American countries, so you can understand why most people think the US is to blame for lots of their problem.
In this link you will find a small example of how US policies throughout the XX century affected what Latin America is today.
More recently, in the seventies, the US also supported dictatorships in South America (at least US official records say so), which are to blame, among worse things, for ten fold increased external debts.
I only mean that as an introduction to the issue, that maybe you don't know about.
What I mean is that it is ignorant to say that Latin American people should pay for the consequences, and US people should not.
If you effectively fscked up a country, and profited from that, you can't whine about their people coming to your country, and taking your job. Alright, you _can_ whine, but it would not be fair.
Well, I can't sympathize with you, because the situation in my country is the opposite. We get unskilled immigrants from poorer countries, of course, looking for a better future for their families, but we also export skilled people, and a big chunk of our college graduates mostly to Europe. That is a net loss for us, partly because our education is free, but also because they get to hire our best people, whatever our investment. From my point of view, they must be getting some benefits from all those people, because they give them work visas and stuff. The US does too, of course. All that is a benefit they get from people ability to cross borders.
You whining about that phenomenon harming your work environment and your people makes me feel no sympathy. The US has benefited a lot in the past, and still benefits a lot from immigrants, legal and illegal. Some times there are hard times, and they are easy to blame, but they are there because the country needs them.
The only reason lots of them are made illegal is because that way they are easier to manage, but they are a part of the economy, and a tool the country uses to compete in the global market.
I don't think the US government would shoot themselves in the foot by punishing companies that use those tools to benefit themselves, and the economy.
And please don't repeat that ER thing. Immigrants everywhere are healthier than other people. Sick people stay at home. Immigrants don't pay a lot of taxes, but they pay much more than the services they get. Remember they don't get social security.
Personally I have no respect for unions anymore since they are actively trying to unionize illegal workers. The union was supposed to be about protecting American jobs, not encouraging those who are breaking the law. Now it's all about the $$$.
Unions are about protecting workers, as people. Solidarity with your fellow worker doesn't necessarily end at the border, at least not for all of us. The whole idea of unionizing is to avoid exploited workers. Illegal immigrants are more vulnerable to that. In fact, their vulnerability is what makes them more interesting for employers. If illegal immigrants were unionized, they would lose some of their appeal as slave workers, which could even have a beneficial effect for all workers.
I was not trying to answer your question. And what you say now is new, you said:
- Step 1: Rip off 20 year old patented technology
So, you were clearly talking about Nintendo patents, not content. And it's hard to make the case that they are ripping off someone. Just because I use Newton laws, it doesn't mean I am ripping him off. The games made their money, and now some Chinese/Indian is also making money off them. It's the same thing as with patents. Someone makes a creative work, gets money with help from society, but at some point that help has to come back to society. I know it's still not legal in the US to make money off those games, but what I say is that I don't think it's unfair, as in someone getting ripped off.
About your question, well, I don't really like what they are trying to do. Using that to teach kids to use a mouse and a keyboard lacks insight.
The XO was better lots of ways, because it was about advancing the state of the art, succeeding, in a way. This idea is about helping kids who are lagging too far behind to lag a little closer. I don't think it's a good idea.
You make it sound as if it was unfair. This is the expressed goal of patents. Nintendo had their patent monopolies, and in exchange, everybody gets to benefit from the technology today. This is a win-win situation. Nintendo got their money, and we get our cheap systems. I don't understand why you call this "ripping off" technology. For me, it's making the system work as it was intended.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an _actual_ gray beard, you insensitive clod!
Well, I see your point, and kind of agree for the most part.
The thing is that the article talks about the US. In the US you are _supposed_ to provide for yourself, and any other support from society is supposed to be heretic. This is the _efficient_ way of running a country.
(I know it's not like that in practice, but the mainstream idea seems to go like that)
I don't know which gadgets you are talking about.
As far as I'm concerned, old stuff doesn't get dropped. It happened to me a lot, lack of upgraded drivers, when changing OS, mainly due to manufacturer going out of business, or dropping product lines, but no in Linux, mainly because drivers crawl into mainstream Linux, and the manufacturer no longer has full control and responsibility over the driver. Usually, just recompiling the driver just works(TM).
Even if that _were_ the case (which it is't), Dell computers would stay supported by Canonical at least as long as there is Canonical. It's cheap to support a couple of hardware drivers that already work and are integrated in mainstream Linux, and it makes PR sense. Anyhow, it wouldn't be that hard for any individual to keep them maintained, at that point.
As a former potential H1B inmigrant, I mostly agree with you.
Everything you say _is_ true. You are only missing the part that it's too late now.
In my case, now I have a much better job than what I could hope for in the US, but in different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Of course, that is a plus, if you are a Latin American, because working in the US would imply being treated as a second class criminal periodically. I lie to think of me as a productive memberof society, though.
For other people I know, and I'm talking about the most capable people in software consulting I know, similar things happen. Some of them are working for companies in Mexico, Panama, and enjoying a great standard of living. Those of them who stayed home have good wages, mostly working for companies that export software and software services to the US and Europe.
And there's also Europe. They have historically paid a lot less than the US, but a weak dollar has changed that, and they have nice places to work, and laws that protect the workers.
And there are social issues with immigrants, but the governments doesn't see you as a second class citizen.
I can see that, as Latin America is rising, Asia is rising, too. So, the only ones who actually want to move to the US are low wage workers. Theones who can choose, just have better choices. I think now it's getting late for the US to start attracting talent. They are not that attractive anymore.
you still have a choice of wifi manufacturers, ethernet cable manufacturers and implementors of internet protocols, I think you are confusing standardization and monopolization, they're two entirely unrelated concepts.
Thank you Captain Obvious for stating the obvious!!
What I mean is that the equality relationship is not true for all cases, period.
I mean that choice is not better, in general. For most things, people want/need a good standard. For some other things, choice is good. But I see that "choice=good" line, and it's just wrong. Lots of retards keep repeating their mantras here "choice is good", "competition is good", like they were true. _useful_ choice is good, _good_ competition is good. There is such a thing as a harmful choice, or bad competition. They are not the answer to everything, only to a lot of things.
Alright. I understand you think so. I just disagree.
Nuclear war could have been pretty bad for the ecology, but nowhere near half the people in the planet would get killed.
In that kind of scenario, the soviets _could_ see an opportunity to rebuild everything like a marxist utopia. Remember they already had bunkers, they didn't have to die themselves.
More choice = better. Simple, really.
[Citation needed]
I don't like choice WRT Ethernet cables, or WIFI standards, or inter net protocols. I'm happy with IP having the monopoly of the internet.
Aside from that, Apple has no right to say what other manufacturer can build.
Of course, they can refuse to support OSX outside of Apple computers, that's their business choice.
Well, that kinda happened today to a hungarian guy.
Look up olympics elbow in youtube or something. No link, because they keep yanking off the video.
The fact that you are writing that states that they have a great respect for the value of human life.
In the cold war, the URSS had enough nukes to add glass parks in every US city. If they didn't care for human life, they would have taken the chances they had. The guy making the decision would not be affected, anyway.
And they had more territory, so in an all out nuclear war, realistically they would end up losing less than the US. Specially if you take into account that their regime would allow them to keep more control over their own people, a nuclear scenario could be seen as a win, if you didn't care about killing millions of people.
However, you've got to look at the context. Firstly, Microsoft are more concerned about the system being stable on the sort of hardware bought by businesses - half-decent quality PCs and servers - and these tend to use relatively conservative hardware which has decent drivers.
Secondly, a bit of history - while the idea of true microkernels with practically every driver being a true userland process is not new, the performance penalty they introduce (which is less of an issue on modern hardware) was considered unacceptable when the NT kernel was first designed - and the kind of overhaul that would be necessary to change this is something Microsoft have historically shied away from.
Well, we know that MS marketing department is to blame for a lot of issues with the system, but from the outside, they are just a company that provides bad solutions to problems.
I know that the fact that microkernels seem to be hard is an issue, too. There are different ways to make your system reliable, and I understand why they didn't choose any of them.
Anyhow, being run by marketing, selling proprietary software, or lacking knowledge are excuses, but not good reasons not to provide a reliable platform.
But also they answer for the drivers, so a "bad driver" issue is actually a kernel issue.
I don't understand why "bad drivers" are not supposed to be the responsibility of MS. It's possible to design a system resilient to that kind of failure.
The Linux solution for having good drivers (maintaining them themselves), seems to be working just fine, though.
Esp. coming from the only country where football is not actually played with your feet!!
I can only program in managed languages, you insensitive clod.
My second language is English, you insensitive clod!
You say that as if I implied that subverting copyright was a bad thing.
I agree that copyleft licenses respect copyright law.
Maybe the term "subvert", as in "overthrow from the base" was too hard. The GPL, as a copyleft license, is a way to fight the effects of copyright from the inside, using copyright against itself to fight its harmful consequences. That is what I meant by "subvert".
And remember that nobody has a right to control who copies their works. Published works belong to the public domain, period. There is copyright, but that is a temporary monopoly on distribution granted by most states, meant as an incentive for people to give works to the public domain, not a right at all.
I don't understand that.
What is so wrong about having an agenda?
Having a hidden agenda _might_ be a bad thing, in a perfectly free society.
I think modern people despite so much politicians that they even renounce to their duty to be political themselves. People are supposed to have political ideas. It's a good thing, not a bad thing.
When people do not have and agenda, they lack depth in their political decisions, and only think day to day stuff, what doesn't seem wise to me.
There are lots of better solutions.
My favorite is to decrease wattage, it's just simpler.
Passive heatsinks are good, too.
Liquid cooling not involving water is used, too.
The problem comes when you want to define "better".
We have lots of engines that are better than the internal combustion engine, but in that case, "better" depends on so many things, that nobody agrees to choose a replacement.
Grep is a good tool for that job , because it's more reusable, and you can keep using it even if you change programs.
You can just have a small shell script that takes a search criteria, and egreps all the log file collections sequentially, reformatting xmls as needed.
Then, an extension could be written to use it, but it's useful to have it stand alone, so you don't need to open a program to use it, maybe you can just have it as a global command, or as a part of another program too.
That's the beauty of the unix way, do things in small chunks, and then combine them.
You fail it. The guy just said he doesn't like participating in modern capitalism. And using the same system to subvert it is a valid way to do it. The GPL does so with copyright, and succeeds, as an example.
I kind of agree with your last paragraph, although I am more radical against "intellectual property" stuff.
This started LONG before NAFTA...what was their excuse then?
Maybe you need to understand the role the US played in the development of some Latin American countries, so you can understand why most people think the US is to blame for lots of their problem.
In this link you will find a small example of how US policies throughout the XX century affected what Latin America is today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit (Reputation, Banana massacre)
More recently, in the seventies, the US also supported dictatorships in South America (at least US official records say so), which are to blame, among worse things, for ten fold increased external debts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor#U.S._involvement
I only mean that as an introduction to the issue, that maybe you don't know about.
What I mean is that it is ignorant to say that Latin American people should pay for the consequences, and US people should not.
If you effectively fscked up a country, and profited from that, you can't whine about their people coming to your country, and taking your job. Alright, you _can_ whine, but it would not be fair.
It has been said. Posters don't RTFA, but most slashdotters don't post.
Well, I can't sympathize with you, because the situation in my country is the opposite.
We get unskilled immigrants from poorer countries, of course, looking for a better future for their families, but we also export skilled people, and a big chunk of our college graduates mostly to Europe.
That is a net loss for us, partly because our education is free, but also because they get to hire our best people, whatever our investment.
From my point of view, they must be getting some benefits from all those people, because they give them work visas and stuff. The US does too, of course.
All that is a benefit they get from people ability to cross borders.
You whining about that phenomenon harming your work environment and your people makes me feel no sympathy. The US has benefited a lot in the past, and still benefits a lot from immigrants, legal and illegal. Some times there are hard times, and they are easy to blame, but they are there because the country needs them.
The only reason lots of them are made illegal is because that way they are easier to manage, but they are a part of the economy, and a tool the country uses to compete in the global market.
I don't think the US government would shoot themselves in the foot by punishing companies that use those tools to benefit themselves, and the economy.
And please don't repeat that ER thing. Immigrants everywhere are healthier than other people. Sick people stay at home. Immigrants don't pay a lot of taxes, but they pay much more than the services they get. Remember they don't get social security.
Personally I have no respect for unions anymore since they are actively trying to unionize illegal workers. The union was supposed to be about protecting American jobs, not encouraging those who are breaking the law. Now it's all about the $$$.
Unions are about protecting workers, as people.
Solidarity with your fellow worker doesn't necessarily end at the border, at least not for all of us. The whole idea of unionizing is to avoid exploited workers. Illegal immigrants are more vulnerable to that. In fact, their vulnerability is what makes them more interesting for employers.
If illegal immigrants were unionized, they would lose some of their appeal as slave workers, which could even have a beneficial effect for all workers.
I was not trying to answer your question.
And what you say now is new, you said:
- Step 1: Rip off 20 year old patented technology
So, you were clearly talking about Nintendo patents, not content.
And it's hard to make the case that they are ripping off someone. Just because I use Newton laws, it doesn't mean I am ripping him off.
The games made their money, and now some Chinese/Indian is also making money off them. It's the same thing as with patents. Someone makes a creative work, gets money with help from society, but at some point that help has to come back to society. I know it's still not legal in the US to make money off those games, but what I say is that I don't think it's unfair, as in someone getting ripped off.
About your question, well, I don't really like what they are trying to do. Using that to teach kids to use a mouse and a keyboard lacks insight.
The XO was better lots of ways, because it was about advancing the state of the art, succeeding, in a way. This idea is about helping kids who are lagging too far behind to lag a little closer. I don't think it's a good idea.
You make it sound as if it was unfair.
This is the expressed goal of patents.
Nintendo had their patent monopolies, and in exchange, everybody gets to benefit from the technology today. This is a win-win situation.
Nintendo got their money, and we get our cheap systems. I don't understand why you call this "ripping off" technology.
For me, it's making the system work as it was intended.