He will never get over it. When mswindows 95 appeared, it wasn't called "the DOS system". It was the Windows system, running on DOS. Okay, that's too much of a stretch. mswindows nt/2000 was not the "kernel32.exe". OSX is not "mach + some apple stuff".
An operating system is a lot more than a kernel, in the same way that a car is a lot more than its engine, even when it doesn't work without it. The user doesn't get to interact with the engine, and the car would be the same car, if the engine is replaced. That happens the same way with Operating Systems and kernels. Debian is not there yet, but they have several GNU distributions with varying kernels.
Linux is a good kernel, and plays an important role for the success of free software. Aside from that, when you get for example, Ubuntu, there is a lot more GNU than Linux included in the CD. And the platform is defined by the GNU system, not the Linux kernel. When people say they know "Linux", for example the "Linux" console, they are talking about bash. When talking about "Linux" programming, it's usually GCC, the "Linux" desktop might be Gnome or KDE, of course, but it's not Linux either.
The guy will never get over it, because, in that particular issue, he is right, and the people who think different from him are just wrong. There's no way he will change his opinion on that issue.
I think you missed the stereotype. Mac users are supposed to be homos. Slashdotters are supposed to be virgins, even though years have passed and lots of people have gotten married and had children, they are still virgins. Maybe Mac slashdotters would be virgin homos.
"Google is an outsourcer of US jobs to other countries, at a time when many US tech workers are unemployed. "
That is great, "US jobs". Google takes money from all over the world, but somehow, the jobs are sacred and belong to the US. Please stop staring at your bellybutton, and look around.
Ethanol from corn is a loser (duh!). Ethanol from sugar cane is, of course, a much better alternative, and has been used for decades now. It's cost effective too.
It would be interesting to see some serious study about hemp. It could have yields comparable to sugar cane. When I say serious, it would at least be some study linked from a site without "Legalize it" banners.
The money has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is usually from profits from drugs. And as I said earlier, profits are an indication of social utility -- how much people value the drug. The more profits, the more people value the drug. The larger the profit, the more good the drug does, and the more incentive to produce that drug (which is why capitalism is pretty cool). Capitalism has some cool things. This is exactly where it fails. You are counting people as equals. You equate amount of money invested with people that benefit. That is just not true, specially in a capitalistic society.
If your reasoning had any logic, then casinos would be more valuable for society than hospitals, because there's more money invested into them.
The most money, globally, is overrepresented for rich people problems, like cancer and alzheimer. Globally, the most short term benefit for people as a whole would be acheived if that money was invested (as an example) into _cheap_ vaccines for AIDS, and other infectious diseases.
The bias is set by concentration of wealth, and while it is the way things work and we should deal with it, it is a flaw in the system.
Of course, the same thing happens in a less obvious fashion, inside developed and underdeveloped countries. Pharma companies get patents granted , and then the governments that granted them, are not able to pay for proper treatment for their citizens.
If governments in general spent their money into funding research instead of paying for already invented medicine, there is no reason to believe, a priori, that the outcome would be worse than the current (bad) situation.
Of course, it is more obvious in the third world. There is little natural incentive to honor foreing patents, and that is why trade agreements that protect "IP" are so important for the US and the EU.
The issue is very similar to the proprietary software vs free software thing. The same thing was argued, back in the day, that big software could not be developed without funding, and the promise of future profit from licenses. That was proven to be non true. I'm really hoping something like that (not the same, but a system that shares some fundamentals witht he FSF) happens in the pharma industry. I think it could happen.
Just FYI, in spanish, we used to think that asians in general changed R's into L's ("puelta" instead of "puerta"). I think it's because the ones that learn spanish, at first usually don't pronnounce a strong "R", the same as most non-native spanish speakers.
Staying Free is a guaranteed way to lose? Tell me more, you seem to have invented a fascinating new branch of logic, cos it seems to me that if you are forced to use non-Free software (or hardware), you have already lost.
I think you have that logic because you have a particular ideology. Personally, I am not forced to use free or non-free, I use what works best. If it's good software, I shouldn't have to tinker with it either way. Generally, the more general-purpose the task, the free version runs better, but if you get off the beaten path just slightly, often the commercial version runs better.
Exactly, and that is _your_ ideology. You believe that freedom is pointless compared to general availability and short term interoperability (I mean short term, because non disclosed formats do usually hinder long-term interoperability, in the way of the playsforsure-zune issue, or simply because of exclusive providers losing interest in supporting old formats).
The same as everybody, your ideology defines what is good of bad for you. It would be sad if it were otherwise.
And remember, free software can be commercial, and proprietary software can be non-commercial. The issue is between free software and proprietary software. People are welcome to make money from free software and they do (think Novell, Sun, MySQL, IBM, RedHat).
For a given value of "works", where 'works' is defined as meeting requirements. My first requirement as a software user is that doesn't steal my freedoms to share, copy, study, modify, redistribute (etc) it. If I can't do that with it, it's not working.
Most people do not have those requirements. What about other people, who don't want software projects stealing their time because they are coded by unpaid people that don't understand the industry? Or programmed by people that don't have a good grasp of what a good user interface should be like? I see too much free software that simply doesn't work as well as a commercial equivalent.
There's also the matter of time. I know I can make free software to do what I need, but time is money. If I'm not getting paid to do what is essentially work, I'd rather relax and do non-work. If it's volunteer work, then I'd rather use the time to work with people and not sit behind a computer screen. You don't seem to understand. Free software is not exclusively volunteer work. People do get paid to develop free software. Aside from that, the fact that you prefer to do non-work if given the choice, does say something about you, but it doesn't prove anything with respect to free software viability. There are actual people who do useful stuff, and share the results.
There is no need to theorize about that, because the results are here. Right now, there is a viable free platform, that is very big compared to the work built by the proprietary software industry in more than 20 years.
In lots of areas, free software outperforms proprietary software.
For example, as a desktop platform, the only remaining issue is interoperability. That is important, in context, but if you compare the best products of the proprietary software industry (maybe OS X and software available for it, or maybe XP) with the best the free software has to offer (maybe Ubuntu Edgy?), there is no significant difference in what can be done with each desktop, and the amount of training that it takes.
Of course, the interoperability stuff is important, but it's a marketing problem, and not a technical issue, we just need to have a good amount of users to be able to put some pressure on the other side.
When IE had 97% of the web, it was easy to make an IE only page. Right now, with something like 80%, it's actually seen as unprofesional .
In the future, we just need to get, for example, a 20% of alternative office users, in order to be able to demand open formats, and interoperable formats, from the other side.
Back in the day, slashdotters used to be nerds without girlfriends, who didn't get laid. Years have passed, paople have matured, and lots of them have married. The getting laid thing hasn't improved much.
You don't use the term "applet" to describe bits of JavaScript unless you're very confused. To quote wikipedia:-
An applet is a software component that runs in the context of another program, for example a web browser...An applet is written in a language that is different from the scripting or HTML language which invokes it. The applet is written in a compiled language, while the scripting language of the container is an interpreted language, hence the greater performance or functionality of the applet.
I'm sure you can see why confusion should arise over incorrect use of the term "applet".
I see what the wikipedia says. It's wrong. First, the idea of the applet being written in a compiled language is completely arbitrary, and probably comes from the nineties, when you couldn't easily write a web component just with JavaScript.
Right now, JavaScript has the power to implement a big part of the behaviors that Java Applets originally provided (e.g.:drag and drop, image manipulation and stuff).
There is a bit in the Wikipedia about applets being compiled, so it was fast, as opposed to interpreted languages. It might have been argued to be true some time, but right now that is just not an issue.
I think the wikipedia article is about the reality of eight years ago. Right now, javascript is ok to make applets. You can watch OpenLaszlo. One of the targets they generate for clients is flash, that would be an applet, and another is JavaScript+DOM, and by the definition of wikipedia it would not be an applet, although it is functionally indistinguishible from the other.
Or maybe it just lowers the barrier to entry of the market. Right now the money makers are distributors. And you get the to choose your stuff stuff mostly from distributors (you buy channel packages). With this kind of deal, other content providers who have no deals with big distributors could enter the game, and the competition could be over content, and maybe price, and not over distribution channels. It could be a nice thing for the guy who actually buys the stuff.
In the context of _this_ discussion, it was clear what he was talking about.
It might be clear to you but it's not clear to me whether he's written 25k lines of Java or JavaScript. Although this topic is based on JavaScript, he's talking about applets and processing PDF files and XML, things that are more commonly associated with Java. Perhaps you can enlighten the rest of us as to what he is talking about, I don't have the energy to try to decipher his muddled post. Ok, here it goes (the full text of his post):
As someone who has written applets with over 25,000 lines, I can easily agree. Out of the roughly two dozen languages (scripting, etc.) that I know, JS has been a cornerstone of both simple and solid applets and the quick & dirty prototype. Let's hope the future agrees:) The topic is JS. He talks about applets. He says he knows "roughly two dozen languages", and that "JS has been a cornerstone of both simple and solid applets and the quick and dirty prototype".
He means "JS applets". Nobody talked about Java.
The only reason some people thought about Sun Java Applets is that Sun promoted that term a lot back in the day. As someone else said, this is supposed to be "news for marketdroids", it's news for nerds, and nerds are supposed to know the difference between a JS powered applet, and a Sun Java Applet.
I know he was not clear, and could have chosen better words, but I insist that it is a wrong correction to make, telling a guy that all applets are Sun Java Applets.
Cut the guy some slack. Only because Sun trademarked "Applet" it doesn't mean they invented it, or that they own it. An applet is a small app. More often, it's a web, client side app. Much more often, it's a "Sun Java Applet". In the context of this discussion, the second meaning was obvious. All of your responses were too pedant. There _are_ applets that are not "Sun Java Applets". In the context of _this_ discussion, it was clear what he was talking about.
The FSF is not about Open Source, it's about Free Software. They don't care as much about the source, and learning from it, as they care about mmporg users not needing to use propietary software, and offering them a choice, hoping they will choose the free one.
Anyhow, he will hire the guy, because that guy will forget to remind him not to. And that will happen, because the guy in question didn't ask anyone to remind him to remind his potential employer not to hire him.
Which would ironically be contrary to the spirit of capitalism.
Pure capitalism has no spirit. It's exactly that, the lack of regulation, thus, the lack of an intentional direction. The thing that would happen if governments didn't do anything. They are something like a natural state of affairs. There is no intention behind capitalism.
"IP" exists _only_ due to government intervention. For example, Copyright is an exclusive distribution contract with the government. If the government didn't offer that deal, copyright, and distribution monopolies based on it, would not exist.
Damn, I didnt know bad taste was a jailable offence.
If that was the case 51% of the US electorate should have been jailed after the 2004 presidential election. And a 49% of the US effective voters, after the 2000 presidential election.
It's like my friend in dental school. She says she doesn't want to make a lot of money, she wants to help people. So when she graduates, she's going to spend a year in south America building houses for poor people. I told her that if she really wanted to help, she would work in the US and use half her salary to hire a dozen workers in her place to work in her place and build many more houses than she could ever build. I live in Uruguay, and they do that here, "un techo por Uruguay". They are building wooden houses (we use brick houses here, because of the climate) for the poor. The only sensible thing would be to make a fund, to help people buy materials, and give them some free help in the design of the houses. Instead of that, they are providing free labor (also known as "dumping") in a country where there are lots of good, cheap, unemployed construction workers, and building houses hat do not adapt to our reality or needs.
Aside from that, I don't agree with your post, you are just chanting to the gods of capitalism. It is just not that easy, although it's better to send vaccines than to send food. But it would be better to get rid of the MS tax, so the governments in third world countries could have a little more money to spend on social programs instead of licenses. So I don't think Bill Gates has a good net effect on third world countries, vaccines or not vaccines.
That's a comment that amuses me, that shows up a lot in US centric (or at least english speaking) forums.
I don't see anything particularly wrong, for example with the idea of charging people for the time they spend in jail. Charging the cost of the bullet to the family is only a reasonable extension of that principle. Killing a person and billing the family is in no way worse than just killing the person. There's no need to be sensitive with the family of a guy you just murdered.
Of course, the issue of a government murdering a person looks completely insane to me, but that is another issue.
What calls my attention is that the brutality is evident to some people only when they send the bill to the family. I wonder why people are more shocked by that more than for the actual problem.
Because a windows vista machine (hardware + licenses) could be too much money for a traffic shaping router. There are so many providers, and so many good, inexpensive solutions, that there is no reason to even think of MS for that kind of stuff.
In engineering, a useful aproximation for pi is 3.
If yer buyin' by the yard I'd use 3 1/4 if I were you. It may have escaped your attention so far, but sooner or later you're bound to discover empirically that you just can't cut the part longer.
I live in Uruguay, and people say "puto" to mean "faggot" specifically. It can also be used to imply cowardness. "marica", "maricón", "trolo" have similar meanings. And it's meant as an offense, it doesn't mean "gay man".
I have heard it to mean "man whore" somewhere, too, but I thought that the other meaning was the dominant one. Anyhow, people in southern South America and Mexico are going to smile at the expense of your nick.
The developer, in choosing GPL, is giving the freedom to the users. It's not 'taking it,' which implies some force. You are just puting it under a good light. I was trying to see it from the worst reasonable point of view of the next developer (actually I should have used distributor to be more clear), and show how it is still a great deal.
The original developer is not forced to do anything when using the GPL. He can always relicense.
Freedom is actually taken away (or not granted, that's a language issue, but it could be put this way) from the next developer that uses the code, because he ccan use it, but doesn't have the freedom to distribute it as he wishes. The issue here is that the GPL is about giving the most freedom for the users, for various reasons, one of them being that we are all users first, and distributors next.
What the hell does any of this have to do with Microsoft? Your government chose Windows. Then your government chose.Net. Whose fault is that?
.Net is obviously not the right solution for this situation, even if you're dealing with Microsoft. The problem, as always, has nothing do to the business, but the incompetent bureaucrats who took your money at gun point and gave it to them. I am not bitching about Microsoft, and am not implying that they are the sole responsibles for the current situation. I was pointing out to the GP that free software is about money, and people lives, too.
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He will never get over it.
When mswindows 95 appeared, it wasn't called "the DOS system". It was the Windows system, running on DOS. Okay, that's too much of a stretch.
mswindows nt/2000 was not the "kernel32.exe".
OSX is not "mach + some apple stuff".
An operating system is a lot more than a kernel, in the same way that a car is a lot more than its engine, even when it doesn't work without it. The user doesn't get to interact with the engine, and the car would be the same car, if the engine is replaced. That happens the same way with Operating Systems and kernels. Debian is not there yet, but they have several GNU distributions with varying kernels.
Linux is a good kernel, and plays an important role for the success of free software. Aside from that, when you get for example, Ubuntu, there is a lot more GNU than Linux included in the CD. And the platform is defined by the GNU system, not the Linux kernel.
When people say they know "Linux", for example the "Linux" console, they are talking about bash. When talking about "Linux" programming, it's usually GCC, the "Linux" desktop might be Gnome or KDE, of course, but it's not Linux either.
The guy will never get over it, because, in that particular issue, he is right, and the people who think different from him are just wrong. There's no way he will change his opinion on that issue.
I think you missed the stereotype.
Mac users are supposed to be homos.
Slashdotters are supposed to be virgins, even though years have passed and lots of people have gotten married and had children, they are still virgins. Maybe Mac slashdotters would be virgin homos.
"Google is an outsourcer of US jobs to other countries, at a time when many US tech workers are unemployed. "
That is great, "US jobs".
Google takes money from all over the world, but somehow, the jobs are sacred and belong to the US.
Please stop staring at your bellybutton, and look around.
Ethanol from corn is a loser (duh!).
Ethanol from sugar cane is, of course, a much better alternative, and has been used for decades now. It's cost effective too.
It would be interesting to see some serious study about hemp. It could have yields comparable to sugar cane.
When I say serious, it would at least be some study linked from a site without "Legalize it" banners.
You are counting people as equals. You equate amount of money invested with people that benefit. That is just not true, specially in a capitalistic society.
If your reasoning had any logic, then casinos would be more valuable for society than hospitals, because there's more money invested into them.
The most money, globally, is overrepresented for rich people problems, like cancer and alzheimer. Globally, the most short term benefit for people as a whole would be acheived if that money was invested (as an example) into _cheap_ vaccines for AIDS, and other infectious diseases.
The bias is set by concentration of wealth, and while it is the way things work and we should deal with it, it is a flaw in the system.
Of course, the same thing happens in a less obvious fashion, inside developed and underdeveloped countries.
Pharma companies get patents granted , and then the governments that granted them, are not able to pay for proper treatment for their citizens.
If governments in general spent their money into funding research instead of paying for already invented medicine, there is no reason to believe, a priori, that the outcome would be worse than the current (bad) situation.
Of course, it is more obvious in the third world. There is little natural incentive to honor foreing patents, and that is why trade agreements that protect "IP" are so important for the US and the EU.
The issue is very similar to the proprietary software vs free software thing. The same thing was argued, back in the day, that big software could not be developed without funding, and the promise of future profit from licenses. That was proven to be non true. I'm really hoping something like that (not the same, but a system that shares some fundamentals witht he FSF) happens in the pharma industry. I think it could happen.
Just FYI, in spanish, we used to think that asians in general changed R's into L's ("puelta" instead of "puerta").
I think it's because the ones that learn spanish, at first usually don't pronnounce a strong "R", the same as most non-native spanish speakers.
I think you have that logic because you have a particular ideology. Personally, I am not forced to use free or non-free, I use what works best. If it's good software, I shouldn't have to tinker with it either way. Generally, the more general-purpose the task, the free version runs better, but if you get off the beaten path just slightly, often the commercial version runs better.
Exactly, and that is _your_ ideology. You believe that freedom is pointless compared to general availability and short term interoperability (I mean short term, because non disclosed formats do usually hinder long-term interoperability, in the way of the playsforsure-zune issue, or simply because of exclusive providers losing interest in supporting old formats).
The same as everybody, your ideology defines what is good of bad for you. It would be sad if it were otherwise.
And remember, free software can be commercial, and proprietary software can be non-commercial. The issue is between free software and proprietary software. People are welcome to make money from free software and they do (think Novell, Sun, MySQL, IBM, RedHat).
For a given value of "works", where 'works' is defined as meeting requirements. My first requirement as a software user is that doesn't steal my freedoms to share, copy, study, modify, redistribute (etc) it. If I can't do that with it, it's not working.
Most people do not have those requirements. What about other people, who don't want software projects stealing their time because they are coded by unpaid people that don't understand the industry? Or programmed by people that don't have a good grasp of what a good user interface should be like? I see too much free software that simply doesn't work as well as a commercial equivalent.
There's also the matter of time. I know I can make free software to do what I need, but time is money. If I'm not getting paid to do what is essentially work, I'd rather relax and do non-work. If it's volunteer work, then I'd rather use the time to work with people and not sit behind a computer screen. You don't seem to understand. Free software is not exclusively volunteer work. People do get paid to develop free software.
Aside from that, the fact that you prefer to do non-work if given the choice, does say something about you, but it doesn't prove anything with respect to free software viability. There are actual people who do useful stuff, and share the results.
There is no need to theorize about that, because the results are here. Right now, there is a viable free platform, that is very big compared to the work built by the proprietary software industry in more than 20 years.
In lots of areas, free software outperforms proprietary software.
For example, as a desktop platform, the only remaining issue is interoperability. That is important, in context, but if you compare the best products of the proprietary software industry (maybe OS X and software available for it, or maybe XP) with the best the free software has to offer (maybe Ubuntu Edgy?), there is no significant difference in what can be done with each desktop, and the amount of training that it takes.
Of course, the interoperability stuff is important, but it's a marketing problem, and not a technical issue, we just need to have a good amount of users to be able to put some pressure on the other side.
When IE had 97% of the web, it was easy to make an IE only page. Right now, with something like 80%, it's actually seen as unprofesional .
In the future, we just need to get, for example, a 20% of alternative office users, in order to be able to demand open formats, and interoperable formats, from the other side.
Back in the day, slashdotters used to be nerds without girlfriends, who didn't get laid.
Years have passed, paople have matured, and lots of them have married. The getting laid thing hasn't improved much.
Or maybe it just lowers the barrier to entry of the market.
Right now the money makers are distributors. And you get the to choose your stuff stuff mostly from distributors (you buy channel packages).
With this kind of deal, other content providers who have no deals with big distributors could enter the game, and the competition could be over content, and maybe price, and not over distribution channels. It could be a nice thing for the guy who actually buys the stuff.
He means "JS applets". Nobody talked about Java.
The only reason some people thought about Sun Java Applets is that Sun promoted that term a lot back in the day. As someone else said, this is supposed to be "news for marketdroids", it's news for nerds, and nerds are supposed to know the difference between a JS powered applet, and a Sun Java Applet.
I know he was not clear, and could have chosen better words, but I insist that it is a wrong correction to make, telling a guy that all applets are Sun Java Applets.
Cut the guy some slack.
Only because Sun trademarked "Applet" it doesn't mean they invented it, or that they own it.
An applet is a small app. More often, it's a web, client side app. Much more often, it's a "Sun Java Applet".
In the context of this discussion, the second meaning was obvious. All of your responses were too pedant. There _are_ applets that are not "Sun Java Applets". In the context of _this_ discussion, it was clear what he was talking about.
The FSF is not about Open Source, it's about Free Software.
They don't care as much about the source, and learning from it, as they care about mmporg users not needing to use propietary software, and offering them a choice, hoping they will choose the free one.
Anyhow, he will hire the guy, because that guy will forget to remind him not to. And that will happen, because the guy in question didn't ask anyone to remind him to remind his potential employer not to hire him.
Pure capitalism has no spirit. It's exactly that, the lack of regulation, thus, the lack of an intentional direction. The thing that would happen if governments didn't do anything. They are something like a natural state of affairs. There is no intention behind capitalism.
"IP" exists _only_ due to government intervention.
For example, Copyright is an exclusive distribution contract with the government. If the government didn't offer that deal, copyright, and distribution monopolies based on it, would not exist.
If that was the case 51% of the US electorate should have been jailed after the 2004 presidential election.
And a 49% of the US effective voters, after the 2000 presidential election.
Aside from that, I don't agree with your post, you are just chanting to the gods of capitalism. It is just not that easy, although it's better to send vaccines than to send food. But it would be better to get rid of the MS tax, so the governments in third world countries could have a little more money to spend on social programs instead of licenses. So I don't think Bill Gates has a good net effect on third world countries, vaccines or not vaccines.
That's a comment that amuses me, that shows up a lot in US centric (or at least english speaking) forums.
I don't see anything particularly wrong, for example with the idea of charging people for the time they spend in jail.
Charging the cost of the bullet to the family is only a reasonable extension of that principle.
Killing a person and billing the family is in no way worse than just killing the person.
There's no need to be sensitive with the family of a guy you just murdered.
Of course, the issue of a government murdering a person looks completely insane to me, but that is another issue.
What calls my attention is that the brutality is evident to some people only when they send the bill to the family. I wonder why people are more shocked by that more than for the actual problem.
Because a windows vista machine (hardware + licenses) could be too much money for a traffic shaping router.
There are so many providers, and so many good, inexpensive solutions, that there is no reason to even think of MS for that kind of stuff.
If yer buyin' by the yard I'd use 3 1/4 if I were you. It may have escaped your attention so far, but sooner or later you're bound to discover empirically that you just can't cut the part longer.
KFG Nice definition of "integer".
I live in Uruguay, and people say "puto" to mean "faggot" specifically. It can also be used to imply cowardness.
"marica", "maricón", "trolo" have similar meanings.
And it's meant as an offense, it doesn't mean "gay man".
I have heard it to mean "man whore" somewhere, too, but I thought that the other meaning was the dominant one.
Anyhow, people in southern South America and Mexico are going to smile at the expense of your nick.
The original developer is not forced to do anything when using the GPL. He can always relicense.
Freedom is actually taken away (or not granted, that's a language issue, but it could be put this way) from the next developer that uses the code, because he ccan use it, but doesn't have the freedom to distribute it as he wishes. The issue here is that the GPL is about giving the most freedom for the users, for various reasons, one of them being that we are all users first, and distributors next.
I'm sure you have already heard this, but are you aware that "puto" means something like "faggot" in spanish?
I was pointing out to the GP that free software is about money, and people lives, too.