The current situation is a counterexample to your reasoning. Right now most DVDs are the shittiest shit possible. Good movies are harder to find that crappy ones, and less sold. And they don't produce them. The other day they were filming parts of a Miami Vice movie around here!! talk about crap! crap squared! And DVDs dn't cost 5 bucks right now.
I agree with you that Open Source is orthogonal to capitalism. Open source is mostly a way of developing programs and distributing them. It has no politics at all.
Free software, on the other hand is not orthogonal to capitalism. Non-theorethical modern capitalism gives power to the corporations, and takes it away from "consumers". It _could_ be said that actual capitalism wouldn't work that way, and that the free market this and the free market that, but the problems happen in practice, not in theory.
Free software was born from a single "consumer" denying to accept unfair conditions imposed in the trade of software.
Big corporations, using the power that their accumulation of resources gives them, impose restrictions to users freedom. That is permitted by the excessive power corporations have over "consumers". And _that_ is the flaw of modern capitalism I'm talking about.
Corporations restrict further and further your freedom to use software (by forcing their products on you, or even legislating against you), and free software gives you a way around some of those restrictions on your freedom, so the power is again yours. Maybe you could say that it's not against capitalistic corporations, but it's a paliative against some of their issues.
The real issue, for me, is that in restricting your freedom in software, corporations also might restrict your freedom outside of software. For example, software patents and the DMCA that is being exported everywhere (into my country, Uruguay, too) do restrict your freedom even outside of the software realm. Of course this is not a problem of capitalism per se, but it's a consequence of its current implementation.
Of course, when I am talking about freedom in software, I mean the traditional Free Software Foundation definition, freedom to use the software, share it, improve it, and share your improvements with the community.
Blender _is_ free software, aside from the fact that it is open source. It's GPL. I followed the process.
That means there is a political issue. Although it's not communist, whatever that means for you in the USA (I hear it's a pretty bad word around there), it does have politics implied. And they could have something to do with capitalism.
Free software by itself is not against capitalism. But it is made to fix some of the flaws of some capitalistic systems. Proprietary software can be seen as a product of capitalistic systems, because corporations go to great lengths, even limiting their customers freedom, in order to attain profit, and they can do so, because their concentration of capital allows them to do it (they have big resources to make products, and the channels to make or even lock the sales). Free software is made to fix that.
Of course, calling proprietary software "capitalistic" software does not imply you are a communist (again, whatever that means today in the USA) . It might imply you dislike some consequences of capitalism, at most.
Aside from that, blender rocks! And RMS rules! Go Go GNU!! Death to Proprietary software!! (does it sound too communist??)
And Brazilians and (in a much smaler scale) Uruguayans, too, because we could sell you cane, and employ people in poor areas. We make cane sugar here. Using corn for sugar is a waste. You need fertile fields to make corn, and it's a good crop to feed people. Sugar cane grows in the worts fields, needs much less care, doesn't need you to use your fertile lands that could be used for actual food, and so is much less expensive to produce.
Here in Uruguay, Pepsi is sweetened with sugar cane, and Coca-Cola, with corn syrup, and most people prefer the taste of Coca-Cola. Corn syrup is mre expensive here than cane sugar, so maybe people like expensive stuff, no matter what it is. I like cold Pepsi, on a glass 1.25 L bottle, but most people seem to prefer fructose around here.
The jams where caused when you typed over a certain speed (albeit a slow speed) so the "myth" does hold some truth.
Not. The jams were caused by fast typers. Solution #1 would have been to tell them to go slower. The solution they chose was to change the design, so typists could type faster without clogging the keys. Of course, it takes time to learn to type fast in this layout, but it isn't designed to slow typists, and is doesn't do it. The myth holds no truth.
(One could an analogous question: Of the boy geeks (and there are many), why aren't there vary many boy *knitting* geeks? I don't know if the answers are similar.)
I actually have a friend who does knit and is male. Some guy in an apartment in front of mine uses a mechanical knitter, but that would count as self-employment other than an interest, of course. I even learned the basics of knitting, because it seemed interesting. I didn't actually knit anything, but I care enough to look into it.
Well, lots of people pay 20$ a gigabyte here in Uruguay. Our state-owned ISP charges 490 uruguayan pesos (around 22 dollars) for a giga a month internet access contract, at 256kBps . Unmetered service, with half a MB throughput is around 50 dollars a month. But that's too expensive. Luckily cable companies are starting to realize there's money to be made in that area, and will start competing.
Here it's much cheaper to rent a DVD for 1.5 dollars, and just copy it, or buy CD copies for 1.5 dollars a CD right on the street. Awful spanish accent audio-translated bootleg copies, of course, but cheaper than downloading the movies yourself.
Great!! Finally, a sensible customer. I have a great selection of turds. I am very proud of the last batch, I can warrant an improvement of 30% over the previous. I'm sure you will be glad to buy the improved product, with that brilliant reasoning!
If he wants a windows server, and a justification of the CALs, he should ask Microsoft itself. If he wants a solution to his problem, the response can be wider, and it would make sense to ask for it in this forum.
It might be a PITa to configure (I just tried too long ago) and there might be features you need that it doesn't have, but it might me worth trying. I don't like SuSE, but it I had to admin Windows accounts, Novell SuSE doesn't sound so bad after all.
Bullshit! This doesn't make Windows far more like Unix and Linux. Windows keeps proprietary. On the technical side, as we can't see the code, we can only talk out of experience, it comes from the makers of past Windows versions. That is the kind of quality we should expect, sensibly.
But paper does have some harmful chemicals (bleach and stuff) that could filter from landfills into water supplies. I think that using paper to feed the soil that grows trees is a good idea, but the whole process could be improved in order not to contaminate further the soil.
When it had ads it was already free in the sense of cost. One problem then, and now, is that it is proprietary, so _they_ choose whether stuff like ads is acceptable or not. I care about freedom in software, not about cost. I agree that "free" is a term too wide to describe software. I mean "free software" in the sense of "freedom" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html . It is about more things that cost. It's more about giving the users the right to use it in any way he wants.
Software is what it is out of the box. Extensions, like firefox extensions, might be good, because they mark the limits of big chunks of functionality that some specific users might need. Configuring the system is not that great. It takes too much time, and if you can't work with the default, the default is wrong. Firefox proved that. Control centers ae just a nice way to spend your time. I have used KDE since they started getting popular (I used Enlightenment at the time), and Gnome since the first versions, and I've had it with configuring desktops. The desktops should just work out of the box. That way you don't pass the responsibility of choosing the right defaults to users. And that "power user" thing is a fallacy (sp?) . Users are experts in what they know how to do, and novices at what they don't know, along their whole experience (I think Jef Raskin said that) . There's no "expert" user, who knows what's more productive for him, specially when he can't measure his productivity objectively. That's what interface experts are for!
Ubuntu's gnome desktop is great out of the box, and it requires no tweaking.
I don't think there's a benefit in a usability comparison between KDE and gnome, though. Gnome is much better in terms of modern usability trends, and KDE is much more familiar to the former mswindows user. It comes down to a philosophical issue, rather than a technical one, if you think "usability" means "familiarity", then KDE is much better, and there are reasons to think that way, and it's measurably better, when you are talking about former mswindows users. Gnome would be better in the modern meaning of "usability", when you take into account cognitive skills and stuff, but that can make experts think that you are treating the user as if he were dumb.
I used Opera back in the day at work, together with Windows NT 4.0. I liked tabs. I hated the banners. I hated the email client. Now I don't have to use non-free software for my job, and even if I liked Opera, the main reason not to use Opera is not tu use non-free software. I actually care about freedom in software, and Opera is against it, so I wouldn't even try it again. There are times when I need to use non-free software, but I try to do that only when I can't do my jobs with a free tool, even if it was a technically inferior tool. Luckily the tools I have available are great, so it doesn't cost me anything, but at the end of the day, it's freedom what matters to me, and I wouldn't want to lose that.
I feel your pain, brother. I work for a retail color laser printer. Printers are the worst bosses. This one pays me cash, the bank once said something about yellow dots in my money, and refused to accept a deposit.
I wasn't talking about virtual girls being virtual assistants. I was talking about models losing their jobs, and working as real life assistants!!
Maybe _that_ is pathetic, and only technology won't change it, of course.
About virtual assitants, well, virtual stuff is usually associated with fantasy. If you take into account that men are the main consumers of "virtual" products, it's logical that there should be tits involved. It's a marketing issue, more than a design issue. I don't think commercials need to show naked women in them, but I understand why they do. I does make sense. It's about maximizing sales, taking into account what the consumer likes. Men don't want a deodorant, they want blondes with huge racks. And when it comes to virtual environments, a blonde with a huge rack beats Clippy every time.
I don't think it's pathetic. It's important from a technological perspective, of course. Not everybody is a kernel hacker, some of us have interests in CG and other areas. It's important from a social perspective, too (where will RL models find jobs now?!!?!?!?, will they work as my secretaries? what about virtual actors? virtual environments populated by virtual people indistiguishable from other people?)
How much yen do you want to bet that it's one of those stupid "Are you sure?" dialog boxes that everyone clicks "Yes" to without actually thinking about what it's asking? Ah, how I love ignoring those warnings, too.
Well, I am lucky. I am a developer, and I can choose my tools. I use gnome, that doesnt't have "Ok/Cancel" buttons or "are you sure" dialogs that I know of. My reaction towards that kind of dialogs is anihilation. If I am using an HTML editor, and it pulls one of those dialogs, I just stop using it, and get a better editor. Eclipse doesn't have many issues like this that I found, neither does Firefox, nor Thunderbird. I have some problems with OpenOffice, but maybe it's not possible to mimick MSOffice without copying some bad stuff.
Of course, not everybody gets to choose their tools, but when you can, it's easy to avoid that kind of stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
And did they pay your dinner, or something?
Or you were happy with just the fuzzy feeling of being Bill's free 24/7 tech support?
The current situation is a counterexample to your reasoning.
Right now most DVDs are the shittiest shit possible.
Good movies are harder to find that crappy ones, and less sold. And they don't produce them. The other day they were filming parts of a Miami Vice movie around here!! talk about crap! crap squared! And DVDs dn't cost 5 bucks right now.
I agree with you that Open Source is orthogonal to capitalism.
Open source is mostly a way of developing programs and distributing them.
It has no politics at all.
Free software, on the other hand is not orthogonal to capitalism.
Non-theorethical modern capitalism gives power to the corporations, and takes it away from "consumers". It _could_ be said that actual capitalism wouldn't work that way, and that the free market this and the free market that, but the problems happen in practice, not in theory.
Free software was born from a single "consumer" denying to accept unfair conditions imposed in the trade of software.
Big corporations, using the power that their accumulation of resources gives them, impose restrictions to users freedom. That is permitted by the excessive power corporations have over "consumers". And _that_ is the flaw of modern capitalism I'm talking about.
Corporations restrict further and further your freedom to use software (by forcing their products on you, or even legislating against you), and free software gives you a way around some of those restrictions on your freedom, so the power is again yours. Maybe you could say that it's not against capitalistic corporations, but it's a paliative against some of their issues.
The real issue, for me, is that in restricting your freedom in software, corporations also might restrict your freedom outside of software. For example, software patents and the DMCA that is being exported everywhere (into my country, Uruguay, too) do restrict your freedom even outside of the software realm. Of course this is not a problem of capitalism per se, but it's a consequence of its current implementation.
Of course, when I am talking about freedom in software, I mean the traditional Free Software Foundation definition, freedom to use the software, share it, improve it, and share your improvements with the community.
Blender _is_ free software, aside from the fact that it is open source.
It's GPL. I followed the process.
That means there is a political issue. Although it's not communist, whatever that means for you in the USA (I hear it's a pretty bad word around there), it does have politics implied. And they could have something to do with capitalism.
Free software by itself is not against capitalism. But it is made to fix some of the flaws of some capitalistic systems. Proprietary software can be seen as a product of capitalistic systems, because corporations go to great lengths, even limiting their customers freedom, in order to attain profit, and they can do so, because their concentration of capital allows them to do it (they have big resources to make products, and the channels to make or even lock the sales). Free software is made to fix that.
Of course, calling proprietary software "capitalistic" software does not imply you are a communist (again, whatever that means today in the USA) . It might imply you dislike some consequences of capitalism, at most.
Aside from that, blender rocks!
And RMS rules! Go Go GNU!! Death to Proprietary software!! (does it sound too communist??)
And Brazilians and (in a much smaler scale) Uruguayans, too, because we could sell you cane, and employ people in poor areas.
We make cane sugar here. Using corn for sugar is a waste.
You need fertile fields to make corn, and it's a good crop to feed people.
Sugar cane grows in the worts fields, needs much less care, doesn't need you to use your fertile lands that could be used for actual food, and so is much less expensive to produce.
Here in Uruguay, Pepsi is sweetened with sugar cane, and Coca-Cola, with corn syrup, and most people prefer the taste of Coca-Cola. Corn syrup is mre expensive here than cane sugar, so maybe people like expensive stuff, no matter what it is. I like cold Pepsi, on a glass 1.25 L bottle, but most people seem to prefer fructose around here.
The jams where caused when you typed over a certain speed (albeit a slow speed) so the "myth" does hold some truth.
Not.
The jams were caused by fast typers. Solution #1 would have been to tell them to go slower. The solution they chose was to change the design, so typists could type faster without clogging the keys. Of course, it takes time to learn to type fast in this layout, but it isn't designed to slow typists, and is doesn't do it.
The myth holds no truth.
(One could an analogous question: Of the boy geeks (and there are many), why aren't there vary many boy *knitting* geeks? I don't know if the answers are similar.)
I actually have a friend who does knit and is male.
Some guy in an apartment in front of mine uses a mechanical knitter, but that would count as self-employment other than an interest, of course.
I even learned the basics of knitting, because it seemed interesting. I didn't actually knit anything, but I care enough to look into it.
A good reclinable chair you can sleep on. And diapers.
Your are right, I call it "erre-ese-ese" in spanish, and I didn't care about the meaning of the words.
Well, lots of people pay 20$ a gigabyte here in Uruguay.
Our state-owned ISP charges 490 uruguayan pesos (around 22 dollars) for a giga a month internet access contract, at 256kBps . Unmetered service, with half a MB throughput is around 50 dollars a month. But that's too expensive. Luckily cable companies are starting to realize there's money to be made in that area, and will start competing.
Here it's much cheaper to rent a DVD for 1.5 dollars, and just copy it, or buy CD copies for 1.5 dollars a CD right on the street. Awful spanish accent audio-translated bootleg copies, of course, but cheaper than downloading the movies yourself.
First you should echo $GREP_OPTS , because at least once i saw a GREP_OPTS=-i or something like that, in a server I didn't administer.
Great!! Finally, a sensible customer.
I have a great selection of turds. I am very proud of the last batch, I can warrant an improvement of 30% over the previous. I'm sure you will be glad to buy the improved product, with that brilliant reasoning!
If he wants a windows server, and a justification of the CALs, he should ask Microsoft itself.
If he wants a solution to his problem, the response can be wider, and it would make sense to ask for it in this forum.
It might be a PITa to configure (I just tried too long ago) and there might be features you need that it doesn't have, but it might me worth trying.
I don't like SuSE, but it I had to admin Windows accounts, Novell SuSE doesn't sound so bad after all.
Bullshit!
This doesn't make Windows far more like Unix and Linux.
Windows keeps proprietary.
On the technical side, as we can't see the code, we can only talk out of experience, it comes from the makers of past Windows versions. That is the kind of quality we should expect, sensibly.
But paper does have some harmful chemicals (bleach and stuff) that could filter from landfills into water supplies.
I think that using paper to feed the soil that grows trees is a good idea, but the whole process could be improved in order not to contaminate further the soil.
sorry, can't verify if it works though.
It's better if it's your non-dexterous hand.
But could you elaborate why you can't verifiy it?
Do you lack some of the appendages required ?
Or the experience to compare #1 with #2 ?
When it had ads it was already free in the sense of cost.
One problem then, and now, is that it is proprietary, so _they_ choose whether stuff like ads is acceptable or not.
I care about freedom in software, not about cost.
I agree that "free" is a term too wide to describe software.
I mean "free software" in the sense of "freedom" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html . It is about more things that cost. It's more about giving the users the right to use it in any way he wants.
Software is what it is out of the box.
Extensions, like firefox extensions, might be good, because they mark the limits of big chunks of functionality that some specific users might need.
Configuring the system is not that great. It takes too much time, and if you can't work with the default, the default is wrong.
Firefox proved that.
Control centers ae just a nice way to spend your time. I have used KDE since they started getting popular (I used Enlightenment at the time), and Gnome since the first versions, and I've had it with configuring desktops.
The desktops should just work out of the box. That way you don't pass the responsibility of choosing the right defaults to users.
And that "power user" thing is a fallacy (sp?) .
Users are experts in what they know how to do, and novices at what they don't know, along their whole experience (I think Jef Raskin said that) . There's no "expert" user, who knows what's more productive for him, specially when he can't measure his productivity objectively. That's what interface experts are for!
Ubuntu's gnome desktop is great out of the box, and it requires no tweaking.
I don't think there's a benefit in a usability comparison between KDE and gnome, though. Gnome is much better in terms of modern usability trends, and KDE is much more familiar to the former mswindows user. It comes down to a philosophical issue, rather than a technical one, if you think "usability" means "familiarity", then KDE is much better, and there are reasons to think that way, and it's measurably better, when you are talking about former mswindows users. Gnome would be better in the modern meaning of "usability", when you take into account cognitive skills and stuff, but that can make experts think that you are treating the user as if he were dumb.
Don't diss it because it's not OSS.
I used Opera back in the day at work, together with Windows NT 4.0. I liked tabs.
I hated the banners. I hated the email client.
Now I don't have to use non-free software for my job, and even if I liked Opera, the main reason not to use Opera is not tu use non-free software.
I actually care about freedom in software, and Opera is against it, so I wouldn't even try it again.
There are times when I need to use non-free software, but I try to do that only when I can't do my jobs with a free tool, even if it was a technically inferior tool.
Luckily the tools I have available are great, so it doesn't cost me anything, but at the end of the day, it's freedom what matters to me, and I wouldn't want to lose that.
I work for a retail label printer.
I feel your pain, brother. I work for a retail color laser printer. Printers are the worst bosses. This one pays me cash, the bank once said something about yellow dots in my money, and refused to accept a deposit.
I can't count with my feet, you insensitive clod!
I can count only 0, 1, 4 and 5, but I can't move those 4 toes independently.
I wasn't talking about virtual girls being virtual assistants. I was talking about models losing their jobs, and working as real life assistants!!
Maybe _that_ is pathetic, and only technology won't change it, of course.
About virtual assitants, well, virtual stuff is usually associated with fantasy. If you take into account that men are the main consumers of "virtual" products, it's logical that there should be tits involved. It's a marketing issue, more than a design issue.
I don't think commercials need to show naked women in them, but I understand why they do. I does make sense. It's about maximizing sales, taking into account what the consumer likes. Men don't want a deodorant, they want blondes with huge racks. And when it comes to virtual environments, a blonde with a huge rack beats Clippy every time.
I don't think it's pathetic.
It's important from a technological perspective, of course. Not everybody is a kernel hacker, some of us have interests in CG and other areas.
It's important from a social perspective, too (where will RL models find jobs now?!!?!?!?, will they work as my secretaries? what about virtual actors? virtual environments populated by virtual people indistiguishable from other people?)
How much yen do you want to bet that it's one of those stupid "Are you sure?" dialog boxes that everyone clicks "Yes" to without actually thinking about what it's asking? Ah, how I love ignoring those warnings, too.
Well, I am lucky. I am a developer, and I can choose my tools. I use gnome, that doesnt't have "Ok/Cancel" buttons or "are you sure" dialogs that I know of.
My reaction towards that kind of dialogs is anihilation. If I am using an HTML editor, and it pulls one of those dialogs, I just stop using it, and get a better editor. Eclipse doesn't have many issues like this that I found, neither does Firefox, nor Thunderbird. I have some problems with OpenOffice, but maybe it's not possible to mimick MSOffice without copying some bad stuff.
Of course, not everybody gets to choose their tools, but when you can, it's easy to avoid that kind of stuff.
Of cours