Part 1: I understand you can fix problems in mswindows. The only problem is that it's too difficult. I know becuase I tried to learn. For years. And all the knowledge I got through the years is useless, I know, because I can't help people with XP systems. I try, not too hard, because I don't enjoy it, but I honestly try. I just give up and tell the to find someone who understands XP. I did fix win98 systems for money, and I used win98, and I used win NT for development. On the other hand, I learned to compile kernel modules back in 1996. I hadn't done it for a long long time. I had to do it last month for a parallel port dual joypad with no advertised linux support (I bought it because I needed just one, though). The kernel had support, but it recognized just one joypad. I used knowledge I aquired back in 1996 for compiling the kernel. I tweaked two constants in a C program, copy&pasted an "if" statement, and now I have two joypads, so I can play FIFA2005 on winex. By the way, I kept a win98 for gaming purposes, but FIFA got fucked up, and TV-out keeps de-configuring itself. I needed the damn joypads to just work, I can't spend an afternoon installing mswindows.
About looking at the source code, well, I am a developer, I use source code for a living. I use lots of third party libraries (most of it BSD licensed), and I need to read code so I can understand how to code, myself. I used to program in VB6, and they has the MSDN, but nothing beats actually being able to look into the implementation of the library that will become part of you application.
Try talking to most married women. Changing your name causes all kinds of problems. (But so does not changing your name. What a world.)
What a _country_. The world is not all like that.
I live in Uruguay, and most women keep their own names when they marry. Some very old ladies use their husbands name _after_their full names ("Mirtha Legrand _de_ Tinayre" , "de" means something like "property of"), reminiscent of the times when women were the property of their husbands. Anyhow, in the "last name" fields of a form, they use their own family name.
Changing the last name from the fathers name to the husbands name could have lots of interpretations, none sounds nice to me.
BSODs were a big problem, that still does happen. Of course, faulty hardware can make all the system fail, but a good system should cope with most of those problems, and provide some easy way to fix them, or at least diagnose them. Most GNU/Linux users can tell you to watch some files in/var/log after a hardware failure. I don't know how to diagnose a hardware failure, post mortem, in Windows, after tinkering with it from its existance to around 2000. It's not a matter of mswindows failing too much. That happens, too, because users need to install their own drivers sometimes, and that of course can lead to some failures, it's understandable, and I believe XP has somewhat good hardware support. The problem is that when it fails, it's very difficult to know what happen, and to have a chance at fixing it. When it works, mswindows might suit the needs of the user, but once the user has some trouble, things start to get exponentially harder. What I like in unix-like systems is that stuff has increasing levels of difficulty, so you can learn while you use it, and problems like hardware compatibility issues or troubleshooting the network don't require wizardry.
That, and the fact that most people I know, keep reinstalling their mswindows systems because of issues like "Internet is too slow" or something. We have a mswindows 2000 server, that had soe issues with terminal services (they use it for develoment) and the only fix available was reinstalling. That's too much of a cost.
Well, maybe you can tell me that people who know enough of mswindows should be able to fix issues without reinstalling. I just know that I took two MS courses on win 2000, and I can't fix a damn thing on windows, and most people I know can keep their systems going for years without reinstalling (and for months without rebooting ) with GNU/Linux, man, HOWTOs, and some googling.
And about switching..... Well... that's not a technical issue. Do you know what Free Software stands for? If you read some stuff at http://www.fsf.org/ , aside from what many of people think about them, and wit an open mind, you could realize that the issue of using free software is not technical, although it does have technical advantages. Its an ethical issue. Sharing software and having the possibility to do your own fixes to software should be your right, and you lose it with proprietary software, other technical issues aside.
Ok, fusion is nice, and solar arrays, too (although solar arrays have the potential of failing in pretty apocalyptical ways)
But fission works. Right now. And it's cost efficient. And it pollutes, but _much_ less than any other means of energy generation. It even generates less radioactive waste than some. And the waste it generates is manageably containable. Plus, you could always get rid of your waste once you had a fusion reactor working. With that kind of amount of energy, someone would come up with some soution.
About using windmills.... has there been any discussion about the effects of actual widespread wind farms on the environment? Does it make a difference, extracting energy from the wind, in the natural course of events, or it it too small for us to care? n general, we actually are too small, but weather is a complex system that could have some weak spots, I believe.
Maybe ten year ago, Visual Studio was great. We all used it. Now, we have Eclipse, and _I_ have GCJ, and SWT. And I don't need Visual Studio to make a standalone dialog EXE. So I don't use it. Or maybe it's the fact that I can use Eclipse for my web development too. And the same with Java. Or maybe it's that Eclipse does so much more than syntax highlighting. Refactoring is solid with Eclipse. CVS support is flawless (to the extent of the capabilities of CVS) . Working with Eclipse feels, now, the same that Visual Studio felt like back in 1995.
That, in the technical realm, aside from the fact that Eclipse is free. As in beer, and as in, for example, being available from here to eternity (another nice side-effect of free software). so you will never have to retrain, or recode, or change the language you use. Java with Eclipse rocks.
Of course you could use other languages with Eclipse, but that's what _I_ like.
GPL is not about defending copyright. It's about fighting copyright, fighting fire with fire. The GPL does not use copyright law on a _moral_ or _ethical_ basis, it just uses it as a tool.
The whole idea of the GPL is keeping free stuff free. When someone want to keep free software from being free, you can use copyright law, as a tool against them. Of course, the GPL would be useless in a world without copyright, but of course, it wouldn't be necessary, because that's the kinds of world the creators of the GPL want.
I'm sorry to be envangelizing here, but (wait! I'm not sorry, I like evangelizing everywhere!!) there are many people who believe that software licensing terms do have ethical issues.
RMS, aside from being regarded as a nut by some people, makes a lot of sense once you listen to him. I was a "Linux" supporter, here in Uruguay, when he came for a talk about GNU/Linux and stuff.
The guy expressed _why_ software should be free, in the sense of freedom (freedom to use, to share, to improve, and to share improvements, that means to not be locked with your provider, as a user, or as a community) . He talked about why NDAs hurt people, and why proprietary licenses hurt the development of the software community. The GPL is a tool, that aside from seeing the source or not, helps us in getting rid of proprietary software in our lifes. Giving some thinking myself, and being form south America, I actually feel the problem of us giving money to software companies, and getting too little in return, and being hurt by vendor lock-in, and how free software could help these countries develop, and how proprietary software hurts that. Of course, when it comes down to paying or not a hundred bucks for a license for your home machine, it's not so much of an ssue. When propretary software vendors takes loads of money from your government, and lock themselves in by propriteary protocols and formats, that's money that could be mused much better. Plus, you could be free from forced upgrades, or products that quit being supported, and lots of problems that arise from propriteary software. Most of them are not a problem for rich people, or corporations, but where I live, it's not ethical to give that much control to software corporations.
The guy makes a lot of sense to me, here you can read some stuff by RMS, about why free software is important, and why it's bad supporting proprietary software: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays
Well, for me, it's not ethical to use proprietary software. The fact that mswindows is crap is just one issue. That helped me look for other alternatives, and discover free software, long ago.
Technical issues are not everything. Ethics are important. I don't want to use msoffice and be the tool of someone else total control delirium. I don't trust Microsoft, either, and I believe they have a negative impact in the industry I work for, specially in South America, where I live. I wouldn't want to support them, ever. The fact that they make good software by some specific metric doesn't justify using it, in the big picture.
Well.... I have never played RPG, but that's just because I could never find a group to play with. I enjoyed reading SF, since I learned to read. I liked Asimov at seven, and I had good social skills, thank you very much. I read Jules Verne, and lots of epical and fantastic literature, because I liked. Of course, I liked playing with other kids too. There was nothing wrong with my life. I had _some_ trouble as a teenager, like most people do, but I developed good people skills. Now I have a lot of friends, I had my share of girls, and now I live with one, I don't think I have any problem with the real world, other than the mundane lack of cash. And I still enjoy fantastic literature, a bit of Star Trek, good computer games, 3d animation, technology,/. .
Maybe there's no correlation between social skills and enjoyment of fantasy, SF, games.
Struts does not equal Smarty. Maybe Struts + Velocity might do a similar job than Smarty. And Java is not that difficult. In my case, I have less trouble with Java than PHP. I work with different distributions, and PHP libs are not trivially deployed, although it's not too hard. Because I know some Java, it's much easier for me to install Java stuff than PHP stuff. I understand that PHP might have lots of features I like in Java, but I happen to like the fact that Java _forces_ you to have some structure. People like different things. I like Java, because I know what to expect from my teammates work, regardless of individual genius. Java I can always fix. PHP has lots of potential to be harder.
Anyway, that wasn't even my point. I was just saying that the stuff about kids learning PHP and then using it in the enterprise is now necessarily true, because I have a different experience. Of course, you can use any language to program, but people have different taste and expectations towards languages. I liked Pascal myself, and hated C. Lots of people thought otherwise. In the end, I believe it's a matter of taste.
I was a student in 1996, and I learned ASP for a specific project. Some time later, I found PHP, and liked it. I did some stuff with PHP. I really admire Rasmus, I met him when he came to Uruguay, and he is great. I believe PHP is a great idea, and works great.
But now I use Java, because I think it's much easier to work with, when you have teams of more than two people. PHP gives you too much freedom to be easily managed. It's nice for experimenting, for stuff you want to see right away, for complex stuff you don't have to maintain for others, too. I like better the ability to have interfaces, standards, Struts, lots of things that make Java better for developer teams.
The same that the guys who start right now with PHP, they might or might not change.
You are kinda right. FIFA made many changes in order to gain a more offensive play. A tie was worth 1 point and a win, 2 points, before. Now it's 3 for a win, so if you are winning one goal ahead, missing 90 seconds, you still have 2 points to care about. And you win or lose a championship because of those two points. Another thing is that in tournaments there is simple elimination, and games have a definition similar to basketball, where you can tie, but play extra time , with sudden death some times, or shoot penaltys.
Another thing is that actually there is not such a thing as being 90 seconds from the end, because the referee doesn't stop the game until he actually fees like it, so actually anything can happen in the end, and does.
But it is not a game to watch on TV, anyway. And it doesn't fit the US model of a game.
I live in Uruguay, I am not wealthy at all. I didn't remember I had that freeservers page though, thank you.
What I was specifically saying is that have a problem getting any sympathy for some guy who doesn't want to do some googling, and wants to bother other people just to save a few bucks.
I don't like it in RL when people come to me asking for my free time so they can save some bucks. I need a better motivation. For example someone who really can put the bucks they save, to a good use, like a public school or something. Or someone who wants something more, like a good technical solution. For example, I like changing proprietary software for free software, so I like to give advice to people about that. But the whole idea of helping someone out is the idea of doing something with some value, technical, ethical or whatever, not just saving some money for some guy who doesn't really care what software he is running.
Insightful, but not true. International standards, my ass. The US has ridiculous patent laws. They can patent software! That is completely ridiculous, and not an international standard, unless they make it so.
The US is right now trying to legislate in my country (Uruguay) a change in patents and copyrights, disguised in an "investment protection agreement", where we need to respect the same standards in protection of "intellectual property", whatever they mean by that nasty term. If they succeed, they will be effectively passing laws in my country. And my country doesn't have huge hunger problems, it is just in deep shit from lots of money borrowed in the seventies and the eighties.
It's easy for a rich country to go over the sovereignity of a poor country. Much more, in Africa, where they have huge problems. And about the governments being immune to patents....... well... when Brazil threatened with making their own AIDS medicine, tired of being milked by international corporations, they accepted a deal, because they couldn't go through with it. And I don't mean technically, they have an industry capable of producing whatever they want.
There _is_ a reason why people shouldn't use Exchange.
Nowadays, if you don't go by standards, you are fucked in the near future. You don't know whether your company will want to upgrade to next mswindows version, and with exchange you don't have a migration path. At least, as there are no big standards for calendaring, you should use software that lets you retrieve the information and use it elsewhere, easily. Vendor lock-in is a risk for any company, you have the responsibility to help the company you work for to avoid that risk.
Maybe it would be worth to spend more money, evaluating free alternatives, and after choosing one, more money to get some feature that is missing, and time, so you can have a calendar that suits your needs, and is not a possible headache for your company. Of course, you could end up spending more in the beggining than just buying exchange, and mswindows clients, but freedom is worth much more (financially).
Note: I didn't feel very happy about the original question. It's not _that_ ok to come to Ask Slashdot, just to save a few bucks. Our collective "consulting" expertise is worth moch more that a few bucks. I like "Ask Slashdot"s that are about making something work, or work better than it does, or using free software, not el-cheapo software.
Sorry, editing schizophrenia. I had written another thing (much bigger) originally, and chopped the wrong parts. The idea is something more in the line of: "Just because many so-called communist contry projects have failed miserabily in most aspects, it doesn't make communism itself, as a concept, a completely idiotic idea"
First of all, it's not an excuse. It's an attempot to explain a fact.
Futbol is actually very accesible to real poor kids.
Great stars _do_ come from very poor places. Maradona, Tevez, are from very (very) poor places. In my country, Uruguay, most of them come from truly disadvantaged backgrounds, and many become stars in Europe. Of course, being poor is an incentive to try and shine in sports so you can make a living out of it, but in this sport I believe the thing that helps is that poor places can produce players as good as rich places can.
In fact, most kids _do_ learn the game playing it just on an open area ("el campito"). Just an open area. Period. The most important thing, is that you don't have a substancially different experience than the guy who plays it in an actual field. Goals (the rectangulars hole where you shoot the ball at) can be (and most times are) represented as two marks on the floor that represent the vertical poles. The horizontal pole is something around the height of the goalkeeper. Two shoes (you can play barefoot and in many cases people do, in the beach, or when they just don't have sports shoes), two shirts, anything. The only thing you really need is the ball. Any ball.
Even the ball can be anything. Kids at school, in regular breaks, where you are not allowed to play futbol, don't even think about bringing your ball to school, play with paper-tape-socks-nylon-etc balls they manage to build ad-hoc (I even did it some times). That's because most of the game happens just on an open field, so most of the game even professionally, doesn't use infrastructure.
I'm not saying you can't play probably any game without infrastructure, with some creativity. What I am pointing out is that kids actually _do_it_ with futbol here in South America. And that they _do_ actually learn to play the game like pros, playing that way.
I did play basketball, and it's not fun without a hoop, a ball that bounces and a court that makes it bounce. I can't say anything about other games, because I have only seen them on ESPN and movies, so i can't imagine for example what the difference between playing baseball with a bat or with a stick would be.
GPL is not about "Open Source", whatever that means today. The GPL is the license used by the Free Software Foundation, as a tool in their idea that software should be free (not just open source, actually free, as in "freedom", freedom to use, to share, to improve, and to share improvements), and it is actually purposely restrictive achieving the goal of being incompatible with proprietary software licenses, which it's supposed to "fight".
The GPL is just a license, not a political statement, so it just states what it does, and not what it does it for.
The GP was right in that the GPL reason for existing is "freeing" software, by making it easier to develop free software than proprietary software. That is the "political" essence of the GPL.
That's an interesting choice of words. In an purely liberal system, you are not assured the FEEDOM to eat, either. Or the FREEDOM to live in a house. Or the FREEDOM to get an education. Or the FREEDOM to get medical care.
Owning property is one of the Human Rights, of course, but no economic system assures all of them.
Just because communism has failed miserabily, it doesn't mean it's a completely idiotic idea. I believe it's good to measure other systems against it. Capitalism is a means, too, non an objective. The objective is the well being of the society and te individuals that form it. We have a lot to learn from every system. Just because communism is easily used by totalitarians, it doesn't mean Marx was an idiot with nothing useful to say. Totalitarians have that nasty habit of getting power in every system. Of course some are more fragile than others.
Slashdot Mirror
Part 1:
I understand you can fix problems in mswindows.
The only problem is that it's too difficult. I know becuase I tried to learn. For years. And all the knowledge I got through the years is useless, I know, because I can't help people with XP systems. I try, not too hard, because I don't enjoy it, but I honestly try. I just give up and tell the to find someone who understands XP. I did fix win98 systems for money, and I used win98, and I used win NT for development.
On the other hand, I learned to compile kernel modules back in 1996.
I hadn't done it for a long long time. I had to do it last month for a parallel port dual joypad with no advertised linux support (I bought it because I needed just one, though). The kernel had support, but it recognized just one joypad. I used knowledge I aquired back in 1996 for compiling the kernel.
I tweaked two constants in a C program, copy&pasted an "if" statement, and now I have two joypads, so I can play FIFA2005 on winex. By the way, I kept a win98 for gaming purposes, but FIFA got fucked up, and TV-out keeps de-configuring itself. I needed the damn joypads to just work, I can't spend an afternoon installing mswindows.
About looking at the source code, well, I am a developer, I use source code for a living. I use lots of third party libraries (most of it BSD licensed), and I need to read code so I can understand how to code, myself.
I used to program in VB6, and they has the MSDN, but nothing beats actually being able to look into the implementation of the library that will become part of you application.
especially when you don't talk English!
Liar
Try talking to most married women. Changing your name causes all kinds of problems. (But so does not changing your name. What a world.)
What a _country_. The world is not all like that.
I live in Uruguay, and most women keep their own names when they marry. Some very old ladies use their husbands name _after_their full names ("Mirtha Legrand _de_ Tinayre" , "de" means something like "property of"), reminiscent of the times when women were the property of their husbands. Anyhow, in the "last name" fields of a form, they use their own family name.
Changing the last name from the fathers name to the husbands name could have lots of interpretations, none sounds nice to me.
Isn't that regarded as an sexist issue in the US?
BSODs were a big problem, that still does happen. /var/log after a hardware failure. I don't know how to diagnose a hardware failure, post mortem, in Windows, after tinkering with it from its existance to around 2000.
Of course, faulty hardware can make all the system fail, but a good system should cope with most of those problems, and provide some easy way to fix them, or at least diagnose them.
Most GNU/Linux users can tell you to watch some files in
It's not a matter of mswindows failing too much.
That happens, too, because users need to install their own drivers sometimes, and that of course can lead to some failures, it's understandable, and I believe XP has somewhat good hardware support.
The problem is that when it fails, it's very difficult to know what happen, and to have a chance at fixing it.
When it works, mswindows might suit the needs of the user, but once the user has some trouble, things start to get exponentially harder.
What I like in unix-like systems is that stuff has increasing levels of difficulty, so you can learn while you use it, and problems like hardware compatibility issues or troubleshooting the network don't require wizardry.
That, and the fact that most people I know, keep reinstalling their mswindows systems because of issues like "Internet is too slow" or something. We have a mswindows 2000 server, that had soe issues with terminal services (they use it for develoment) and the only fix available was reinstalling. That's too much of a cost.
Well, maybe you can tell me that people who know enough of mswindows should be able to fix issues without reinstalling. I just know that I took two MS courses on win 2000, and I can't fix a damn thing on windows, and most people I know can keep their systems going for years without reinstalling (and for months without rebooting ) with GNU/Linux, man, HOWTOs, and some googling.
And about switching.....
Well... that's not a technical issue.
Do you know what Free Software stands for?
If you read some stuff at http://www.fsf.org/ , aside from what many of people think about them, and wit an open mind, you could realize that the issue of using free software is not technical, although it does have technical advantages. Its an ethical issue. Sharing software and having the possibility to do your own fixes to software should be your right, and you lose it with proprietary software, other technical issues aside.
Ok, fusion is nice, and solar arrays, too (although solar arrays have the potential of failing in pretty apocalyptical ways)
But fission works. Right now.
And it's cost efficient.
And it pollutes, but _much_ less than any other means of energy generation.
It even generates less radioactive waste than some. And the waste it generates is manageably containable. Plus, you could always get rid of your waste once you had a fusion reactor working. With that kind of amount of energy, someone would come up with some soution.
About using windmills.... has there been any discussion about the effects of actual widespread wind farms on the environment? Does it make a difference, extracting energy from the wind, in the natural course of events, or it it too small for us to care? n general, we actually are too small, but weather is a complex system that could have some weak spots, I believe.
Maybe ten year ago, Visual Studio was great. We all used it.
Now, we have Eclipse, and _I_ have GCJ, and SWT. And I don't need Visual Studio to make a standalone dialog EXE.
So I don't use it.
Or maybe it's the fact that I can use Eclipse for my web development too. And the same with Java.
Or maybe it's that Eclipse does so much more than syntax highlighting. Refactoring is solid with Eclipse. CVS support is flawless (to the extent of the capabilities of CVS) . Working with Eclipse feels, now, the same that Visual Studio felt like back in 1995.
That, in the technical realm, aside from the fact that Eclipse is free. As in beer, and as in, for example, being available from here to eternity (another nice side-effect of free software).
so you will never have to retrain, or recode, or change the language you use.
Java with Eclipse rocks.
Of course you could use other languages with Eclipse, but that's what _I_ like.
I agree with the previous reply.
Hawaiians deserve the same respect for their religion/culture as everybody else.
If you don't like it, build it in your back yard. If your back yard is not a suitable spot, tough luck.
GPL is not about defending copyright.
It's about fighting copyright, fighting fire with fire.
The GPL does not use copyright law on a _moral_ or _ethical_ basis, it just uses it as a tool.
The whole idea of the GPL is keeping free stuff free. When someone want to keep free software from being free, you can use copyright law, as a tool against them.
Of course, the GPL would be useless in a world without copyright, but of course, it wouldn't be necessary, because that's the kinds of world the creators of the GPL want.
I'm sorry to be envangelizing here, but (wait! I'm not sorry, I like evangelizing everywhere!!) there are many people who believe that software licensing terms do have ethical issues.
RMS, aside from being regarded as a nut by some people, makes a lot of sense once you listen to him. I was a "Linux" supporter, here in Uruguay, when he came for a talk about GNU/Linux and stuff.
The guy expressed _why_ software should be free, in the sense of freedom (freedom to use, to share, to improve, and to share improvements, that means to not be locked with your provider, as a user, or as a community) . He talked about why NDAs hurt people, and why proprietary licenses hurt the development of the software community. The GPL is a tool, that aside from seeing the source or not, helps us in getting rid of proprietary software in our lifes.
Giving some thinking myself, and being form south America, I actually feel the problem of us giving money to software companies, and getting too little in return, and being hurt by vendor lock-in, and how free software could help these countries develop, and how proprietary software hurts that.
Of course, when it comes down to paying or not a hundred bucks for a license for your home machine, it's not so much of an ssue. When propretary software vendors takes loads of money from your government, and lock themselves in by propriteary protocols and formats, that's money that could be mused much better. Plus, you could be free from forced upgrades, or products that quit being supported, and lots of problems that arise from propriteary software. Most of them are not a problem for rich people, or corporations, but where I live, it's not ethical to give that much control to software corporations.
The guy makes a lot of sense to me, here you can read some stuff by RMS, about why free software is important, and why it's bad supporting proprietary software:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html
Well, for me, it's not ethical to use proprietary software.
The fact that mswindows is crap is just one issue.
That helped me look for other alternatives, and discover free software, long ago.
Technical issues are not everything. Ethics are important. I don't want to use msoffice and be the tool of someone else total control delirium. I don't trust Microsoft, either, and I believe they have a negative impact in the industry I work for, specially in South America, where I live. I wouldn't want to support them, ever. The fact that they make good software by some specific metric doesn't justify using it, in the big picture.
Well.... /. .
I have never played RPG, but that's just because I could never find a group to play with.
I enjoyed reading SF, since I learned to read. I liked Asimov at seven, and I had good social skills, thank you very much.
I read Jules Verne, and lots of epical and fantastic literature, because I liked. Of course, I liked playing with other kids too. There was nothing wrong with my life.
I had _some_ trouble as a teenager, like most people do, but I developed good people skills.
Now I have a lot of friends, I had my share of girls, and now I live with one, I don't think I have any problem with the real world, other than the mundane lack of cash. And I still enjoy fantastic literature, a bit of Star Trek, good computer games, 3d animation, technology,
Maybe there's no correlation between social skills and enjoyment of fantasy, SF, games.
Struts does not equal Smarty.
Maybe Struts + Velocity might do a similar job than Smarty.
And Java is not that difficult. In my case, I have less trouble with Java than PHP. I work with different distributions, and PHP libs are not trivially deployed, although it's not too hard.
Because I know some Java, it's much easier for me to install Java stuff than PHP stuff.
I understand that PHP might have lots of features I like in Java, but I happen to like the fact that Java _forces_ you to have some structure.
People like different things. I like Java, because I know what to expect from my teammates work, regardless of individual genius. Java I can always fix. PHP has lots of potential to be harder.
Anyway, that wasn't even my point. I was just saying that the stuff about kids learning PHP and then using it in the enterprise is now necessarily true, because I have a different experience.
Of course, you can use any language to program, but people have different taste and expectations towards languages. I liked Pascal myself, and hated C. Lots of people thought otherwise. In the end, I believe it's a matter of taste.
I was a student in 1996, and I learned ASP for a specific project. Some time later, I found PHP, and liked it. I did some stuff with PHP. I really admire Rasmus, I met him when he came to Uruguay, and he is great. I believe PHP is a great idea, and works great.
But now I use Java, because I think it's much easier to work with, when you have teams of more than two people. PHP gives you too much freedom to be easily managed. It's nice for experimenting, for stuff you want to see right away, for complex stuff you don't have to maintain for others, too.
I like better the ability to have interfaces, standards, Struts, lots of things that make Java better for developer teams.
The same that the guys who start right now with PHP, they might or might not change.
You are kinda right.
FIFA made many changes in order to gain a more offensive play.
A tie was worth 1 point and a win, 2 points, before.
Now it's 3 for a win, so if you are winning one goal ahead, missing 90 seconds, you still have 2 points to care about.
And you win or lose a championship because of those two points.
Another thing is that in tournaments there is simple elimination, and games have a definition similar to basketball, where you can tie, but play extra time , with sudden death some times, or shoot penaltys.
Another thing is that actually there is not such a thing as being 90 seconds from the end, because the referee doesn't stop the game until he actually fees like it, so actually anything can happen in the end, and does.
But it is not a game to watch on TV, anyway. And it doesn't fit the US model of a game.
I live in Uruguay, I am not wealthy at all. I didn't remember I had that freeservers page though, thank you.
What I was specifically saying is that have a problem getting any sympathy for some guy who doesn't want to do some googling, and wants to bother other people just to save a few bucks.
I don't like it in RL when people come to me asking for my free time so they can save some bucks. I need a better motivation. For example someone who really can put the bucks they save, to a good use, like a public school or something. Or someone who wants something more, like a good technical solution. For example, I like changing proprietary software for free software, so I like to give advice to people about that. But the whole idea of helping someone out is the idea of doing something with some value, technical, ethical or whatever, not just saving some money for some guy who doesn't really care what software he is running.
Don't be a square.
You can get that with just a 138.2 salary radius.
Insightful, but not true.
International standards, my ass. The US has ridiculous patent laws. They can patent software! That is completely ridiculous, and not an international standard, unless they make it so.
The US is right now trying to legislate in my country (Uruguay) a change in patents and copyrights, disguised in an "investment protection agreement", where we need to respect the same standards in protection of "intellectual property", whatever they mean by that nasty term. If they succeed, they will be effectively passing laws in my country. And my country doesn't have huge hunger problems, it is just in deep shit from lots of money borrowed in the seventies and the eighties.
It's easy for a rich country to go over the sovereignity of a poor country. Much more, in Africa, where they have huge problems.
And about the governments being immune to patents....... well... when Brazil threatened with making their own AIDS medicine, tired of being milked by international corporations, they accepted a deal, because they couldn't go through with it. And I don't mean technically, they have an industry capable of producing whatever they want.
There _is_ a reason why people shouldn't use Exchange.
Nowadays, if you don't go by standards, you are fucked in the near future. You don't know whether your company will want to upgrade to next mswindows version, and with exchange you don't have a migration path. At least, as there are no big standards for calendaring, you should use software that lets you retrieve the information and use it elsewhere, easily. Vendor lock-in is a risk for any company, you have the responsibility to help the company you work for to avoid that risk.
Maybe it would be worth to spend more money, evaluating free alternatives, and after choosing one, more money to get some feature that is missing, and time, so you can have a calendar that suits your needs, and is not a possible headache for your company. Of course, you could end up spending more in the beggining than just buying exchange, and mswindows clients, but freedom is worth much more (financially).
Note: I didn't feel very happy about the original question.
It's not _that_ ok to come to Ask Slashdot, just to save a few bucks. Our collective "consulting" expertise is worth moch more that a few bucks. I like "Ask Slashdot"s that are about making something work, or work better than it does, or using free software, not el-cheapo software.
Sorry, editing schizophrenia.
I had written another thing (much bigger) originally, and chopped the wrong parts. The idea is something more in the line of: "Just because many so-called communist contry projects have failed miserabily in most aspects, it doesn't make communism itself, as a concept, a completely idiotic idea"
First of all, it's not an excuse. It's an attempot to explain a fact.
Futbol is actually very accesible to real poor kids.
Great stars _do_ come from very poor places. Maradona, Tevez, are from very (very) poor places. In my country, Uruguay, most of them come from truly disadvantaged backgrounds, and many become stars in Europe. Of course, being poor is an incentive to try and shine in sports so you can make a living out of it, but in this sport I believe the thing that helps is that poor places can produce players as good as rich places can.
In fact, most kids _do_ learn the game playing it just on an open area ("el campito"). Just an open area. Period.
The most important thing, is that you don't have a substancially different experience than the guy who plays it in an actual field.
Goals (the rectangulars hole where you shoot the ball at) can be (and most times are) represented as two marks on the floor that represent the vertical poles. The horizontal pole is something around the height of the goalkeeper.
Two shoes (you can play barefoot and in many cases people do, in the beach, or when they just don't have sports shoes), two shirts, anything. The only thing you really need is the ball. Any ball.
Even the ball can be anything. Kids at school, in regular breaks, where you are not allowed to play futbol, don't even think about bringing your ball to school, play with paper-tape-socks-nylon-etc balls they manage to build ad-hoc (I even did it some times).
That's because most of the game happens just on an open field, so most of the game even professionally, doesn't use infrastructure.
I'm not saying you can't play probably any game without infrastructure, with some creativity. What I am pointing out is that kids actually _do_it_ with futbol here in South America. And that they _do_ actually learn to play the game like pros, playing that way.
I did play basketball, and it's not fun without a hoop, a ball that bounces and a court that makes it bounce. I can't say anything about other games, because I have only seen them on ESPN and movies, so i can't imagine for example what the difference between playing baseball with a bat or with a stick would be.
GPL is not about "Open Source", whatever that means today.
The GPL is the license used by the Free Software Foundation, as a tool in their idea that software should be free (not just open source, actually free, as in "freedom", freedom to use, to share, to improve, and to share improvements), and it is actually purposely restrictive achieving the goal of being incompatible with proprietary software licenses, which it's supposed to "fight".
The GPL is just a license, not a political statement, so it just states what it does, and not what it does it for.
The GP was right in that the GPL reason for existing is "freeing" software, by making it easier to develop free software than proprietary software. That is the "political" essence of the GPL.
That's an interesting choice of words.
In an purely liberal system, you are not assured the FEEDOM to eat, either.
Or the FREEDOM to live in a house.
Or the FREEDOM to get an education.
Or the FREEDOM to get medical care.
Owning property is one of the Human Rights, of course, but no economic system assures all of them.
Just because communism has failed miserabily, it doesn't mean it's a completely idiotic idea. I believe it's good to measure other systems against it. Capitalism is a means, too, non an objective. The objective is the well being of the society and te individuals that form it. We have a lot to learn from every system. Just because communism is easily used by totalitarians, it doesn't mean Marx was an idiot with nothing useful to say. Totalitarians have that nasty habit of getting power in every system. Of course some are more fragile than others.
How much cooler is a carbon fiber-anything that a regular plastic anything?? a lot!!
And cheaper?? it doesn't get cheaper than plastic!
I like watching the game rather than the guys chests.
If nicely built chests is what you want, body building might be your sport.