It's true, you have the right to protest, and in the USSR you wouldn't, that is an actual difference, and one of the things why many people who called themselves communists used to migrate to the US, and not the USSR. That is the exact point, the only actual advantage in human rights the US, and most of the "western" countries have, is freedom of speech. Most other problems with authoritarism exist, although usually in a smaller scale, but at least you can do something about it. The problem I see now is that especially the US people, although they can, don't care, and others are going the same way. And that freedom of speech is been slowly undermined, in the name of patriotism, with noone standing up for themselves. The ones who do, are shushed and called stupid, like Michael Moore (who might be stupid, but whatever his points of view are, they are worthy of exploring), so noone cares. You still have a better country to live in than the USSR, but not thaaaaat much better, and the situation isn't improving, I believe.
But then, it's nice to feel like you have a voice. They held elections in the old USSR... or should that be, "In Soviet Russia, Elections hold YOU!" ?
Lack of elections are a bad example of soviet failure, athough there are many. You should start with the US example, and Florida voters, that is much more recent, and a much more believable illusion.
Plus, in the USSR, eleccions were actually a way to decide some things, you just didn't decide which government to have. You don't either, many times, in the US, and many other countries ruled by capitalism, including mine, Uruguay.
Maybe this is too much to answer to an innocent comment, but I just wanted to point out that the exact characteristics of the USSR that are considered unacceptable, are very accepted nowadays, in systems that claim to be opposite to it. Maybe it is because it's not a matter of right-wing or left wing, of course./rant
That kind of completion sucks. The NT console is painful. Plus, it lacks many of the features bash has accustomed us to, for example parameter completion, that is another productivity leap. When I used NT at work, with just a few months of bash console experience, I ended up installing cygwin, just to have a usable console, where I could launch my batch jobs, and write scriptlets.
java is not a bad language. i think many would agree that is it at least decent (i think it's pretty good, actually). but java is the language of the B coders. it is made to be easy and idiot proof, like visual basic.
I kind-of-liked your post, until I read this. VB is exacly in the other side of the field from Java when it comes to idiot-proofness.
I use Java, because I don't want to deal with pointers, or direct references to memory. I believe it's bad programming not to have an abstraction layer over that.
C++, and even perl, show the illusion of an abstraction layer, but anyway, even at the top layers of your software, you have do deal with null references and stuff. Java lets you break your problem in very small parts, give the easy ones to the code monkeys, and deal with the ones you enjoy.
I believe the problem comes because people who call themselves hackers (real hackers don't, you need to be declared a hacker by other) enjoy building their projects as a whole. I, myself, like to make a neat design, implement what I like, hand some specs, and let somebody else implement my projects. Blue-collar work I don't like. If you use perl for your project, you are likely to be spending skilled people's hour doing blue-collar work, because usually blue-collar programmers can't write good perl.
(DISCLAIMER: I participated in the making of an accounting system in perl, and _did_ suffer the last sentence, but now I enjoy working with Java )
free software means free. The only term that means exactly "free as in beer" is Freeware, that meets your description.
If you didn't understand what free software means, you should not assume any restriction, and could use reading the above link, from the Free Software Foundation.
If you looked up the term "free" in the dictionary, the meaning related to cost is the last one that is described, so I can't understand why you would assume that "free" means "no cost" or "for free" instead of "free".
English is an awkward language sometimes, and I am not a native speaker, but anyway I believe "free software" should have an obvious meaning.
On the other hand, if you were just trolling, I think the explanation is necessary anyway, because posts like that are confusing for some people.
Open Source is a marketing term used by everybody to mean whatever they need it to mean. The only thing all the definitions have in common is access to the source. Maybe I wasn't clear that that was my point.
The GPL is not so much about source as it is about freedom (for the user). GPL is about freedom, not technical advantages. The freedom to use the software, change it, share it, and share your changes.
you don't live in Uruguay. Here, 0wning the cops networks would be so easy it wouldn't even be funny. They have some intelligence assistance from the US. and they have access to everybody's private records, but ineptitude goes a long way.
I believe that was the idea with Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions/animatrix/games, but it seems like they had already thought of that before shooting the film, they even got motion capture from some of the cast! Of course, it's doable if you start the picture already thinking about a game. I believe the original idea was about recycling the LOTR movie material into a game.
For example, If I make a proprietary, undocumented interpreter, and then released some script that runs on it, like this:
start; with (inputs) do_wp_stuff; end;
It could be said that my program was and Open Source word processor.
Open source is a popular term, but it doesn't say much about the usefulness of a project. I, myself, don't care much about open source projects, but for Free software projects. A free software project is one that you are effectively free to run, copy and modify, not just one that shows the sources.
That is why I believe OSS is a term that, although very popular in slashdot, is not a very informative thing to say about software.
I believe, if you make a win32 software, one requisite for it to be free would be that it runs on wine, or any other free implementation of the libs.
I don't make movies for a living, but I believe 3d cinema has similarities to actual cinema. They don't need to build the full middle Earth to any acceptable detail, they need just some specific sets, and some landscape. The needs of the movie might not fulfill those of the game.
Anyway, the models used for renderman and such differ a great deal from the models you would need for a game. For example, in a recursive renderer, a good specfication of the material would be the only thing you need for an good render, in a game, you would need more specific procedural shaders, that don't need to be easily translated.
I mean that maybe the work of adapting the movie sets to game sets might end up to be a comparable effort to building the sets again, and even give sub-par results.
Good software is not about empowering people to be self-sufficient. Tech courses are.
If your software is for servers, you can sell pre-installed servers, and skip the cost of making an installer-for-dummies, that you will need to support, and might have its own compatibility requirements. That money can be spent on making better software, or better manager apps, if it's intended for the server market.
Small apps can be supported by selling CDs, T-Shirts, like the Mozilla Foundation, web adds, phone support.
If your software is useful enough, your community can help you with the next steps to take.
Isn't PDF some sort of bastardization of Microsoft's.DOC format? IANAPDFE (I am not a PDF expert), but I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere when trying to figure out how to read a PDF using my own code..
I understand. PDF is Adobe's substitute to their own Postscript, and Postscript itself is a postfix programming language, intended for printers.
About MSO, there's no way to be sure how MSOffice preloads, because there are no sources available. Plus, it uses the native widget set, which is preloaded. Anyhow, OO must be slower than MSO, just not 10x slower.
Nobody wants Linux on the desktop. Some people want Gnome (the GNU desktop project) or KDE on the desktop. Linux on the desktop might be a nightmare!! How would you talk to a kernel using standard input?? I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but i'd much rather use my bash, at least.
If there were OEM built computers including BSD+Gnome, those "Linux on the desktop" fans would have what they want, and not Linux. Linux is great, because it is here, and is a very important part of the system, but the power is in free software as a whole, not just the most convenient kernel at the time.
I was just pointing out that if you want a fair comparison, you need to preload OO too. Of course, I don't do that either, for I never use OO, but then again, I only use it to open crappy.DOCs with strange formatting, or.PPS, and I do all my word processing on Abiword, which is a snap. Anyway, the amount of PPS and.DOC that I get is nearing null, thanks to my uni standardizing on PDF.
Repression of citizens, granted.... I lost most of my family during the occupation
My condolences. That's one reason I strongly favor capitalism over socialism; for all of the evils attributed to capitalism, none compare to the horrific atrocities committed by socialist governments gone astray.
You are quite wrong. In South America, and Central America, right-wing military dicatorships, with central help from the CIA (they say so), and funding from the US, commited the same kind of atrocities "socialist" governments have, in the seventies and the eighties. Their commandos were trained in Panama by the US armed forces.
In Uruguay, where I live, we had one of the smaller (in number) dictatorships, and we are still living its consequences. For example, they kidnapped people and disposed of them them, sedated, in the sea, like in Argentina (google for "plan condor") , children are still missing, and the perpetrators of the crimes are unknown, twenty years later.
Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina, had worse luck.
That is just to say that there's no way you can link authoritarism, and government terror, to communism. That is an evil that can happen in all kinds of government.
Cuba, for example, has had violation of the humans rights, but then again, there is no other country where they are respected (the US you say?? they don't have such thing as freedom of press either, plus they lack government support for the basic human needs). It is a perfect example of a communist country, which, if left alone, could even be succesful, with the ethical advantage of having social justice. It is being harrassed since 40 years ago, and manages to subsist, with many problems.
That's art/printing, not physics. Color is not made of RGB, it's easily represented by RGB axes. The same idea is used in 6+ ink printers. The thing this achieves is just more color resolution, and better saturation without an obscene amount of power . Crts are capable of showing a wide range of colors, but accuracy comes at the cost of efficiency. They might have found a better tradeoff than the one that is most widely used.
Try using the OO pre-loader, it will give you a better comparison. MSOffice preloads at start. It would be fair to preload OO too. Anyway, it is probably slower. OO is a very bloated program, but it might get leaner with time.
Abiword is a good, fast word processor. Something like a full featured wordpad. Frontends to MySQL, there are many. If you like MSAccess, rekall mimics everything, even its evilness. There is a new kde project, kexi aiming for the same objective.
The tools are there, the problem is that the ones who need them, like MSOffice.
IDLITUS (I don't live in the United States) , but according to previous posts I've read, I understand you need to have your trailer equipped with a TV and an XBox in order to apply for food stamps.
My reasons for using GNU and other free software are political, not just technical.
(I don't either have the money to buy proprietary software right now, but that could be arranged, I have an employer)
I don't care as much about technical stuff as I care about politics. If I felt that the Mono project was a threat to freedom, I would be against it. That's the reasoning behind all the mono bashing. Anyway, I don't care much about Mono because I enjoy Java & GCJ, but my point is that it's useless to refute political statements with technical reasons. There is some proprietary software that is technically better (.... matlab?, Intel compilers?) but freedom is too much to pay for better performance.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true, you have the right to protest, and in the USSR you wouldn't, that is an actual difference, and one of the things why many people who called themselves communists used to migrate to the US, and not the USSR.
That is the exact point, the only actual advantage in human rights the US, and most of the "western" countries have, is freedom of speech.
Most other problems with authoritarism exist, although usually in a smaller scale, but at least you can do something about it.
The problem I see now is that especially the US people, although they can, don't care, and others are going the same way. And that freedom of speech is been slowly undermined, in the name of patriotism, with noone standing up for themselves. The ones who do, are shushed and called stupid, like Michael Moore (who might be stupid, but whatever his points of view are, they are worthy of exploring), so noone cares.
You still have a better country to live in than the USSR, but not thaaaaat much better, and the situation isn't improving, I believe.
But then, it's nice to feel like you have a voice. They held elections in the old USSR... or should that be, "In Soviet Russia, Elections hold YOU!" ?
/rant
Lack of elections are a bad example of soviet failure, athough there are many.
You should start with the US example, and Florida voters, that is much more recent, and a much more believable illusion.
Plus, in the USSR, eleccions were actually a way to decide some things, you just didn't decide which government to have. You don't either, many times, in the US, and many other countries ruled by capitalism, including mine, Uruguay.
Maybe this is too much to answer to an innocent comment, but I just wanted to point out that the exact characteristics of the USSR that are considered unacceptable, are very accepted nowadays, in systems that claim to be opposite to it. Maybe it is because it's not a matter of right-wing or left wing, of course.
That kind of completion sucks.
The NT console is painful.
Plus, it lacks many of the features bash has accustomed us to, for example parameter completion, that is another productivity leap.
When I used NT at work, with just a few months of bash console experience, I ended up installing cygwin, just to have a usable console, where I could launch my batch jobs, and write scriptlets.
java is not a bad language. i think many would agree that is it at least decent (i think it's pretty good, actually). but java is the language of the B coders. it is made to be easy and idiot proof, like visual basic.
I kind-of-liked your post, until I read this. VB is exacly in the other side of the field from Java when it comes to idiot-proofness.
I use Java, because I don't want to deal with pointers, or direct references to memory. I believe it's bad programming not to have an abstraction layer over that.
C++, and even perl, show the illusion of an abstraction layer, but anyway, even at the top layers of your software, you have do deal with null references and stuff. Java lets you break your problem in very small parts, give the easy ones to the code monkeys, and deal with the ones you enjoy.
I believe the problem comes because people who call themselves hackers (real hackers don't, you need to be declared a hacker by other) enjoy building their projects as a whole. I, myself, like to make a neat design, implement what I like, hand some specs, and let somebody else implement my projects. Blue-collar work I don't like.
If you use perl for your project, you are likely to be spending skilled people's hour doing blue-collar work, because usually blue-collar programmers can't write good perl.
(DISCLAIMER: I participated in the making of an accounting system in perl, and _did_ suffer the last sentence, but now I enjoy working with Java )
free software
means free. The only term that means exactly "free as in beer" is Freeware, that meets your description.
If you didn't understand what free software means, you should not assume any restriction, and could use reading the above link, from the Free Software Foundation.
If you looked up the term "free" in the dictionary, the meaning related to cost is the last one that is described, so I can't understand why you would assume that "free" means "no cost" or "for free" instead of "free".
English is an awkward language sometimes, and I am not a native speaker, but anyway I believe "free software" should have an obvious meaning.
On the other hand, if you were just trolling, I think the explanation is necessary anyway, because posts like that are confusing for some people.
Open Source is a marketing term used by everybody to mean whatever they need it to mean. The only thing all the definitions have in common is access to the source. Maybe I wasn't clear that that was my point.
The GPL is not so much about source as it is about freedom (for the user). GPL is about freedom, not technical advantages. The freedom to use the software, change it, share it, and share your changes.
you don't live in Uruguay. Here, 0wning the cops networks would be so easy it wouldn't even be funny.
They have some intelligence assistance from the US. and they have access to everybody's private records, but ineptitude goes a long way.
I believe that was the idea with Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions/animatrix/games, but it seems like they had already thought of that before shooting the film, they even got motion capture from some of the cast!
Of course, it's doable if you start the picture already thinking about a game. I believe the original idea was about recycling the LOTR movie material into a game.
mplayer/mencoder is no good for you??
Of course, it is open source.
For example, If I make a proprietary, undocumented interpreter, and then released some script that runs on it, like this:
start;
with (inputs) do_wp_stuff;
end;
It could be said that my program was and Open Source word processor.
Open source is a popular term, but it doesn't say much about the usefulness of a project.
I, myself, don't care much about open source projects, but for Free software projects. A free software project is one that you are effectively free to run, copy and modify, not just one that shows the sources.
That is why I believe OSS is a term that, although very popular in slashdot, is not a very informative thing to say about software.
I believe, if you make a win32 software, one requisite for it to be free would be that it runs on wine, or any other free implementation of the libs.
I don't make movies for a living, but I believe 3d cinema has similarities to actual cinema.
They don't need to build the full middle Earth to any acceptable detail, they need just some specific sets, and some landscape.
The needs of the movie might not fulfill those of the game.
Anyway, the models used for renderman and such differ a great deal from the models you would need for a game. For example, in a recursive renderer, a good specfication of the material would be the only thing you need for an good render, in a game, you would need more specific procedural shaders, that don't need to be easily translated.
I mean that maybe the work of adapting the movie sets to game sets might end up to be a comparable effort to building the sets again, and even give sub-par results.
Good software is not about empowering people to be self-sufficient.
Tech courses are.
If your software is for servers, you can sell pre-installed servers, and skip the cost of making an installer-for-dummies, that you will need to support, and might have its own compatibility requirements. That money can be spent on making better software, or better manager apps, if it's intended for the server market.
Small apps can be supported by selling CDs, T-Shirts, like the Mozilla Foundation, web adds, phone support.
If your software is useful enough, your community can help you with the next steps to take.
Isn't PDF some sort of bastardization of Microsoft's .DOC format? IANAPDFE (I am not a PDF expert), but I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere when trying to figure out how to read a PDF using my own code..
I understand. PDF is Adobe's substitute to their own Postscript, and Postscript itself is a postfix programming language, intended for printers.
About MSO, there's no way to be sure how MSOffice preloads, because there are no sources available. Plus, it uses the native widget set, which is preloaded. Anyhow, OO must be slower than MSO, just not 10x slower.
Nobody wants Linux on the desktop. Some people want Gnome (the GNU desktop project) or KDE on the desktop. Linux on the desktop might be a nightmare!! How would you talk to a kernel using standard input?? I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but i'd much rather use my bash, at least.
If there were OEM built computers including BSD+Gnome, those "Linux on the desktop" fans would have what they want, and not Linux. Linux is great, because it is here, and is a very important part of the system, but the power is in free software as a whole, not just the most convenient kernel at the time.
I was just pointing out that if you want a fair comparison, you need to preload OO too. Of course, I don't do that either, for I never use OO, but then again, I only use it to open crappy .DOCs with strange formatting, or .PPS, and I do all my word processing on Abiword, which is a snap. Anyway, the amount of PPS and .DOC that I get is nearing null, thanks to my uni standardizing on PDF.
Here, in Uruguay, you can buy ice everywhere. It's useless to have a big freezer just in case you have a party
Some info about US & Plan Condor
Repression of citizens, granted.... I lost most of my family during the occupation
My condolences. That's one reason I strongly favor capitalism over socialism; for all of the evils attributed to capitalism, none compare to the horrific atrocities committed by socialist governments gone astray.
You are quite wrong.
In South America, and Central America, right-wing military dicatorships, with central help from the CIA (they say so), and funding from the US, commited the same kind of atrocities "socialist" governments have, in the seventies and the eighties. Their commandos were trained in Panama by the US armed forces.
In Uruguay, where I live, we had one of the smaller (in number) dictatorships, and we are still living its consequences. For example, they kidnapped people and disposed of them them, sedated, in the sea, like in Argentina (google for "plan condor") , children are still missing, and the perpetrators of the crimes are unknown, twenty years later.
Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina, had worse luck.
That is just to say that there's no way you can link authoritarism, and government terror, to communism. That is an evil that can happen in all kinds of government.
Cuba, for example, has had violation of the humans rights, but then again, there is no other country where they are respected (the US you say?? they don't have such thing as freedom of press either, plus they lack government support for the basic human needs). It is a perfect example of a communist country, which, if left alone, could even be succesful, with the ethical advantage of having social justice. It is being harrassed since 40 years ago, and manages to subsist, with many problems.
DEFRAG???????
That takes FOREVER!!
Windows can't use Reiser/JFS, but it has NTFS. There's no need for defrag. Ever.
That's art/printing, not physics.
Color is not made of RGB, it's easily represented by RGB axes.
The same idea is used in 6+ ink printers. The thing this achieves is just more color resolution, and better saturation without an obscene amount of power . Crts are capable of showing a wide range of colors, but accuracy comes at the cost of efficiency. They might have found a better tradeoff than the one that is most widely used.
Try using the OO pre-loader, it will give you a better comparison.
MSOffice preloads at start. It would be fair to preload OO too. Anyway, it is probably slower. OO is a very bloated program, but it might get leaner with time.
Abiword is a good, fast word processor. Something like a full featured wordpad.
Frontends to MySQL, there are many. If you like MSAccess, rekall mimics everything, even its evilness. There is a new kde project, kexi aiming for the same objective.
The tools are there, the problem is that the ones who need them, like MSOffice.
.
IDLITUS (I don't live in the United States) , but according to previous posts I've read, I understand you need to have your trailer equipped with a TV and an XBox in order to apply for food stamps.
Or Java and GCJ, from the GNU Compiler Collection.
My reasons for using GNU and other free software are political, not just technical.
(I don't either have the money to buy proprietary software right now, but that could be arranged, I have an employer)
I don't care as much about technical stuff as I care about politics. If I felt that the Mono project was a threat to freedom, I would be against it. That's the reasoning behind all the mono bashing.
Anyway, I don't care much about Mono because I enjoy Java & GCJ, but my point is that it's useless to refute political statements with technical reasons. There is some proprietary software that is technically better (.... matlab?, Intel compilers?) but freedom is too much to pay for better performance.