That was my thought exactly. I wonder if the execs at Apple that are responsible for this have any idea how much their success has to do with the goodwill they get from the very people they're attacking. It will be easier than they think to become the Bad Guys in the marketplace, and there are a lot of other companies making portable MP3 players out there.
What makes them think that we will be happy with either option?
They probably don't care. They'll just do what everybody else does when their customers won't voluntarily support their business model: Pay Congress to force it on us.
Firstly that is a very arrogant approach, some of the best developers in the world work on open source stuff, saying it is to hard is just stupid.
It's hard in the sense that the specifications of the underlying hardware are not available, and have to be inferred from its observed behavior to "reverse engineer" the driver.
I am not going to restrict my system capablities just because the FSF doesn't approve.
That's not the point here. FSF doesn't care whose drivers you use, or whether everything on your system is open source. What is important is the ability to package and deliver an OS that works out of the box, without proprietary encumbrances and without requiring users (especially the less technically adept ones) to fish around for drivers before they can boot their systems.
Sorry you had such a bad experience. You might have done better just settling on a single distribution and getting more familiar with it. As a novice, Gentoo was probably the worst you could have picked, since you have to build it from source. Aside from that, the distributions are pretty much the same with respect to the kernel and application software; the major differences arise in installation, package management, and administration tools. That's probably enough to cause some grief if you're constantly switching between them.
Your comments may be sincere, but people are going to suspect trolling when an anonymous poster describes an experience with Linux that is so different from their own. I've used it (Fedora, lately) with very little trouble for a long time, and finally stopped dual-booting several years ago (and without regrets). What problems there have been - with hardware drivers, mostly - were typically resolved by simple Google searches in less time than you'd spend on hold calling tech support for a proprietary platform. So there's no way I'm going back, regardless of how many apocryphal tales of woe I read here and elsewhere. It's like listening to someone insist that learning to ride a bicycle is simply impossible, when I'm out with mine nearly every day.
Huge amounts of money are at stake in markets under threat from Linux and FOSS, and so it would be surprising if there weren't organized efforts afoot to astroturf the "only uber-geeks can learn Linux" meme. Slowing the rate of adoption even a little through FUD can translate into hundreds of millions - maybe billions - of dollars per year, I'm sure. We all recognize this fact of life, and perhaps it makes us a little too quick to cry "troll".
You used "a mixture" of Gentoo and a couple of other distributions? Why on earth would anyone do that? Looks like you went looking for a nightmare, just so you could tell us about it.
This has been a major peeve of mine for a long time. There seems to be an assumption on the part of educational program designers that the proper way to make science palatable to kids is to dress it up as a cartoon and have streams of half-truths spew from the mouths of furry animated characters. That may be entertainment, but it's unlikely to spark the kind of inquisitiveness that will lead to an active interest in science or mathematics. So much so that, like you, I wonder whether the people that create (or approve) these materials have ever had such an interest themselves.
A good way to determine how best to ignite an interest in science would be to ask actual scientists what it was that initially got them interested in figuring out the Why and How of things. I'll bet that most of them could give a pretty detailed accounting of that, and I'll bet you further that few, if any, of them were smitten while watching watered-down educational cartoons.
In our increasingly theocratically-leaning society (writing from the US), it would also help a great deal if more of the public had a basic understanding of what science actually is. Unfortunately, to far too many it's just a collection of arbitrary doctrines and proclamations issued by a lofty elite of men with beards. As such it's in competition with other such collections (e.g., from priests and ministers), and the choice boils down to little more than faith and personal credibility. If science has any edge at all in this game, it's simply that its magic works better.
And while I am quite the geek, my GF is not, nor are most of her friends.
Do you really have a girlfriend, or are you just saying that so we won't all think, "I'll bet he doesn't have a girlfriend"? I'm talking about real girlfriends here, not the "friends" on MySpace that merely claim to be your friend (or female).
[Sorry, that was rude. I don't know what got into me...]
I'm not too paranoid, and I don't think the gov't can process this stuff fast enough for it to matter,
They don't have to process it "fast enough for it to matter". It just has to be on file, for whenever it happens that someone with the authority to look at it has a reason to do so. That reason could be legitimate, or maybe not so much. It could even be quite personal, and totally unrelated to the avowed purposes for which the information was gathered in the first place.
And it seems like we agree on what the "separation of church and state" is used for. I don't agree that it's OK to make religious people second-class citizens.
Glad we can agree on something. But how exactly are your religious freedoms being infringed? How are religious people being relegated to "second-class citizen" status? I can see how a Muslim can legitimately make that complaint in our society, but it amazes me when it comes from Christians. Doesn't it all boil down to your frustration over having to respect and tolerate those same rights and liberties as exercised by others who don't share your particular faith? Be honest.
Perhaps you should read it more carefully. The founders recognized the threat that theocracy poses to democracy, being well aware of recent European history. You assume that the concern was limited to a "Church of England" situation, where the State essentially creates an official church. But what of the more likely scenario - one which is relevant in our day - where a particular religion co-opts the power of the State to enforce its own doctrines and marginalize heretics and non-believers? Would it not have been clear to them that this would necessarily interfere with the right of "free exercise" on the part of people of other faiths, or no faith at all? To ignore the underlying logic is to see with one eye closed (and squinting through the other).
Of the militant "Christians" who argue their right to make Government their handmaiden, I can only ask: Would you similarly defend the right of another faith to impose themselves on you in this manner? Or is the Golden Rule, like the Geneva Convention and international prohibitions against the use of torture, hopelessly antiquated and obsolete in this modern post-9/11 world?
That's just a contemporary legal tactic used to victimize and disenfranchise religious people (especially Christians) using the judicial system.
LOL. Perhaps in the faith-based world, where "victimize and disenfranchise" translates to something like "prevent us from using government power to force our religious views on everyone else" in real world language...
Are you in fact a commercial company that has been giving away your products for free for several decades?
No, but I've written a lot of closed code that is no longer useful to anybody because the companies that owned it folded. The point is that we don't have to rely on any one company - or any commercial company at all, for that matter - to keep the FOSS coming and improving. It's nice that some companies can build a business model around it, but I'm certainly not depending on that.
No commercial company can sustain that amount of development and give the product away. Period. Time will prove this correct.
I just love it when the MS astroturfers around here (ACs all) tell me that the world I live, breathe, and work in every day is simply not possible. It was impossible 11 or 12 years ago, when I first started using Slackware Linux, it was impossible 3 years ago, when I finally wiped the Windows partition off of my last dual-boot machine, and it's impossible now that I'm running FC4 exclusively. Yes sir, the end is near, armageddon for FOSS is just around the corner. Better pony up for summa them MS licenses and knuckle under to those EULAs again while there's still time! Oh, the humanity!
The progress made in the FOSS world (and Linux in particular) since I first encountered it is nothing short of stunning, and I have no doubt that you would have insisted back then on the "impossibility" of what we all can take for granted today. And don't underestimate how much nastier Microsoft and other proprietary vendors would be to deal with if it weren't for the threat of FOSS.
As is often the case, I read versions of reality here that repeatedly bear no resemblance to my actual experience. I've only very rarely had any problems at all with FC or any of the other Linux distros I've used, and what problems have come up I could resolve quickly myself with nothing more than a Google search. I'm sure there are bugs I have yet to encounter, but I'm confident that I'll be able to deal with those the same way. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong?
The Republicans are consistently very friendly to monopoly, and the reason has nothing to do with ideology (and everything to do with money, power, and patronage). In a competitive industry free from government support or intervention, campaign contributions are not going to be a big priority for companies because there is little they need from politicians. When government adopts policies promoting monopolization, it concentrates vast amounts of wealth in the hands of a few players who know fully well where the Gravy Train is coming from and will not fail to do what it takes to keep it chugging along. The Republicans thoroughly understand the power of gratitude and greed among the hand-picked winners.
If you can't sense the definite overall liberal bent to NPR perhaps you have been sheltering yourself from more conservative viewpoints.
Be that as it may - and I have read the National Review and watched conservative cable news shows from time to time, when I have the stomach for it - it would still be an interesting exercise to codify NPR's specific transgressions over the span of a few hours, as I said in the parent post. It could reveal a lot (although we might disagree exactly what) about how self-professed "liberals" and "conservatives" define themselves and each other. I have my own views on that and I'm sure you do as well, but it would make a much longer thread than I care to get into tonight...
Though I have found that when NPR covers a President Bush speech, I hear a little "backhanded" commentary on what he said.
And what would be the proper, unbiased way to comment on a Bush speech? If there are demonstrable contradictions, fallacies, stupidities, or deceptions in the speech itself, are you doing the public any service by ignoring them? In the perfect unbiased world, are our leaders free from the possibility of being challenged, or from having to make any sense at all?
I would argue that if NPR can deliver no more than vague, "backhanded" commentary after a Bush speech (out of fear of criticism by conservatives), then they are effectively closer to a conservative than a liberal bias.
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You sound like an enemy combatant in the War on Reason. See you it Gitmo!
That was my thought exactly. I wonder if the execs at Apple that are responsible for this have any idea how much their success has to do with the goodwill they get from the very people they're attacking. It will be easier than they think to become the Bad Guys in the marketplace, and there are a lot of other companies making portable MP3 players out there.
They probably don't care. They'll just do what everybody else does when their customers won't voluntarily support their business model: Pay Congress to force it on us.
Oh my goodness... Can Polo be far behind?
That's still better than vanishing in a cloud of someone else's vomit (to paraphrase a line from Spinal Tap)...
It's hard in the sense that the specifications of the underlying hardware are not available, and have to be inferred from its observed behavior to "reverse engineer" the driver.
I am not going to restrict my system capablities just because the FSF doesn't approve.
That's not the point here. FSF doesn't care whose drivers you use, or whether everything on your system is open source. What is important is the ability to package and deliver an OS that works out of the box, without proprietary encumbrances and without requiring users (especially the less technically adept ones) to fish around for drivers before they can boot their systems.
Your comments may be sincere, but people are going to suspect trolling when an anonymous poster describes an experience with Linux that is so different from their own. I've used it (Fedora, lately) with very little trouble for a long time, and finally stopped dual-booting several years ago (and without regrets). What problems there have been - with hardware drivers, mostly - were typically resolved by simple Google searches in less time than you'd spend on hold calling tech support for a proprietary platform. So there's no way I'm going back, regardless of how many apocryphal tales of woe I read here and elsewhere. It's like listening to someone insist that learning to ride a bicycle is simply impossible, when I'm out with mine nearly every day.
Huge amounts of money are at stake in markets under threat from Linux and FOSS, and so it would be surprising if there weren't organized efforts afoot to astroturf the "only uber-geeks can learn Linux" meme. Slowing the rate of adoption even a little through FUD can translate into hundreds of millions - maybe billions - of dollars per year, I'm sure. We all recognize this fact of life, and perhaps it makes us a little too quick to cry "troll".
You used "a mixture" of Gentoo and a couple of other distributions? Why on earth would anyone do that? Looks like you went looking for a nightmare, just so you could tell us about it.
That was after 3 pints of fine porter and IPA. It seemed clever at the time.
Real GF's are a PITA, but worth it.
Mine lives 500 miles away. That has its plusses and minusses, but on Friday night it was probably on the debit side of the ledger...
Heh heh... Where are those mod points when you need 'em?
Best to stay away from biology and geology as well, these days...
A good way to determine how best to ignite an interest in science would be to ask actual scientists what it was that initially got them interested in figuring out the Why and How of things. I'll bet that most of them could give a pretty detailed accounting of that, and I'll bet you further that few, if any, of them were smitten while watching watered-down educational cartoons.
In our increasingly theocratically-leaning society (writing from the US), it would also help a great deal if more of the public had a basic understanding of what science actually is. Unfortunately, to far too many it's just a collection of arbitrary doctrines and proclamations issued by a lofty elite of men with beards. As such it's in competition with other such collections (e.g., from priests and ministers), and the choice boils down to little more than faith and personal credibility. If science has any edge at all in this game, it's simply that its magic works better.
Do you really have a girlfriend, or are you just saying that so we won't all think, "I'll bet he doesn't have a girlfriend"? I'm talking about real girlfriends here, not the "friends" on MySpace that merely claim to be your friend (or female).
[Sorry, that was rude. I don't know what got into me...]
They don't have to process it "fast enough for it to matter". It just has to be on file, for whenever it happens that someone with the authority to look at it has a reason to do so. That reason could be legitimate, or maybe not so much. It could even be quite personal, and totally unrelated to the avowed purposes for which the information was gathered in the first place.
Glad we can agree on something. But how exactly are your religious freedoms being infringed? How are religious people being relegated to "second-class citizen" status? I can see how a Muslim can legitimately make that complaint in our society, but it amazes me when it comes from Christians. Doesn't it all boil down to your frustration over having to respect and tolerate those same rights and liberties as exercised by others who don't share your particular faith? Be honest.
Of the militant "Christians" who argue their right to make Government their handmaiden, I can only ask: Would you similarly defend the right of another faith to impose themselves on you in this manner? Or is the Golden Rule, like the Geneva Convention and international prohibitions against the use of torture, hopelessly antiquated and obsolete in this modern post-9/11 world?
LOL. Perhaps in the faith-based world, where "victimize and disenfranchise" translates to something like "prevent us from using government power to force our religious views on everyone else" in real world language...
That doesn't sound a bit like "separation" to you?
Quote of the day, that.
Well if that isn't the quote of the day here, I don't know what is.
No, but I've written a lot of closed code that is no longer useful to anybody because the companies that owned it folded. The point is that we don't have to rely on any one company - or any commercial company at all, for that matter - to keep the FOSS coming and improving. It's nice that some companies can build a business model around it, but I'm certainly not depending on that.
I just love it when the MS astroturfers around here (ACs all) tell me that the world I live, breathe, and work in every day is simply not possible. It was impossible 11 or 12 years ago, when I first started using Slackware Linux, it was impossible 3 years ago, when I finally wiped the Windows partition off of my last dual-boot machine, and it's impossible now that I'm running FC4 exclusively. Yes sir, the end is near, armageddon for FOSS is just around the corner. Better pony up for summa them MS licenses and knuckle under to those EULAs again while there's still time! Oh, the humanity!
The progress made in the FOSS world (and Linux in particular) since I first encountered it is nothing short of stunning, and I have no doubt that you would have insisted back then on the "impossibility" of what we all can take for granted today. And don't underestimate how much nastier Microsoft and other proprietary vendors would be to deal with if it weren't for the threat of FOSS.
As is often the case, I read versions of reality here that repeatedly bear no resemblance to my actual experience. I've only very rarely had any problems at all with FC or any of the other Linux distros I've used, and what problems have come up I could resolve quickly myself with nothing more than a Google search. I'm sure there are bugs I have yet to encounter, but I'm confident that I'll be able to deal with those the same way.
Perhaps I'm doing something wrong?
The Republicans are consistently very friendly to monopoly, and the reason has nothing to do with ideology (and everything to do with money, power, and patronage). In a competitive industry free from government support or intervention, campaign contributions are not going to be a big priority for companies because there is little they need from politicians. When government adopts policies promoting monopolization, it concentrates vast amounts of wealth in the hands of a few players who know fully well where the Gravy Train is coming from and will not fail to do what it takes to keep it chugging along. The Republicans thoroughly understand the power of gratitude and greed among the hand-picked winners.
Be that as it may - and I have read the National Review and watched conservative cable news shows from time to time, when I have the stomach for it - it would still be an interesting exercise to codify NPR's specific transgressions over the span of a few hours, as I said in the parent post. It could reveal a lot (although we might disagree exactly what) about how self-professed "liberals" and "conservatives" define themselves and each other. I have my own views on that and I'm sure you do as well, but it would make a much longer thread than I care to get into tonight...
And what would be the proper, unbiased way to comment on a Bush speech? If there are demonstrable contradictions, fallacies, stupidities, or deceptions in the speech itself, are you doing the public any service by ignoring them? In the perfect unbiased world, are our leaders free from the possibility of being challenged, or from having to make any sense at all?
I would argue that if NPR can deliver no more than vague, "backhanded" commentary after a Bush speech (out of fear of criticism by conservatives), then they are effectively closer to a conservative than a liberal bias.