> Here is a typical conversation between a web site developer and a customer...
This rings soooo true.
I develop on linux so I'm damned well going to support netscape, and supporting ie goes without saying.. as for the rest.. well.. netscape's available for most platforms, my time is limited and my boss wants unportable features on the client side. I try to argue for the lowest common denominator, but I don't always win. Sorry, opera and lynx, I'd love to do things right but I gotta eat.
I hope gecko gets into every nook and cranny eventually, and explorer dies an embarrassing death. How cool would it be to defeat a browser bug by going through it's source?:)
The license flamewars have fizzled out, but new battle lines have already been drawn.
C versus C++ isn't much of a war, people. C is a clean procedural language, C++ is a dirty OO language.
The only thing going for C++, when you think about it, is easy compatibility with C. That's all that stopped it losing to a cleaner OO language like Eiffel.
If KDE was QPL then Debian would already have included it. Their beef was that the two licenses were incompatible, thus they could not legally distribute KDE. I believe the QPL version of Qt is already in Debian non-free.
Whatever the PR, Troll did this because the Gnome Foundation scared them. One advantage of GPL over QPL is it's hydra-headedness.. you could kill Qt before by putting Troll out of business.. but now Qt is immortal.
/etc/apt/sources.list will be losing a line anytime now.. coolies.
Hmmm... how about NAT for the for the LAN, PPP server for when I'm out and about, and apache+sybase running cos that's what I have to use for work... the gnome and kde games which I can't keep the kids away from..
Linux isn't great, but it's free, and extremely flexible, and since I have years of experience under my belt, it runs at least as smoothly as anything else I've ever seen. This is partly due to me being able to fix things instantly that would floor a newbie... but that's no different to any other system.
Not a typical home user? Bite me.
Here's an interesting tidbit that will eventually lead linux and it's cousins to dominate the desktop: ever since microsoft scrapped solitaire and minesweeper from their dist, my largish family stopped fighting over rights to the windows machine and started fighting over access to same-gnome and kmahjongg. Had to make the windows machine dual-boot:)..
That's two deployments of linux on the desktop that IDC will never know about. Come to think of it, an overwhelming majority of desktop installations of linux are done off shared cds or net installs...
Let all users rate sites. Let the set of all users be U. Now when a user A, who has already rated a bunch of sites R, goes to a new site W:
take the subset S of U containing users who have rated a subset of R with the same ratings as A, and have also rated W.
now, average S's rating of W, and bingo! - censorship that A most probably finds accurate:)
now, ignoring the ludicrous amount of processing power required to efficiently do this for millions of sites plus hundreds of millions of users, I think I'm onto a winner. anyone wanna pay me to implement it?
hmm I'll be the biggest dotcom of them all.. I'm gonna be rich.. I hope these fascist fuckwits don't suddenly all decide to stop "protecting" the world at large from every little thing that doesn't fit into their narrow world view.
There is both burger king and hungry jacks in australia. Not sure why, but heard a rumor along these lines: hungry jacks was a chain of burger king franchises out here, then burger king decided to move in for real and turn everything into burger king, but the people running hungry jacks managed to hold on to the name somehow.. lawyers or something. anyway just a rumor.
It seems since day one, the power elites in the US have fought to overturn free speech and the lefties have fought to defend it. How they got it into the constituion is anybody's guess.
IMNSHO, "Free Speech" means the freedom to transmit information.
Whether this is done by strumming my vocal cords, arranging ink in novel patterns, or juggling electrical potentials is not an issue, or should not be an issue. All these methods are Turing-equivalent. Which one to use is a question of convenience and efficiency, not right and wrong.
In the US the constitution enshrines free speech and the legal system attacks it. Patent law, copyright law, the recent plague of UCITA's and DMCA's, are all invoked by power elites to crush individual freedoms.
When are people going to wake up and realise that it's intrinsically wrong to prevent a person from expressing ideas and information? By expressing, I mean duplicating, implementing, distributing, communicating, etc etc.
Arguments against Freedom of information tend to boil down to "but it could be used to break the law" and "it could cut into x's monopoly on distribution of that information". Fine. So punish people who actually do bad things, and fuck monopoly. Monopoly is wrong. Wrong WRonG wROnG WRONG wrong WrOnG wrong! Any justification of monpoly can be shot down with ease.
To the clowns who respond with "you want to rob all those hardworking programmers and artists of their hard-earned cash you stinking pirate", I say this:
0. copying isn't theft. nobody loses when I copy. Hmmm.. that's not quite right - what I mean is, nobody loses anything but monopoly power when I copy.
1. the natural treatment of information and ideas is to copy freely, sorta like public domain code... forcing people to pay is extortion.
2. I want to protect myself from monopolies trying to steal *my* hard-earned cash.
3. People who generate good code and ideas deserve to be rewarded, however they should not recieve their reward at the expense of others (ie, me).
So yes, I am looking for a free ride. I demand to right to free use of any information and ideas I may encounter.
Preventing the flow of information is like chopping off somebody's hands, cos, like, you know, they might try to strangle someone or something.
Hmm.. I see this message will never be read, too far down the list... hopefully the title will catch sombody's eye, even if I've strayed away from it a little.
Slashdot Mirror
> Here is a typical conversation between a web site developer and a customer...
:)
This rings soooo true.
I develop on linux so I'm damned well going to support netscape, and supporting ie goes without saying.. as for the rest.. well.. netscape's available for most platforms, my time is limited and my boss wants unportable features on the client side. I try to argue for the lowest common denominator, but I don't always win. Sorry, opera and lynx, I'd love to do things right but I gotta eat.
I hope gecko gets into every nook and cranny eventually, and explorer dies an embarrassing death. How cool would it be to defeat a browser bug by going through it's source?
The license flamewars have fizzled out, but new battle lines have already been drawn.
C versus C++ isn't much of a war, people. C is a clean procedural language, C++ is a dirty OO language.
The only thing going for C++, when you think about it, is easy compatibility with C. That's all that stopped it losing to a cleaner OO language like Eiffel.
If KDE was QPL then Debian would already have included it. Their beef was that the two licenses were incompatible, thus they could not legally distribute KDE. I believe the QPL version of Qt is already in Debian non-free.
Whatever the PR, Troll did this because the Gnome Foundation scared them. One advantage of GPL over QPL is it's hydra-headedness.. you could kill Qt before by putting Troll out of business.. but now Qt is immortal.
/etc/apt/sources.list will be losing a line anytime now.. coolies.
Dunno about California, but in Australia petrol taxes are supposed to pay for maintenence of roads.
So is the state of California going to provide internet connections for the people it taxes, or is this just an extortion racket?
Optus@home just dropped alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* from their news servers. Three cheers for government meddling in the net.
> When did MS scrap Minesweeper and Solitare? They seem to be part of Win2k, along with pinball and Freecell.
Hmmm.. I don't have win2k. I have 98 which I installed by clicking ok at every step, so I suppose the default install doesn't include the games.
Troll: windows installation is still easier than linux installation, provided nothing goes wrong and you don't mind ten reboots.
Hmmm... how about NAT for the for the LAN, PPP server for when I'm out and about, and apache+sybase running cos that's what I have to use for work... the gnome and kde games which I can't keep the kids away from..
:)..
Linux isn't great, but it's free, and extremely flexible, and since I have years of experience under my belt, it runs at least as smoothly as anything else I've ever seen. This is partly due to me being able to fix things instantly that would floor a newbie... but that's no different to any other system.
Not a typical home user? Bite me.
Here's an interesting tidbit that will eventually lead linux and it's cousins to dominate the desktop: ever since microsoft scrapped solitaire and minesweeper from their dist, my largish family stopped fighting over rights to the windows machine and started fighting over access to same-gnome and kmahjongg. Had to make the windows machine dual-boot
That's two deployments of linux on the desktop that IDC will never know about. Come to think of it, an overwhelming majority of desktop installations of linux are done off shared cds or net installs...
Bill will rue the day he took solitaire away.
Let all users rate sites. Let the set of all users be U. Now when a user A, who has already rated a bunch of sites R, goes to a new site W: take the subset S of U containing users who have rated a subset of R with the same ratings as A, and have also rated W. now, average S's rating of W, and bingo! - censorship that A most probably finds accurate :)
now, ignoring the ludicrous amount of processing power required to efficiently do this for millions of sites plus hundreds of millions of users, I think I'm onto a winner. anyone wanna pay me to implement it?
hmm I'll be the biggest dotcom of them all.. I'm gonna be rich.. I hope these fascist fuckwits don't suddenly all decide to stop "protecting" the world at large from every little thing that doesn't fit into their narrow world view.
There is both burger king and hungry jacks in australia. Not sure why, but heard a rumor along these lines: hungry jacks was a chain of burger king franchises out here, then burger king decided to move in for real and turn everything into burger king, but the people running hungry jacks managed to hold on to the name somehow.. lawyers or something. anyway just a rumor.
they both serve the same stuff.
I think I will start calmly and end up ranting.
It seems since day one, the power elites in the US have fought to overturn free speech and the lefties have fought to defend it. How they got it into the constituion is anybody's guess.
IMNSHO, "Free Speech" means the freedom to transmit information.
Whether this is done by strumming my vocal cords, arranging ink in novel patterns, or juggling electrical potentials is not an issue, or should not be an issue. All these methods are Turing-equivalent. Which one to use is a question of convenience and efficiency, not right and wrong.
In the US the constitution enshrines free speech and the legal system attacks it. Patent law, copyright law, the recent plague of UCITA's and DMCA's, are all invoked by power elites to crush individual freedoms.
When are people going to wake up and realise that it's intrinsically wrong to prevent a person from expressing ideas and information? By expressing, I mean duplicating, implementing, distributing, communicating, etc etc.
Arguments against Freedom of information tend to boil down to "but it could be used to break the law" and "it could cut into x's monopoly on distribution of that information". Fine. So punish people who actually do bad things, and fuck monopoly. Monopoly is wrong. Wrong WRonG wROnG WRONG wrong WrOnG wrong! Any justification of monpoly can be shot down with ease.
To the clowns who respond with "you want to rob all those hardworking programmers and artists of their hard-earned cash you stinking pirate", I say this:
0. copying isn't theft. nobody loses when I copy. Hmmm.. that's not quite right - what I mean is, nobody loses anything but monopoly power when I copy.
1. the natural treatment of information and ideas is to copy freely, sorta like public domain code... forcing people to pay is extortion.
2. I want to protect myself from monopolies trying to steal *my* hard-earned cash.
3. People who generate good code and ideas deserve to be rewarded, however they should not recieve their reward at the expense of others (ie, me).
So yes, I am looking for a free ride. I demand to right to free use of any information and ideas I may encounter.
Preventing the flow of information is like chopping off somebody's hands, cos, like, you know, they might try to strangle someone or something.
Hmm.. I see this message will never be read, too far down the list... hopefully the title will catch sombody's eye, even if I've strayed away from it a little.