My current sig sums it up. It's a quote from Book in Firefly, but that makes it no less true: "A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned."
1. Partitioning. Why in the fucking hell do you have to partition TWICE? Why do you need a standard partition that can be seen by other OSes and then those weird ass partitions within that partition that only BSD can see? How is that useful?
How useful is the partitioning scheme of Linux and Windows? First you have primary partitions, then extended partitions, and then logical partitions. Huh?
Here's the scoop, numbnut: way back in the beginning of harddisks on the PC, the idea was that every OS got its own primary partition. Then the OS could slice up its own partition however it wanted to. Microsoft decided to use extended/logical partitions, while 386BSD decided to use the traditional BSD slices. Then Linux came along and said "let's do it the Microsoft way!" The truth is that neither method is better or worse than the other. In the absence of any standard, each OS is free to subdivide their primary partition however they want.
Scott's FreeBSD code is *in* Darwin. This isn't deception, it's pride that he helped write a code base with such high quality that Apple decided to use it.
You don't always have to brag about your kids, sometimes you can brag about your nephews and nieces.
So apparently, a copy of Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition costs $30.
Actually, that could be right. There is a cost to Dell for shipping Windows. But when 99.997% of Dell systems have Windows, then there is ALSO a cost to Dell for shipping system without it. The difference between the two plus Dell's markup for online orders happens to be $30.
You still have it wrong. What the GPL protects is the developer's fragile sense of hypermorality. That's because there's nothing else out there for the GPL to protect.
The GPL does not protect the software. Software/information can be infinitely copied at no cost without harm to the original. Since software cannot be damaged, then obviously it's not the software that the GPL is protecting.
The GPL does not protect the users' rights. The user can get full and irrevocable permission to use, copy, distribute and modify the software with something as simple as the BSD or MIT licenses. The GPL does not protect the users' rights because no one can take those rights away.
And the GPL does not protect other users freedoms.There's no need to protect those freedoms because they are not in danger. Those other users are fully capable of choosing free software. They have the free choice to choose your original software.
What the GPL protects is the developer's legal right to take freedom away from you. It prevents you from making choices the developer does not want you to make. Your wrong choices aren't going to harm the software, the developer, or other users. But you aren't being given the right to make those wrong choices.
It's one thing for the developer to restrict and regulate his own property. He has the right to control how you use his property, but he has NO right to control how you use your own property. When he gives you a copy of his software, that specific copy is now yours. He should not be able to tell you what you can or cannot do with it. The law may give the developer the legal right to do so (via copyright), but God and nature has not given him the moral right to do so.
If you only meant to rent or loan out the software, then be explicit about it and don't claim it's free. But don't "give" it away and then continue to assert privileges over it.
Which is just one tiny component in the grand scheme of things. And it wouldn't hurt to take a look at KDE's kio system. Before you set out to invent the wheel, first check to see if anyone has already invented one.
The real problem here is the lack of a cross-platform office suite. But it's not such a problem if you use open standards and implement network transparency.
"If you think about it, it would mean having access to your office documents from any browser"
Hell, I don't need a new fangled web-based office suite to do that. All I need is a remote filesytem. Even FTP meets the requirements. Why is everyone so insistant on solving problems that have already been solved decades ago?
Sheesh, just use KDE/KOffice and you get all the network transparency you need. Wouldn't it be easier for Google to implement network transparency for Windows than to write a whole new office suite (with the obligatory nastiness of a web interface)?
That's because PDF is a WYSIWYP (the "P" standing for "print"). Yes, it's a pain, but PDF is hardly alone in this regard. Most word processing formats have the same drawback. I don't know if these fixed-width formats are because of the "Age of Paper" as you say, or whether it's because so many people can't stand the user/reader being in control of the formatting. IMHO, HTML and other markup languages are better (as well as simpler) for information content than rigid page formats.
Oh well, I guess everyone's out watching Serenity...
Speaking of Serenity, did anyone see the credits? There were animal handlers, animal trainers, and a disclosure that no animals were harmed. What animals?!?! Other than brief glimpse of an iguana, I don't recall any animals. Was there a horse in the background of Haven that I missed? Or were they referring Adam Baldwin?
I'm just saying he's not happy with the unequal wealth distribution in the galaxy...
Every crook since the dawn of time felt that way. Duh. Burglary is all about liberating money from those who have it, otherwise it wouldn't be burglary. Don't make Mal out to be some sort of Dennis Moore.
We do see members of the Alliance being good guys. In the pilot the heroes send a fake distress signal to lure the "bad guys" away on a "good deed" rescue mission. Could you imagine a Lucas Star Destroyer do that, because I can't. There are several other instances where the Alliance are the good guys, but just happen to be in the way of the heros.
In fact, I only remember one truly bad guy in the Alliance (not counting the Blue Sun dudes), and that was the guy that captured Simon, River and Jayne in "Ariel". Elsewhere they were just bureaucratic cogs in a machine.
I keep hearing this theme, that Firefly/Serenity is libertarian or conservative. I've seen most of the right leaning blogs gushing about that universe's conservatism, and I still don't buy it. But I do make out two elements of Firefly that make people think this.
The first is the "frontier". It's pretty damned hard to tell a story about the frontier without it being quasi-libertarian. The frontier character is libertarian in nature because your nearest government is days or weeks away. You can't sit around waiting for the police station or welfare office to meet your needs, so you meet them yourself on your own initiative. Either that or you die whining.
Sidenote: ever notice that libertarian flavored stories are all rural while big brother dystopias are all urban? There's a reason for that.
The second reason though, that people think Whedon wrote a conservative universe, is that it doesn't follow the Hollywood/television stereotypes. When you strip away the science fiction, the Firefly universe is realistic. It has real people with real problems and real emotions. Thus you will see in it what you want to see in it. Liberals will recognize a liberal universe because it resembles the real universe liberals live in. Ditto [sic] for conservatives. Or socialists, progressives, etc.
Firefly/Serenity is so alien to the crap the "Hollywood Left" has been putting out that it's only natural to assume it's the opposite and thus conservative. Do a side by side comparison of Serenity with Episode III and there's no mistaking it, the Firefly universe leans *away* from what Hollywood normally serves up for our consumption. Just one example: there's a Christian preacher in the series, but he isn't treated like moral hypocrite. He isn't perfect, but neither is he the cookie-cutter cariactures that Hollywood insists on pulling out everytime there's a black frock in the script.
And Mal has a pretty serious beef with the social imbalance in his universe, too. If he could redistribute wealth, he wouldn't hesitate. The reason he doesn't trust the government to do that is they're run by the rich people.
Then please explain why Mal is so busy trying to get rich. Every episode (well nearly every), he's out trying to make a fast big buck for himself. He goes and knocks over a hospital on Ariel and makes off with loads of high priced medicine desperately needed on the frontier worlds. Does he do the Robin Hood and freely distribute them socialist like? Fsck no! He sells them on the black market for a profit!
You seen 'Heart of Gold'? (It didn't air.) Did you catch what Mal thought about that guy who kept the rest of society poor so he could run around playing cowboy?
Oh, you mean the government on that planet? Take a look at the "Trash" episode. Lots of rich people in it, including the very rich Lassiter owner, but you didn't see Mal out to kill them. Why? Because they weren't the government! Or what about the episode "Shindig" where he actually set up a business relationship with a rich s.o.b. The point is, Mal may have considered the rich to be soft fancy pants, but he didn't have a quarrel with them for being rich. His quarrel was only with the government and people who don't keep their end of a bargain.
I don't necessarily agree that Firefly/Serenity is libertarian, it's merely a "frontier" universe instead, but that doesn't mean it's the opposite and Mal is an wealth hating collectivist instead.
No good. First, without a massive bureacratic spec, every toolkit is going to interpret your XML differently. Do you know how many years it took just to get webpages looking somewhat similar when viewed on two different browsers? And that's with a spec!
Second, your XML is going to presuppose a widget and drawing model. For just one example: are widgets going to be created through inheritance or composition?
Third, what do you do when SVG goes out of style? Really! Currently it's popular because it has a different look from other styles, and so seems "fresh". But it won't last forever.
Finally, what's the fricking problem with having different toolkits? If this really is a problem for people, and we really do need a totalitarian dictatator, wouldn't it be easier just to mandate a single toolkit than to mandate a single standard?
Why don't you compare Windows XP and KDE 1.1 on same hardware, and see which is faster?
I've done this, about a month ago in fact. A machine in our lab has been dual-booting Win98 and Linux for years and it finally got updated to WinXP. I took at look at it and noticed that it had KDE 1.1. Playing around with it, it didn't seem subjectively slower or faster than my current KDE, but then again, this was a 266Mhz machine. Then I tried booting over into the WinXP that just got installed...
Gaaargh! It was like trying to dog paddle in cold molasses! If KDE 1.1 kicked Windows' butt on this "old" system, I wonder what it would be like on a 4GHz system with 1Gb RAM, 150MHz SATA and AGP video?
I did a comparison once a couple of years ago. On a dual-boot system at work I timed booting from poweroff to a finished Slashdot render in a browser. FreeBSD+KDE+Konqueror was ten to fifteen seconds quicker than WindowsXP+IExplorer.
It shouldn't be necessary for GTK to piggyback over QT or vice versa - just define a nice spec which allows both widget sets to call a well defined API.
You are expecting the impossible. First of all you need to get the Qt and GTK+ developers to agree to a common API. That ain't going to happen. One library is standard C++ and the other is C with non-standard OO constructs. In order to get a common API both sides would have to revert to an archaic motif/win32-like API.
Second, even if you do manage this, you still need to convince KDE and GNOME (and lots of other people) *NOT* to fork off the old versions. Some people like the Qt API and some like the GTK+ API, and nothing you can do short of holding a gun to their heads will make them behave according to your dictates.
Third, that still won't result in an absolutely uniform look and feel. Windows has its Win32 API yet even Microsoft itself can't manage to get uniformity in its own set of applications. Or what about Apple, who can't decide if they want an aluminum or jelly look?
Finally, this is a non-issue. Real people in the real world don't care about this. People aren't crapping their pants about Quicktime not looking like MediaPlayer, so what makes you think they're crapping their pants over K3B not looking like Evolution?
Of course, for all I know such a plugin architecture already exists...
It DOES exist. And it's used. Everything in Konqueror is a plugin, so it is used a lot. When you install Cervisia, for example, it automatically integrates with Konqueror. I don't know what the grandparent's problem is, because I'm always hassling with turning that *OFF* because I don't want it.
Every system deals with memory differently. For example, FreeBSD will not allocate swap unless it actually needs to, Linux will allocate swap because it might need to swap in the future, and Windows will allocate swap because it will swap whether it needs to or not.
I've got one Gig of RAM on my system. FreeBSD+KDE has never once touched swap in over two years (the last time it did was because of a memory leak). Yet on the same system running Windows I can hear the drive seek to swap everytime I switch between windows on two running applications. It's almost like Windows uses swap for paging.
Slashdot Mirror
My current sig sums it up. It's a quote from Book in Firefly, but that makes it no less true: "A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned."
1. Partitioning. Why in the fucking hell do you have to partition TWICE? Why do you need a standard partition that can be seen by other OSes and then those weird ass partitions within that partition that only BSD can see? How is that useful?
How useful is the partitioning scheme of Linux and Windows? First you have primary partitions, then extended partitions, and then logical partitions. Huh?
Here's the scoop, numbnut: way back in the beginning of harddisks on the PC, the idea was that every OS got its own primary partition. Then the OS could slice up its own partition however it wanted to. Microsoft decided to use extended/logical partitions, while 386BSD decided to use the traditional BSD slices. Then Linux came along and said "let's do it the Microsoft way!" The truth is that neither method is better or worse than the other. In the absence of any standard, each OS is free to subdivide their primary partition however they want.
FreeBSD has only fallen by the wayside if you listen to the trolls.
Scott's FreeBSD code is *in* Darwin. This isn't deception, it's pride that he helped write a code base with such high quality that Apple decided to use it.
You don't always have to brag about your kids, sometimes you can brag about your nephews and nieces.
So apparently, a copy of Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition costs $30.
Actually, that could be right. There is a cost to Dell for shipping Windows. But when 99.997% of Dell systems have Windows, then there is ALSO a cost to Dell for shipping system without it. The difference between the two plus Dell's markup for online orders happens to be $30.
Slashdot in a nutshell: Microsoft is Evil. Bush is Evil. If Slashot can find a way to link the two together they will.
You still have it wrong. What the GPL protects is the developer's fragile sense of hypermorality. That's because there's nothing else out there for the GPL to protect.
The GPL does not protect the software. Software/information can be infinitely copied at no cost without harm to the original. Since software cannot be damaged, then obviously it's not the software that the GPL is protecting.
The GPL does not protect the users' rights. The user can get full and irrevocable permission to use, copy, distribute and modify the software with something as simple as the BSD or MIT licenses. The GPL does not protect the users' rights because no one can take those rights away.
And the GPL does not protect other users freedoms.There's no need to protect those freedoms because they are not in danger. Those other users are fully capable of choosing free software. They have the free choice to choose your original software.
What the GPL protects is the developer's legal right to take freedom away from you. It prevents you from making choices the developer does not want you to make. Your wrong choices aren't going to harm the software, the developer, or other users. But you aren't being given the right to make those wrong choices.
It's one thing for the developer to restrict and regulate his own property. He has the right to control how you use his property, but he has NO right to control how you use your own property. When he gives you a copy of his software, that specific copy is now yours. He should not be able to tell you what you can or cannot do with it. The law may give the developer the legal right to do so (via copyright), but God and nature has not given him the moral right to do so.
If you only meant to rent or loan out the software, then be explicit about it and don't claim it's free. But don't "give" it away and then continue to assert privileges over it.
The main difference would be one of File I/O.
Which is just one tiny component in the grand scheme of things. And it wouldn't hurt to take a look at KDE's kio system. Before you set out to invent the wheel, first check to see if anyone has already invented one.
The real problem here is the lack of a cross-platform office suite. But it's not such a problem if you use open standards and implement network transparency.
"If you think about it, it would mean having access to your office documents from any browser"
Hell, I don't need a new fangled web-based office suite to do that. All I need is a remote filesytem. Even FTP meets the requirements. Why is everyone so insistant on solving problems that have already been solved decades ago?
Sheesh, just use KDE/KOffice and you get all the network transparency you need. Wouldn't it be easier for Google to implement network transparency for Windows than to write a whole new office suite (with the obligatory nastiness of a web interface)?
That's because PDF is a WYSIWYP (the "P" standing for "print"). Yes, it's a pain, but PDF is hardly alone in this regard. Most word processing formats have the same drawback. I don't know if these fixed-width formats are because of the "Age of Paper" as you say, or whether it's because so many people can't stand the user/reader being in control of the formatting. IMHO, HTML and other markup languages are better (as well as simpler) for information content than rigid page formats.
But the iguana didn't DO anything! So what did they need an "Animal Trainer" for? Oh well...
Oh well, I guess everyone's out watching Serenity...
Speaking of Serenity, did anyone see the credits? There were animal handlers, animal trainers, and a disclosure that no animals were harmed. What animals?!?! Other than brief glimpse of an iguana, I don't recall any animals. Was there a horse in the background of Haven that I missed? Or were they referring Adam Baldwin?
Dude! Use some lotion!
Yoda was a Christian preacher? That's a pretty odd interpretation of Star Wars you've got there...
I'm just saying he's not happy with the unequal wealth distribution in the galaxy...
Every crook since the dawn of time felt that way. Duh. Burglary is all about liberating money from those who have it, otherwise it wouldn't be burglary. Don't make Mal out to be some sort of Dennis Moore.
We do see members of the Alliance being good guys. In the pilot the heroes send a fake distress signal to lure the "bad guys" away on a "good deed" rescue mission. Could you imagine a Lucas Star Destroyer do that, because I can't. There are several other instances where the Alliance are the good guys, but just happen to be in the way of the heros.
In fact, I only remember one truly bad guy in the Alliance (not counting the Blue Sun dudes), and that was the guy that captured Simon, River and Jayne in "Ariel". Elsewhere they were just bureaucratic cogs in a machine.
I keep hearing this theme, that Firefly/Serenity is libertarian or conservative. I've seen most of the right leaning blogs gushing about that universe's conservatism, and I still don't buy it. But I do make out two elements of Firefly that make people think this.
The first is the "frontier". It's pretty damned hard to tell a story about the frontier without it being quasi-libertarian. The frontier character is libertarian in nature because your nearest government is days or weeks away. You can't sit around waiting for the police station or welfare office to meet your needs, so you meet them yourself on your own initiative. Either that or you die whining.
Sidenote: ever notice that libertarian flavored stories are all rural while big brother dystopias are all urban? There's a reason for that.
The second reason though, that people think Whedon wrote a conservative universe, is that it doesn't follow the Hollywood/television stereotypes. When you strip away the science fiction, the Firefly universe is realistic. It has real people with real problems and real emotions. Thus you will see in it what you want to see in it. Liberals will recognize a liberal universe because it resembles the real universe liberals live in. Ditto [sic] for conservatives. Or socialists, progressives, etc.
Firefly/Serenity is so alien to the crap the "Hollywood Left" has been putting out that it's only natural to assume it's the opposite and thus conservative. Do a side by side comparison of Serenity with Episode III and there's no mistaking it, the Firefly universe leans *away* from what Hollywood normally serves up for our consumption. Just one example: there's a Christian preacher in the series, but he isn't treated like moral hypocrite. He isn't perfect, but neither is he the cookie-cutter cariactures that Hollywood insists on pulling out everytime there's a black frock in the script.
Or liberals who don't know what "liberal" means. Come to think of it, everyone's pretty shaky on every label. Oh well.
And Mal has a pretty serious beef with the social imbalance in his universe, too. If he could redistribute wealth, he wouldn't hesitate. The reason he doesn't trust the government to do that is they're run by the rich people.
Then please explain why Mal is so busy trying to get rich. Every episode (well nearly every), he's out trying to make a fast big buck for himself. He goes and knocks over a hospital on Ariel and makes off with loads of high priced medicine desperately needed on the frontier worlds. Does he do the Robin Hood and freely distribute them socialist like? Fsck no! He sells them on the black market for a profit!
You seen 'Heart of Gold'? (It didn't air.) Did you catch what Mal thought about that guy who kept the rest of society poor so he could run around playing cowboy?
Oh, you mean the government on that planet? Take a look at the "Trash" episode. Lots of rich people in it, including the very rich Lassiter owner, but you didn't see Mal out to kill them. Why? Because they weren't the government! Or what about the episode "Shindig" where he actually set up a business relationship with a rich s.o.b. The point is, Mal may have considered the rich to be soft fancy pants, but he didn't have a quarrel with them for being rich. His quarrel was only with the government and people who don't keep their end of a bargain.
I don't necessarily agree that Firefly/Serenity is libertarian, it's merely a "frontier" universe instead, but that doesn't mean it's the opposite and Mal is an wealth hating collectivist instead.
No good. First, without a massive bureacratic spec, every toolkit is going to interpret your XML differently. Do you know how many years it took just to get webpages looking somewhat similar when viewed on two different browsers? And that's with a spec!
Second, your XML is going to presuppose a widget and drawing model. For just one example: are widgets going to be created through inheritance or composition?
Third, what do you do when SVG goes out of style? Really! Currently it's popular because it has a different look from other styles, and so seems "fresh". But it won't last forever.
Finally, what's the fricking problem with having different toolkits? If this really is a problem for people, and we really do need a totalitarian dictatator, wouldn't it be easier just to mandate a single toolkit than to mandate a single standard?
Why don't you compare Windows XP and KDE 1.1 on same hardware, and see which is faster?
I've done this, about a month ago in fact. A machine in our lab has been dual-booting Win98 and Linux for years and it finally got updated to WinXP. I took at look at it and noticed that it had KDE 1.1. Playing around with it, it didn't seem subjectively slower or faster than my current KDE, but then again, this was a 266Mhz machine. Then I tried booting over into the WinXP that just got installed...
Gaaargh! It was like trying to dog paddle in cold molasses! If KDE 1.1 kicked Windows' butt on this "old" system, I wonder what it would be like on a 4GHz system with 1Gb RAM, 150MHz SATA and AGP video?
I did a comparison once a couple of years ago. On a dual-boot system at work I timed booting from poweroff to a finished Slashdot render in a browser. FreeBSD+KDE+Konqueror was ten to fifteen seconds quicker than WindowsXP+IExplorer.
It shouldn't be necessary for GTK to piggyback over QT or vice versa - just define a nice spec which allows both widget sets to call a well defined API.
You are expecting the impossible. First of all you need to get the Qt and GTK+ developers to agree to a common API. That ain't going to happen. One library is standard C++ and the other is C with non-standard OO constructs. In order to get a common API both sides would have to revert to an archaic motif/win32-like API.
Second, even if you do manage this, you still need to convince KDE and GNOME (and lots of other people) *NOT* to fork off the old versions. Some people like the Qt API and some like the GTK+ API, and nothing you can do short of holding a gun to their heads will make them behave according to your dictates.
Third, that still won't result in an absolutely uniform look and feel. Windows has its Win32 API yet even Microsoft itself can't manage to get uniformity in its own set of applications. Or what about Apple, who can't decide if they want an aluminum or jelly look?
Finally, this is a non-issue. Real people in the real world don't care about this. People aren't crapping their pants about Quicktime not looking like MediaPlayer, so what makes you think they're crapping their pants over K3B not looking like Evolution?
Of course, for all I know such a plugin architecture already exists...
It DOES exist. And it's used. Everything in Konqueror is a plugin, so it is used a lot. When you install Cervisia, for example, it automatically integrates with Konqueror. I don't know what the grandparent's problem is, because I'm always hassling with turning that *OFF* because I don't want it.
Every system deals with memory differently. For example, FreeBSD will not allocate swap unless it actually needs to, Linux will allocate swap because it might need to swap in the future, and Windows will allocate swap because it will swap whether it needs to or not.
I've got one Gig of RAM on my system. FreeBSD+KDE has never once touched swap in over two years (the last time it did was because of a memory leak). Yet on the same system running Windows I can hear the drive seek to swap everytime I switch between windows on two running applications. It's almost like Windows uses swap for paging.