Blurting out "source code is free speech" to people who have no clue what source code is is totally ineffective.
And blurting that out to people who know what free speech is is counterproductive. They'll just start looking for your missing straight jacket.
Free Speech is a right of the speaker. But the rights attached to Free Software belong to the user, not the author! Furthermore, the right of Free Speech imposes no obligations, but the "right" of Free Software places obligations on the author (who must perform certain acts to grant those "rights" to the user).
It's not Free as in Speech, it's "Free as in Property." This copy of the software is my Property and you can't tell me what to do with it. If you don't like that state of affairs, you should never have sold or given it to me.
He's probably thinking of England with its enlightened surveillance laws, or Norway which would never arrest a DeCSS programmer, or Germany where they only allow trademark holders to sue for trademark infringement, or France where you can sell Nazi memorabilia online, or...
I'd actually give Windows the edge here. In Windows, you get terms like "hard drive", whereas in Red Hat you get things like "/dev/????".
This test was between two absolute newbies. "/dev/hda" is going to be as foreign to them as "C:". People who have used DOS or Windows in the past know that C: is the first drive, not A:. But to a newbie that isn't obvious. Why shouldn't it be A:? Why isn't it "1" or "First"?
Whenever my Mom asks where a certain file is, and I tell her it's on the D drive, she responds "what a D drive?"
I expect that nine times out of ten, the newbie is going to choose the default install and let the installation program figure this all out anyway.
Why?
Well, I don't know that much about Redhat, not having used it in quite a while, but I strongly suspect that an expert Redhat admin can install from scratch in about fifteen to twenty minutes. I know I can do it in that amount of time with Slackware or FreeBSD, because I've done it countless times.
When you know what you're doing, Linux, BSD and most other Unices let you get it done without getting in your way.
In Windows, the terminology is something like "Get IP address automatically", not "Use DHCP".
Not using Redhat, I really don't know what term they use. So I checked in their online manual. Interesting! They use the term "Configure using DHCP", which isn't the most intuitive statement in the world, but right to the left of that statement is a help window that says "If you do not have DHCP client access or are unsure as to what this information is, please contact your Network Administrator."
Now that's helpful! I'm serious. They're actually telling you to ask someone for this info. This is a Good Thing(tm). Imagine some poor schmuck under Windows choosing "Get IP Address Automatically", because it's oh so intuitive, when in fact their ISP assigned them a static IP!
p.s. If the only thing keeping Linux off the newbie's desktop is the choice of terminology, that can easily be fixed!
Okay, if you didn't like that comparison, here are four others you can do instead:
1) Have two complete clueless newbies do the installs. One for Window2K and one for Redhat. They both have empty harddrives to work with. Which one will win? Frankly, I don't know. I would give it even odds.
2) Same test, but with gurus. Pit a Windows expert against a Redhat expert. Which one will win? No question about it, Redhat will win.
3 and 4) Now for the acid test of reality. Same two tests, with the same people, but this time they must install their respective systems on the second partition of the harddrive, without blowing away the preexisting OS on the first partition! I'm pretty sure who will win.
"...What's DHCP? And what the hell is this GRUB thing it's asking me about? I'm calling tech support..."
What? They don't have DHCP on Windows? I'm shocked! "Hello, Microsoft? Could you put my ISP on the line, 'cuz I have to ask him if I use DHCP or not. And while you're there, could you explain this NT Boot Manager thing to me?"
But recovery disks aren't the same thing as the shrinkwrap disks. I greatly suspect that recovery disks have a simpler install than the originals. On my friends computer, his recovery disks are nothing more than hard drive images. He can reinstall Windows and MSOffice in ten minutes.
The why is easy. People were buying stock prices. It's sounds stupid, but that's what they did. There was a Red Tag sale as Sears and millions of people bought Red Tags.
When you buy a stock, you are actually buying a piece of a company. The price of the stock is irrelevant. The value of the company is what matters. That stock will gain you nothing in the long run unless the company produces something of value to non-stockholders. But people didn't care about the companies, they cared about buying up these worthless pieces of paper.
I remember looking on in horror as millions of people oohed an aahed over the emperor's new clothes. The less a company produced the higher its stock price soared. Hell, the more money a company burned the more was thrown at it. It was too sad to be funny. I have friends who lost everything. Others out of work because the only skill they have is having read "Learn Java in 24 Hours".
This shakeup is good. At least for the next few years will have their eyes open. A good swift kick to the butt teaches you a lot about reality.
Hollywood? Who cares about hollywood? I'm still in shock over the collapse of the abacus and slide rule industries!
And my poor grandpa... He never was the same after they laid him off at the buggy whip plant.
Re:All OSS no better than all CSS
on
Mega-Geek March?
·
· Score: 1
The real solution is to completely reform California's byzantine bidding process from the ground up. As it stands now, the rules all but specify the winner in advance.
Ever bid on a government project, especially one in California? I have. It's not fun. It's highly specialized work for highly specialized firms.
Here's the problems:
A) Paperwork measured in tonnage. The time involved filling this out is often better spent selling your product to the private industry instead. The rules regarding bidding in California are byzantine.
B) Checklists. When the government wants a bid on something, they specify exactly what they want. 99 times out of 100, this specifies a particular product in everything but name.
C) The Old Boy Network. Sad but true. If you aren't part of the network, consider offering bribes. I'm not really sure if I'm joking here or not...
I'm not at all surprised that Open Source companies haven't won any government bids. I would be surprised, however, if any actually made it for enough just to submit a bid!
Point is, the Democrats are no better than the Republicans when it comes to taking away our freedom and destroying the Constitution in the name of winning the war on drugs.
I mean geez! Even the ultra right-wing Constitution party at least discusses the possibility of decriminilizing drugs!
one that began under Nixon, was escalated out of control under Reagan and Bush Senior
Don't leave the Democrats out! They got us into this mess too. Ever since the Harrison act, no Democratic president failed to increase the War on Drugs.
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that Clinton had to discipline his Surgeon General for merely proposing the study of narcotic decriminalization.
The legalized bribery won't stop until we, the citizens, stop accepting bribes. That's right. We. And we've come to expect it.
Politicians are falling all over each other in trying to bribe us to vote for them. A politician gives this group some money, and lo and behold, the next election that group overwhelmingly votes for that politician. No matter who you are, odds are you are part of some special group that gets bribed by the politicians.
I didn't say that the net was a utopia. It has its share of problems. But you need to distinguish between ordinary criminals and organized statist forces. No society under any system will ever get rid of crime. It's just not an option. But it might, just might, be possible to have a society without a government.
Crackers and script kiddies are criminals. What about the "multitude of agencies" casting about for ways to control us online? They're still criminals. They might be legitimate governments on the outside, but in cyberspace they're still interloping crooks. They're like the mafia trying to set up a protection racket in your neighborhood.
We certainly do need to keep our guard up to prevent the mafia/state from getting a foothold here. I am not arguing complacency. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Even here.
It grants you power in the ability to support more people viewing your stuff at once. The ability to advertise on other sites, so that more people know about your site. All else being equal, the ability to add things to your site that someone with less money could not.
That is true, and I won't deny it. But to be blunt, so what? I would much rather have the current internet than some regulated network where everyone was guaranteed equal resources according to some Bergeronesque scheme. The point of my post was that the mostly anarcho/libertarian society(1) that is the internet today WORKS, and it works WELL. We don't need disgruntled statists sticking their fingers in the works. Egalite is nice, but it must always take a back seat to liberte.
People are much more likely to visit a site that is easy to navigate, visually pleasing, and easy to use, than they are to visit a site that is ugly or difficult to use.
Money is only a small part of a good website. Even small businesses can (and do) have attractive, usable and robust websites without having to break the bank. If you go look at the top ten websites rated by visual appeal, usability, and ease of use, you will find that those lists are not dominated by the richest companies. Far from it.
more money = more power
That means more power to you, not more power over me. At least in cyberspace it doesn't.
(1) When I say "anarcho/libertarian society", I don't mean that its members are anarchist or libertarian. The vast majority of them are not. But the society is anarchist because it is not organized through the application of force.
But it doesn't matter how much money people have in cyberspace! Your faster server doesn't give you any power over me with my slow server. And your professionally designed website is irrelevant. Nobody in the real world cares that Microsoft has better facades on their buildings than Redhat does. So why should this make any difference in cyberspace?
All of money behind microsoft.com couldn't stop gnu.org. All of the money behind sun.com couldn't stop kde.org. That's because there are no police here to bribe or senators to buy. Money might make you more comfortable in cyberspace, give you a nice website, and stuff like that, but it doesn't grant you any power.
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Blurting out "source code is free speech" to people who have no clue what source code is is totally ineffective.
And blurting that out to people who know what free speech is is counterproductive. They'll just start looking for your missing straight jacket.
Free Speech is a right of the speaker. But the rights attached to Free Software belong to the user, not the author! Furthermore, the right of Free Speech imposes no obligations, but the "right" of Free Software places obligations on the author (who must perform certain acts to grant those "rights" to the user).
It's not Free as in Speech, it's "Free as in Property." This copy of the software is my Property and you can't tell me what to do with it. If you don't like that state of affairs, you should never have sold or given it to me.
He's probably thinking of England with its enlightened surveillance laws, or Norway which would never arrest a DeCSS programmer, or Germany where they only allow trademark holders to sue for trademark infringement, or France where you can sell Nazi memorabilia online, or...
I'd actually give Windows the edge here. In Windows, you get terms like "hard drive", whereas in Red Hat you get things like "/dev/????".
This test was between two absolute newbies. "/dev/hda" is going to be as foreign to them as "C:". People who have used DOS or Windows in the past know that C: is the first drive, not A:. But to a newbie that isn't obvious. Why shouldn't it be A:? Why isn't it "1" or "First"?
Whenever my Mom asks where a certain file is, and I tell her it's on the D drive, she responds "what a D drive?"
I expect that nine times out of ten, the newbie is going to choose the default install and let the installation program figure this all out anyway.
Why?
Well, I don't know that much about Redhat, not having used it in quite a while, but I strongly suspect that an expert Redhat admin can install from scratch in about fifteen to twenty minutes. I know I can do it in that amount of time with Slackware or FreeBSD, because I've done it countless times.
When you know what you're doing, Linux, BSD and most other Unices let you get it done without getting in your way.
In Windows, the terminology is something like "Get IP address automatically", not "Use DHCP".
Not using Redhat, I really don't know what term they use. So I checked in their online manual. Interesting! They use the term "Configure using DHCP", which isn't the most intuitive statement in the world, but right to the left of that statement is a help window that says "If you do not have DHCP client access or are unsure as to what this information is, please contact your Network Administrator."
Now that's helpful! I'm serious. They're actually telling you to ask someone for this info. This is a Good Thing(tm). Imagine some poor schmuck under Windows choosing "Get IP Address Automatically", because it's oh so intuitive, when in fact their ISP assigned them a static IP!
p.s. If the only thing keeping Linux off the newbie's desktop is the choice of terminology, that can easily be fixed!
My WinME CD didn't have my video or sound drivers (G450+ and ES1371). I would have made that CD a coaster, but the hologram was too pretty...
it's the assumption that 90+% of people who are installing Windows want Windows to boot when they turn on their computer.
No, the assumption is that there will be only one OS per computer. Win2K hates an existing Win98 just as much as it hates an existing Redhat Linux.
Okay, if you didn't like that comparison, here are four others you can do instead:
1) Have two complete clueless newbies do the installs. One for Window2K and one for Redhat. They both have empty harddrives to work with. Which one will win? Frankly, I don't know. I would give it even odds.
2) Same test, but with gurus. Pit a Windows expert against a Redhat expert. Which one will win? No question about it, Redhat will win.
3 and 4) Now for the acid test of reality. Same two tests, with the same people, but this time they must install their respective systems on the second partition of the harddrive, without blowing away the preexisting OS on the first partition! I'm pretty sure who will win.
"...What's DHCP? And what the hell is this GRUB thing it's asking me about? I'm calling tech support..."
What? They don't have DHCP on Windows? I'm shocked! "Hello, Microsoft? Could you put my ISP on the line, 'cuz I have to ask him if I use DHCP or not. And while you're there, could you explain this NT Boot Manager thing to me?"
But recovery disks aren't the same thing as the shrinkwrap disks. I greatly suspect that recovery disks have a simpler install than the originals. On my friends computer, his recovery disks are nothing more than hard drive images. He can reinstall Windows and MSOffice in ten minutes.
I've got two floppies for FreeBSD...
Oh, that's right.... that means almost no Free Software is ever fixed"
Are you volunteering to start the KDE SQA Project?
Im a finance major by the way.
Why am I not surprised?
The why is easy. People were buying stock prices. It's sounds stupid, but that's what they did. There was a Red Tag sale as Sears and millions of people bought Red Tags.
When you buy a stock, you are actually buying a piece of a company. The price of the stock is irrelevant. The value of the company is what matters. That stock will gain you nothing in the long run unless the company produces something of value to non-stockholders. But people didn't care about the companies, they cared about buying up these worthless pieces of paper.
I remember looking on in horror as millions of people oohed an aahed over the emperor's new clothes. The less a company produced the higher its stock price soared. Hell, the more money a company burned the more was thrown at it. It was too sad to be funny. I have friends who lost everything. Others out of work because the only skill they have is having read "Learn Java in 24 Hours".
This shakeup is good. At least for the next few years will have their eyes open. A good swift kick to the butt teaches you a lot about reality.
Hollywood? Who cares about hollywood? I'm still in shock over the collapse of the abacus and slide rule industries!
And my poor grandpa... He never was the same after they laid him off at the buggy whip plant.
The real solution is to completely reform California's byzantine bidding process from the ground up. As it stands now, the rules all but specify the winner in advance.
Ever bid on a government project, especially one in California? I have. It's not fun. It's highly specialized work for highly specialized firms.
Here's the problems:
A) Paperwork measured in tonnage. The time involved filling this out is often better spent selling your product to the private industry instead. The rules regarding bidding in California are byzantine.
B) Checklists. When the government wants a bid on something, they specify exactly what they want. 99 times out of 100, this specifies a particular product in everything but name.
C) The Old Boy Network. Sad but true. If you aren't part of the network, consider offering bribes. I'm not really sure if I'm joking here or not...
I'm not at all surprised that Open Source companies haven't won any government bids. I would be surprised, however, if any actually made it for enough just to submit a bid!
He didn't have to, he chose to.
Point is, the Democrats are no better than the Republicans when it comes to taking away our freedom and destroying the Constitution in the name of winning the war on drugs.
I mean geez! Even the ultra right-wing Constitution party at least discusses the possibility of decriminilizing drugs!
Shut up dammit! This is Slashdot. Don't confuse us with the truth.
Consider the fact that the majority of lawyers in Washington DC work for Microsoft
Fact? Do you have any references for this fact?
"Majority" means over 50%. What verifiable documentation do you have that over 50% of the lawyers in Washington DC work for Microsoft?
when is congress going to be held accountable and quit being the whores for Big Business
As long as we give congress so much power over our lives that they have to sell the excess, the whoring won't stop.
one that began under Nixon, was escalated out of control under Reagan and Bush Senior
Don't leave the Democrats out! They got us into this mess too. Ever since the Harrison act, no Democratic president failed to increase the War on Drugs.
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that Clinton had to discipline his Surgeon General for merely proposing the study of narcotic decriminalization.
The legalized bribery won't stop until we, the citizens, stop accepting bribes. That's right. We. And we've come to expect it.
Politicians are falling all over each other in trying to bribe us to vote for them. A politician gives this group some money, and lo and behold, the next election that group overwhelmingly votes for that politician. No matter who you are, odds are you are part of some special group that gets bribed by the politicians.
Your vote was bought and sold years ago.
I didn't say that the net was a utopia. It has its share of problems. But you need to distinguish between ordinary criminals and organized statist forces. No society under any system will ever get rid of crime. It's just not an option. But it might, just might, be possible to have a society without a government.
Crackers and script kiddies are criminals. What about the "multitude of agencies" casting about for ways to control us online? They're still criminals. They might be legitimate governments on the outside, but in cyberspace they're still interloping crooks. They're like the mafia trying to set up a protection racket in your neighborhood.
We certainly do need to keep our guard up to prevent the mafia/state from getting a foothold here. I am not arguing complacency. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Even here.
Money was so scarce that George Washington
had to pose separately for each dollar bill
That was nothing! The reason he wore wooden teeth was because his real ones got knocked out when they stamped his head to make all the quarters!
It grants you power in the ability to support more people viewing your stuff at once. The ability to advertise on other sites, so that more people know about your site. All else being equal, the ability to add things to your site that someone with less money could not.
That is true, and I won't deny it. But to be blunt, so what? I would much rather have the current internet than some regulated network where everyone was guaranteed equal resources according to some Bergeronesque scheme. The point of my post was that the mostly anarcho/libertarian society(1) that is the internet today WORKS, and it works WELL. We don't need disgruntled statists sticking their fingers in the works. Egalite is nice, but it must always take a back seat to liberte.
People are much more likely to visit a site that is easy to navigate, visually pleasing, and easy to use, than they are to visit a site that is ugly or difficult to use.
Money is only a small part of a good website. Even small businesses can (and do) have attractive, usable and robust websites without having to break the bank. If you go look at the top ten websites rated by visual appeal, usability, and ease of use, you will find that those lists are not dominated by the richest companies. Far from it.
more money = more power
That means more power to you, not more power over me. At least in cyberspace it doesn't.
(1) When I say "anarcho/libertarian society", I don't mean that its members are anarchist or libertarian. The vast majority of them are not. But the society is anarchist because it is not organized through the application of force.
But it doesn't matter how much money people have in cyberspace! Your faster server doesn't give you any power over me with my slow server. And your professionally designed website is irrelevant. Nobody in the real world cares that Microsoft has better facades on their buildings than Redhat does. So why should this make any difference in cyberspace?
All of money behind microsoft.com couldn't stop gnu.org. All of the money behind sun.com couldn't stop kde.org. That's because there are no police here to bribe or senators to buy. Money might make you more comfortable in cyberspace, give you a nice website, and stuff like that, but it doesn't grant you any power.