They have a couple of token configurations available without Windows. For 99% of their PCs, you get Windows whether you like it or not, you are buying a Windows PC.
Yes, the issue of companies using trademarks to lock up GPL software is one I think ought to be addressed in GPL v3. I wrote to RMS about it, and also posted my thoughts. I think it's a genuine risk.
RMS himself doesn't have a problem with what Mozilla are doing, but I think that loophole is going to get widened if Mozilla get away with it.
One of the problems is that there appears to be tremendous under-utilization of assistance services, for reasons I don't understand at present. Perhaps people are ashamed of it or something.
Absolutely they are. Part of the big American myth system everyone's indoctrinated into is that poor people are poor because they deserve it, and that anyone can be successful and get ahead if they try. Accepting food from a charity is seen as personal failure.
Another problem, shown on the PBS documentary People Like Us about the US class system, is that the food given to charities is often not the food poor people want. They had an example of a food co-op that tried to give away bread that was hitting its freshness date--but the poor people wouldn't take it, because it was wholegrain focaccia and the like rather than the bleached white loaf they were used to.
This lead on to a whole added level of unwillingness to take charity, because many of them felt they were being patronized by the latte-sipping Prius-driving Birkenstock-wearing college-educated yuppies that they've been trained to hate.
The top 5 vendors, who all bundle Windows as a mandatory feature of their machines, are 50% of the market. The market share of PC vendors who don't bundle Windows is such a tiny fraction it's irrelevant.
So, the poor and hungry are all driving around in Mercedes and deserve to be hungry because they're stupid. Any other Compassionate Conservative talking points you'd like to treat us to?
That "poverty level" is by U.S. standards, which means USD 4700 per person per year. That seems pretty low, but consider that most of the world is at approximately USD 700 per person per year.
Without factoring in how the cost of living varies between countries, a comparison of dollar figures is meaningless.
Fact is, 16% of families with children in the USA don't manage to feed themselves adequately. Tens of millions of people seek emergency food assistance from charities every year. 46% of African-American children are chronically hungry.
Also, starvation is virtually impossible in the U.S., even for homeless people. In fact, the very poor are one of the most likely groups in the U.S. to be grossly overweight.
Yes, malnourishment can kill via obesity and diabetes as well as via starvation. That doesn't mean it's not a problem, though, does it?
Infant mortality rates for the US are worse than those of practically every industrialized nation. Cuba has better infant mortality rates than the USA. And remember that if you're black in the USA, the rate is 3x higher...
On what factual basis do you think Bush has done a good job?
Number of US civilians killed by terrorists has increased. Unemployment has increased. Value of the dollar has crashed. Economy has gone into massive deficit, national debt has increased. War veterans' benefits have been slashed.
No, he didn't. Saddam went out of his way to frustrate their efforts. How many times were the denied access to sites? How many times were they kicked out?
Saddam denied access to weapons inspectors who he claimed were CIA spies rather than legimitate UN weapons inspectors.
And you know what? He was right. They were CIA spies. Of course, the US media weren't keen to remind people of that minor detail.
The alternative in the last election represents a far-left anti-war contingency.
No, the sad thing is that you believe that. Kerry voted for the Iraq war, go look it up. His position was that he would have gone to war too, he just would have done it better.
There was no anti-war candidate in the last election who had a hope in hell of winning. That's why Kerry lost--he didn't appeal to the left because he kept speaking in favor of the war on terror, and he didn't appeal to the right because he was smeared by Fox News et al as some kind of anti-war nut.
With XP, almost all of the crashes are due to bad (usually non-MS) device drivers. If you run a system with pure MS drivers and quality hardware you'll never see a BSOD.
I just had XP not merely BSOD, but destroy itself so it wouldn't boot any more, after I installed a set of Microsoft security updates.
It was using no 3rd party drivers, and it wasn't a hardware problem because I was running it under VMware and other Windows images continued to run just fine.
MySpace: Crappy bands and empty-headed teenage girls.
LiveJournal: Trolls, drama queens and emo girls who are into cutting.
Orkut: Brazilians and nobody else.
Yahoo / Yahoo 360: Bored teenagers and creepy swingers.
Friendster: Old people who are so behind the curve they think Windows is a pretty neat OS. The kind of people who call their web browser "the Internet" and use MSN Messenger.
I'll doubtless get mocked, but Animal Crossing: Wild World is a great way to relax for 20-30 minutes a day. The fact that it's a real time game means that you can check in for a few minutes and be in a familiar, friendly place, yet also know that things have probably changed and there will be new things to look at and explore. Add the whole online thing, and you have a very good casual game.
Assuming the Wii really does run Linux, they will doubtless be using the TiVo hole to get around the GPL v2.
That is, they'll provide the source code with their proprietary modifications for the Wii hardware, but it'll be totally useless as the Wii hardware will be designed so that it will only run code signed by Nintendo. So the modified code will be useless to Wii owners, and also useless to everyone else as PC hardware won't have any use for the Wii hardware support.
And Linus will no doubt say that this is just peachy.
I think it's exactly the kind of crap the GPL was supposed to stop. If I purchase hardware and software that's GPL licensed, I should be able to modify the software and run the modified version on the only hardware it's useful for, the hardware I own. That's why I support RMS's efforts with GPL v3 and think they're a good thing. In fact, I think they should go further.
When you buy a Tivo, you buy a TIVO, not a PC or experiment/development computer.
When you buy a PC, you buy a PC running Windows. Presumably you'd have no objection if all the PC manufacturers were required by Microsoft to implement code signing support so that unsigned Linux wouldn't run?
There was a movement to get AmigaOS open sourced in the late nineties. It was widely criticised by many, including those within the Amiga community, who decided that it was in some way wrong to allow Amiga technologies to become free enough that they might help bolster rival operating systems.
Yet ironically, the Amiga OS was based on the open source Tripos OS and BCPL compiler...
I think it's more of a reason to avoid Qt if you might ever want to write proprietary software, actually. If you love open source there's no problem.
I think TrollTech are being particularly stupid here. They're basically saying that if you have existing open source code that you own that uses Qt, and you want to become a TrollTech customer, they'll tell you to fuck off. Somehow that doesn't strike me as good business practice.
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They have a couple of token configurations available without Windows. For 99% of their PCs, you get Windows whether you like it or not, you are buying a Windows PC.
Yes, the issue of companies using trademarks to lock up GPL software is one I think ought to be addressed in GPL v3. I wrote to RMS about it, and also posted my thoughts. I think it's a genuine risk.
RMS himself doesn't have a problem with what Mozilla are doing, but I think that loophole is going to get widened if Mozilla get away with it.
Awesome, show me where on the Dell web site I can buy a laptop without Windows.
On the off chance that you're serious, here's a quick refutation of your first statement:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meta404/252520628/
Slashdot didn't even enter my mind when I thought "social network".
Absolutely they are. Part of the big American myth system everyone's indoctrinated into is that poor people are poor because they deserve it, and that anyone can be successful and get ahead if they try. Accepting food from a charity is seen as personal failure.
Another problem, shown on the PBS documentary People Like Us about the US class system, is that the food given to charities is often not the food poor people want. They had an example of a food co-op that tried to give away bread that was hitting its freshness date--but the poor people wouldn't take it, because it was wholegrain focaccia and the like rather than the bleached white loaf they were used to.
This lead on to a whole added level of unwillingness to take charity, because many of them felt they were being patronized by the latte-sipping Prius-driving Birkenstock-wearing college-educated yuppies that they've been trained to hate.
The top 5 vendors, who all bundle Windows as a mandatory feature of their machines, are 50% of the market. The market share of PC vendors who don't bundle Windows is such a tiny fraction it's irrelevant.
I'm English, I only know one person who uses MSN, and she's American. I stand by my characterization...
So, the poor and hungry are all driving around in Mercedes and deserve to be hungry because they're stupid. Any other Compassionate Conservative talking points you'd like to treat us to?
So basically, XP is perfectly reliable in some theoretical sense, but not if you actually use it?
Bread for the World: 20% of children in New York City rely on food handouts to survive.
USDA: 11% of US households are food-insecure, meaning they do not have adequate food throughout a typical year.
This is actually a particularly timely topic, what with World Food Day USA coming soon.
Without factoring in how the cost of living varies between countries, a comparison of dollar figures is meaningless.
Fact is, 16% of families with children in the USA don't manage to feed themselves adequately. Tens of millions of people seek emergency food assistance from charities every year. 46% of African-American children are chronically hungry.
Yes, malnourishment can kill via obesity and diabetes as well as via starvation. That doesn't mean it's not a problem, though, does it?
Infant mortality rates for the US are worse than those of practically every industrialized nation. Cuba has better infant mortality rates than the USA. And remember that if you're black in the USA, the rate is 3x higher...
On what factual basis do you think Bush has done a good job?
Number of US civilians killed by terrorists has increased. Unemployment has increased. Value of the dollar has crashed. Economy has gone into massive deficit, national debt has increased. War veterans' benefits have been slashed.
Oh, wait. Tax cuts, right?
Saddam denied access to weapons inspectors who he claimed were CIA spies rather than legimitate UN weapons inspectors.
And you know what? He was right. They were CIA spies. Of course, the US media weren't keen to remind people of that minor detail.
No, the sad thing is that you believe that. Kerry voted for the Iraq war, go look it up. His position was that he would have gone to war too, he just would have done it better.
There was no anti-war candidate in the last election who had a hope in hell of winning. That's why Kerry lost--he didn't appeal to the left because he kept speaking in favor of the war on terror, and he didn't appeal to the right because he was smeared by Fox News et al as some kind of anti-war nut.
I just had XP not merely BSOD, but destroy itself so it wouldn't boot any more, after I installed a set of Microsoft security updates.
It was using no 3rd party drivers, and it wasn't a hardware problem because I was running it under VMware and other Windows images continued to run just fine.
MySpace: Crappy bands and empty-headed teenage girls.
LiveJournal: Trolls, drama queens and emo girls who are into cutting.
Orkut: Brazilians and nobody else.
Yahoo / Yahoo 360: Bored teenagers and creepy swingers.
Friendster: Old people who are so behind the curve they think Windows is a pretty neat OS. The kind of people who call their web browser "the Internet" and use MSN Messenger.
You misparsed my sentence. It was "hardware and (software licensed under the GPL)".
And I didn't agree to any license when I purchased my hardware.
That's why Linus is wrong and RMS is right.
I'll doubtless get mocked, but Animal Crossing: Wild World is a great way to relax for 20-30 minutes a day. The fact that it's a real time game means that you can check in for a few minutes and be in a familiar, friendly place, yet also know that things have probably changed and there will be new things to look at and explore. Add the whole online thing, and you have a very good casual game.
Assuming the Wii really does run Linux, they will doubtless be using the TiVo hole to get around the GPL v2.
That is, they'll provide the source code with their proprietary modifications for the Wii hardware, but it'll be totally useless as the Wii hardware will be designed so that it will only run code signed by Nintendo. So the modified code will be useless to Wii owners, and also useless to everyone else as PC hardware won't have any use for the Wii hardware support.
And Linus will no doubt say that this is just peachy.
I think it's exactly the kind of crap the GPL was supposed to stop. If I purchase hardware and software that's GPL licensed, I should be able to modify the software and run the modified version on the only hardware it's useful for, the hardware I own. That's why I support RMS's efforts with GPL v3 and think they're a good thing. In fact, I think they should go further.
When you buy a PC, you buy a PC running Windows. Presumably you'd have no objection if all the PC manufacturers were required by Microsoft to implement code signing support so that unsigned Linux wouldn't run?
Yet ironically, the Amiga OS was based on the open source Tripos OS and BCPL compiler...
Yes, let's verb random nouns and utterance them.
I think it's more of a reason to avoid Qt if you might ever want to write proprietary software, actually. If you love open source there's no problem.
I think TrollTech are being particularly stupid here. They're basically saying that if you have existing open source code that you own that uses Qt, and you want to become a TrollTech customer, they'll tell you to fuck off. Somehow that doesn't strike me as good business practice.
No, not true. You can use the free GPL-licensed version of Qt all you want.