There's a chicken pox vaccine... kids don't have to get chicken pox anymore. Hundreds of kids die of encephalitis due to chiken pox every year. There's also the school time lost, the scrring, and the eventual possibility of shingles.
Nonetheless, parents still "vaccinate" their kids by exposing them to other kids who have chicken pox at a convenient time, like summer vacation. Insanity.
I guess this is one of those "spay or neuter your pet" announcements. Get the issue out there.
I just talked to someone two minutes ago who says that the vaccine you're talking about doesn't actually keep you from getting the virus but rather just lessens the symptoms. If this is true, the vaccine wouldn't protect you from the possibility of Shingles as an adult. I would be interested to hear from anyone who knows more about the specifics of whether the vaccine does or doesn't actually keep you from acquiring the virus or keeping it in your system.
Very interesting thread. I can safely say until this point I had no idea what the root cause of Shingles was. (See grandparent post.)
Comparing Microsoft the monopolist to any run-of-the-mill car manufacturer, the analogy always fails, for several reasons:
A) the car manufacturer isn't a monopoly B) they don't use a proprietary, secret, unpublished wiring scheme to hook the radio into the car and then refuse to publish the specs to third-party radio makers C) they don't use a proprietary, secret, unpublished digital protocol to interface between the speakers and the radio, and then refuse to publish the protocols to third-party radio makers D) they don't hook proprietary connections between the radio and the engine, and then try to pretend that you will void your warranty and wind up with random engine crashes when you try to remove or replace the radio with a "competitor's" radio E) they don't normally manufacture the radio, instead they buy them from a third party and rebrand if necessary (I'm assuming.) F) thus, the car manufacturer isn't directly "competing" with other third party radio makers, and vice versa. The third-party radio manufacturers are all welcome to try to get a contract with any of the non-monopoly car manufacturers to include their radios pre-installed. G) Microsoft does do or try to do all of these things. That is, it makes the radio itself, it uses proprietary connectors and protocols, and hooks the radio up to the engine ostensibly to provide "features" to the car buyer but really to make it incredibly difficult to replace the built-in Microsoft "radio".
All that aside, I think the answer to your question is quite simple. What would be "fair" behaviour for Microsoft? When it becomes possible for other companies to build compatible, competing products and penetrate the monopolized market far enough to become real competitors, at that point we can probably say that Microsoft is acting in a "fair" manner. Notice I said "possible". These competitors won't necessarily succeed in the market, but as long as it is "possible" to succeed, then the market can be considered a fair market.
At the moment, it is impossible for many competing businesses to even enter the various markets that Microsoft exerts influence over, no less to remain there. Partially because Microsoft has a monopoly (this is the fault of the consumers, Microsoft didn't create a monopoly out of thin air), but most importantly because Microsoft takes steps as a monopoly to make sure that market penetration continues to be impossible, by bundling products and using proprietary, closed formats and protocols. (Many of those same steps would only be unethical if they were not a monopoly.)
Time and time again they have started from the monopoly position, and then added on certain behaviours in order to extinguish competition and solidify that monopoly position. This has been made illegal in most countries because history has shown that abusing a monopoly like this causes damage to governments and economies. Competition is an absolute necessity in a healthy local or world economy, and Microsoft has a long history if using these illegal tactics (illegal solely because they are a monopoly) to kill off competition, thus causing present or potential future damage to the economy, and thus to the citizens that are affected by the health of that economy.
"Fair" is not a silly, selfish thing, it has to do with having a level playing field for healthy competition, healthy economies, and consumer choice. I don't think the question is as complicated as you make it seem. Microsoft isn't "behaving fairly" because in addition to having a passive monopoly created by the consumers which makes competition difficult, they also actively weild that monopoly in secondary ways to make competing with them more difficult, and in many cases impossible.
It would be more correct to say there are no planets in this solar system with sub-zero cores. It's quite possible there are planets in other solar systems that have had time to bleed off all the heat from their cores. In fact, I'd say it's quite likely, being that there are probably on the order of 10^12 planets just in the "nearby" visible universe alone.
Indeed, Mandrake patches almost everything up the yin-yang so that what you get when they make a release really is about the latest-and-greatest you could have gotten. Granted, GNOME 2.6 looks pretty awesome, to the point where this KDE-only user wants to try it out for a while to see whether it still makes me feel like I'm trapped in a box. (Anybody else feel that way about GNOME? It's the best analogy I can come up with for why I always reverted back to KDE. Nothing personal, just my perception of my past experiences with it.)
But the main thing I would like to point out and have everyone else re-point-out, is that the Official release doesn't actually come out for a couple of months! At which point it will most likely contain KDE 3.2.2, GNOME 2.6.1, kernel 2.6.5, GIMP 2.0.x and whatever else has come out in the meantime, plus a whole bunch of bug-fixes, etc.
But all that aside, I betcha you can't find another distro release that includes half of what Mandrake has managed to stuff into 10.0. It's gotten a pretty good run-through by the community already through all the beta and RC releases. I'll feel perfectly confident putting this on my day-to-day machine, and I'll be renewing my Silver membership shortly to help support a decent Linux company that puts out an outstanding product.
That's right, I'll be "putting my money where my mouth is". Anyone who wants the next release of their favorite distro to be better should do the same instead of whining that a two-week-old release of a hugely complicated product doesn't contain software that was released two days ago.
I am running KDE 3.2 right now on my [expletive deleted] Linux box. A really good upgrade from KDE 3.1. Its like switching from Jaguar to Panther in Mac terms, or Windows 95 to 98 in Windows terms. It looks mostly like KDE 3.1, but its so much faster and the GUI has been cleaned up a bit
One of these is not like the other...
KDE 3.1 to KDE 3.2 Jaguar to Panther Windows 95 to Windows 98--Hnuhh??
Don't you mean "it's like switching from Windows 98 to Windows 95?" Heh.
The ISOs and torrent links are only available to members right now. The general public should have access to the free download version in a couple of weeks when things have calmed down. If you really think you need it that bad, you should support the company by giving them a little cash for a membership. A general membership ($60) will get you the public 4-disc download version ahead of time, plus support and access to the club site, which is actually kind of cool since you can read a lot of informative articles and vote for applications to be updated or included in the next release (yes, members can vote for the apps and features you want to include in the distro). A Silver membership is $120 and gets all of the above and also gets access to the Powerpack edition ISOs/torrents. You'll also have access to any upcoming releases for the next year. I have found this to be very handy, but the main reason I signed up for a membership last year was because this company puts out an excellent desktop-oriented distro that has worked very well on all the hardware I've tried it on, and they listen to the community and their users.
Mandrake puts out a great product at a great price, and despite some bad management going off on tangents in the past and burning up a bunch of the company's money, their MandrakeLinux branch has always done well financially. If you like MandrakeLinux and want it to continue to exist, do yourself a favor and get a membership. Or wait a couple of weeks for your download.
The fact is, a person's writing skills is almost a direct correlation to the quality of their education. It is not unreasonable to determine someone is less educated after reading material from them that is riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes.
You are wrong.
The fact that someone can't spell well might usually have a relation to their education level. But I personally know someone who knows more about:
- Electricity - Electronics - Building codes - Fire codes - World history - Geography - International conflicts - Heating systems - Welding techniques - Carpentry - Mathematics - Writing - Storytelling - Sociology - Anthropology - and much, much more that I can't think of right now...
...knows more about these subjects than any 100 people from the general population, and any 10 specialists from those areas! Yet he can't type and can't spell worth a god-damn even when he's writing it longhand, because his brain doesn't work that way.
A little dude they call A. Einstein had a quality education all the way up through enough college to get his doctorate, yet I hear he was so dyslexic as a child that he had to teach himself to read whole sentences. This may or may not be true, but the fact remains that there are plenty of brilliant people who couldn't avoid spelling and grammar mistakes if their lives depended on it.
What you fail to understand is that written human languages are a relatively recent invention, and man is not born with the pathways that allow him to learn to not only use the basic rules of a language, but also to memorize all the stupid-ass exceptions! The English language is filled with stupid exceptions to often just as stupid rules, because during its evolution it has pulled words from probably a hundred other languages. You can be well-educated and even brilliant without having the ability to avoid spelling errors.
On the other hand, you can have a very poor education and still be able to follow all those spelling and grammar rules to the letter. Or have a high education level, be a great speller and still be an ignorant fool.
I always find it humorous when someone assumes that because they have good spelling skills it means they are not only well-educated but also intelligent and knowledgeable.
By the way, I'm not disagreeing that it is usually more effective to communicate with proper grammar and spelling. But you certainly can't make a blanket statement that anyone is an idiot who makes a few spelling mistakes in a message posted on a public forum, which was probably written in a web browser text field like this one was.
When I read your post, I immediately concluded that you are an arrogant, jump-to-conclusions, spells-pretty-well... jerk. If I thought about it for a while and looked at things from both sides, I would probably conclude that I was partially incorrect and shouldn't be so hard on you. Just like you shouldn't be so hard on this guy. Last I checked, leading a company of any size is not an easy task, and when was the last time you understood the full consequences of any decision you made?
Now that I've gone to all this trouble, I wish I could cut-n-paste this post in reply to all the other people on this forum who are berating this guy because of some spelling errors. There are bigger issues at hand, and he's only human.
You couldn't be more wrong. The GPL is fascist? You've got something very backwards. Firstly, the GPL doesn't say anything about how you can use the software. This needs to be said a lot more often, because most people still don't get that part clear in their heads. Even I didn't get it until pretty recently, even though I've been hearing about the GPL for years now.
Secondly, the GPL extends the rights given to you by normal copyright law, it does not restrict your rights. You know, the copyright law that automatically applies to any published work, giving sole permission to the author to say how it may or may not be copied. That copyright law is the only thing that might be said to be restricting the way you use the code, because you can't redistribute (copy) the code without permission from the author.
The main point of the GPL is one simple idea: If you promise to abide by terms of the GPL and openly publish any changes you make to my copyrighted work, I will automatically give you permission to distribute (and/or sell!) your derivative version of my copyrighted work at no cost. If you don't want to redistribute your derivative version of my copyrighted work, you can do whatever you want with it. The GPL doesn't even apply, as long as you aren't trying to make copies of my work and redistribute it to others.
If there was no GPL, you would be violating copyright law if you attempted to redistribute code without getting express permission from the author. The GPL is solely a way of automatically extending that "permission to copy" to any person who chooses to abide by the rules of the GPL. Of course, you are always free to negotiate any sort of non-GPL license with the author directly, if you wish to have permission to redistribute his copyrighted code.
I guess if giving you more rights than the normal laws allow is fascist, then by golly the GPL is fascist. But I think several million people would disagree with you quite strenuously, because it's wrong. It's as wrong as wrong gets.
I'm actually finding it difficult to understand what problem you do have with the GPL, as I can't get from your post whether you want code to be absolutely free (Public Domain) or you want to be forced to pay to license all code (commercial code protected by copyright law plus usage agreements that are more restrictive than copyright law!). I think you need to do a bit more research and thinking about this issue.
I used to think as you do, most of the time. I have recently begun to think differently. I disagree that you "can clearly see the arguments on both sides of this issue." I would argue that you would to well to do a bit more research into really understanding what the "sides" are really saying, and what the consequences will be in the future if we go down one path as opposed to another.
You're right that there is a bit of zealotry going on, but sometimes one man's zealot is another man's "man with uncompromising and rational principles". People do tend to get riled up when they are trying to protect basic freedoms, especially when they have personally experienced the infringement of those freedoms. If the goverment tried to turn around and take away your freedom of expression, I'll bet the world would have another "Free Speech" zealot on their hands in an instant. Instead of closing your mind as I have often done when someone seems to be a little too zealous about software freedom, maybe you should stop and take a closer look to what they are actually saying rather than how they're saying it.
You say: I have no personal problem with people seeking to make money off software they've written, so long as they don't force me into paying them if I don't want it. One of the points that some of those zealots make speaks directly to this. If I write some software and patent the secret methods that I used in that source code, you may find yourself being forced to pay that person whether you want to buy his software or not. The way things stand now, you can not only restrict someone from using your software, by charging money for it and not publishing the source (the text of the book, if you will), but you can also restrict vast swaths of other code that might happen to work in a similar manner. If I write some code that happens to use a siliar method, I am now restricted from publishing that code or giving away my software gratis. Instead I am forced into the necessity to license that idea from the author who has patented it. This is the main problem that free software is trying to avoid.
The Free Software movement has a problem with non-free software not because of price but because we cannot use it the way we use other information, i.e. by sharing and improving upon it, making it work better for us. We choose not to use (or buy!) code that is not free in this manner, because we have seen firsthand that it causes damage to business processes, such as being locked into one solution when another solution would be much better for your company. It causes damage in many ways that I'm not qualified to explain. It slows technological progress throughout the technology world. It damages the ability of the US to keep up and compete with other countries that are willing to embrace Free Software, for example.
I'm sure I've muddied the waters even more by now, but I do hope you spend more time listening, like I did.
You know, one of those things that's always pissed me off about trying to use Linux over the years, was trying to get X11 configured and working. Anyone care to explain what is so difficult about having a default "safe video mode"? Windows has a simple video mode that it defaults to that has never failed me. VGA, 640x480, 16 colors. I used to use BeOS, and even on completely unsupported video chipsets it would always be able to run in either the monochrome 640x480 mode or one of the VESA compatible modes. Some machines would run up to 1280x1024 in VESA compatibility mode. It was an amazingly helpful way of still being able to get into the system, use it if necessary, and open the config tools or even jump on the net in a graphical browser to try and troubleshoot the problem.
Seems like it isn't too difficult to have one or more video modes that are gauranteed to work on every computer that's at least a 386 or higher. Yet to this day X has no default mode that it turns to in case of a problem with the config file. It either works, or it doesn't, in which case you are stuck on the command line and forced to become an expert on working with the shell and reading XFree86 config files until you figure the glitch out. If you're lucky you know some things about VESA modes already and realize you can use the VESA driver. That's if you're lucky and you already have that knowledge.
Would it really have been (be) that difficult to implement a VGA/16-color default mode or some sort of VESA compatible mode list that the user can choose from when the config is fscked up and X won't start? Would it? Sure doesn't seem like it. It would have saved me and a lot of other people a lot of pain over the years.
It's a nightmare when you've only got one computer on site and vital stuff like the graphics system simply won't work until you've spent 6 hours discovering that your "shell" has this command called "man" where you can actually look up helpful information about everything on the system... as soon as you figure out which of the 10,000 cryptic program names you should be looking up. This is one of those things that could have had a partial or total solution a decade ago, and still doesn't really have a solution, except we don't notice because now X is usually configured for us automatically, most of the time. This is the mindset that is keeping a lot of fringe people away from Linux to this day, I'm afraid. I ran that gauntlet already, but I don't consider it much of an accomplishment when it was a problem that could have been fixed years ago./rant off. Going back to my Mandrake and Fedora computers now. But I really am searching for an explanation on why X is still such a pain in the ass when it isn't configured perfectly. I'll feel pretty stupid if this is no longer the case, but I haven't seen any sign otherwise even since a few months ago when I last was stuck setting up X 4.x by hand.
Umm, isn't legislating against 'monopolies' a breach of rights (to free trade for instance)? Businesses should be able to do what they want, how the hell do you think the US got to be the richest country in the world? It wasn't just because of a war that happened 50 years ago.
Corporations have become the new scapegoats for our failures as businesses and consumers.
You're absolutely right. Businesses should be allowed to do exactly what they want. They should be allowed to get so big and powerful that they can control governments and become a physical, social and economic menace to entire populations. I'm sure you'd like that.
Shee-it.
By the way, it's been said a million times but it looks like it needs to be said a million more times: it's NOT ILLEGAL TO BE A MONOPOLY. It's only illegal to ABUSE A MONOPOLY POSITION. Because abusing a monopoly position leads to serious consequences that can end up destroying not just other related or competing businesses, but a country's entire economy and thus the lives of potentially millions of people. But why would we want to avoid potential economic disasters by regulating abusive monopolies? Hell if I know.
Sometimes the mods really do seem to be smoking something.
There's only 26 letters in the English alphabet, and the most commonly used are RNSTLE (can a WheelWatcher verify this for me?)
I'm not a wheelwatcher myself but I believe you're referring to ETAOIN SHRDLU, the twelve most common letters in the English language, as identified by Morse (of Morse code fame) by counting the type in a typesetter's office(!). Just one of those facts of limited use that some of us love to etch into our brains the moment we find out about it.;)
God bless Google. I searched for "etaion shrdlu" first and only got 641 hits, but of course it brilliantly asked if I had actually intended to search for "etaoin shrdlu", whereupon I got 6,020 hits. Google rocks.
> The size of DVD images can be too big: many sites would hesitate to publish it afraiding too many people would download it and crash their sites, while many users would hesitate to download it as it's too big for their DSL lines.
Duh! This is exactly the problem that BitTorrent is designed to solve!:)
You mean to say BitTorrent makes my DSL line faster? No? I didn't think so. BitTorrent only really solves the problem for the uploaders, not the downloaders.
Besides which, I've had a fair share of BitTorrent downloads that downloaded 3MB or less over a 24-hour period. It's great for the initial burst of distributed downloading but once most of the hosts get completed and drop off the network it becomes almost useless. If you don't catch it in the first couple of days it seems to be pretty worthless.
Somebody ought to come up with something to bridge between using BitTorrent hosts for the initial burst and gradually switching over to regular FTP downloads as most of the hosts drop off the network. Or what if the FTP servers actually ran BitTorrent themselves so the downloading would always be distributed between all the different mirrors. Sounds like a good idea. I would assume that they do this if the BitTorrent performance wasn't always so abysmal after the first couple of days.
I would personally really hesitate to download a DVD image by any method unless I had a (very expensive) fat pipe to download on.
I wonder what made you think you were arguing against me? I didn't say which side I was on, nor which side uses the real data and which does not. I can't decide whether you've passed this little test or failed miserably.:P
One side feels gun ownership is fundamental to a free and prosperous society. The other side not so much. Both sides can present "scientific" evidence proving their case.
Firstly, bull.
One side of the gun control debate makes a point to present verifiable facts, hard data measured under well-defined circumstances, whenever possible by unbiased, disinterested third-parties, including parties that are supposedly part of the opposition. These verifiable (scientific, no quotes) facts are repeatedly and constantly completely ignored by the other side.
The other side uses nothing but highly modified data that has been restructured to suit their purposes, to "prove" their points. That's when they even bother to present any data at all. Most of the time they stick to straw-man emotional arguments, name-calling and fear propaganda based on... what? Certainly not real data that will hold up to scrutiny.
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which is which. The two sides bear no resemblance in this respect that I can see.
Secondly, why is the parent modded insightful? Science has no place in deciding social policy? He isn't even talking about science, by definition. He's talking about pseudo-science. That's what it's called when the results can be used to prove whatever hypothesis you feel like proving that day.
Real science decidely does have a place in our decision-making processes in any field. But by definition that means the hypotheses and data must be verifiable by multiple, perhaps antithetical parties. That's science, not this mumbo-jumbo the parent was talking about.
I'm about as big a Heinlein fan as you will find, but in the interests of historical accuracy I would have to say that I'd be very surprised if monocycles hadn't been "predicted" by half a dozen other sci-fi authors before his time. He has plenty of his own predictions, but I doubt he can take credit for that particular one. Let's just say science fiction predicted it, as it has predicted so many other things.
You, and a lot of other people apparently, seem to be missing the point. We don't care if they block anti-gun sites also. I don't want them to, and the poster probably doesn't either. What we're outraged about is that sites solely dedicated to promoting true information and political discussion about legal gun use (hunting, target shooting, self-defense, etc), and promoting the defense of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution (yes, we still have one), are lumped together with sites that may tell you how to build a bomb or homemade gun and may promote the uses of such for nefarious, illegal purposes. This is what is unacceptable to us. They are censoring only one side of a political discussion.
When it comes right down to it, the NRA and similar websites talk about the same things that that anti-gun sites talk about, i.e., guns and gun rights (gasp!). Thus if they (Symantec) followed their own insanity properly they would also lump anti-gun sites into the "weapons" category. So in the end, this really is a case of blatant anti-gun bias. The filter creators want your children to see anti-gun information even when you've told the filter you want to block "weapons" sites. They've made the political decision for you that it's OK to show your children "weapons" sites as long as they are anti-gun sites.
All I know is, Symantec products are crap, they're implementing activation features, and now this shite. It's the straw that broke this camel's back. I'll never buy or recommend another Symantec product.
Other people have made recommendations for alternatives, but here's mine anyway to help increase the signal-to-noise ratio: Firewall: Kerio Personal Firewall Anti-virus: AVG
Why is it that more and more companies believe that turning a profit and being honest are mutually exclusive?
Why is it that everyone thinks that more and more companies believe turning a profit and being honest are mutually exclusive? I mean, I think so too, I just wonder why, and if it's actually a correct impression of what's really been happening in the business world. I can think of plenty of non-ethical businesses in the past, stretching back decades, centuries, even millenia.
Is it maybe just because there are more companies in total then there have ever been before, who are all just acting like companies always have? Say, that's a nifty theory. I should apply for a patent...
As for the `/~ key? Still haven't found a useful function for it other than typing a ` or a ~.
In Mac OS X (and 8/9?), pressing Command-backtick in most applications will cycle through all open windows for that particular application, as opposed to using Command-tab to cycle through open applications. Very nice feature. In BeOS, Alt-backtick shifts between the current workspace (like a virtual desktop) and whatever workspace you were previously in, so you could quickly switch between two workspaces that weren't necessarily "next to" each other. Over time I found that a very nice feature and I still miss being able to switch back and forth quickly between the last two virtual desktops on my Linux box. KDE doesn't seem to have that feature available in the key scheme. If anyone knows otherwise I would appreciate some info.
Just a side note about BeOS, another one of the thousands of little things that made it so cool was you could give each workspace (desktop) a different resolution, and/or color depth, and/or refresh rate! With a good video card you'd barely notice the adjustment as you switched between workspaces. Imagine being able to preview your website in several different resolutions and color depths just by switching between different virtual desktops. That's the BeOS for you.
I really miss my BeOS. But it was closed source and tied to a single company that died. As much as I dislike many things about Linux on the desktop, I have faith that it can never be killed by the failure of a single entity, and it will always keep improving.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a chicken pox vaccine... kids don't have to get chicken pox anymore. Hundreds of kids die of encephalitis due to chiken pox every year. There's also the school time lost, the scrring, and the eventual possibility of shingles.
Nonetheless, parents still "vaccinate" their kids by exposing them to other kids who have chicken pox at a convenient time, like summer vacation. Insanity.
I guess this is one of those "spay or neuter your pet" announcements. Get the issue out there.
I just talked to someone two minutes ago who says that the vaccine you're talking about doesn't actually keep you from getting the virus but rather just lessens the symptoms. If this is true, the vaccine wouldn't protect you from the possibility of Shingles as an adult. I would be interested to hear from anyone who knows more about the specifics of whether the vaccine does or doesn't actually keep you from acquiring the virus or keeping it in your system.
Very interesting thread. I can safely say until this point I had no idea what the root cause of Shingles was. (See grandparent post.)
Hear, hear! How dare those Europeans meddle in their own affairs!
--
Uh...
Comparing Microsoft the monopolist to any run-of-the-mill car manufacturer, the analogy always fails, for several reasons:
A) the car manufacturer isn't a monopoly
B) they don't use a proprietary, secret, unpublished wiring scheme to hook the radio into the car and then refuse to publish the specs to third-party radio makers
C) they don't use a proprietary, secret, unpublished digital protocol to interface between the speakers and the radio, and then refuse to publish the protocols to third-party radio makers
D) they don't hook proprietary connections between the radio and the engine, and then try to pretend that you will void your warranty and wind up with random engine crashes when you try to remove or replace the radio with a "competitor's" radio
E) they don't normally manufacture the radio, instead they buy them from a third party and rebrand if necessary (I'm assuming.)
F) thus, the car manufacturer isn't directly "competing" with other third party radio makers, and vice versa. The third-party radio manufacturers are all welcome to try to get a contract with any of the non-monopoly car manufacturers to include their radios pre-installed.
G) Microsoft does do or try to do all of these things. That is, it makes the radio itself, it uses proprietary connectors and protocols, and hooks the radio up to the engine ostensibly to provide "features" to the car buyer but really to make it incredibly difficult to replace the built-in Microsoft "radio".
All that aside, I think the answer to your question is quite simple. What would be "fair" behaviour for Microsoft? When it becomes possible for other companies to build compatible, competing products and penetrate the monopolized market far enough to become real competitors, at that point we can probably say that Microsoft is acting in a "fair" manner. Notice I said "possible". These competitors won't necessarily succeed in the market, but as long as it is "possible" to succeed, then the market can be considered a fair market.
At the moment, it is impossible for many competing businesses to even enter the various markets that Microsoft exerts influence over, no less to remain there. Partially because Microsoft has a monopoly (this is the fault of the consumers, Microsoft didn't create a monopoly out of thin air), but most importantly because Microsoft takes steps as a monopoly to make sure that market penetration continues to be impossible, by bundling products and using proprietary, closed formats and protocols. (Many of those same steps would only be unethical if they were not a monopoly.)
Time and time again they have started from the monopoly position, and then added on certain behaviours in order to extinguish competition and solidify that monopoly position. This has been made illegal in most countries because history has shown that abusing a monopoly like this causes damage to governments and economies. Competition is an absolute necessity in a healthy local or world economy, and Microsoft has a long history if using these illegal tactics (illegal solely because they are a monopoly) to kill off competition, thus causing present or potential future damage to the economy, and thus to the citizens that are affected by the health of that economy.
"Fair" is not a silly, selfish thing, it has to do with having a level playing field for healthy competition, healthy economies, and consumer choice. I don't think the question is as complicated as you make it seem. Microsoft isn't "behaving fairly" because in addition to having a passive monopoly created by the consumers which makes competition difficult, they also actively weild that monopoly in secondary ways to make competing with them more difficult, and in many cases impossible.
RedBear
There are no planets with 'subzero cores'.
It would be more correct to say there are no planets in this solar system with sub-zero cores. It's quite possible there are planets in other solar systems that have had time to bleed off all the heat from their cores. In fact, I'd say it's quite likely, being that there are probably on the order of 10^12 planets just in the "nearby" visible universe alone.
(Reiterating parent and replying to grandparent)
Indeed, Mandrake patches almost everything up the yin-yang so that what you get when they make a release really is about the latest-and-greatest you could have gotten. Granted, GNOME 2.6 looks pretty awesome, to the point where this KDE-only user wants to try it out for a while to see whether it still makes me feel like I'm trapped in a box. (Anybody else feel that way about GNOME? It's the best analogy I can come up with for why I always reverted back to KDE. Nothing personal, just my perception of my past experiences with it.)
But the main thing I would like to point out and have everyone else re-point-out, is that the Official release doesn't actually come out for a couple of months! At which point it will most likely contain KDE 3.2.2, GNOME 2.6.1, kernel 2.6.5, GIMP 2.0.x and whatever else has come out in the meantime, plus a whole bunch of bug-fixes, etc.
But all that aside, I betcha you can't find another distro release that includes half of what Mandrake has managed to stuff into 10.0. It's gotten a pretty good run-through by the community already through all the beta and RC releases. I'll feel perfectly confident putting this on my day-to-day machine, and I'll be renewing my Silver membership shortly to help support a decent Linux company that puts out an outstanding product.
That's right, I'll be "putting my money where my mouth is". Anyone who wants the next release of their favorite distro to be better should do the same instead of whining that a two-week-old release of a hugely complicated product doesn't contain software that was released two days ago.
I am running KDE 3.2 right now on my [expletive deleted] Linux box. A really good upgrade from KDE 3.1. Its like switching from Jaguar to Panther in Mac terms, or Windows 95 to 98 in Windows terms. It looks mostly like KDE 3.1, but its so much faster and the GUI has been cleaned up a bit
One of these is not like the other...
KDE 3.1 to KDE 3.2
Jaguar to Panther
Windows 95 to Windows 98--Hnuhh??
Don't you mean "it's like switching from Windows 98 to Windows 95?" Heh.
The ISOs and torrent links are only available to members right now. The general public should have access to the free download version in a couple of weeks when things have calmed down. If you really think you need it that bad, you should support the company by giving them a little cash for a membership. A general membership ($60) will get you the public 4-disc download version ahead of time, plus support and access to the club site, which is actually kind of cool since you can read a lot of informative articles and vote for applications to be updated or included in the next release (yes, members can vote for the apps and features you want to include in the distro). A Silver membership is $120 and gets all of the above and also gets access to the Powerpack edition ISOs/torrents. You'll also have access to any upcoming releases for the next year. I have found this to be very handy, but the main reason I signed up for a membership last year was because this company puts out an excellent desktop-oriented distro that has worked very well on all the hardware I've tried it on, and they listen to the community and their users.
Mandrake puts out a great product at a great price, and despite some bad management going off on tangents in the past and burning up a bunch of the company's money, their MandrakeLinux branch has always done well financially. If you like MandrakeLinux and want it to continue to exist, do yourself a favor and get a membership. Or wait a couple of weeks for your download.
Cheers.
The fact is, a person's writing skills is almost a direct correlation to the quality of their education. It is not unreasonable to determine someone is less educated after reading material from them that is riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes.
...knows more about these subjects than any 100 people from the general population, and any 10 specialists from those areas! Yet he can't type and can't spell worth a god-damn even when he's writing it longhand, because his brain doesn't work that way.
You are wrong.
The fact that someone can't spell well might usually have a relation to their education level. But I personally know someone who knows more about:
- Electricity
- Electronics
- Building codes
- Fire codes
- World history
- Geography
- International conflicts
- Heating systems
- Welding techniques
- Carpentry
- Mathematics
- Writing
- Storytelling
- Sociology
- Anthropology
- and much, much more that I can't think of right now...
A little dude they call A. Einstein had a quality education all the way up through enough college to get his doctorate, yet I hear he was so dyslexic as a child that he had to teach himself to read whole sentences. This may or may not be true, but the fact remains that there are plenty of brilliant people who couldn't avoid spelling and grammar mistakes if their lives depended on it.
What you fail to understand is that written human languages are a relatively recent invention, and man is not born with the pathways that allow him to learn to not only use the basic rules of a language, but also to memorize all the stupid-ass exceptions! The English language is filled with stupid exceptions to often just as stupid rules, because during its evolution it has pulled words from probably a hundred other languages. You can be well-educated and even brilliant without having the ability to avoid spelling errors.
On the other hand, you can have a very poor education and still be able to follow all those spelling and grammar rules to the letter. Or have a high education level, be a great speller and still be an ignorant fool.
I always find it humorous when someone assumes that because they have good spelling skills it means they are not only well-educated but also intelligent and knowledgeable.
By the way, I'm not disagreeing that it is usually more effective to communicate with proper grammar and spelling. But you certainly can't make a blanket statement that anyone is an idiot who makes a few spelling mistakes in a message posted on a public forum, which was probably written in a web browser text field like this one was.
When I read your post, I immediately concluded that you are an arrogant, jump-to-conclusions, spells-pretty-well... jerk. If I thought about it for a while and looked at things from both sides, I would probably conclude that I was partially incorrect and shouldn't be so hard on you. Just like you shouldn't be so hard on this guy. Last I checked, leading a company of any size is not an easy task, and when was the last time you understood the full consequences of any decision you made?
Now that I've gone to all this trouble, I wish I could cut-n-paste this post in reply to all the other people on this forum who are berating this guy because of some spelling errors. There are bigger issues at hand, and he's only human.
You couldn't be more wrong. The GPL is fascist? You've got something very backwards. Firstly, the GPL doesn't say anything about how you can use the software. This needs to be said a lot more often, because most people still don't get that part clear in their heads. Even I didn't get it until pretty recently, even though I've been hearing about the GPL for years now.
Secondly, the GPL extends the rights given to you by normal copyright law, it does not restrict your rights. You know, the copyright law that automatically applies to any published work, giving sole permission to the author to say how it may or may not be copied. That copyright law is the only thing that might be said to be restricting the way you use the code, because you can't redistribute (copy) the code without permission from the author.
The main point of the GPL is one simple idea: If you promise to abide by terms of the GPL and openly publish any changes you make to my copyrighted work, I will automatically give you permission to distribute (and/or sell!) your derivative version of my copyrighted work at no cost. If you don't want to redistribute your derivative version of my copyrighted work, you can do whatever you want with it. The GPL doesn't even apply, as long as you aren't trying to make copies of my work and redistribute it to others.
If there was no GPL, you would be violating copyright law if you attempted to redistribute code without getting express permission from the author. The GPL is solely a way of automatically extending that "permission to copy" to any person who chooses to abide by the rules of the GPL. Of course, you are always free to negotiate any sort of non-GPL license with the author directly, if you wish to have permission to redistribute his copyrighted code.
I guess if giving you more rights than the normal laws allow is fascist, then by golly the GPL is fascist. But I think several million people would disagree with you quite strenuously, because it's wrong. It's as wrong as wrong gets.
I'm actually finding it difficult to understand what problem you do have with the GPL, as I can't get from your post whether you want code to be absolutely free (Public Domain) or you want to be forced to pay to license all code (commercial code protected by copyright law plus usage agreements that are more restrictive than copyright law!). I think you need to do a bit more research and thinking about this issue.
I used to think as you do, most of the time. I have recently begun to think differently. I disagree that you "can clearly see the arguments on both sides of this issue." I would argue that you would to well to do a bit more research into really understanding what the "sides" are really saying, and what the consequences will be in the future if we go down one path as opposed to another.
You're right that there is a bit of zealotry going on, but sometimes one man's zealot is another man's "man with uncompromising and rational principles". People do tend to get riled up when they are trying to protect basic freedoms, especially when they have personally experienced the infringement of those freedoms. If the goverment tried to turn around and take away your freedom of expression, I'll bet the world would have another "Free Speech" zealot on their hands in an instant. Instead of closing your mind as I have often done when someone seems to be a little too zealous about software freedom, maybe you should stop and take a closer look to what they are actually saying rather than how they're saying it.
You say: I have no personal problem with people seeking to make money off software they've written, so long as they don't force me into paying them if I don't want it. One of the points that some of those zealots make speaks directly to this. If I write some software and patent the secret methods that I used in that source code, you may find yourself being forced to pay that person whether you want to buy his software or not. The way things stand now, you can not only restrict someone from using your software, by charging money for it and not publishing the source (the text of the book, if you will), but you can also restrict vast swaths of other code that might happen to work in a similar manner. If I write some code that happens to use a siliar method, I am now restricted from publishing that code or giving away my software gratis. Instead I am forced into the necessity to license that idea from the author who has patented it. This is the main problem that free software is trying to avoid.
The Free Software movement has a problem with non-free software not because of price but because we cannot use it the way we use other information, i.e. by sharing and improving upon it, making it work better for us. We choose not to use (or buy!) code that is not free in this manner, because we have seen firsthand that it causes damage to business processes, such as being locked into one solution when another solution would be much better for your company. It causes damage in many ways that I'm not qualified to explain. It slows technological progress throughout the technology world. It damages the ability of the US to keep up and compete with other countries that are willing to embrace Free Software, for example.
I'm sure I've muddied the waters even more by now, but I do hope you spend more time listening, like I did.
You know, one of those things that's always pissed me off about trying to use Linux over the years, was trying to get X11 configured and working. Anyone care to explain what is so difficult about having a default "safe video mode"? Windows has a simple video mode that it defaults to that has never failed me. VGA, 640x480, 16 colors. I used to use BeOS, and even on completely unsupported video chipsets it would always be able to run in either the monochrome 640x480 mode or one of the VESA compatible modes. Some machines would run up to 1280x1024 in VESA compatibility mode. It was an amazingly helpful way of still being able to get into the system, use it if necessary, and open the config tools or even jump on the net in a graphical browser to try and troubleshoot the problem.
/rant off. Going back to my Mandrake and Fedora computers now. But I really am searching for an explanation on why X is still such a pain in the ass when it isn't configured perfectly. I'll feel pretty stupid if this is no longer the case, but I haven't seen any sign otherwise even since a few months ago when I last was stuck setting up X 4.x by hand.
Seems like it isn't too difficult to have one or more video modes that are gauranteed to work on every computer that's at least a 386 or higher. Yet to this day X has no default mode that it turns to in case of a problem with the config file. It either works, or it doesn't, in which case you are stuck on the command line and forced to become an expert on working with the shell and reading XFree86 config files until you figure the glitch out. If you're lucky you know some things about VESA modes already and realize you can use the VESA driver. That's if you're lucky and you already have that knowledge.
Would it really have been (be) that difficult to implement a VGA/16-color default mode or some sort of VESA compatible mode list that the user can choose from when the config is fscked up and X won't start? Would it? Sure doesn't seem like it. It would have saved me and a lot of other people a lot of pain over the years.
It's a nightmare when you've only got one computer on site and vital stuff like the graphics system simply won't work until you've spent 6 hours discovering that your "shell" has this command called "man" where you can actually look up helpful information about everything on the system... as soon as you figure out which of the 10,000 cryptic program names you should be looking up. This is one of those things that could have had a partial or total solution a decade ago, and still doesn't really have a solution, except we don't notice because now X is usually configured for us automatically, most of the time. This is the mindset that is keeping a lot of fringe people away from Linux to this day, I'm afraid. I ran that gauntlet already, but I don't consider it much of an accomplishment when it was a problem that could have been fixed years ago.
You're absolutely right. Businesses should be allowed to do exactly what they want. They should be allowed to get so big and powerful that they can control governments and become a physical, social and economic menace to entire populations. I'm sure you'd like that.
Shee-it.
By the way, it's been said a million times but it looks like it needs to be said a million more times: it's NOT ILLEGAL TO BE A MONOPOLY. It's only illegal to ABUSE A MONOPOLY POSITION. Because abusing a monopoly position leads to serious consequences that can end up destroying not just other related or competing businesses, but a country's entire economy and thus the lives of potentially millions of people. But why would we want to avoid potential economic disasters by regulating abusive monopolies? Hell if I know.
Sometimes the mods really do seem to be smoking something.
I'm not a wheelwatcher myself but I believe you're referring to ETAOIN SHRDLU, the twelve most common letters in the English language, as identified by Morse (of Morse code fame) by counting the type in a typesetter's office(!). Just one of those facts of limited use that some of us love to etch into our brains the moment we find out about it.
God bless Google. I searched for "etaion shrdlu" first and only got 641 hits, but of course it brilliantly asked if I had actually intended to search for "etaoin shrdlu", whereupon I got 6,020 hits. Google rocks.
You mean to say BitTorrent makes my DSL line faster? No? I didn't think so. BitTorrent only really solves the problem for the uploaders, not the downloaders.
Besides which, I've had a fair share of BitTorrent downloads that downloaded 3MB or less over a 24-hour period. It's great for the initial burst of distributed downloading but once most of the hosts get completed and drop off the network it becomes almost useless. If you don't catch it in the first couple of days it seems to be pretty worthless.
Somebody ought to come up with something to bridge between using BitTorrent hosts for the initial burst and gradually switching over to regular FTP downloads as most of the hosts drop off the network. Or what if the FTP servers actually ran BitTorrent themselves so the downloading would always be distributed between all the different mirrors. Sounds like a good idea. I would assume that they do this if the BitTorrent performance wasn't always so abysmal after the first couple of days.
I would personally really hesitate to download a DVD image by any method unless I had a (very expensive) fat pipe to download on.
What gets you stoked about Linux? The price tag? Quality? Security? or the fact that it isn't M$.
I'd like to answer that question: Yes.
I wonder what made you think you were arguing against me? I didn't say which side I was on, nor which side uses the real data and which does not. I can't decide whether you've passed this little test or failed miserably. :P
Firstly, bull.
One side of the gun control debate makes a point to present verifiable facts, hard data measured under well-defined circumstances, whenever possible by unbiased, disinterested third-parties, including parties that are supposedly part of the opposition. These verifiable (scientific, no quotes) facts are repeatedly and constantly completely ignored by the other side.
The other side uses nothing but highly modified data that has been restructured to suit their purposes, to "prove" their points. That's when they even bother to present any data at all. Most of the time they stick to straw-man emotional arguments, name-calling and fear propaganda based on... what? Certainly not real data that will hold up to scrutiny.
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which is which. The two sides bear no resemblance in this respect that I can see.
Secondly, why is the parent modded insightful? Science has no place in deciding social policy? He isn't even talking about science, by definition. He's talking about pseudo-science. That's what it's called when the results can be used to prove whatever hypothesis you feel like proving that day.
Real science decidely does have a place in our decision-making processes in any field. But by definition that means the hypotheses and data must be verifiable by multiple, perhaps antithetical parties. That's science, not this mumbo-jumbo the parent was talking about.
I'm about as big a Heinlein fan as you will find, but in the interests of historical accuracy I would have to say that I'd be very surprised if monocycles hadn't been "predicted" by half a dozen other sci-fi authors before his time. He has plenty of his own predictions, but I doubt he can take credit for that particular one. Let's just say science fiction predicted it, as it has predicted so many other things.
If you're sayin' coming here was a bad idea, I'm beginning to agree with you.
;)
Or in other words, everything I need to know I learned from Star Wars.
I would think that the Gauls generally said anything they damn well pleased...
Ba-dum-tcsh! Thanks, I'll be here all night!
You, and a lot of other people apparently, seem to be missing the point. We don't care if they block anti-gun sites also. I don't want them to, and the poster probably doesn't either. What we're outraged about is that sites solely dedicated to promoting true information and political discussion about legal gun use (hunting, target shooting, self-defense, etc), and promoting the defense of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution (yes, we still have one), are lumped together with sites that may tell you how to build a bomb or homemade gun and may promote the uses of such for nefarious, illegal purposes. This is what is unacceptable to us. They are censoring only one side of a political discussion.
When it comes right down to it, the NRA and similar websites talk about the same things that that anti-gun sites talk about, i.e., guns and gun rights (gasp!). Thus if they (Symantec) followed their own insanity properly they would also lump anti-gun sites into the "weapons" category. So in the end, this really is a case of blatant anti-gun bias. The filter creators want your children to see anti-gun information even when you've told the filter you want to block "weapons" sites. They've made the political decision for you that it's OK to show your children "weapons" sites as long as they are anti-gun sites.
All I know is, Symantec products are crap, they're implementing activation features, and now this shite. It's the straw that broke this camel's back. I'll never buy or recommend another Symantec product.
Other people have made recommendations for alternatives, but here's mine anyway to help increase the signal-to-noise ratio:
Firewall: Kerio Personal Firewall
Anti-virus: AVG
(Both free for personal use.)
One more here. That's one of those books that really had a sense of magic and the bizarre to it. Truly original.
;)
Whoops, gotta go, you know how Time Flies.
Reminds me of the preview I saw of "Stuck on You" (Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear)
Doing a crossword: "What's a four-letter word for 'snatch'?"
"Grab."
"Oh... Oh yeah [chuckles to himself while using his eraser]"
Funniest "innocuous" joke I've heard in years.
Why is it that everyone thinks that more and more companies believe turning a profit and being honest are mutually exclusive? I mean, I think so too, I just wonder why, and if it's actually a correct impression of what's really been happening in the business world. I can think of plenty of non-ethical businesses in the past, stretching back decades, centuries, even millenia.
Is it maybe just because there are more companies in total then there have ever been before, who are all just acting like companies always have? Say, that's a nifty theory. I should apply for a patent...
In Mac OS X (and 8/9?), pressing Command-backtick in most applications will cycle through all open windows for that particular application, as opposed to using Command-tab to cycle through open applications. Very nice feature. In BeOS, Alt-backtick shifts between the current workspace (like a virtual desktop) and whatever workspace you were previously in, so you could quickly switch between two workspaces that weren't necessarily "next to" each other. Over time I found that a very nice feature and I still miss being able to switch back and forth quickly between the last two virtual desktops on my Linux box. KDE doesn't seem to have that feature available in the key scheme. If anyone knows otherwise I would appreciate some info.
Just a side note about BeOS, another one of the thousands of little things that made it so cool was you could give each workspace (desktop) a different resolution, and/or color depth, and/or refresh rate! With a good video card you'd barely notice the adjustment as you switched between workspaces. Imagine being able to preview your website in several different resolutions and color depths just by switching between different virtual desktops. That's the BeOS for you.
I really miss my BeOS. But it was closed source and tied to a single company that died. As much as I dislike many things about Linux on the desktop, I have faith that it can never be killed by the failure of a single entity, and it will always keep improving.