It's not a privilege to create and sell a product. It is a privilege to be granted an artificial monopoly on said product because you invented it.
Patents and IP in general are not god-given rights (or any other sort of rights). They are privileges, created by governments to further the public good by encouraging innovation. When patents are used to restrict the public good (ie keeping medicine from dying people in Africa), they should be thrown out the window.
It's called kmozilla. You can get it from debian unstable, or problem as an RPM for redhat. Once it's installed, you can switch the rendering engine on the fly from KHTML to Gecko.
The only difference I've noticed is that kmozilla uses really tiny fonts, and seems to ignore the "minimum font size" setting. I had the same problem with galeon, as it turns out.
Obviously, C is just being used as a metaphor for the Divine Language of the Great Programmer, which cannot be comprehended by mere mortals or compiled on our measly computers.
D == (Java)--
Because:
Java also removed all the compatibility junk.
Java, like D, also added GC as a major development booster.
Java added advanced programming paradigms, extensive standard API and bytecode, and D didn't.
Some of us are looking for Java--. Not compiling to bytecode is a _good_ thing, because the program will run faster. I got the impression from the spec that D is supposed to be as fast (at least) as C++, something that java will never do.
Also, while java's "extensive standard API" does do just about everything for you, which is nice, it is also bloated, confusing, sometimes self-contradictory (ie try iterating over the keys vs values of a Hashtable... last I checked they use completely different APIs), and annoying to use.
Well, there's kpackage... just double-click the.rpm, and then click "Install" on the resulting dialog.
Of course, finding the dependencies could be a pain.
And then there's apt + stormpkg (or gnome-apt).
Just type the name of the software, it will search for it, and click "install"
It's not "standard" in the sense of the same across all distros, but who cares? If you set up an office with all debian, and only give them gnome-apt, how then how are the users going to be confused by the other options?
The article you mention was posted on/. a few weeks back. Go read the discussion that happened then to find out all of the reasons why this study is absolutely meaningless.
Quick summary: no mention of bitrate, or audio equipment used, and the test was not done in a blind fashion.
Don't forget that.net is going to have a centralized infrastructure, owned (of source), by
MS.
So, even if people using Linux/Mono as both the client and the server, they are still authenticating through Passport and so forth... which means MS is in control and will be able to make a cut from it.
...has a 10-day return policy for PC games. I have never had any trouble making a return, as long as I save the receipt, and it's come in handy on several occassions.
I knew people who used to buy games, beat them within 10 days, then return them and move on to the next game...
There is a "fancy gui" in the form of a gtk/gnome frontend to apt-get.
Also, apt-get has the option to download and compile source packages. I think it takes a couple more steps than the ports system, but it's not terribly complicated AFAIK (anyone wi/ more deb experience want to comment?)
This _doesn't_ free you from dependence on an OS, which is the real problem. The only thing I can see it being useful for is taking someone else's compiled program and translating it. If you have the source, you can just recompile.
The only problem there is that the license probably prevents. While it would be neat if this could be used to make, say, windows, run on new processor X, even if it was technically feasible, this probably counts as dissasembly/modification and therefore is not allowed by the EULA.
I don't think the original poster (teg) was arguing that they weren't free... just that they are impractical for a distribution. RedHat needs to be able to distribute all the software in the distributions as RPMS, _and_ they need to be able to fix security holes promptly, and distribute those fixes as RPMS as well.
So, if there was a hole in djbdns, and the original author doesn't fix it (or doesn't fix it fast enough), RedHat is out of luck because they can't distribute their own fix as an RPM. There's also the issue of not being able to relocate files when you package it, which is also annoying to a distro maker trying to organize things consistently.
Now, the chance of a security hole in djbdns may be really small. I'm not familiar with the software myself. But, I can see why RedHat wants to have the ability to respond flexibly to holes if they do occur.
The article mentions only that HavenCo is "developing platforms for anonymous activity", but then the rest of the article is about file sharing of music/movies. That seems to imply that HavenCo is somehow involved in file sharing (as does the summary here, but we know how accurate that is).
Does anyone know if HavenCo actually has any involvement in file sharing?
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise.
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 1
Socialism reduces the freedom of the privileged few to make ungodly amounts of money that they have no real use for anyway. On the other hand, it increases the freedom of the disadvantaged masses to live their lives. It frees them from the need to work long hours under bad conditions just to feed their families.
It's easy for tech workers to forget that not everyone has it so easy in life. But some day the number of workers will catch up with the number of jobs, and tech workers will lose their privileged position.
I rather like this idea, but I see one huge flaw in it: free markets are based fundamentally on rationality, and to behave rationally, you have to be informed. But in general, most people are not informed about what is being done with their personal information, and moreover, in a lot of cases it is impossible to be informed.
In order for this to work, sites that use personal information need to make their privacy policies publicly available (before they grab your personal info), and actually stick to those policies. That way you can make the choice about your privacy.
The article addressed this to a certain extent but sort of glossed over it. I don't think that the mechanisms are in place for people to make informed choices about privacy at the moment, and I'm not sure that they ever will be.
On the other hand, I don't think government regulation is going to work for this issue any more than it has worked for anything else on the net.
As a kid we used to have a couple of board games by a sort of new-agey company. They were cooperative and environmentally oriented. In one you played as beavers, trying to store up food for the winter and build a dam, and the other was bees.
Unfortunately I can't remember the names of the games or the company. I have no idea if they are still around, either.
You don't seem to be terribly familiar with the Free Software movement. For many people, the choice to use free software is as much a moral choice as anything else.
Personally, I use linux because it doesn't crash and I can get under the hood and tinker with the OS and all my apps. But a lot of people use it because it's free.
I don't think the idea is to totally lose the OS, but just to get rid of the OS existing as an application. I think the use of the term OS in this article is misleading to *nix folks, tho. It sounds like they are really talking about the desktop/window manager.
As I read it, you would still have the OS providing common services, including basic GUI elements. It sounds to me like the article is proposing the equivalent of KDE or Gnome, but without a desktop and panel. Instead you would start an app and it basically takes over and is the only thing you see until you switch to another app.
Personally I would still take my PC as it is now, but I think the _vast_ majority of computer users (the ones who don't care about computers, but like to used word and IE), would find this a better solution.
This sounds really cool, but it seems there could be some problems with implementation. If you build category listings dynamically, this drastically slows down tasks like a simple directory listing (or even locating a file by name), because you start having to do searches. Of course you can speed this up wi/ good indexing, but you still have to pull those indices off the disk and do a fair amount of processing.
You might be able to build some of the categories statically, but if your fs is truly fluid, then the number of possible categories is gonna be too huge to build and maintain statically. Maybe it needs to be a little less liquid, or maybe you can find a way to indentify commonly accessed files/categories and build that stuff statically, then do everything else dynamically.
I also think this needs to integrate with rather than replacing a traditional fs. I doubt this method will ever be as efficient in terms of looking up, creating, and deleting files as a traditional fs, so it would be bad for system stuff like/bin,/temp, etc. OTOH, it would be great for home directories where the user is mostly storing documents and a relatively minor performance hit isn't noticeable.
The average Linux user is a lot different from the average user. Let's face it -- Linux is for geeks, and most of us like it that way. And geeks need a C compiler.
Despite all the talk of bringing linux to the desktop, if linux becomes easier than windows, as the article suggested it should, most linux users probably won't like it much.
I internet at a web shop that did this sort of thing... basically because the office was very small, so there half-height cubes all around the edges and a couple desks in the middle of the floor. You could see everyone in the office, shout questions across the room, etc. Plus during quake games you could taunt each other without having to tie up your hands typing;-)
I found it to be a great environment to work in. Whether I was actually more productive, I'm not sure, but it was definitely more fun, which probably leads to better productivity.
UNIX is not for everyone. UNIX is apparently not for you.
But as for the ease of installation, I too have installed windows many times, and redhat a couple times. Redhat is easier! (I'm talking about the graphical install here).
It autodetects the things it should (including video card settings), then I pick the packages and it installs. Unlike windows where I have to come check on the install and see if it needs to be rebooted yet again.
UNIX may offer you nothing... but to those of us who have studied computer science, it is a really good fit. Windows is dumbed-down so that you don't need to know anything to use it, and that holds you back. With Unix, once you get over the learning curve (and there is a learning curve, even for geeks), the OS actually lets you do what you need to do.
Unix is not an OS for the mainstream, and quite likely never will be, despite redhat, KDE, gnome, etc. But for some people Unix beats any other OS out there hands down.
make, automake, and autoconf are used to automate the build/install process, so you should be basically familiar with those, especially make.
Most *nix coders just write their code in a text editor, and use make for compilation. Emacs or vi is the editor of choice (there is an ongoing holy war over this -- I love emacs but have never really used vi, so I won't invite flames by making a recommendation).
If you are programming for GNOME, you will want to learn the GTK+ toolkit, and you may want to check out Glade (an interface builder for GTK).
If you like IDEs, the only one I know of is kdevelop, I am sure there are others out there... but I have used lots of windows IDEs (VB, VC++, Visual Cafe), and I find that a well-configured emacs/make beats all of them hands down. There is a rather steep learning curve, however.
I have used koffice (mostly kword) a bit and find it to be pretty decent. Unfortunately it is really lacking in filters. It imports word but does not export, and the filter chokes on complicated tables and formatting.
Since I have to share files with word users, and do all my printing from windows b/c my printer won't work in linux, I have mostly stuck to word 97 with wine, but my initial impression is that koffice is pretty decent. And, unlike staroffice, it doesn't take over my entire desktop or eat up all my memory.
It says that Nader hasn't previously made a statement about encryption, so his staff (who prepared the responses) weren't able to quote him on it.
I think that all of these responses are just recycled quotes (I know some of them are, I've seen them elsewhere). Which is fine with me, they still reflect his positions... although a few didn't seem to really answer the questions at hand.
I think that's the idea of the much-hyped (on/. at least) Indrema. Check out the interview about this a couple days back... it runs Linux, and the SDK is free (and also open source, I believe). They are counting on that as their big selling point.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a privilege to create and sell a product. It is a privilege to be granted an artificial monopoly on said product because you invented it.
Patents and IP in general are not god-given rights (or any other sort of rights). They are privileges, created by governments to further the public good by encouraging innovation. When patents are used to restrict the public good (ie keeping medicine from dying people in Africa), they should be thrown out the window.
It's called kmozilla. You can get it from debian unstable, or problem as an RPM for redhat. Once it's installed, you can switch the rendering engine on the fly from KHTML to Gecko.
The only difference I've noticed is that kmozilla uses really tiny fonts, and seems to ignore the "minimum font size" setting. I had the same problem with galeon, as it turns out.
Obviously, C is just being used as a metaphor for the Divine Language of the Great Programmer, which cannot be comprehended by mere mortals or compiled on our measly computers.
Some of us are looking for Java--. Not compiling to bytecode is a _good_ thing, because the program will run faster. I got the impression from the spec that D is supposed to be as fast (at least) as C++, something that java will never do.
Also, while java's "extensive standard API" does do just about everything for you, which is nice, it is also bloated, confusing, sometimes self-contradictory (ie try iterating over the keys vs values of a Hashtable... last I checked they use completely different APIs), and annoying to use.
Well, there's kpackage... just double-click the .rpm, and then click "Install" on the resulting dialog.
Of course, finding the dependencies could be a pain.
And then there's apt + stormpkg (or gnome-apt).
Just type the name of the software, it will search for it, and click "install"
It's not "standard" in the sense of the same across all distros, but who cares? If you set up an office with all debian, and only give them gnome-apt, how then how are the users going to be confused by the other options?
The article you mention was posted on /. a few weeks back. Go read the discussion that happened then to find out all of the reasons why this study is absolutely meaningless.
Quick summary: no mention of bitrate, or audio equipment used, and the test was not done in a blind fashion.
Don't forget that .net is going to have a centralized infrastructure, owned (of source), by
MS.
So, even if people using Linux/Mono as both the client and the server, they are still authenticating through Passport and so forth... which means MS is in control and will be able to make a cut from it.
...has a 10-day return policy for PC games. I have never had any trouble making a return, as long as I save the receipt, and it's come in handy on several occassions.
I knew people who used to buy games, beat them within 10 days, then return them and move on to the next game...
There is a "fancy gui" in the form of a gtk/gnome frontend to apt-get.
Also, apt-get has the option to download and compile source packages. I think it takes a couple more steps than the ports system, but it's not terribly complicated AFAIK (anyone wi/ more deb experience want to comment?)
This _doesn't_ free you from dependence on an OS, which is the real problem. The only thing I can see it being useful for is taking someone else's compiled program and translating it. If you have the source, you can just recompile.
The only problem there is that the license probably prevents. While it would be neat if this could be used to make, say, windows, run on new processor X, even if it was technically feasible, this probably counts as dissasembly/modification and therefore is not allowed by the EULA.
I don't think the original poster (teg) was arguing that they weren't free... just that they are impractical for a distribution. RedHat needs to be able to distribute all the software in the distributions as RPMS, _and_ they need to be able to fix security holes promptly, and distribute those fixes as RPMS as well.
So, if there was a hole in djbdns, and the original author doesn't fix it (or doesn't fix it fast enough), RedHat is out of luck because they can't distribute their own fix as an RPM. There's also the issue of not being able to relocate files when you package it, which is also annoying to a distro maker trying to organize things consistently.
Now, the chance of a security hole in djbdns may be really small. I'm not familiar with the software myself. But, I can see why RedHat wants to have the ability to respond flexibly to holes if they do occur.
The article mentions only that HavenCo is "developing platforms for anonymous activity", but then the rest of the article is about file sharing of music/movies. That seems to imply that HavenCo is somehow involved in file sharing (as does the summary here, but we know how accurate that is).
Does anyone know if HavenCo actually has any involvement in file sharing?
Socialism reduces the freedom of the privileged few to make ungodly amounts of money that they have no real use for anyway. On the other hand, it increases the freedom of the disadvantaged masses to live their lives. It frees them from the need to work long hours under bad conditions just to feed their families.
It's easy for tech workers to forget that not everyone has it so easy in life. But some day the number of workers will catch up with the number of jobs, and tech workers will lose their privileged position.
I rather like this idea, but I see one huge flaw in it: free markets are based fundamentally on rationality, and to behave rationally, you have to be informed. But in general, most people are not informed about what is being done with their personal information, and moreover, in a lot of cases it is impossible to be informed.
In order for this to work, sites that use personal information need to make their privacy policies publicly available (before they grab your personal info), and actually stick to those policies. That way you can make the choice about your privacy.
The article addressed this to a certain extent but sort of glossed over it. I don't think that the mechanisms are in place for people to make informed choices about privacy at the moment, and I'm not sure that they ever will be.
On the other hand, I don't think government regulation is going to work for this issue any more than it has worked for anything else on the net.
As a kid we used to have a couple of board games by a sort of new-agey company. They were cooperative and environmentally oriented. In one you played as beavers, trying to store up food for the winter and build a dam, and the other was bees.
Unfortunately I can't remember the names of the games or the company. I have no idea if they are still around, either.
You don't seem to be terribly familiar with the Free Software movement. For many people, the choice to use free software is as much a moral choice as anything else.
Personally, I use linux because it doesn't crash and I can get under the hood and tinker with the OS and all my apps. But a lot of people use it because it's free.
Check out the GNU homepage for more info.
I don't think the idea is to totally lose the OS, but just to get rid of the OS existing as an application. I think the use of the term OS in this article is misleading to *nix folks, tho. It sounds like they are really talking about the desktop/window manager.
As I read it, you would still have the OS providing common services, including basic GUI elements. It sounds to me like the article is proposing the equivalent of KDE or Gnome, but without a desktop and panel. Instead you would start an app and it basically takes over and is the only thing you see until you switch to another app.
Personally I would still take my PC as it is now, but I think the _vast_ majority of computer users (the ones who don't care about computers, but like to used word and IE), would find this a better solution.
This sounds really cool, but it seems there could be some problems with implementation. If you build category listings dynamically, this drastically slows down tasks like a simple directory listing (or even locating a file by name), because you start having to do searches. Of course you can speed this up wi/ good indexing, but you still have to pull those indices off the disk and do a fair amount of processing.
/bin, /temp, etc. OTOH, it would be great for home directories where the user is mostly storing documents and a relatively minor performance hit isn't noticeable.
You might be able to build some of the categories statically, but if your fs is truly fluid, then the number of possible categories is gonna be too huge to build and maintain statically. Maybe it needs to be a little less liquid, or maybe you can find a way to indentify commonly accessed files/categories and build that stuff statically, then do everything else dynamically.
I also think this needs to integrate with rather than replacing a traditional fs. I doubt this method will ever be as efficient in terms of looking up, creating, and deleting files as a traditional fs, so it would be bad for system stuff like
The average Linux user is a lot different from the average user. Let's face it -- Linux is for geeks, and most of us like it that way. And geeks need a C compiler.
Despite all the talk of bringing linux to the desktop, if linux becomes easier than windows, as the article suggested it should, most linux users probably won't like it much.
I internet at a web shop that did this sort of thing... basically because the office was very small, so there half-height cubes all around the edges and a couple desks in the middle of the floor. You could see everyone in the office, shout questions across the room, etc. Plus during quake games you could taunt each other without having to tie up your hands typing ;-)
I found it to be a great environment to work in. Whether I was actually more productive, I'm not sure, but it was definitely more fun, which probably leads to better productivity.
UNIX is not for everyone. UNIX is apparently not for you.
But as for the ease of installation, I too have installed windows many times, and redhat a couple times. Redhat is easier! (I'm talking about the graphical install here).
It autodetects the things it should (including video card settings), then I pick the packages and it installs. Unlike windows where I have to come check on the install and see if it needs to be rebooted yet again.
UNIX may offer you nothing... but to those of us who have studied computer science, it is a really good fit. Windows is dumbed-down so that you don't need to know anything to use it, and that holds you back. With Unix, once you get over the learning curve (and there is a learning curve, even for geeks), the OS actually lets you do what you need to do.
Unix is not an OS for the mainstream, and quite likely never will be, despite redhat, KDE, gnome, etc. But for some people Unix beats any other OS out there hands down.
make, automake, and autoconf are used to automate the build/install process, so you should be basically familiar with those, especially make.
Most *nix coders just write their code in a text editor, and use make for compilation. Emacs or vi is the editor of choice (there is an ongoing holy war over this -- I love emacs but have never really used vi, so I won't invite flames by making a recommendation).
If you are programming for GNOME, you will want to learn the GTK+ toolkit, and you may want to check out Glade (an interface builder for GTK).
If you like IDEs, the only one I know of is kdevelop, I am sure there are others out there... but I have used lots of windows IDEs (VB, VC++, Visual Cafe), and I find that a well-configured emacs/make beats all of them hands down. There is a rather steep learning curve, however.
Good luck.
I have used koffice (mostly kword) a bit and find it to be pretty decent. Unfortunately it is really lacking in filters. It imports word but does not export, and the filter chokes on complicated tables and formatting.
Since I have to share files with word users, and do all my printing from windows b/c my printer won't work in linux, I have mostly stuck to word 97 with wine, but my initial impression is that koffice is pretty decent. And, unlike staroffice, it doesn't take over my entire desktop or eat up all my memory.
It says that Nader hasn't previously made a statement about encryption, so his staff (who prepared the responses) weren't able to quote him on it.
I think that all of these responses are just recycled quotes (I know some of them are, I've seen them elsewhere). Which is fine with me, they still reflect his positions... although a few didn't seem to really answer the questions at hand.
I think that's the idea of the much-hyped (on /. at least) Indrema. Check out the interview about this a couple days back... it runs Linux, and the SDK is free (and also open source, I believe). They are counting on that as their big selling point.