China's respect for human rights and their software usage are totally unrelated issues.
It is a good thing they choose other software than Microsoft, for this will create serious competition in a monopolistic market. This will stimulate innovation and will drive prices down in the long run.
The Human Right issue is of course a serious one and should be dicussed at any UN summit over and over again, as should the illegal detention of outlawed warriors on Guantanamo Bay for that matter.
The article refers to a report which is already available in german and will be available in english soon. The german report is 91 pages and addresses all your questions in perfect detail.
On page 8 they point out that a usability analysis usaualy consists of 10 to 20 "testpersonen", but that they increased this amount for the linux testing group dramatically in order to be able to analyse differences between users or what they call Nutzentypen.
The researches find those differences indeed and expand on them on pages 74 through 77.
They test on 10 tasks ranging from writing some text in a wordprocessor to burning a document to CD. It occurs to me this is a very well designed and planned usability test.
Check you facts; this article is hardly unsubstantiated.
Updating software is not trivial because it X + A + B is not equal X + B + A : the update A can and will in general change something of the modification B. After a few such operations it becomes very difficult to keep track about all possible
I think with a decent package management system, X + A + B should equal X + B + A. Debian for instance refuses to install packages which contain files that already belong to other packages. If there is no overlap, you can upgrade, downgrade, reinstall all way around.
For this reason it should also be much easier to maintain a computer by upgrading, than by reinstalling it every now and then. I've been running the same Debian system for two years now, and I don't even know which version it is at. All I do is upgrade. No problemo,
In the business week article Darl McBride tries to scare (potential) OSS consumers:
I believe the way the open-source community works right now has some fundamental flaws that have got to be addressed. We need to address how this open-source intellectual property is developed, routed, and sold. Thousands of software developers send code to contribute to open-source projects -- but there isn't a protective device for the customer using the software to ensure they're not in violation of the law by using stolen code.
This might be true, IANAL. But this is no different for proprieraty, closed source code. For open and closed source alike, you cannot trace if code has illegaly been copied into it from another source. So, even if you buy a proprietary closed source application, you might as well be in violation of the law.
The makers of US cartoon family The Simpsons are facing legal action after Rio de Janeiro's tourist board complained about an episode that made fun of the city.
It showed the main character Homer being robbed by street children and kidnapped by an unlicensed taxi, and monkeys overrunning an orphanage in the Brazilian city.
The tourist board said it could take a joke - but that the episode went too far and undermined an £18m (£12.5m) advertising campaign to attract visitors to the city.
Although the common believe is that less typing force results in less RSI, I have problem believing that.
From my experience as a computer user I rather have an old rigid keyboard, than this new FingerBoard.
Old keyboard force you to enlarge your movements while typing. These new keyboard make those movements smaller. But it are those subtle movements that in my experience cause the pain.
This is just my two cents, and if anyone has decent scientific research on this subject that would change my mind, I would be glad to see it.
These organisations piss me off! I'm living in Holland and the Europian Championship of soccer has just finished. It's incredible how many basic human rights they (and our governments) have trembled upon. People didn't have access to Belgium and Holland if they had some record of being a hooligan. People could be arrested for a few hours although they hadn't done anything (yet). But also other things: other advertisers than the official sponsors were not allowed around the stadions. Firms using the colours of Euro 2000 (the organising party) in they logo's were sued. The reason, so thay say, it that sport is such a wondefull thing, which should be protected. The real reason is because they want to make money.
Same thing will happen with the IOC, this is just the beginning.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, isn't this like saying that the temperature tomorrow will either be lower of higher than today?
This is an exact quote of the last paragraph of the article mentioned! The post doesn't contain any news
China's respect for human rights and their software usage are totally unrelated issues.
It is a good thing they choose other software than Microsoft, for this will create serious competition in a monopolistic market. This will stimulate innovation and will drive prices down in the long run.
The Human Right issue is of course a serious one and should be dicussed at any UN summit over and over again, as should the illegal detention of outlawed warriors on Guantanamo Bay for that matter.
The article refers to a report which is already available in german and will be available in english soon. The german report is 91 pages and addresses all your questions in perfect detail.
On page 8 they point out that a usability analysis usaualy consists of 10 to 20 "testpersonen", but that they increased this amount for the linux testing group dramatically in order to be able to analyse differences between users or what they call Nutzentypen. The researches find those differences indeed and expand on them on pages 74 through 77.
They test on 10 tasks ranging from writing some text in a wordprocessor to burning a document to CD. It occurs to me this is a very well designed and planned usability test.
Check you facts; this article is hardly unsubstantiated.
I want to install my system and keep it up-to-date and want to never have to re-install it (unless the box was compromised of course).
And exactly because Debian is so easy to keep up-to-date, the whole discussion about its complex installer is void.
With debian you go through the hassle of installing once, and keep up-to-date for years without any pain.
Though it is. The headline says Linux Tag is the largest Linux event in Europe
The Libre Software Meeting is about Free Software in general. Quite a different scope.
Updating software is not trivial because it X + A + B is not equal X + B + A : the update A can and will in general change something of the modification B. After a few such operations it becomes very difficult to keep track about all possible
I think with a decent package management system, X + A + B should equal X + B + A. Debian for instance refuses to install packages which contain files that already belong to other packages. If there is no overlap, you can upgrade, downgrade, reinstall all way around.
For this reason it should also be much easier to maintain a computer by upgrading, than by reinstalling it every now and then. I've been running the same Debian system for two years now, and I don't even know which version it is at. All I do is upgrade. No problemo,
In the business week article Darl McBride tries to scare (potential) OSS consumers:
I believe the way the open-source community works right now has some fundamental flaws that have got to be addressed. We need to address how this open-source intellectual property is developed, routed, and sold. Thousands of software developers send code to contribute to open-source projects -- but there isn't a protective device for the customer using the software to ensure they're not in violation of the law by using stolen code.
This might be true, IANAL. But this is no different for proprieraty, closed source code. For open and closed source alike, you cannot trace if code has illegaly been copied into it from another source. So, even if you buy a proprietary closed source application, you might as well be in violation of the law.
The makers of US cartoon family The Simpsons are facing legal action after Rio de Janeiro's tourist board complained about an episode that made fun of the city.
It showed the main character Homer being robbed by street children and kidnapped by an unlicensed taxi, and monkeys overrunning an orphanage in the Brazilian city.
The tourist board said it could take a joke - but that the episode went too far and undermined an £18m (£12.5m) advertising campaign to attract visitors to the city.
iTunes2 synchronizes data between the iPod and your computer's hd.
So, if you don't have an iPod or your iPod holds no data, everything is erased from your hd in the process of synchronizing.
Seems very obvious this is a feature.
[...] enhances the link analysis idea [...]
Although the common believe is that less typing force results in less RSI, I have problem believing that.
From my experience as a computer user I rather have an old rigid keyboard, than this new FingerBoard.
Old keyboard force you to enlarge your movements while typing. These new keyboard make those movements smaller. But it are those subtle movements that in my experience cause the pain.
This is just my two cents, and if anyone has decent scientific research on this subject that would change my mind, I would be glad to see it.
These organisations piss me off! I'm living in Holland and the Europian Championship of soccer has just finished.
It's incredible how many basic human rights they (and our governments) have trembled upon. People didn't have access to Belgium and Holland if they had some record of being a hooligan. People could be arrested for a few hours although they hadn't done anything (yet).
But also other things: other advertisers than the official sponsors were not allowed around the stadions. Firms using the colours of Euro 2000 (the organising party) in they logo's were sued.
The reason, so thay say, it that sport is such a wondefull thing, which should be protected. The real reason is because they want to make money.
Same thing will happen with the IOC, this is just the beginning.