cannot continue in the same spirit if users willingly give away their freedoms for the sake of convenience.
My real problem here I think is that it at least sounds as though you're claiming the perogative to make this decision for other people. If you on your own didn't want to use the binary drivers, I'd have no issue with that. However, if I want to use them and you try and insist that I shouldn't, or even worse, actually try to prevent me from doing so, I'm going to object.
Not all of us subscribe to the "100% either/or" mode of thinking that the FSF/its' fans do. Yes, obviously we want most things to remain OSS, but we're not going to think that *nothing* can be proprietary in order for FOSS software as a whole to be able to continue to exist at all. IMHO anywayz it's stupid thinking, and as I said earlier, it's based on fear.
The other difference between the FSF/its' supporters and some of the rest of us is that we don't adopt the attitude that we need to bully the rest of the planet into conforming to our every whim, merely in order to ensure that we're going to be able to co-exist with them. Again, this is erroneous, fear based thinking. It's the idea that *everything* must be FOSS in order for FOSS to continue to exist at all.
That is all nice and fine in theory, but 99% of the users would happily give up some of those freedoms (and maybe even pay) to just get the freedom to use some hardware with an OS other than Windows. I am one of them.
I don't look at it in terms of giving up freedom, and I prefer myself anyway to try and avoid talking about it in those terms, because that simply gives cultists like the parent's author ammunition to think of us as moral degenerates.
The real problem with the FSF's perspective is that, apart from anything else, it absolutely stinks of fear. In Stallman's mind there is only room in the world for one perspective; his own. He thinks that if people are not completely uncompromising and unquestioning in their adoption of his perspective, that we are all doomed to a situation of total corporate fascism; it's a case of giving corporations way too much credit, and everyone else not nearly enough.
The man is nowhere near the visionary people claim he is...he's a blind, bigoted, autocratic moron, and his followers generally are worse. I see more evidence of that every day.
The thing that really sucks recently in particular is that if music DRM *is* abandoned, the FSF are just sufficiently delusional that they might actually try and take credit for it, rather than realising that they were actually grossly ignorant and stupid all along for ever thinking that DRM was going to be a viable means of controlling technology.
Proprietary drivers are against the spirit of the community.
And there we have it...the proverbial totally emotive, BS subjective abstraction which means exactly zero.
If we want to talk about emotions, I can also talk about how I'm still figuring out how to control mine over the fact that attitudes like the above still exist. The real problem is that if you're the type that the above comment leads me to suspect you are, you really deeply believe that you're right thinking the way you do. You're not aware that attitudes like the above only really serve as a massive impediment and obstacle, or how misguided and utterly induced via mind control such perspectives are. If you're like the usual individual on here who holds such attitudes, try consciously realising that such ideas (and I use that word loosely, here) aren't actually yours. They're Richard Stallman's, which you've adopted entirely uncritically because of how much easier it is for you to use his brain in leiu of your own.
Fifth, it's not permissible. You may not appreciate the work ethic behind Linux, but I guarantee you that the thousands of people that coded long, arduous hours to bring you the system upon which you now work are damn well aware of the conditions under which they make available their code.
It's them having this type of attitude which makes me wish that assembling a distro was a lot easier. That way people could still use a FOSS operating system without having to put up with tyrannical fanaticism. If more people had the ability to assemble their own, when such zealots tried to control their behaviour on the basis that the zealots felt they were owed something, said other people could tell the zealots to shut up and go away.
This however is what a lot of people in the "Linux community" desperately need, in my observation. They need to be told to disappear...Loudly, consistently, and repeatedly...until they actually do so.
There's no genuinely sane reason for this, and all it does is greatly inconvenience total newbs...the exact group Ubuntu ostensibly is meant to target.
Ubuntu needs to find a way to continue development work while not allowing zealots to have influence...because it will only hurt the distribution in the long term.
I've been reading recently about how there are plans to scrap music DRM entirely, which I knew was going to happen all along, once the companies figured out how unpopular it was. The zealots think they're right about a lot of the Doomsday predictions they make...but the reality is that they virtually never are.
If the music industry ends up deciding to scrap DRM on its' own, that will be a tremendous opportunity for us to tell the FSF and the fanatical element of the Debian Project to STFU once and for all...I say we take it.
...is a version of the Sims 2 rewritten so that the Sims have a much greater degree of genuine autonomy, and for said version to be run without human intervention (and recorded) for a period of months or years on a multiple TFlop system. If the environment was made a lot more detailed than it is in the retail version of the game, and if the Sims were given somewhat more capacity for learning than what they've currently got, something tells me the results of such an experiment might be extremely interesting, given enough time.
Ugh. One guy is protecting criminals, and the other abandoned his men in order to make a political statement. Both of them are despicable scumbags, although if I had to choose one of them to beat the snot out of, it'd definitely be Deserter Watada.
Yes...because as we all know, The Government Is Always Right. You are a naive, brainless sheep...and I can only hope that eventually you're one of the people who gets shafted by the government yourself. Maybe then you might learn something.
The FSF have wanted to do similar things before, acting as a trustee for software that was listed as part of the GNU project. Their recent attitude towards Novell however, among other things, should give you some idea of whether collaborating with them on this is a good idea.
The end goal here is not legal "safety in numbers," as they might claim. It's control, pure and simple. You only need to look at how they behave, and how they want to bar access to software they already control to people they don't like, in order to see the truth of this. Remember Bruce Perens' veiled threats to Novell? I'm going to probably get the usual brainwashed GNU/cultists replying to this and attempting to justify that attitude in various ways, but as far as I'm concerned there is no justification. Control is control, and the ends do not justify the means. As I said then, those sorts of threats are more in line with what we expect Steve Ballmer to use.
Ulrich Drepper was dead right in calling Richard Stallman a raving megalomaniac; that's exactly what he is. The end goal of the FSF is to establish a software monoculture of their own, which they have complete control over, and which they can completely dictate use of. They also seek the marginalisation of alternatives. (The BSDs) Stallman doesn't want computer users to have anywhere to run.
The FSF's cheerleading squad on here can talk about how wonderful they are as much you want. The truth is nowhere near as attractive.
I really wish the Pirate Bay site was not moving to Sealand. All any country containing a lobby that disapproves of Sealand-based activities needs to do is deploy a single troop ship from their country's Navy. Given the flotilla's small size, I doubt it would survive more than three sufficiently large shells at most. End of story.
If Sealand is still under the jurisdiction of the UK, then eventually its' activities will bother the EU and various other people that I could imagine Prime Minister Wormtongue ordering an action similar to the above. According to Wikipedia, Sealand's sovereignty is not recognised, and it is still legally considered the property of the UK.
If, on the other hand, Sealand ever does somehow manage to gain its' own sovereignty, (which is extremely unlikely) said naval vessel in the above scenario could belong to one of any number of other countries, although most likely America.
Please cease and desist engaging in blatantly populist, prostitutional behaviour. It is deeply unbecoming, and reveals that as a company, you are largely devoid of self-respect.
More seriously, I wish people in general would stop trying to curry favour with the FSF and the associated cultists. Apart from anything else, it causes the FSF and said supporting cultists to continue to hold the unfortunate delusion that they're actually important, when the reality is that people generally do it merely in order to vainly attempt to shut the FSF up. It's exactly the same strategy of appeasement that Neville Chamberlain tried to use with Hitler, and we all know how well that worked out.
Trying to appease tyrants never works; it simply causes them to believe that you're afraid of them and thus that they can abuse you more. Capitulating to Stallman's tyranny isn't the answer...the answer is to firmly and collectively tell him to take a running jump.
You haven't been paying attention. Anti-semitism, Holocaust Denial and outright jew hatred are now pretty much mainstream on sites like Daily Kos and DU.
The Daily Kos is about as mainstream as the FSF.;) That is to say, it's on the radar of archetypical Marxist looney tunes, while those of us to the right of Trotsky quietly try to forget that it exists.
Nobody, whether it be Democrat or Republican, gets into office unless they are fundamentally a sock puppet that can be controlled by the genuine powers that be. Democratic supporters in particular have a tendency to be horrifically childlike and naive in their desperate need to believe that the American political system is still genuinely functional. It isn't.
The proverbial man behind the curtain is who is genuinely in power, and he never gets voted out. With the Presidency, the only person you're really voting for is the guy who has to take the blame on the frequent occasions when the man behind the curtain screws up.
I just watched a video yesterday where Nick was talking about his situation. This was only a few days after having watched a video from someone else, TheAmazingAtheist, which was a critical rant about Christianity.
Personally, I'm getting just as sick of fearful, ranting atheists as I am of militant monotheists who insist that everyone must subscribe to their beliefs or die. I don't believe for one moment that YouTube should be silencing only the atheists and allowing Muslims and Christians to continue to speak, but I'd have no problem at all with it if they were impartial in shutting both groups up. Their debate is entirely subjective and emotional on both sides and benefits nobody.
Both groups need to accept that other people have every right to their own beliefs, and that if we don't want to accept their belief system, that that is a valid choice. I will also admit to being less sympathetic towards Islam in this situation; Muslims have never been willing to accept the idea that other people should not have to accept their belief system, and I really feel that the only reason why the atheists are being as vocal as they are is because of how threatened they are feeling. There are some atheists who think that the only way that their belief system can survive is if monotheism ceases to exist. Richard Dawkins is only the most prominent of these, but there are many others as we're seeing here.
The Islamic world needs to accept once and for all the fact that, apart from anything else, the non-Islamic world is several times larger than it is. It would also seriously help Muslims' case if they'd stop behaving quite so much like the Borg. Resistance in this case fairly evidently is not futile; Charlemagne and the Knights of Malta were among the first to prove that, and other members of the non-Islamic world have managed to fairly consistently demonstrate it since.
To both groups, I say this. You can keep your own beliefs yourselves, but I am not either atheistic or Islamic, I have no desire to be, and I'm not going to be. Deal with it.
I also have no real sympathy for Nick Gisburne as an individual...from everything I've seen, the guy is a whining pain in the neck, and I can also remember thinking what a truly moronic jackass TheAmazingAtheist was when I was watching his rant a few days ago. The rest of you might say that Gisburne being obnoxious as an individual isn't the point here, and that it's free speech as a principle that's at stake. What you're not seeing is that as someone else said, YouTube aren't a government, and Nick also wasn't paying them for the hosting service. He has plenty of other options for hosting his material, archive.org and p2p being only the two most immediately apparent.
1) Open source UNIX is the future, long term. OSX, and to a lesser extent, Linux, will continue to be the public, lowest common denominator face of that. The BSDs will continue to have a place for people who care more about technical quality and aren't simply looking for a *nix based Windows clone. Barring the appearance of another alternative, (which definitely needs to happen) OSX will probably inherit the bulk of the consumer space after the demise of Windows/Microsoft, although Apple need to start making a lot more intelligent decisions before it can happen. If there is a mainstream move to Apple, it will be out of necessity, due to OSX being the least-bad option as far as the mainstream end user is concerned...not because it is what most people will want. Linux in my own opinion is not going to become a genuinely mainstream end user operating system any time soon, despite what some of its' advocates might want. The death of the FSF is the single main thing that would need to happen to enable mainstream adoption of Linux.
2) We'll either come up with a global form of/substitute for assembler at some stage, or the 8086/its' derivatives will become so completely dominant that we won't have to. Said global form is not, in my own opinion, likely to be C as some have speculated.
3) In terms of interfaces, at some point (probably beginning around 10 years out) we'll figure out how to make 3D work for us. (And I mean really work; not cosmetic crap like Beryl or Aero, but interfaces which involve a genuinely 3D environment...something more like Croquet) I don't know what that looks like yet...and to be honest, I don't think anyone else really does either. I don't believe it's going to ultimately resemble the Gibsonian "Matrix" model at all, (at least superficially) mainly because such is far too complex for mainstream use. Graphically/visually speaking, Gibson's and the other earlier VR models were conceptualised via modernism, which is now long dead. If the existing pattern holds true, you'll probably see the interface prototyped within experimental games like Black and White (which used gestures very widely) or Spore, (whose development of a direct object-manipulation interface I think stands to have implications that will reach much further than just that game itself) and then backported out to the operating system itself.
4) Microsoft will largely cease to exist at some point between 2015 and 2025. I use a ten year bracket there because given the size of the company's cash reserves and the number of other variables, an exact date is impossible to predict with any certainty. We're not going to see a reduced consultancy role for the company post-monopoly like IBM, either...in the case of Microsoft there is far too much hostility and too many people with an active desire to see the death of the company. Vista is going to greatly exacerbate and speed the sinking process, and I think hindsight will allow us to see that with Vista being the abomination that it is, Microsoft have squandered their last real opportunity to create a scenario where they might have been able to survive, long term.
5) The arrival of 64 bit is going to be an entry in the "so what?" category. It's a phased, incremental upgrade; people will quietly buy 64 bit machines, the various operating systems will quietly release 64 bit ports, and the world will keep turning without interruption on that score.
6) The microkernel model will remain the road less travelled for kernel development, mainly because of its' degree of difficulty to implement. A less intelligent but more simple hybrid monolithic/modular kernel, making a gradual transition towards being more service oriented, a la Plan 9, will I think take shape. Professor Tanenbaum might well have been right in his opinion that a microkernel was technically superior, but at the end of the day, having something that works well is going to be trumped by the need to have something that works at all. This was again proven by
That which is worthwhile survives...that which is not, passes away.
As I've written before, Wikipedia lost its' way quite some time ago now. I'm guessing that if few people are contributing financially, it's because people who otherwise might contribute are realising that their money would not go to something genuinely worth paying for.
The Wiki in general was one of the forerunner fads of Web 2.0, but it seems to have faded in the same way that a lot of things do. People realised that having anyone being able to edit articles interfered with their biases and prejudices, which they didn't want. People being able to write anything means that people can potentially write the truth...which was certain to become terminally unpopular sooner or later, given human nature.
Wikipedia has proven that it is unable to live with integrity...so it should be allowed to die.
Although I haven't played Gears of War, I am a very happy owner of boxed copies of Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and Unreal Tournament 2004. The games are fantastic, the editor is even better, and they're produced by a group of extremely creative, intelligent, and generally wonderful human beings.
If you don't have a copy of any of the UT series, I strongly recommend them...the original UT is probably the best of the lot, but UT 2004 is also very enjoyable. If you get the original UT, I also like the Bullet Time and Unreal4Ever modifications, both of which were still available from FilePlanet last time I checked. There are also some fantastic user-made maps here, and the community there are interesting and very talented people.
It's a major pain in the rear end...it took me close to a month.
Blizz either need to make it cheaper, or better educate people on earning gold in the game. Personally though, I think they should try and avoid having any single item cost more than 50g at the absolute most...cos that way people would have much less incentive to buy from gold farmers.
Justice is whatever society says it is, so there's no problem here.
Atheistic relativism is fun, isn't it kids?;)
Let me ask...if it becomes widely accepted within your society, (hypothetically speaking of course!) that armed paramilitary goons kicking your front door down and blowing your brains out all over your living room carpet for pretty much whatever reason they feel like is part of the definition of justice, I'm assuming, based on your comment here, that you'd have no problem with that whatsoever.
I believe that the Free Software/Open Source community need eachother to an extent. You have one group at one end and the other group at the other.
I used to think that myself, before the FSF started throwing its' weight around to the degree it does currently. If they stop trying to be so dominant, I might even go back to believing it.
Apparently you are telling me that you would rather have Microsoft as a bedfellow than the FSF
No, I'm not. I'm saying that I think they're both piloted by megalomaniacs, and that I don't want any association with either.
I'm one of presumably the minority of people with autism (I was diagnosed at 16 with NLD after the usual traumatic experience with the neurotypical education system) who'd love to be cured myself, if such a thing became available. Autism is a genetic aberration and a curse, for the most part, and needs to be seen as such. Being autistic is neither glamorous or enjoyable, and the only people who try and see it as a blessing are those who wish to gain some extra privelege over and above the normal population, as members of yet another minority. The neurotypical population sees us as the proverbial sewer-dwelling mutants for a reason; it's because we genuinely are.
I've also written numerous times that I believe that the overwhelming predominance of autism in the Linux community is the single main thing holding Linux as an operating system back. Autistics who use Linux (Stallman being primary among them) believe that their philosophical view is morally superior, when I feel that in reality it (particularly the degree of repetitive consistency of the message over time) is simply a result of their neurological disability.
The "five freedoms" aren't things Linux users care about so strongly because they're people with an inherently more developed moral sense than most people, or because of the inherent moral value of the ideas; they're things that Linux users care about to that degree because autism causes rote, uncontrollable fixations with certain concepts or areas of interest, sometimes on a long term basis. In some kids with Asperger's it's trains or a collection of toilet brushes. In the case of Stallman and the Debian developers, it's a perverted definition of software freedom. The fixation is with an abstract concept rather than physical objects, but that's about the only difference.
Can someone tell me what the technical differences are between commercial UNIXes and Linux? I read Solaris was based on BSD, so that one's obvious...but what about the others?
I'm assuming obviously that of course there are driver differences and so on as well...but are there any major architectural differences?
Slashdot Mirror
cannot continue in the same spirit if users willingly give away their freedoms for the sake of convenience.
My real problem here I think is that it at least sounds as though you're claiming the perogative to make this decision for other people. If you on your own didn't want to use the binary drivers, I'd have no issue with that. However, if I want to use them and you try and insist that I shouldn't, or even worse, actually try to prevent me from doing so, I'm going to object.
Not all of us subscribe to the "100% either/or" mode of thinking that the FSF/its' fans do. Yes, obviously we want most things to remain OSS, but we're not going to think that *nothing* can be proprietary in order for FOSS software as a whole to be able to continue to exist at all. IMHO anywayz it's stupid thinking, and as I said earlier, it's based on fear.
The other difference between the FSF/its' supporters and some of the rest of us is that we don't adopt the attitude that we need to bully the rest of the planet into conforming to our every whim, merely in order to ensure that we're going to be able to co-exist with them. Again, this is erroneous, fear based thinking. It's the idea that *everything* must be FOSS in order for FOSS to continue to exist at all.
That is all nice and fine in theory, but 99% of the users would happily give up some of those freedoms (and maybe even pay) to just get the freedom to use some hardware with an OS other than Windows. I am one of them.
I don't look at it in terms of giving up freedom, and I prefer myself anyway to try and avoid talking about it in those terms, because that simply gives cultists like the parent's author ammunition to think of us as moral degenerates.
The real problem with the FSF's perspective is that, apart from anything else, it absolutely stinks of fear. In Stallman's mind there is only room in the world for one perspective; his own. He thinks that if people are not completely uncompromising and unquestioning in their adoption of his perspective, that we are all doomed to a situation of total corporate fascism; it's a case of giving corporations way too much credit, and everyone else not nearly enough.
The man is nowhere near the visionary people claim he is...he's a blind, bigoted, autocratic moron, and his followers generally are worse. I see more evidence of that every day.
The thing that really sucks recently in particular is that if music DRM *is* abandoned, the FSF are just sufficiently delusional that they might actually try and take credit for it, rather than realising that they were actually grossly ignorant and stupid all along for ever thinking that DRM was going to be a viable means of controlling technology.
Proprietary drivers are against the spirit of the community.
And there we have it...the proverbial totally emotive, BS subjective abstraction which means exactly zero.
If we want to talk about emotions, I can also talk about how I'm still figuring out how to control mine over the fact that attitudes like the above still exist. The real problem is that if you're the type that the above comment leads me to suspect you are, you really deeply believe that you're right thinking the way you do. You're not aware that attitudes like the above only really serve as a massive impediment and obstacle, or how misguided and utterly induced via mind control such perspectives are. If you're like the usual individual on here who holds such attitudes, try consciously realising that such ideas (and I use that word loosely, here) aren't actually yours. They're Richard Stallman's, which you've adopted entirely uncritically because of how much easier it is for you to use his brain in leiu of your own.
Fifth, it's not permissible. You may not appreciate the work ethic behind Linux, but I guarantee you that the thousands of people that coded long, arduous hours to bring you the system upon which you now work are damn well aware of the conditions under which they make available their code.
It's them having this type of attitude which makes me wish that assembling a distro was a lot easier. That way people could still use a FOSS operating system without having to put up with tyrannical fanaticism. If more people had the ability to assemble their own, when such zealots tried to control their behaviour on the basis that the zealots felt they were owed something, said other people could tell the zealots to shut up and go away.
This however is what a lot of people in the "Linux community" desperately need, in my observation. They need to be told to disappear...Loudly, consistently, and repeatedly...until they actually do so.
I don't understand why we can't use proprietary drivers if they exist.
Because the FSF and the reactionary, brainwashed morons who support them also want control over what everyone else does, is why.
"Free as in do as I say."
There's no genuinely sane reason for this, and all it does is greatly inconvenience total newbs...the exact group Ubuntu ostensibly is meant to target.
Ubuntu needs to find a way to continue development work while not allowing zealots to have influence...because it will only hurt the distribution in the long term.
I've been reading recently about how there are plans to scrap music DRM entirely, which I knew was going to happen all along, once the companies figured out how unpopular it was. The zealots think they're right about a lot of the Doomsday predictions they make...but the reality is that they virtually never are.
If the music industry ends up deciding to scrap DRM on its' own, that will be a tremendous opportunity for us to tell the FSF and the fanatical element of the Debian Project to STFU once and for all...I say we take it.
...for the anthem of Windows Vista.
...is a version of the Sims 2 rewritten so that the Sims have a much greater degree of genuine autonomy, and for said version to be run without human intervention (and recorded) for a period of months or years on a multiple TFlop system. If the environment was made a lot more detailed than it is in the retail version of the game, and if the Sims were given somewhat more capacity for learning than what they've currently got, something tells me the results of such an experiment might be extremely interesting, given enough time.
Ugh. One guy is protecting criminals, and the other abandoned his men in order to make a political statement. Both of them are despicable scumbags, although if I had to choose one of them to beat the snot out of, it'd definitely be Deserter Watada.
Yes...because as we all know, The Government Is Always Right. You are a naive, brainless sheep...and I can only hope that eventually you're one of the people who gets shafted by the government yourself. Maybe then you might learn something.
All we need is one firm to blow the whistle & M$ is in a world of hurt.
Not with Bush's judicial branch, they won't be. The antitrust case against them was dropped around five minutes after the Chimp took office.
The FSF have wanted to do similar things before, acting as a trustee for software that was listed as part of the GNU project. Their recent attitude towards Novell however, among other things, should give you some idea of whether collaborating with them on this is a good idea.
The end goal here is not legal "safety in numbers," as they might claim. It's control, pure and simple. You only need to look at how they behave, and how they want to bar access to software they already control to people they don't like, in order to see the truth of this. Remember Bruce Perens' veiled threats to Novell? I'm going to probably get the usual brainwashed GNU/cultists replying to this and attempting to justify that attitude in various ways, but as far as I'm concerned there is no justification. Control is control, and the ends do not justify the means. As I said then, those sorts of threats are more in line with what we expect Steve Ballmer to use.
Ulrich Drepper was dead right in calling Richard Stallman a raving megalomaniac; that's exactly what he is. The end goal of the FSF is to establish a software monoculture of their own, which they have complete control over, and which they can completely dictate use of. They also seek the marginalisation of alternatives. (The BSDs) Stallman doesn't want computer users to have anywhere to run.
The FSF's cheerleading squad on here can talk about how wonderful they are as much you want. The truth is nowhere near as attractive.
I really wish the Pirate Bay site was not moving to Sealand. All any country containing a lobby that disapproves of Sealand-based activities needs to do is deploy a single troop ship from their country's Navy. Given the flotilla's small size, I doubt it would survive more than three sufficiently large shells at most. End of story.
If Sealand is still under the jurisdiction of the UK, then eventually its' activities will bother the EU and various other people that I could imagine Prime Minister Wormtongue ordering an action similar to the above. According to Wikipedia, Sealand's sovereignty is not recognised, and it is still legally considered the property of the UK.
If, on the other hand, Sealand ever does somehow manage to gain its' own sovereignty, (which is extremely unlikely) said naval vessel in the above scenario could belong to one of any number of other countries, although most likely America.
Please cease and desist engaging in blatantly populist, prostitutional behaviour. It is deeply unbecoming, and reveals that as a company, you are largely devoid of self-respect.
More seriously, I wish people in general would stop trying to curry favour with the FSF and the associated cultists. Apart from anything else, it causes the FSF and said supporting cultists to continue to hold the unfortunate delusion that they're actually important, when the reality is that people generally do it merely in order to vainly attempt to shut the FSF up. It's exactly the same strategy of appeasement that Neville Chamberlain tried to use with Hitler, and we all know how well that worked out.
Trying to appease tyrants never works; it simply causes them to believe that you're afraid of them and thus that they can abuse you more. Capitulating to Stallman's tyranny isn't the answer...the answer is to firmly and collectively tell him to take a running jump.
You haven't been paying attention. Anti-semitism, Holocaust Denial and outright jew hatred are now pretty much mainstream on sites like Daily Kos and DU.
;) That is to say, it's on the radar of archetypical Marxist looney tunes, while those of us to the right of Trotsky quietly try to forget that it exists.
The Daily Kos is about as mainstream as the FSF.
ROFL...
I love it...absolute genius.
Nobody, whether it be Democrat or Republican, gets into office unless they are fundamentally a sock puppet that can be controlled by the genuine powers that be. Democratic supporters in particular have a tendency to be horrifically childlike and naive in their desperate need to believe that the American political system is still genuinely functional. It isn't.
The proverbial man behind the curtain is who is genuinely in power, and he never gets voted out. With the Presidency, the only person you're really voting for is the guy who has to take the blame on the frequent occasions when the man behind the curtain screws up.
I just watched a video yesterday where Nick was talking about his situation. This was only a few days after having watched a video from someone else, TheAmazingAtheist, which was a critical rant about Christianity.
Personally, I'm getting just as sick of fearful, ranting atheists as I am of militant monotheists who insist that everyone must subscribe to their beliefs or die. I don't believe for one moment that YouTube should be silencing only the atheists and allowing Muslims and Christians to continue to speak, but I'd have no problem at all with it if they were impartial in shutting both groups up. Their debate is entirely subjective and emotional on both sides and benefits nobody.
Both groups need to accept that other people have every right to their own beliefs, and that if we don't want to accept their belief system, that that is a valid choice. I will also admit to being less sympathetic towards Islam in this situation; Muslims have never been willing to accept the idea that other people should not have to accept their belief system, and I really feel that the only reason why the atheists are being as vocal as they are is because of how threatened they are feeling. There are some atheists who think that the only way that their belief system can survive is if monotheism ceases to exist. Richard Dawkins is only the most prominent of these, but there are many others as we're seeing here.
The Islamic world needs to accept once and for all the fact that, apart from anything else, the non-Islamic world is several times larger than it is. It would also seriously help Muslims' case if they'd stop behaving quite so much like the Borg. Resistance in this case fairly evidently is not futile; Charlemagne and the Knights of Malta were among the first to prove that, and other members of the non-Islamic world have managed to fairly consistently demonstrate it since.
To both groups, I say this. You can keep your own beliefs yourselves, but I am not either atheistic or Islamic, I have no desire to be, and I'm not going to be. Deal with it.
I also have no real sympathy for Nick Gisburne as an individual...from everything I've seen, the guy is a whining pain in the neck, and I can also remember thinking what a truly moronic jackass TheAmazingAtheist was when I was watching his rant a few days ago. The rest of you might say that Gisburne being obnoxious as an individual isn't the point here, and that it's free speech as a principle that's at stake. What you're not seeing is that as someone else said, YouTube aren't a government, and Nick also wasn't paying them for the hosting service. He has plenty of other options for hosting his material, archive.org and p2p being only the two most immediately apparent.
1) Open source UNIX is the future, long term. OSX, and to a lesser extent, Linux, will continue to be the public, lowest common denominator face of that. The BSDs will continue to have a place for people who care more about technical quality and aren't simply looking for a *nix based Windows clone. Barring the appearance of another alternative, (which definitely needs to happen) OSX will probably inherit the bulk of the consumer space after the demise of Windows/Microsoft, although Apple need to start making a lot more intelligent decisions before it can happen. If there is a mainstream move to Apple, it will be out of necessity, due to OSX being the least-bad option as far as the mainstream end user is concerned...not because it is what most people will want. Linux in my own opinion is not going to become a genuinely mainstream end user operating system any time soon, despite what some of its' advocates might want. The death of the FSF is the single main thing that would need to happen to enable mainstream adoption of Linux.
2) We'll either come up with a global form of/substitute for assembler at some stage, or the 8086/its' derivatives will become so completely dominant that we won't have to. Said global form is not, in my own opinion, likely to be C as some have speculated.
3) In terms of interfaces, at some point (probably beginning around 10 years out) we'll figure out how to make 3D work for us. (And I mean really work; not cosmetic crap like Beryl or Aero, but interfaces which involve a genuinely 3D environment...something more like Croquet) I don't know what that looks like yet...and to be honest, I don't think anyone else really does either. I don't believe it's going to ultimately resemble the Gibsonian "Matrix" model at all, (at least superficially) mainly because such is far too complex for mainstream use. Graphically/visually speaking, Gibson's and the other earlier VR models were conceptualised via modernism, which is now long dead. If the existing pattern holds true, you'll probably see the interface prototyped within experimental games like Black and White (which used gestures very widely) or Spore, (whose development of a direct object-manipulation interface I think stands to have implications that will reach much further than just that game itself) and then backported out to the operating system itself.
4) Microsoft will largely cease to exist at some point between 2015 and 2025. I use a ten year bracket there because given the size of the company's cash reserves and the number of other variables, an exact date is impossible to predict with any certainty. We're not going to see a reduced consultancy role for the company post-monopoly like IBM, either...in the case of Microsoft there is far too much hostility and too many people with an active desire to see the death of the company. Vista is going to greatly exacerbate and speed the sinking process, and I think hindsight will allow us to see that with Vista being the abomination that it is, Microsoft have squandered their last real opportunity to create a scenario where they might have been able to survive, long term.
5) The arrival of 64 bit is going to be an entry in the "so what?" category. It's a phased, incremental upgrade; people will quietly buy 64 bit machines, the various operating systems will quietly release 64 bit ports, and the world will keep turning without interruption on that score.
6) The microkernel model will remain the road less travelled for kernel development, mainly because of its' degree of difficulty to implement. A less intelligent but more simple hybrid monolithic/modular kernel, making a gradual transition towards being more service oriented, a la Plan 9, will I think take shape. Professor Tanenbaum might well have been right in his opinion that a microkernel was technically superior, but at the end of the day, having something that works well is going to be trumped by the need to have something that works at all. This was again proven by
That which is worthwhile survives...that which is not, passes away.
As I've written before, Wikipedia lost its' way quite some time ago now. I'm guessing that if few people are contributing financially, it's because people who otherwise might contribute are realising that their money would not go to something genuinely worth paying for.
The Wiki in general was one of the forerunner fads of Web 2.0, but it seems to have faded in the same way that a lot of things do. People realised that having anyone being able to edit articles interfered with their biases and prejudices, which they didn't want. People being able to write anything means that people can potentially write the truth...which was certain to become terminally unpopular sooner or later, given human nature.
Wikipedia has proven that it is unable to live with integrity...so it should be allowed to die.
Although I haven't played Gears of War, I am a very happy owner of boxed copies of Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and Unreal Tournament 2004. The games are fantastic, the editor is even better, and they're produced by a group of extremely creative, intelligent, and generally wonderful human beings.
If you don't have a copy of any of the UT series, I strongly recommend them...the original UT is probably the best of the lot, but UT 2004 is also very enjoyable. If you get the original UT, I also like the Bullet Time and Unreal4Ever modifications, both of which were still available from FilePlanet last time I checked. There are also some fantastic user-made maps here, and the community there are interesting and very talented people.
It's a major pain in the rear end...it took me close to a month.
Blizz either need to make it cheaper, or better educate people on earning gold in the game. Personally though, I think they should try and avoid having any single item cost more than 50g at the absolute most...cos that way people would have much less incentive to buy from gold farmers.
Justice is whatever society says it is, so there's no problem here.
;)
;)
Atheistic relativism is fun, isn't it kids?
Let me ask...if it becomes widely accepted within your society, (hypothetically speaking of course!) that armed paramilitary goons kicking your front door down and blowing your brains out all over your living room carpet for pretty much whatever reason they feel like is part of the definition of justice, I'm assuming, based on your comment here, that you'd have no problem with that whatsoever.
Right?
I believe that the Free Software/Open Source community need eachother to an extent. You have one group at one end and the other group at the other.
I used to think that myself, before the FSF started throwing its' weight around to the degree it does currently. If they stop trying to be so dominant, I might even go back to believing it.
Apparently you are telling me that you would rather have Microsoft as a bedfellow than the FSF
No, I'm not. I'm saying that I think they're both piloted by megalomaniacs, and that I don't want any association with either.
I'm one of presumably the minority of people with autism (I was diagnosed at 16 with NLD after the usual traumatic experience with the neurotypical education system) who'd love to be cured myself, if such a thing became available. Autism is a genetic aberration and a curse, for the most part, and needs to be seen as such. Being autistic is neither glamorous or enjoyable, and the only people who try and see it as a blessing are those who wish to gain some extra privelege over and above the normal population, as members of yet another minority. The neurotypical population sees us as the proverbial sewer-dwelling mutants for a reason; it's because we genuinely are.
I've also written numerous times that I believe that the overwhelming predominance of autism in the Linux community is the single main thing holding Linux as an operating system back. Autistics who use Linux (Stallman being primary among them) believe that their philosophical view is morally superior, when I feel that in reality it (particularly the degree of repetitive consistency of the message over time) is simply a result of their neurological disability.
The "five freedoms" aren't things Linux users care about so strongly because they're people with an inherently more developed moral sense than most people, or because of the inherent moral value of the ideas; they're things that Linux users care about to that degree because autism causes rote, uncontrollable fixations with certain concepts or areas of interest, sometimes on a long term basis. In some kids with Asperger's it's trains or a collection of toilet brushes. In the case of Stallman and the Debian developers, it's a perverted definition of software freedom. The fixation is with an abstract concept rather than physical objects, but that's about the only difference.
Can someone tell me what the technical differences are between commercial UNIXes and Linux? I read Solaris was based on BSD, so that one's obvious...but what about the others?
I'm assuming obviously that of course there are driver differences and so on as well...but are there any major architectural differences?