Michael Dell is Microsoft's bitch. He always has been. The single main reason why is that computer hardware is a business with razor-thin profit margins. Microsoft know that they only have to raise the price of their operating system by a tiny amount, and suddenly Dell aren't making any money at all per unit any more.
Hence, Dell have to be unbelievably careful in what they do...they could only be trying to sell blank machines because the demand is sufficiently overwhelming for them to take the risk...from that point of view, it's a good sign.
If you weren't buying from Dell, which IMNSHO you shouldn't be, this wouldn't even be an issue. Dell is either for technophobic morons who don't know any better, or corporations who need a large number of machines and who thus tragically possibly do not have much choice. Given that this is Slashdot, I would be expecting the readership here to know how to very easily get a machine without Windows pre-installed...and I'll give you a hint; Dell (and other companies like them) are NOT the way to go about it.
For single machines anyway, and wherever possible for multiples, you buy parts, and you either install yourself, or you get someone other than who you bought said parts from to do it for you. You're only going to pay the Microsoft tax on a pre-packaged PC...not on an individual hard drive. If you're worried about warranty, get one on the individual parts...you generally do anywayz.
Dell are a tool of Microsoft's dominance, and they always have been...Michael Dell hasn't done any more for the world than maintaining the monopolistic status quo. Do NOT reward him for it, since you'll be screwing yourself as well in the process.
We need one of these governments which has switched to Linux to put some pressure on Dell and other companies like them, and to make it clear to them that if they don't have the spine to stand up to Ballmer, they're going to lose a lot of business. Everyone keeps bragging about how many institutions have switched to Linux...Someone needs to get a few of those institutions to start seriously intimidating Dell.
Are you insane? What on Earth do you think has earned Microsoft the 95+% market share they've got? (And no, for once I'm not talking about their forced sodomy of Michael Dell, either...which actually isn't anywhere near as important as people like to think)
The answer, to a very large extent, is games. Linux for the most part doesn't have games, and that is the single main reason why its' market share is still hovering around 4%, despite all of the government deals and so on that we've seen. Work on developing OpenGL and SDL, pump money into icculus.org, and that will change.
Although I don't live there, with this being a Communist state, I see two different possibilities here:-
(a) The literacy claim is propoganda, or (b) The literacy claim is true, but for reasons entirely unrelated to Communism, and that the Communist state government is causing a large number of other social and economic problems.
I realise that this isn't a popular attitude around here, but contrary to what is popular, Communism is *not* a viable answer to all the world's ills, any more than Steve Ballmer's interpretation of Capitalist philosophy is. Anyone here who is deluded into thinking that Marx was some kind of saviour needs to do some research on the North Korean government some time, and see how well the Communist experiment worked out there. Even in Venezuela, the country club still exists, along with all the exclusionary elitism that goes with it. A lot of people think Hugo Chavez is a wonderful human being. He may well be, but I try and remember that he's still a human being, and that in itself means that whatever system he's going to have isn't going to be perfect, regardless of how good he might try and make it look.
Hard core leftists like Castro and Stallman are very good at making the ideas of Communism look great...but the superficial appearance is an utter crock...the reality is very different.
Corporate management would be profiting from cheaper labour. Everyone else (at least in formerly in IT) would be having to deal with working three jobs a week flipping burgers at Burger King or McDonald's. (Or the unskilled equivalent)
Anyone who thinks that the open (and out) sourcing of India is based on anything morally enlightened is a naive fool. It's about money, plain and simple. Of course they're going to try and make it out to be about morality...the same way arch capitalists try and make out that extreme forms of capitalism in reality are good for people.
I don't know where you get the strange idea that it is the intent of GPLv3 to stop all DRM.
The purpose of the GPL in general (any version) is to gradually create a scenario where Stallman gets to dictate how people do or don't use their computers, and then euphemistically refer to that as "freedom."
The single main reason why I consider the BSD license to be more free than anything else (including the GPL's attempt to control downstream use) is simply because using BSD licensed software means that I don't have to care about what *anybody* else thinks. I don't have to subscribe to Richard Stallman's ideology, and I don't have to follow the corporate "roadmap" of somebody like Microsoft either. I get to determine my own behaviour, rather than having someone else determine it for me. (A radical concept, I know)
The GPL version 3 needs to be sent to the circular file, and the FSF itself along with it.
GPLv3 is a promise. Don't forget the good ol' GPL. RMS has a complete system in place, except of a kernel.
Spoken like a true GNU/zombie. Your Messiah would be very proud. The usual blindly subjective, emotive FSF platitudes are uttered without a micron of supporting logic to back them up.
I honestly wish we could take a census and find out exactly how many people thought like this...As I've written before, I suspect the actual number is very small, but it's still too large for my liking.
Yet, somehow, in IT, a family is often a liability. Something about that is not right in my book.
The main reason why family is considered a liability in IT is because IT is an industry where sweatshop labour is considered the holy grail.
Families have a tendency to get in the way of Dad working 18 hours a day, and the sorts of demoniacs at the top of the IT management pile don't want that. They want people who are willing to work for as long as possible at a stretch, for as little money as possible, in as poor conditions as possible. It's the entire reason why importing people from India has become so popular.
India at least used to be a third world country, and so you can import someone from there, pay them south of $250 a week without any other sorts of benefits, and expect to get 18 or so hour workdays out of them, and they'll still think they've died and gone to heaven. An American rank and file employee on the other hand is never going to put up with that, but American managers crave being able to treat their staff like that, because it keeps overhead to a bare minimum, which means more money in their pockets...which is also the *only* thing they care about.
That is the reason why IT managers don't want workers having families...it's because they don't want to treat IT workers like human beings. They don't want to *acknowledge* that IT workers are human beings, because doing so means they lose more money than they're comfortable with. The "money is more important than life itself," crowd don't care about anything else...in the end they don't even care about their own lives. All they care about is the size of their bank balance.
Even if you're not a Trekkie, immersing yourself into a different environment like this would make for a more interesting experience.
Yes, except what you perhaps don't understand is that normal people don't generally feel any need or desire to do something like this. People who do such things, as well as individuals like the guy who got his ears surgically altered to resemble a Vulcan's, are usually in dire need of psychological help. As caustic and superficially abusive as it may have sounded, William Shatner was correct in observing that people who feel such degrees of devotion to things like television programs generally only do so because of the emptiness of the rest of their lives...it's an indication of extreme imbalance.
If you don't believe that, try watching Trekkies sometime. At least some of the people interviewed in that documentary were seriously confused, unstable, obviously lonely human beings. The lawyer who showed up to court in Starfleet uniform in particular IMHO should have been ordered to undergo a complete psychiatric evaluation, and barred from practicing law until it had been established that she was legally sane. I can guarantee you that there would have been something within her background that was producing some form of psychopathology...because like I said above, normal, stable people don't act like that...and they don't feel any need to. Such behaviour is an indication that there's something wrong.
I know we're mostly fashionably secular/atheistic here on Slashdot, but I've spent some time recently reading on Wikipedia about a particular Hindu Goddess who among other things, apparently reminds people to be willing to work through their dark sides, and I'm assuming looking at pornography would fall within that category.
One of the things I've noticed about the so-called "guardians of morality," is that they almost always tend to actually be doing worse things behind closed doors than the people they persecute...the only difference is that they're very secretive about it, and because of that, they can have a much harder time than others controlling it. The sorts of people I'm talking about are politicians who do such things as taking bribes/holding orgies or bucks parties with a heap of prostitutes, etc...and try very hard to make sure that nobody ever finds out about them doing it, while at the same time condemning and punishing people who openly do the same.
The bottom line is that a dark side is something we *all* have, every last one of us...and you're either intimate with it, know its' dimensions, allow it expression in controlled ways, and thus are able to stay on top of it...or you try to deny its' existence, repress it, stuff it underground, and condemn others who express theirs...and reap the negative consequences of doing so.
...this is as good an opportunity as any to discover FreeBSD for yourself. As I wrote in my journal, it's a fantastic OS...very much worth obtaining a copy of and investigating.
I've also noticed how much the comments attached to this article are riddled with trolls, flamebait, and assorted rubbish. Richard Stallman was the first to slander the BSD license and attempt to discourage its' use, and it is obvious that there are Linux users who seek to continue their master's work in that regard, and shame themselves in the process. They tell people a lot more about their own character (or lack thereof) than about that of what they are attacking.
I didn't consider that open hardware article terribly encouraging, myself.
a) It uses a vanilla PCI bus, not PCI Express or even AGP, and is listed at 300MHz. In other words, compared to commercial products, it's going to be SLOW. But I know, I know...who cares if it's technically inferior, right? It's *free.* Good luck with that, guys.
b) They specifically mention that it "isn't a gaming card," and then talk about how they think Quake 3 *might* work with it. If it's a 3D card, if they're not intending it for games, then WTF *are* they intending it for? Given the hollow idealism that is also presumably driving this effort, they're not caring about making it something which large numbers of non-autistics will actually want to use. That would be a lot more useful, since if we were able to get a sufficiently large userbase behind it, other hardware vendors might start seeing producing open hardware as the norm.
c) It is, predictably, GPL or commercial only. No mention is made of the BSD license, which means people using one of the BSDs will not be able to use it with their own license. Once again, people behave as though Linux is the only FOSS operating system in existence.
This is the most time I've spent thinking about my least favorite of the ST franchise in quite a while. I may have to watch a few episodes now.
What you may find a gratifying exercise is to watch probably the first half of the first season or so, and then read the fanfic that's floating around online. (including those two links I gave you) You'll fairly quickly discover, I think, that more than anything else, Voyager was a case of wasted opportunity. The characters are actually some of the most interesting and worthwhile ones that Trek has given us, and the initial premise was fantastic. The show could have been as intelligent as Firefly if they'd followed through on it...although come to think of it, maybe that's what they didn't. Firefly got canned primarily because it was actually too smart...Berman might actually have been scared in the end that if he made Voyager too involved, Paramount would fear that it wouldn't appeal to Joe Six-pack, and yank it.
Stallman has been in the public eye for 20 years now.
I find myself wondering if the FSF will manage to remain visible for another 20. I don't believe the recent shift towards activism is going to be good for them, long term. Software is always where they have brought people the most benefit...and given that Linux is so involved with corporations now, it has become more important than ever that the toolchain be maintained by a non-profit.
Sadly, the FSF don't seem to be interested in making that, which was their most important work, their focus any more.
Also, in what sense do you mean when you call Voyager "postmodern"? I don't see it.
Janeway's moral ambiguity/relativism, as I mentioned is a big part of it. Also the angry nihilism of the Maquis.
Postmodernism is about deconstructing things, subjective amorality, and discordianism. The Maquis in particular, and Voyager in general, was very largely about taking Trek's previously Utopian thematic underpinning and turning it completely on its' head. The crew were pretty much all rejects from Federation society; you've got a Klingon/Human hybrid who flunked out of the Academy, (BE'lanna) a convict with an unstable background who also failed at the Academy due to the Caldric Prime incident, (Tom Paris) an officer who as a member of an ethnic minority left Starfleet to join a terrorist organisation, (Chakotay) a Vulcan who failed the Kohlinar and who was actually closer to a member of the Rihannsu (Romulans) in many ways, (Tuvok) a holographic Doctor from a group that were later condemned as failed prototypes, various minor anarchists and disgruntled Bajorans (themselves an entire *race* of screwups) from the Maquis, an unstable, developmentally retarded liberated Borg drone, and a deeply immature, essentially civilian captain who was in way over her head.
Then you've got this group living on what at the time was a highly experimental fast scout/light naval support vessel, (the Intrepid class) roughly the same size as TOS's Constitution class, and with an overall strength index of just over half that of the Galaxy class. (the TNG ship) It wasn't designed for long range missions, scientific study, diplomatic functions, or particularly heavy combat.
In short, TNG's crew were the proverbial, "best and the brightest." Voyager's crew were exactly the opposite.
This, and Talking Stick are two pieces of fanfic which summarise what Voyager was archetypically about, IMHO.
...to the monoculture of the GPL. Makes me wonder if a time is going to come when most people will more or less forget that other OSS licenses exist.
I guess, sadly, that it's predictable...between the black of proprietary software and the white of the BSD license/public domain, the GPL does represent the proverbial shade of grey.
As far as the difficulty of making a decent Trek computer game goes, there are at least two major problems. The first of these also had a hand in sinking the show itself.
a) The single most overwhelming problem (which has also hamstrung *every* series and film after TOS) is the question of how much you should try and simply appeal to the established fanbase vs. how much you should try and do outreach to new audiences/go in new directions. Rick Berman's inability to balance this issue was, more than anything else, the single main thing which killed Voyager and Enterprise in the end. With Voyager to a large degree he simply ended up adopting an attitude of, "screw the base," and focused purely on trying to draw new audience, whereas with Enterprise he tried to appeal more to the base at times, but was still unable to balance the issue. I think also the problem is that a balance isn't really possible...you basically have a scenario where the earlier/more conventional series had a philosophical basis of fairly heavy pacifism on the one hand, but where there was a transition period during DS9 in particular where violence started being incorporated more and more as a regular part of the show, until you got to the level of around fifth to seventh season Voyager which regularly had episodes that played like low-budget versions of the Lethal Weapon movies in space. Elite Force in particular was able to use that to its' advantage, and that alone is probably the main reason why that's been one of the only two Trek games (the other having been A Final Unity) that could be called an unqualified success.
Looking at it now, I think the lesson is that because each series had such a fundamentally different approach to the issue of violence, in a game or movie you can't mix series. If you're going to do a Voyager game for instance, you can make an FPS and have it as violent as you want. A Voyager game also wants a heavily postmodern, gritty, and also fairly multi-ethnic feel, with adolescent sexual angst between Tom and BE'lanna, comic relief from the Doctor, Chakotay doing his stereotypical Red Man schtick, and lots of Janeway's trademark moral ambiguity and gleeful abuse of authority.
A TNG game on the other hand *has* to be something like A Final Unity; an almost entirely non-violent puzzle-solver. A TOS game could have some degree of violence, but it has to be 60s oriented and cowboyish in nature, which means unarmed fisticuffs for the most part. The Utopian/"universal peace" vibe doesn't have to be as strong for a TOS game as for TNG either, but a certain amount of it doesn't hurt. I thought Starfleet Academy got it right in terms of having an Andorian as one of the students, as well. That sort of unobtrusive in reference helps to keep the autistic geek base happy, and won't upset normal audiences *too* much if it isn't overdone. Of all of these, DS9 is probably the trickiest to get right, which probably also explains why it hasn't been done successfully in a game. A DS9 game could have a certain amount of violence, but it needs to be kept restrained a subtle way. (Odo's restrained use of martial arts with carefully and clearly performed hand strikes are a good example of what I'm talking about, here) The idea with DS9 is that of a society which has traditionally been pacifist, but which is in the process of discovering that violence is something of a necessity on the basis of self-defense. The seventh season episode, "The Siege of AR-558," is probably the best example of what I'm talking about, there.
b) I get the feeling that in some cases, game design houses possibly (if only subconsciously) had the attitude that because they were doing a Trek game, it probably wasn't going to achieve more than cult popularity anywayz, and so therefore there wasn't much point in making sure that it was a truly quality game. If you're going to do a strongly character/story oriented Trek game, then yes, there is a fairly strong possibility that you're not going to hold much appeal outside the base. Howe
But if the warez networks are using hash signatures to identify perfect original versions of media, wouldn't this technique fail?
It might work for a certain period on IRC, since they may not have started using hashing there...I haven't traded on IRC for years now, and so am not certain. Even if it worked for a certain period though, it'd be a fairly trivial procedure to modify fserves to display hashes in the directory listings for files as well as the filenames themselves, and automatically create hash lists.
Thus, although it'd probably work for long enough to cause a certain amount of havoc, eventually the offending files would be deleted.
The "grey list" idea that that article mentions wouldn't work either...mainly because it presupposes that hash lists would be centralised. The RIAA/MPAA/whoever can put up a couple of bogus hashlists, but what they can't control is the presence of hashlists on individual fserves themselves...once again, it degenerates back to an issue of scale...the fact that there are vastly more people pirating than there are trying to stop the pirates.
If the grey hashlists could be equally decentralised, and were going to outnumber the trustworthy ones, then that could work...but they can't hope to.
IRC is probably the single most difficult medium for the cartels to fight, primarily because it's so interactive...when you have the virtual equivalent of live, face to face transactions, maintaining trust is trivial, and breaking it can only really be done by the individuals within the transactions themselves.
And what if it's a GPL'd chainsaw that you made in college, put on the internet for people to copy and use if they want, but never took the time to test thoroughly?
Ever been part of the warez scene on IRC?
I'm assuming you haven't, so I'll explain. That system is entirely trust based, and self-regulating. If a file ever comes from anyone which has a virus or anything else suspect included, the source of the file immediately gets ostracised, at least as a source, and most likely in terms of download access as well, since the system is based on reciprocal trade. Wrong, I hear you say...what about cracks coming from warez *web* sites or p2p nets which have malware? Said malware would likely be put into the archives by the webmasters of those sites themselves...the upstream cracking groups would NOT be doing it, because there are a lot of people in the warez food chain who are not going to want to receive/propogate known malicious files. ANY group which includes files for compromising a system with a release has just destroyed its' ability to subsequently release files that people will trust at any point in the future. Ditto for eMule files that have nasties in them...they get intercepted/recreated downstream. That is part of the entire reason why nets like eMule use the sorts of file hashing systems that they do; if you know the hash of a particular group's release, you can download said release and get entirely clean warez.
Ditto with any moron who was going to be dumb enough to try and write GPL licensed malware...they'd gain a horrible reputation very, very quickly. The other thing is, anyone who is sufficiently interested in doing the wrong thing as to be writing malware in the first place is not going to care about licensing it unless they are exceptionally stupid...which malware authors generally aren't. Sociopathic and deserving of being used as live shark bait, yes. Stupid, no.
Accidental bugs which lead to buffer overflows and such are different. They are unavoidable, and people know that...despite the best of developer intentions, occasionally they happen. As such, although the author of said bug will not risk ostracision for authoring it, in most cases (at least if the program in question has more than half a dozen or so users) it gets patched very quickly.
I've trolled about vi myself a couple of times in the past, but installing FreeBSD a few weeks ago finally convinced me to take the time to pick up at least a very rudimentary degree of mobility in it.
If nothing else, the one thing which it gave me which I'm actually grateful for is that it disrupted my old habits/patterns (if only temporarily) and forced me to have to think. Vi is a thoroughly alien interface compared to virtually anything else I've used, and although with the tutorial (which is surprisingly good) it's discoverable, I don't feel it would have been without it.
I'm still undecided as to whether or not I feel the interface has actual technical merit, or whether it's simply something vestigial that certain people are so fond of for whatever reason that they've been unable to force themselves to throw it away...although if it's true as Mr Joy says that the editor was originally designed for, and works in, extremely low-bandwidth environments, then that element at least is something which I feel is very much worth keeping.
One thing which I find extremely distressing these days is that many people seem to feel that the conservatism which motivated the philosophy behind a lot of early UNIX software is an anachronistic attitude and is no longer warranted, given the glut of cpu cycles and other system resources we now find ourselves in. I would urge such people to remember that even under normal circumstances, in some situations (such as embedded/small devices) such is not always the case, and that not only that, were a sufficiently large scale disaster of some kind to happen, it could universally cease to be the case also.
Conservatism is a good thing to hold onto. Certainly, when the sun is shining and everything is fine, you can feel lulled into believing that not only do you not need it, but that you'll never need it again. If the last few years have been any indication however, some parts of the world are going to continue to face severe environmental catastrophes going forward...and the conservatism of old school UNIX may be one of the only things we know about that could keep computer infrastructure going in such places under such conditions. It is very strange how the past can often end up being the present and the future, especially when we do not expect it.
Do I feel secure? Yeah, pretty much I do even though I haven't really done anything else to secure my machines.
I really wish we had Theo deRaadt reading (and commenting) on this thread...I can't even begin to imagine how novel, riddled with expletives, and generally blistering the abuse you would get from him would be, I suspect.;-)
I am a level designer myself, and I've been including my 'source'-maps with every release, as I think that people can learn a lot from other people's work, so the concept of sharing is not too strange to me.
I could be wrong, but AFAIK there isn't an open source 3d game engine in existence which isn't under the GPL. That effectively means that for any of them you use, you can't hold back code at all. Technically speaking, you could still copyright/trademark images/textures within the game, though...that's what Red Hat do with their artwork within their Linux distribution.
Also, while there is nothing legally preventing you from making money from GPL licensed software, whether it's accepted or not will depend on where you try it. The Linux community in particular has a fairly strong cultural taboo against people making money from software more or less in general, irrespective of the license used, so you're likely to get viciously verbally abused if you try and sell it to them, or to anyone else where they can see you doing it. On the other hand, you could probably do it offline or with non-Linux users with no ill effects whatsoever...since as I said, selling GPL licensed software isn't illegal...it's more purely a case of Linux developers/users not wanting other people to make money from software if they themselves aren't...envy, in other words. As a good example of this, Linus Torvalds himself originally tried to stipulate (prior to putting the kernel under the GPL) that the kernel was for non-commercial use only, and that people could only use it as long as they did not try and make money from it. Since having become a millionaire himself, although the kernel is still under the GPL, he now has no such economic stipulations whatsoever.;)
If you do sell GPL-licensed software, you do of course have to make sure you provide full source code with whatever binaries you're selling. As long as you do that, you're legally free to charge as much for it as you want.
So they're going to try and tell us that the fact that sticking to a proprietary hardware platform kept them almost entirely irrelevant throughout the company's history had nothing to do with it?;-)
To paraphrase a saying...If you believe that, I recently acquired this really beautiful bridge up in Sydney which you may be interested in purchasing.
The GPL3 has a couple of problems which aren't necessarily about what's actually written on the page, but I think some people are still noticing them.
a) For starters, a lot of people (like, say, Linus) have repeatedly expressed that *because* v2 is as great a license as it is, they're uncomfortable with *anyone* messing with it...and that includes the FSF themselves.
b) Although v2 itself wasn't, v3 is very much a case of Stallman specifically saying, "You can only continue to use software that uses this license as long as you specifically avoid doing anything which I, in my sole discretion, happen to decide that I don't like. In order to continue to use this software, you have to become a fully committed adherent of my religion. That means adopting my ideology to the letter whether it be political, economic, social, or in any other area, as well as doing anything else which I might happen to feel like telling you to do." This is a real problem. Rather than simply stipulate that use of the license mandates providing source with binaries, (which I have no problem with, in fact view as a very good thing) Stallman has indicated a desire to genuinely use the license as a moral/ideological soapbox. Source with binaries on its' own has never been enough for Stallman...and I'm inclined to believe it never will be. He wants power over others...he wants a social movement...and he wants to go a long way beyond merely software itself. If you want me to go into more detail, we can spend as long as you like talking about this, as well...I can cite any amount of evidence of Stallman's megalomania. For the most part he keeps it fairly well hidden...but occasionally the mask cracks. Even if you don't believe he himself wants these things, try reading this and then telling me that Bradley Kuhn isn't a megalomaniac. As Ulrich Drepper noted, the *only* reason why Stallman has wanted the, "or any later version," language in the GPL is precisely so that he has the legal option to pull the carpet out from under people's feet when he feels like it.
Bottom line:- Vista might mean that it's time for people who care about their own self-determination to part ways with Microsoft, but GPLv3 means that in my own mind anyway, the FSF are rapidly moving towards the same point themselves. Other people need to make their own decisions, but I for one will *not* be Stallman or Kuhn's bitch any more than I will be Gates or Ballmer's.
If you want to know why other people are moving away from GPLv3, I can only assume it's because they feel the same way.
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Michael Dell is Microsoft's bitch. He always has been. The single main reason why is that computer hardware is a business with razor-thin profit margins. Microsoft know that they only have to raise the price of their operating system by a tiny amount, and suddenly Dell aren't making any money at all per unit any more.
Hence, Dell have to be unbelievably careful in what they do...they could only be trying to sell blank machines because the demand is sufficiently overwhelming for them to take the risk...from that point of view, it's a good sign.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again...
If you weren't buying from Dell, which IMNSHO you shouldn't be, this wouldn't even be an issue. Dell is either for technophobic morons who don't know any better, or corporations who need a large number of machines and who thus tragically possibly do not have much choice. Given that this is Slashdot, I would be expecting the readership here to know how to very easily get a machine without Windows pre-installed...and I'll give you a hint; Dell (and other companies like them) are NOT the way to go about it.
For single machines anyway, and wherever possible for multiples, you buy parts, and you either install yourself, or you get someone other than who you bought said parts from to do it for you. You're only going to pay the Microsoft tax on a pre-packaged PC...not on an individual hard drive. If you're worried about warranty, get one on the individual parts...you generally do anywayz.
Dell are a tool of Microsoft's dominance, and they always have been...Michael Dell hasn't done any more for the world than maintaining the monopolistic status quo. Do NOT reward him for it, since you'll be screwing yourself as well in the process.
We need one of these governments which has switched to Linux to put some pressure on Dell and other companies like them, and to make it clear to them that if they don't have the spine to stand up to Ballmer, they're going to lose a lot of business. Everyone keeps bragging about how many institutions have switched to Linux...Someone needs to get a few of those institutions to start seriously intimidating Dell.
"Dave, put that Windows CD down. Dave... DAVE!"
Most of the money is in business software anyway.
Are you insane? What on Earth do you think has earned Microsoft the 95+% market share they've got? (And no, for once I'm not talking about their forced sodomy of Michael Dell, either...which actually isn't anywhere near as important as people like to think)
The answer, to a very large extent, is games. Linux for the most part doesn't have games, and that is the single main reason why its' market share is still hovering around 4%, despite all of the government deals and so on that we've seen. Work on developing OpenGL and SDL, pump money into icculus.org, and that will change.
It's the games, stupid.
Although I don't live there, with this being a Communist state, I see two different possibilities here:-
(a) The literacy claim is propoganda, or
(b) The literacy claim is true, but for reasons entirely unrelated to Communism, and that the Communist state government is causing a large number of other social and economic problems.
I realise that this isn't a popular attitude around here, but contrary to what is popular, Communism is *not* a viable answer to all the world's ills, any more than Steve Ballmer's interpretation of Capitalist philosophy is. Anyone here who is deluded into thinking that Marx was some kind of saviour needs to do some research on the North Korean government some time, and see how well the Communist experiment worked out there. Even in Venezuela, the country club still exists, along with all the exclusionary elitism that goes with it. A lot of people think Hugo Chavez is a wonderful human being. He may well be, but I try and remember that he's still a human being, and that in itself means that whatever system he's going to have isn't going to be perfect, regardless of how good he might try and make it look.
Hard core leftists like Castro and Stallman are very good at making the ideas of Communism look great...but the superficial appearance is an utter crock...the reality is very different.
And the USA is profiting from cheaper labor.
Corporate management would be profiting from cheaper labour. Everyone else (at least in formerly in IT) would be having to deal with working three jobs a week flipping burgers at Burger King or McDonald's. (Or the unskilled equivalent)
Anyone who thinks that the open (and out) sourcing of India is based on anything morally enlightened is a naive fool. It's about money, plain and simple. Of course they're going to try and make it out to be about morality...the same way arch capitalists try and make out that extreme forms of capitalism in reality are good for people.
I don't know where you get the strange idea that it is the intent of GPLv3 to stop all DRM.
The purpose of the GPL in general (any version) is to gradually create a scenario where Stallman gets to dictate how people do or don't use their computers, and then euphemistically refer to that as "freedom."
The single main reason why I consider the BSD license to be more free than anything else (including the GPL's attempt to control downstream use) is simply because using BSD licensed software means that I don't have to care about what *anybody* else thinks. I don't have to subscribe to Richard Stallman's ideology, and I don't have to follow the corporate "roadmap" of somebody like Microsoft either. I get to determine my own behaviour, rather than having someone else determine it for me. (A radical concept, I know)
The GPL version 3 needs to be sent to the circular file, and the FSF itself along with it.
a little bit out of touch. DRM is a threat.
GPLv3 is a promise. Don't forget the good ol' GPL. RMS has a complete system in place, except of a kernel.
Spoken like a true GNU/zombie. Your Messiah would be very proud. The usual blindly subjective, emotive FSF platitudes are uttered without a micron of supporting logic to back them up.
I honestly wish we could take a census and find out exactly how many people thought like this...As I've written before, I suspect the actual number is very small, but it's still too large for my liking.
Yet, somehow, in IT, a family is often a liability. Something about that is not right in my book.
The main reason why family is considered a liability in IT is because IT is an industry where sweatshop labour is considered the holy grail.
Families have a tendency to get in the way of Dad working 18 hours a day, and the sorts of demoniacs at the top of the IT management pile don't want that. They want people who are willing to work for as long as possible at a stretch, for as little money as possible, in as poor conditions as possible. It's the entire reason why importing people from India has become so popular.
India at least used to be a third world country, and so you can import someone from there, pay them south of $250 a week without any other sorts of benefits, and expect to get 18 or so hour workdays out of them, and they'll still think they've died and gone to heaven. An American rank and file employee on the other hand is never going to put up with that, but American managers crave being able to treat their staff like that, because it keeps overhead to a bare minimum, which means more money in their pockets...which is also the *only* thing they care about.
That is the reason why IT managers don't want workers having families...it's because they don't want to treat IT workers like human beings. They don't want to *acknowledge* that IT workers are human beings, because doing so means they lose more money than they're comfortable with. The "money is more important than life itself," crowd don't care about anything else...in the end they don't even care about their own lives. All they care about is the size of their bank balance.
Even if you're not a Trekkie, immersing yourself into a different environment like this would make for a more interesting experience.
Yes, except what you perhaps don't understand is that normal people don't generally feel any need or desire to do something like this. People who do such things, as well as individuals like the guy who got his ears surgically altered to resemble a Vulcan's, are usually in dire need of psychological help. As caustic and superficially abusive as it may have sounded, William Shatner was correct in observing that people who feel such degrees of devotion to things like television programs generally only do so because of the emptiness of the rest of their lives...it's an indication of extreme imbalance.
If you don't believe that, try watching Trekkies sometime. At least some of the people interviewed in that documentary were seriously confused, unstable, obviously lonely human beings. The lawyer who showed up to court in Starfleet uniform in particular IMHO should have been ordered to undergo a complete psychiatric evaluation, and barred from practicing law until it had been established that she was legally sane. I can guarantee you that there would have been something within her background that was producing some form of psychopathology...because like I said above, normal, stable people don't act like that...and they don't feel any need to. Such behaviour is an indication that there's something wrong.
I know we're mostly fashionably secular/atheistic here on Slashdot, but I've spent some time recently reading on Wikipedia about a particular Hindu Goddess who among other things, apparently reminds people to be willing to work through their dark sides, and I'm assuming looking at pornography would fall within that category.
One of the things I've noticed about the so-called "guardians of morality," is that they almost always tend to actually be doing worse things behind closed doors than the people they persecute...the only difference is that they're very secretive about it, and because of that, they can have a much harder time than others controlling it. The sorts of people I'm talking about are politicians who do such things as taking bribes/holding orgies or bucks parties with a heap of prostitutes, etc...and try very hard to make sure that nobody ever finds out about them doing it, while at the same time condemning and punishing people who openly do the same.
The bottom line is that a dark side is something we *all* have, every last one of us...and you're either intimate with it, know its' dimensions, allow it expression in controlled ways, and thus are able to stay on top of it...or you try to deny its' existence, repress it, stuff it underground, and condemn others who express theirs...and reap the negative consequences of doing so.
...this is as good an opportunity as any to discover FreeBSD for yourself. As I wrote in my journal, it's a fantastic OS...very much worth obtaining a copy of and investigating.
I've also noticed how much the comments attached to this article are riddled with trolls, flamebait, and assorted rubbish. Richard Stallman was the first to slander the BSD license and attempt to discourage its' use, and it is obvious that there are Linux users who seek to continue their master's work in that regard, and shame themselves in the process. They tell people a lot more about their own character (or lack thereof) than about that of what they are attacking.
I didn't consider that open hardware article terribly encouraging, myself.
a) It uses a vanilla PCI bus, not PCI Express or even AGP, and is listed at 300MHz. In other words, compared to commercial products, it's going to be SLOW. But I know, I know...who cares if it's technically inferior, right? It's *free.* Good luck with that, guys.
b) They specifically mention that it "isn't a gaming card," and then talk about how they think Quake 3 *might* work with it. If it's a 3D card, if they're not intending it for games, then WTF *are* they intending it for? Given the hollow idealism that is also presumably driving this effort, they're not caring about making it something which large numbers of non-autistics will actually want to use. That would be a lot more useful, since if we were able to get a sufficiently large userbase behind it, other hardware vendors might start seeing producing open hardware as the norm.
c) It is, predictably, GPL or commercial only. No mention is made of the BSD license, which means people using one of the BSDs will not be able to use it with their own license. Once again, people behave as though Linux is the only FOSS operating system in existence.
This is the most time I've spent thinking about my least favorite of the ST franchise in quite a while. I may have to watch a few episodes now.
What you may find a gratifying exercise is to watch probably the first half of the first season or so, and then read the fanfic that's floating around online. (including those two links I gave you) You'll fairly quickly discover, I think, that more than anything else, Voyager was a case of wasted opportunity. The characters are actually some of the most interesting and worthwhile ones that Trek has given us, and the initial premise was fantastic. The show could have been as intelligent as Firefly if they'd followed through on it...although come to think of it, maybe that's what they didn't. Firefly got canned primarily because it was actually too smart...Berman might actually have been scared in the end that if he made Voyager too involved, Paramount would fear that it wouldn't appeal to Joe Six-pack, and yank it.
Stallman has been in the public eye for 20 years now.
I find myself wondering if the FSF will manage to remain visible for another 20. I don't believe the recent shift towards activism is going to be good for them, long term. Software is always where they have brought people the most benefit...and given that Linux is so involved with corporations now, it has become more important than ever that the toolchain be maintained by a non-profit.
Sadly, the FSF don't seem to be interested in making that, which was their most important work, their focus any more.
Also, in what sense do you mean when you call Voyager "postmodern"? I don't see it.
Janeway's moral ambiguity/relativism, as I mentioned is a big part of it. Also the angry nihilism of the Maquis.
Postmodernism is about deconstructing things, subjective amorality, and discordianism. The Maquis in particular, and Voyager in general, was very largely about taking Trek's previously Utopian thematic underpinning and turning it completely on its' head. The crew were pretty much all rejects from Federation society; you've got a Klingon/Human hybrid who flunked out of the Academy, (BE'lanna) a convict with an unstable background who also failed at the Academy due to the Caldric Prime incident, (Tom Paris) an officer who as a member of an ethnic minority left Starfleet to join a terrorist organisation, (Chakotay) a Vulcan who failed the Kohlinar and who was actually closer to a member of the Rihannsu (Romulans) in many ways, (Tuvok) a holographic Doctor from a group that were later condemned as failed prototypes, various minor anarchists and disgruntled Bajorans (themselves an entire *race* of screwups) from the Maquis, an unstable, developmentally retarded liberated Borg drone, and a deeply immature, essentially civilian captain who was in way over her head.
Then you've got this group living on what at the time was a highly experimental fast scout/light naval support vessel, (the Intrepid class) roughly the same size as TOS's Constitution class, and with an overall strength index of just over half that of the Galaxy class. (the TNG ship) It wasn't designed for long range missions, scientific study, diplomatic functions, or particularly heavy combat.
In short, TNG's crew were the proverbial, "best and the brightest." Voyager's crew were exactly the opposite.
This, and Talking Stick are two pieces of fanfic which summarise what Voyager was archetypically about, IMHO.
...to the monoculture of the GPL. Makes me wonder if a time is going to come when most people will more or less forget that other OSS licenses exist.
I guess, sadly, that it's predictable...between the black of proprietary software and the white of the BSD license/public domain, the GPL does represent the proverbial shade of grey.
As far as the difficulty of making a decent Trek computer game goes, there are at least two major problems. The first of these also had a hand in sinking the show itself.
a) The single most overwhelming problem (which has also hamstrung *every* series and film after TOS) is the question of how much you should try and simply appeal to the established fanbase vs. how much you should try and do outreach to new audiences/go in new directions. Rick Berman's inability to balance this issue was, more than anything else, the single main thing which killed Voyager and Enterprise in the end. With Voyager to a large degree he simply ended up adopting an attitude of, "screw the base," and focused purely on trying to draw new audience, whereas with Enterprise he tried to appeal more to the base at times, but was still unable to balance the issue. I think also the problem is that a balance isn't really possible...you basically have a scenario where the earlier/more conventional series had a philosophical basis of fairly heavy pacifism on the one hand, but where there was a transition period during DS9 in particular where violence started being incorporated more and more as a regular part of the show, until you got to the level of around fifth to seventh season Voyager which regularly had episodes that played like low-budget versions of the Lethal Weapon movies in space. Elite Force in particular was able to use that to its' advantage, and that alone is probably the main reason why that's been one of the only two Trek games (the other having been A Final Unity) that could be called an unqualified success.
Looking at it now, I think the lesson is that because each series had such a fundamentally different approach to the issue of violence, in a game or movie you can't mix series. If you're going to do a Voyager game for instance, you can make an FPS and have it as violent as you want. A Voyager game also wants a heavily postmodern, gritty, and also fairly multi-ethnic feel, with adolescent sexual angst between Tom and BE'lanna, comic relief from the Doctor, Chakotay doing his stereotypical Red Man schtick, and lots of Janeway's trademark moral ambiguity and gleeful abuse of authority.
A TNG game on the other hand *has* to be something like A Final Unity; an almost entirely non-violent puzzle-solver. A TOS game could have some degree of violence, but it has to be 60s oriented and cowboyish in nature, which means unarmed fisticuffs for the most part. The Utopian/"universal peace" vibe doesn't have to be as strong for a TOS game as for TNG either, but a certain amount of it doesn't hurt. I thought Starfleet Academy got it right in terms of having an Andorian as one of the students, as well. That sort of unobtrusive in reference helps to keep the autistic geek base happy, and won't upset normal audiences *too* much if it isn't overdone. Of all of these, DS9 is probably the trickiest to get right, which probably also explains why it hasn't been done successfully in a game. A DS9 game could have a certain amount of violence, but it needs to be kept restrained a subtle way. (Odo's restrained use of martial arts with carefully and clearly performed hand strikes are a good example of what I'm talking about, here) The idea with DS9 is that of a society which has traditionally been pacifist, but which is in the process of discovering that violence is something of a necessity on the basis of self-defense. The seventh season episode, "The Siege of AR-558," is probably the best example of what I'm talking about, there.
b) I get the feeling that in some cases, game design houses possibly (if only subconsciously) had the attitude that because they were doing a Trek game, it probably wasn't going to achieve more than cult popularity anywayz, and so therefore there wasn't much point in making sure that it was a truly quality game. If you're going to do a strongly character/story oriented Trek game, then yes, there is a fairly strong possibility that you're not going to hold much appeal outside the base. Howe
But if the warez networks are using hash signatures to identify perfect original versions of media, wouldn't this technique fail?
It might work for a certain period on IRC, since they may not have started using hashing there...I haven't traded on IRC for years now, and so am not certain. Even if it worked for a certain period though, it'd be a fairly trivial procedure to modify fserves to display hashes in the directory listings for files as well as the filenames themselves, and automatically create hash lists.
Thus, although it'd probably work for long enough to cause a certain amount of havoc, eventually the offending files would be deleted.
The "grey list" idea that that article mentions wouldn't work either...mainly because it presupposes that hash lists would be centralised. The RIAA/MPAA/whoever can put up a couple of bogus hashlists, but what they can't control is the presence of hashlists on individual fserves themselves...once again, it degenerates back to an issue of scale...the fact that there are vastly more people pirating than there are trying to stop the pirates.
If the grey hashlists could be equally decentralised, and were going to outnumber the trustworthy ones, then that could work...but they can't hope to.
IRC is probably the single most difficult medium for the cartels to fight, primarily because it's so interactive...when you have the virtual equivalent of live, face to face transactions, maintaining trust is trivial, and breaking it can only really be done by the individuals within the transactions themselves.
And what if it's a GPL'd chainsaw that you made in college, put on the internet for people to copy and use if they want, but never took the time to test thoroughly?
Ever been part of the warez scene on IRC?
I'm assuming you haven't, so I'll explain. That system is entirely trust based, and self-regulating. If a file ever comes from anyone which has a virus or anything else suspect included, the source of the file immediately gets ostracised, at least as a source, and most likely in terms of download access as well, since the system is based on reciprocal trade. Wrong, I hear you say...what about cracks coming from warez *web* sites or p2p nets which have malware? Said malware would likely be put into the archives by the webmasters of those sites themselves...the upstream cracking groups would NOT be doing it, because there are a lot of people in the warez food chain who are not going to want to receive/propogate known malicious files. ANY group which includes files for compromising a system with a release has just destroyed its' ability to subsequently release files that people will trust at any point in the future. Ditto for eMule files that have nasties in them...they get intercepted/recreated downstream. That is part of the entire reason why nets like eMule use the sorts of file hashing systems that they do; if you know the hash of a particular group's release, you can download said release and get entirely clean warez.
Ditto with any moron who was going to be dumb enough to try and write GPL licensed malware...they'd gain a horrible reputation very, very quickly. The other thing is, anyone who is sufficiently interested in doing the wrong thing as to be writing malware in the first place is not going to care about licensing it unless they are exceptionally stupid...which malware authors generally aren't. Sociopathic and deserving of being used as live shark bait, yes. Stupid, no.
Accidental bugs which lead to buffer overflows and such are different. They are unavoidable, and people know that...despite the best of developer intentions, occasionally they happen. As such, although the author of said bug will not risk ostracision for authoring it, in most cases (at least if the program in question has more than half a dozen or so users) it gets patched very quickly.
I've trolled about vi myself a couple of times in the past, but installing FreeBSD a few weeks ago finally convinced me to take the time to pick up at least a very rudimentary degree of mobility in it.
If nothing else, the one thing which it gave me which I'm actually grateful for is that it disrupted my old habits/patterns (if only temporarily) and forced me to have to think. Vi is a thoroughly alien interface compared to virtually anything else I've used, and although with the tutorial (which is surprisingly good) it's discoverable, I don't feel it would have been without it.
I'm still undecided as to whether or not I feel the interface has actual technical merit, or whether it's simply something vestigial that certain people are so fond of for whatever reason that they've been unable to force themselves to throw it away...although if it's true as Mr Joy says that the editor was originally designed for, and works in, extremely low-bandwidth environments, then that element at least is something which I feel is very much worth keeping.
One thing which I find extremely distressing these days is that many people seem to feel that the conservatism which motivated the philosophy behind a lot of early UNIX software is an anachronistic attitude and is no longer warranted, given the glut of cpu cycles and other system resources we now find ourselves in. I would urge such people to remember that even under normal circumstances, in some situations (such as embedded/small devices) such is not always the case, and that not only that, were a sufficiently large scale disaster of some kind to happen, it could universally cease to be the case also.
Conservatism is a good thing to hold onto. Certainly, when the sun is shining and everything is fine, you can feel lulled into believing that not only do you not need it, but that you'll never need it again. If the last few years have been any indication however, some parts of the world are going to continue to face severe environmental catastrophes going forward...and the conservatism of old school UNIX may be one of the only things we know about that could keep computer infrastructure going in such places under such conditions. It is very strange how the past can often end up being the present and the future, especially when we do not expect it.
Do I feel secure? Yeah, pretty much I do even though I haven't really done anything else
;-)
to secure my machines.
I really wish we had Theo deRaadt reading (and commenting) on this thread...I can't even begin to imagine how novel, riddled with expletives, and generally blistering the abuse you would get from him would be, I suspect.
I am a level designer myself, and I've been including my 'source'-maps with every release, as I think that people can learn a lot from other people's work, so the concept of sharing is not too strange to me.
;)
I could be wrong, but AFAIK there isn't an open source 3d game engine in existence which isn't under the GPL. That effectively means that for any of them you use, you can't hold back code at all. Technically speaking, you could still copyright/trademark images/textures within the game, though...that's what Red Hat do with their artwork within their Linux distribution.
Also, while there is nothing legally preventing you from making money from GPL licensed software, whether it's accepted or not will depend on where you try it. The Linux community in particular has a fairly strong cultural taboo against people making money from software more or less in general, irrespective of the license used, so you're likely to get viciously verbally abused if you try and sell it to them, or to anyone else where they can see you doing it. On the other hand, you could probably do it offline or with non-Linux users with no ill effects whatsoever...since as I said, selling GPL licensed software isn't illegal...it's more purely a case of Linux developers/users not wanting other people to make money from software if they themselves aren't...envy, in other words. As a good example of this, Linus Torvalds himself originally tried to stipulate (prior to putting the kernel under the GPL) that the kernel was for non-commercial use only, and that people could only use it as long as they did not try and make money from it. Since having become a millionaire himself, although the kernel is still under the GPL, he now has no such economic stipulations whatsoever.
If you do sell GPL-licensed software, you do of course have to make sure you provide full source code with whatever binaries you're selling. As long as you do that, you're legally free to charge as much for it as you want.
So they're going to try and tell us that the fact that sticking to a proprietary hardware platform kept them almost entirely irrelevant throughout the company's history had nothing to do with it? ;-)
To paraphrase a saying...If you believe that, I recently acquired this really beautiful bridge up in Sydney which you may be interested in purchasing.
The GPL3 has a couple of problems which aren't necessarily about what's actually written on the page, but I think some people are still noticing them.
a) For starters, a lot of people (like, say, Linus) have repeatedly expressed that *because* v2 is as great a license as it is, they're uncomfortable with *anyone* messing with it...and that includes the FSF themselves.
b) Although v2 itself wasn't, v3 is very much a case of Stallman specifically saying, "You can only continue to use software that uses this license as long as you specifically avoid doing anything which I, in my sole discretion, happen to decide that I don't like. In order to continue to use this software, you have to become a fully committed adherent of my religion. That means adopting my ideology to the letter whether it be political, economic, social, or in any other area, as well as doing anything else which I might happen to feel like telling you to do." This is a real problem. Rather than simply stipulate that use of the license mandates providing source with binaries, (which I have no problem with, in fact view as a very good thing) Stallman has indicated a desire to genuinely use the license as a moral/ideological soapbox. Source with binaries on its' own has never been enough for Stallman...and I'm inclined to believe it never will be. He wants power over others...he wants a social movement...and he wants to go a long way beyond merely software itself. If you want me to go into more detail, we can spend as long as you like talking about this, as well...I can cite any amount of evidence of Stallman's megalomania. For the most part he keeps it fairly well hidden...but occasionally the mask cracks. Even if you don't believe he himself wants these things, try reading this and then telling me that Bradley Kuhn isn't a megalomaniac. As Ulrich Drepper noted, the *only* reason why Stallman has wanted the, "or any later version," language in the GPL is precisely so that he has the legal option to pull the carpet out from under people's feet when he feels like it.
Bottom line:- Vista might mean that it's time for people who care about their own self-determination to part ways with Microsoft, but GPLv3 means that in my own mind anyway, the FSF are rapidly moving towards the same point themselves. Other people need to make their own decisions, but I for one will *not* be Stallman or Kuhn's bitch any more than I will be Gates or Ballmer's.
If you want to know why other people are moving away from GPLv3, I can only assume it's because they feel the same way.