...You're not allowed to take over the world. Yes, we're aware that you'd like to, just like any other political body on the planet these days. That in itself makes no difference."
Seriously, I'm detecting a note of desperation, here. The EU/UN know very well that the majority don't want them to get their grubby paws on the Internet, and I suspect that in the quiet of their own minds, they also know that there are valid reasons for that. It's basically the EU software patent case all over again.
You've got a canary in a cage, suspended from a ceiling, with a cat sitting on the floor watching the canary. Every so often the cat will continue to try and leap for the cage in an effort to eat the canary, but if the cat gets whacked upside the head with a broom often enough, although it will need to be done numerous times, the cat will eventually get the message...that it's not getting the canary, and it's only going to cause itself continued pain and suffering by continuing to try.
Same deal here. The EU needs to be told repeatedly that in terms of them getting governance of the Internet, we hear them knocking, but they ain't coming in. We might have to do it ten, fifteen, or twenty times, but eventually they'll get the message.
I've noticed that whenever politicians want to enact some truly repressive piece of legislation, appealing to paternal instincts works even more effectively than fearmongering about terrorists.
Makes me think that in Bush's recent quest to implement perpetual martial law, he's simply going about it in the wrong way. If he could somehow find a way to tie implementing martial law to protecting kids from paedophiles, he'd probably have no trouble getting it through whatsoever.
The primary species of large cat usually featured in Australian cryptozoological reports AFAIK is the thylacine, a large and very strange looking marcupial. They normally primarily appeared in Tasmania, but we had a few here on the mainland. They were supposed to have become extinct in the 30s, but people still see them occasionally, and a friend of my father's has sworn he saw one in front of his car in Gippsland one night...scared him half to death, he said.
The cat in that photo doesn't appear to look anything like a thylacine, however. I never would have thought cougars born in captivity would be able to live in the wild over here, although there is livestock for them, and they could try and take on roos as well if they were sufficiently ambitious or hungry. I wouldn't place bets as to who'd come out second from a serious argument between a cougar and a large red roo though, either.;)
Given both the remoteness and the bizarre climate of Gippsland though (I've seen mosquitos in midwinter) I woudn't be entirely surprised if just about anything could live down there.
...but in the groupthink stakes, the GNU crowd reigns supreme, as always.
There are going to be people (a lot of people, actually) who aren't going to want anything to do with Linux until RMS and crew are booted off their pedestal...but as I've said before, I don't see it ever happening.
Thus, I can see Linux getting a lot of commercial/office use, as it already has been...and serverside, as well. The residential desktop however for the most part is not going to happen...because as the GNU crowd may have already noticed, the non-autistic demographic of the population really doesn't care about your opinions, and more importantly, they especially don't want you making your decisions for them. Trying to do that is what got Microsoft in the amount of trouble it ended up in.
Try reading Animal Farm, guys...and then think about Stallman. Hopefully, the parallels will eventually start to become apparent.
...and the sexpests will come. This promises to be The Sims Online all over again, replete with such sociopathic pillars of the online community as this sterling human being.
Does he seriously think that he has any ability to screen for Bastet or Cthulu worshipping gothic pagans with dominant tendencies who in the height of passion also enjoy shots of their significant others' blood?
The other thing is, the above types will not only descend on the game in droves, but because mainstream types don't want to be anywhere near such sewer-dwelling vermin, (completely understandably!) they will be repelled, and thus a comparitively small number of the freaks will be the only people he makes money from.
The thing that MMOG authors don't seem to have got through their skulls yet is that with the possible exception of WoW, normal people don't play MMOGS, because normal people already have lives. Thus, the only demographic you're going to get in an MMOG are those who in ages past would have been part of the inpatient mental health system...Either that, or burned at the stake.;-)
The software is free, the support is free...Is there any element here which people are supposed to pay for?
Oh, wait...I forgot. Earning money is considered evil around here, unless it's done from within a cubicle. My bad.
Honestly, anyone who thinks Communism is dead needs only to spend two weeks on Slashdot. They'll quickly be shown just how mistaken they are. Methinks Senator McCarthy was alive 50 years too early.
Society in my observation generally tends to swim towards the future between two flags. One is planted in the idealism of people like yourself and Kurzweil, people who believe that literally almost anything can/will be possible, and want to make that the case. (Think of either the planet Uranus astrologically or Neo from the Matrix as archetypical metaphors for this style of thinking)
At the other end of the spectrum you've got big business, the elderly, the Luddites as you say, and the non-intellectually/technically inclined. This is the force that was responsible for such things as light bulbs being made to blow eventually in order to earn more money by selling more, when they originally lasted forever, or close to it. It's also the force which keeps the world dependent on fossil fuels, and periodically assassinates Uranian thinkers who develo0p alternative forms of energy generation. (Represented archetypically by the planet Saturn/Agent Smith)
The thing that is important to remember is that both of this forces/mentalities are extremely necessary and important. If we had the Uranian force/mentality on its own, technological development would progress faster than our ability to understand it and keep up mentally, and eventually most of us (if not all) would end up destroying ourselves. We've almost managed to do that as it is.
On the other hand, the Saturnine/Smith force/mentality existing exclusively would mean that both political freedom and technological development would be non-existent and impossible. Nobody would ever think to improve or develop in any way...we'd still be living in caves, and we wouldn't have even invented fire, since invention in any form is a Uranian concept.
What I think is the most important thing to do is to keep both of these mentalities/forces alive, but also to a degree to keep them in check. They each exist as counterweights to each other, to balance each other. I don't believe we will ever achieve Kurtzweil's singularity, because as I said, if we did all or most of us would die fairly shortly afterwards. We do however need the singularity as something on the horizon to shoot for, just as we need its opposite. If we keep both of these in view, we can continue to have new technologies, allowing us to do different things, while at the same time allowing technological advancement to happen sufficiently gradually that we can grow to fully understand it, and hence utilise it fully as well.
My biggest beef with Linus was his brilliant idea of putting the kernel under the GPL in the first place. Thanks to that move, anyone who wants to use Linux now also has to be saddled with Mr. Personality and his Legions of Doom.
That however is only the biggest problem. It's not the only one. Because of several things however, I've done this where Linux is concerned. If I ever use a free UNIX again in the future, it will probably be NetBSD...although in order to avoid these types of problems recurring, I won't be having anything to do with it's developers, either.
I no longer look forward to the day Microsoft goes bankrupt, if such a day comes. Linux is a system written by and for autistic juveniles, and is not going to be remotely close to being ready to replace Windows until that fact changes. I hold out scant hope, however, that it ever will.
I suppose I can't speak for the rest of the population but I don't download new music I've never heard before.
You're missing out. I found most of my current favourite music that way. As an experiment for yourself, search eMule or BT for an mp3 called Crescent Suns, by Shpongle, Slinky Wizard, and Jewel. You might not like it...but then again, you just might.;)
...if she won the case, but if I had it I'd be willing to bet several thousand dollars that she won't. If one of President "Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangster" Bush's friends on the bench is presiding over the case, she's got no chance. That's what got Microsoft off in the end...the case against them was dropped around five minutes after Bush got elected.
People can forget about any successful criminal cases being brought against corporations for as long as Busholini is in office. The judicial branch is almost entirely in his pocket, and they won't allow it.
RMS: "Our goal should be to spread freedom and then defend it. That is more important than making our software popular, which would just be catering to our egos."
I guess that's why he came up with the LGPL...because he cares more about copyleft and his principles than he does about feeding his ego.;-)
I will admit that RMS and his cult are the main reason why I'm currently taking a break from Linux at the moment. I'm more thoroughly sick of him and them than I am of anything else associated with the OS. He IMHO is a hypocritical, megalomaniacal narcissist who contrary to the above comments, is no longer motivated by anything other than the gratification of his ego. I no longer consider him any more credible than Bush when he makes use of the word freedom.
The one thing I've always found more nauseating than anything else, however, is the degree to which Stallman is worshipped by the mindless, Trotskyite zombies that make up his "movement." He isn't deserving of worship. In no way is he anything more than a fallible human being, who also continues to insist on trying to take credit for various things which don't belong to him, including his very relevance itself. It's almost certain to my mind that the majority of people who have heard of him would not have if it hadn't been for Linux.
Stallman and the FSF have lately actually started to remind me of the old parable about the frog and the scorpion...He is the scorpion on Linux's back, and thanks to Linus licensing Linux under the GPL more than anything else, I doubt it will be possible to shake him off in the foreseeable future.
Here's another revolutionary idea for the more ovine of the moderators around here, as well; instead of simply modding this into troll oblivion, why not actually display some evidence of having a brain, a spine, and concrete reasons for believing what you do, and refute me? Tell me why I'm wrong, and don't simply rely on the tired old canard (which I've had on LWN and elsewhere) that I'm simply a wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper for daring to speak against the great god RMS.
I really am absolutely fucking sick of him...the pomposity, the continual smug arrogance, the megalomania, and the attempts at taking credit for anything and everything even remotely related to FOSS. I also know I'm not alone, here...I've read about several other people recently who feel the same way. It upsets me because in many other aspects, I do love Linux...but sadly, it seems that at least having anything to do with other people who use Linux online means at some point being subjected to Stallman.
I just hope that those of you who think he's still helping eventually realise just how much damage he's actually doing instead. Part of the reason why a lot of people try and leave Windows is because they're tired of their operating system being associated with megalomaniacs. The last thing they want is to migrate to Linux and discover that they actually have to put up with exactly the same thing with Linux as well, at least in the case of Stallman.
...that any law passed regarding the Internet is completely unenforceable, for the most part. Oh, sure there'll be the token poor soul here or there who gets legally crucified for expressing an opinion which Adolf Bush and crew don't approve of, but for the most part, we can all look forward to business as usual.
There are those of us who believe that God (and not the guy downstairs who Bush pays homage to) actually gave us the Internet at least partially for the purpose of preserving free expression. Short of physically turning it off completely, (and he probably wouldn't find that very easy either) there's precious little he can do about it.
I truly wish Bush would realise that he's no different from Hitler or any other aspirant megalomaniac. They try, and they die, as far as attempts at world domination are concerned. Within a very short space of time, Bush is going to be reduced to nothing more than roadkill by the side of the ten-lane autobahn of history...which is exactly the position he deserves.
...and this is what's hurting them. Not what their competitors are doing.
In The Science Of Getting Rich, Wallace Wattles talks about how money is primarily made on the creative plane rather than the competitive plane; where the focus is on solving problems or adding real value to people's lives, not on knocking everyone else out of the race.
Microsoft's biggest problem in this regard is that everyone is seen as an enemy, and everything is seen as a threat. If Steve Ballmer actually had a brain in his head, he might realise a couple of things:-
1) Microsoft CAN'T be everywhere at once. It isn't possible. They can't be developing new operating systems, upgrading Office, creating development software, and conquering the Web all at once.
2) Because of 1, other companies are going to be in some computer-related niche somewhere.
3) While Microsoft are busy upgrading Windows or Office, if they want to have some kind of online service, what they could do is what I saw Yahoo doing a few years back. Instead of re-inventing the wheel with their own search, outsource to Google as a backend. Google are still going to have their own site, of course, but what this would mean is that Microsoft could market their own content (syndicated news and so on) on top of Google's search, and if Microsoft's extra content was good enough, they might find that MSN became more popular than Google's plain site anywayz.
4) In doing 3, Microsoft would still have a web presence, (which they want) people could keep using Google, (which they want) and both companies would make money. The reason why Steve Ballmer wouldn't accept an idea like this is because he is insistent on Microsoft completely cornering any and every market it enters, and if they keep doing this, eventually they will end up with nothing.
There are other reasons why Steve Ballmer should be fired, as I've said before...but the monopolistic attitude is the main one. If he is allowed to stay in charge and maintain it, it will eventually destroy the company, and possibly hurt a lot of other people in the process. The bottom line is that, contrary to the popular opinion on Slashdot, there was a time when Microsoft actually did do some genuine good...but with Ballmer at the helm, that is no longer possible. All he cares about is monopoly and economic self-preservation...not about providing a service.
What the music industry still doesn't get (or perhaps doesn't want to accept) is that they're not dying because 14 year olds can swap 80s mp3s on IRC or emule. They're dying because of the likes of Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson. For some inexplicable reason, in the last 5-7 years or so, the music industry has become fixated with promoting mindless, soulless, totally artificial whores, singing equally mindless, synthesised crap. Then when hardly anybody wants to buy this sewage, (big surprise) the RIAA stand around screeching that it's because of piracy.
It's not because of piracy. It's because not since the mid 90s have you produced anything that has actually been worth listening to, let alone buying. If you look at what is often the most popular traded music on IRC channels, you'll notice that the vast majority of music being actively transferred is from 1995 or earlier.
If the RIAA want to revive their industry, they can do so very simply. Get rid of the walking blowup dolls a la Jessica Simpson etc, and instead restore the focus on people who actually view music as an art form, and know how to produce it in that context.
Don't cop out by simply resorting to grunge/punk either. Contrary to the opinions of 14 year olds, there are those of us who know that for the most part, these genres do not constitute genuine music, and who also know that the only real reason why these two genres are popular is because most of the people who listen to them aren't old enough to have heard anything else. When I think about it, in my own mind Kurt Cobain probably had just as much to do with the current near-dead state of mainstream music as Britney Spears, if not more.
But who am I fooling? This is Slashdot. Nobody with the power to really change anything reads posts here...so in reality, all this counts as is futile bitching. I get the feeling that even if one of the demoniacs from the RIAA did read this anywayz, they wouldn't care...it's a lot easier for them to keep shovelling out mass-produced crap which nobody likes and then try and force us to buy it anywayz than it is to try and figure out what we actually WANT to listen to.
Given the amount of competitive progress that Linux has been making recently, it's more than understandable that Microsoft are experiencing some dissention in the ranks. Ballmer isn't anywhere near lucid or flexible enough to genuinely fix the company's problems, either; his tactics can be expected to consist of reassuring the press that everything is fine on the one hand, and then playing business as usual on the other.
Microsoft's most pressing problem is that it desperately needs to get rid of the old guard. Jim Allchin being put out to pasture at the end of 2006 is a step in the right direction; it just needs to be done to a few more people there, Ballmer included.
If at least the majority of the senior management can be persuaded to take their stock nest eggs and ride off into the proverbial sunset, then there might be some hope for the company. They are stuck in their thinking, and more than anything else, Microsoft needs a fundamental paradigm shift in virtually every area if it is going to survive. People need to realise that a very large portion of Microsoft's success has come from marketing. Technically speaking, their software has never been more than barely adequate, and that has been due to some chronic problems with their design philosophy. That design philosophy will not change while the current senior management are still at the helm.
If it's going to happen, however, it needs to happen soon. Microsoft's release cycle is getting longer, and I suspect that if nothing has changed by around 2008-9, the company will reach a tipping point after which, long term, nothing will save it.
I think what you're trying to say is that shitty graphics can be a lot easier for a system to render. *grin*
Quake 2 is/was the single worst FPS in gaming history, for my money...it was complete and utter crap. It became popular I'm assuming because
a) It was the first game IIRC that people could make mods for with a genuine programming language, and
b) Because the graphics were so awful comparitively speaking, it was somewhat more hardware efficient than other games which *didn't* make your eyes bleed if you looked at them.;)
They talk about Firefox and the Mac being insecure because they *want* them to be...it's wishful thinking.
They're a company that have always made a living out of Windows being so poorly designed. If end users move to operating systems that were designed by people who actually had half an idea what they were doing, business for Symantec is going to dry up.
It's exactly like the pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry...they don't make money from people being healthy. They make money from people being sick.
Symantec trying to give people FUD that other systems are insecure is entirely predictable...they won't make sales unless people believe such things.
My single issue with the LSB was caused when I discovered that compliance with the standard requires RPM. As soon as I saw that, I laughed contemptuously and closed the browser window which had loaded the LSB site.
RPM itself is rubbish, and as I said although I didn't go further, I surmised that a standard that was going to endorse crap like RPM in one area, was almost certain to endorse other such evil crap in other areas.
Ordinary Americans desperately need, now, to begin to take back their country. If they leave it much longer, they themselves will not be the only ones to suffer consequences at the hands of their government and groups like the RIAA. The Australian government has already begun passing draconian laws of its own, following the cue of Bush, and I have no doubt that more will follow.
Technology is such these days that it is no longer good enough to merely talk about removing a dictatorial regime after it has come to power. In this case, it's not merely prevention being better than cure...Prevention may be our only option.
...but anyone with a genuine clue knows that comparitive popularity aside, Microsoft do have a truly abysmal philosophy with regards to programming.
I have to wonder when these amoral trolls in the trade press (who somehow think the continuation of their employment is tied into Microsoft remaining a monopoly) are going to give up. Don't they realise that they could still make a living writing stories about Linux?
If I was an editor and had staff pumping out crap like this, it wouldn't matter which side of the fence I was on, opinion wise...they'd get fired.
Maybe it genuinely is true that autism is a prerequisite for considering moral integrity important...because I sure don't know too many muggles (the neurologically typical) who care much about it.
WinFS is about the only thing I would have liked to see in Vista. I've been waiting for that probably almost as long as Bill himself has.
Very little else that I've heard has excited me, though. The 3d additions to the user interface haven't sounded like much more than an excuse to force hardware upgrades.
As someone else said, a decent CLI and scripting language would have been really good, but it's probably true that those of us who want such things are a minority; from Microsoft's perspective, they wouldn't have to care about us.
It's a shame they feel like that, though...because although it might seem to them as though they'll make more money from the home users, the corporate trench coders are probably the people who'll spend the most time using it...so you'd think that they should get some sort of input as to its features.
Either Ballmer, Allchin, and Gates give up control of the company, or Microsoft will be irrelevant (if not bankrupt) by 2012-2015.
Something I've said many times before, and will maintain, is that Microsoft have never had a concrete, long term operating system strategy after Windows NT 4. That is evident from the fact that 2000 and XP were both merely incremental upgrades to NT 4 for the most part.
Vista is going to be comprised of leftovers...Things which Microsoft would have incorporated years ago if it hadn't been for them having to make ship dates. It is also going to be Microsoft's last release that the majority of the computer-using public care about.
Microsoft need to do what Apple have done; move to a BSD core, and thus allow each group to play to its' own strengths. The BSD people are very good at making a core, underlying operating system. Microsoft on the other hand have proven that they're good at UI and glitz. If the two were to be combined, we'd have a system unlike anything we've yet seen...the best of both worlds. This is where the GNU crowd need to see that the BSD license is useful in the grand scheme of things...because it gives companies who want a closed-source product a competently-constructed base.
However, I know that realistically, Microsoft are not going to do this. Gates, Ballmer, and Allchin are going to stay in control, and the company is going to become irrelevant, because they won't let go of their usual, failed way of doing things.
My point, which I think you underestimate, is that he really doesn't NEED to be an EXPERT Linux sys admin to make the conversion. It wouldn't hurt, of course, but it isn't an absolute requirement. And he DOES need to know a certain minimum to be a Linux sys admin at all.
For something quick, and for only a few different types of usage, and in a scenario where he most likely does want the type of support that SuSE and such can offer, then yes, I agree.
He can do all the things you suggest EVENTUALLY. I have no problem at all with that - I'd like to do all that myself if I had the time.
Well, yeah, sure. I will admit that part of my reasoning was that I didn't think he was on a hugely urgent timetable anywayz, from the point of view that he made it sound like (to me anyway) they already had a Windows network where he worked and were happy with that...so I was thinking he could have just left the Windows net working (or crashing;)) away *until* he'd got himself ready to deploy with Linux. I wouldn't have advocated LFS if I'd thought he was on an urgent timeframe.
I'm not familiar enough with RPM vs non-RPM systems to comment on any issues you have with RPM.
RPM has three fairly critical problems, IMHO. Two of these were meant to be positive features, but unfortunately, like a lot of Microsoft's stuff, people tend to take things which were meant to be used in a positive way and abuse them.
a) It strongly encourages (but doesn't force, granted) a primarily precompiled binary system. My issues with that aren't simply Gentoo-esque hysteria, either...at least two of the variants of the BSD ports system that I've seen have warnings in their documentation about the dangers of installing binaries when you (to quote the saying) don't know where they've been. People can download source, write their own vulnerabilities in, compile a binary with said vulnerabilities, and then distribute said binary. It's been done before. The other benefit to compiling yourself is that with the availability of things like the propolice (and other such patches) patches for gcc, glibc, and the kernel, you can make your system inherently secure from a number of different forms of attack. Vendor-precompiled rpms generally do not make use of such things, at least AFAIK. If they did, I'd have less issue with them on that score.
b) Subpackaging, which allows the ability to split one originally whole package into multiple packages. The reason why that's a bad thing is because it creates needless new dependencies which weren't there to begin with. Libraries are typically shipped in both "runtime" and "devel" versions. The runtime version is enough to run a precompiled binary, but if you want to compile anything yourself, you need the "devel" version, whereas compiling the library ordinarily doesn't create that distinction.
c) A spec format which encourages false listing of dependencies (causing you to download deps that aren't really needed etc) and a very poor standard generally. The Mandrake specfiles I've seen were an absolute mess.
By the time he gets everything learned and converted, the package management scene will have changed again anyway, probably.
Sadly, it may not. RPM and dpkg both seem to have been largely accepted as "just good enough" from what I've seen, despite their problems. Most people therefore seem to have assumed that the package management problem has been solved, when as you say, it most definitely hasn't been.
I'm not sure whether I still consider it a legitimate source of information about a lot of things, either.
It's become horribly insistent on being politically correct, for one thing. I've noticed that if they have to choose between factual or political correctness, anybody with revert priveleges will choose political every time.
One other, more subtle and disturbing thing that I've noticed is that a number of articles have attracted a group to whom the topic (and usually a particular perspective on said topic) is important. Anything written on said topic page which goes against the prevailing opinion held by this group, is more or less guaranteed to get reverted.
For purely technical or scientific information (stuff about different pieces of software, zoology, etc) it can be good, but for anything even remotely dealing with people, (especially politics) forget it. It isn't remotely objective, and shouldn't claim to be...what it does do however is express bias in a very subtle, and often difficult manner to detect.
Slashdot Mirror
...You're not allowed to take over the world. Yes, we're aware that you'd like to, just like any other political body on the planet these days. That in itself makes no difference."
Seriously, I'm detecting a note of desperation, here. The EU/UN know very well that the majority don't want them to get their grubby paws on the Internet, and I suspect that in the quiet of their own minds, they also know that there are valid reasons for that. It's basically the EU software patent case all over again.
You've got a canary in a cage, suspended from a ceiling, with a cat sitting on the floor watching the canary. Every so often the cat will continue to try and leap for the cage in an effort to eat the canary, but if the cat gets whacked upside the head with a broom often enough, although it will need to be done numerous times, the cat will eventually get the message...that it's not getting the canary, and it's only going to cause itself continued pain and suffering by continuing to try.
Same deal here. The EU needs to be told repeatedly that in terms of them getting governance of the Internet, we hear them knocking, but they ain't coming in. We might have to do it ten, fifteen, or twenty times, but eventually they'll get the message.
I've noticed that whenever politicians want to enact some truly repressive piece of legislation, appealing to paternal instincts works even more effectively than fearmongering about terrorists.
Makes me think that in Bush's recent quest to implement perpetual martial law, he's simply going about it in the wrong way. If he could somehow find a way to tie implementing martial law to protecting kids from paedophiles, he'd probably have no trouble getting it through whatsoever.
The primary species of large cat usually featured in Australian cryptozoological reports AFAIK is the thylacine, a large and very strange looking marcupial. They normally primarily appeared in Tasmania, but we had a few here on the mainland. They were supposed to have become extinct in the 30s, but people still see them occasionally, and a friend of my father's has sworn he saw one in front of his car in Gippsland one night...scared him half to death, he said.
;)
The cat in that photo doesn't appear to look anything like a thylacine, however. I never would have thought cougars born in captivity would be able to live in the wild over here, although there is livestock for them, and they could try and take on roos as well if they were sufficiently ambitious or hungry. I wouldn't place bets as to who'd come out second from a serious argument between a cougar and a large red roo though, either.
Given both the remoteness and the bizarre climate of Gippsland though (I've seen mosquitos in midwinter) I woudn't be entirely surprised if just about anything could live down there.
...but in the groupthink stakes, the GNU crowd reigns supreme, as always.
There are going to be people (a lot of people, actually) who aren't going to want anything to do with Linux until RMS and crew are booted off their pedestal...but as I've said before, I don't see it ever happening.
Thus, I can see Linux getting a lot of commercial/office use, as it already has been...and serverside, as well. The residential desktop however for the most part is not going to happen...because as the GNU crowd may have already noticed, the non-autistic demographic of the population really doesn't care about your opinions, and more importantly, they especially don't want you making your decisions for them. Trying to do that is what got Microsoft in the amount of trouble it ended up in.
Try reading Animal Farm, guys...and then think about Stallman. Hopefully, the parallels will eventually start to become apparent.
...and the sexpests will come. This promises to be The Sims Online all over again, replete with such sociopathic pillars of the online community as this sterling human being.
;-)
Does he seriously think that he has any ability to screen for Bastet or Cthulu worshipping gothic pagans with dominant tendencies who in the height of passion also enjoy shots of their significant others' blood?
The other thing is, the above types will not only descend on the game in droves, but because mainstream types don't want to be anywhere near such sewer-dwelling vermin, (completely understandably!) they will be repelled, and thus a comparitively small number of the freaks will be the only people he makes money from.
The thing that MMOG authors don't seem to have got through their skulls yet is that with the possible exception of WoW, normal people don't play MMOGS, because normal people already have lives. Thus, the only demographic you're going to get in an MMOG are those who in ages past would have been part of the inpatient mental health system...Either that, or burned at the stake.
The software is free, the support is free...Is there any element here which people are supposed to pay for?
Oh, wait...I forgot. Earning money is considered evil around here, unless it's done from within a cubicle. My bad.
Honestly, anyone who thinks Communism is dead needs only to spend two weeks on Slashdot. They'll quickly be shown just how mistaken they are. Methinks Senator McCarthy was alive 50 years too early.
Society in my observation generally tends to swim towards the future between two flags. One is planted in the idealism of people like yourself and Kurzweil, people who believe that literally almost anything can/will be possible, and want to make that the case. (Think of either the planet Uranus astrologically or Neo from the Matrix as archetypical metaphors for this style of thinking)
At the other end of the spectrum you've got big business, the elderly, the Luddites as you say, and the non-intellectually/technically inclined. This is the force that was responsible for such things as light bulbs being made to blow eventually in order to earn more money by selling more, when they originally lasted forever, or close to it. It's also the force which keeps the world dependent on fossil fuels, and periodically assassinates Uranian thinkers who develo0p alternative forms of energy generation. (Represented archetypically by the planet Saturn/Agent Smith)
The thing that is important to remember is that both of this forces/mentalities are extremely necessary and important. If we had the Uranian force/mentality on its own, technological development would progress faster than our ability to understand it and keep up mentally, and eventually most of us (if not all) would end up destroying ourselves. We've almost managed to do that as it is.
On the other hand, the Saturnine/Smith force/mentality existing exclusively would mean that both political freedom and technological development would be non-existent and impossible. Nobody would ever think to improve or develop in any way...we'd still be living in caves, and we wouldn't have even invented fire, since invention in any form is a Uranian concept.
What I think is the most important thing to do is to keep both of these mentalities/forces alive, but also to a degree to keep them in check. They each exist as counterweights to each other, to balance each other. I don't believe we will ever achieve Kurtzweil's singularity, because as I said, if we did all or most of us would die fairly shortly afterwards. We do however need the singularity as something on the horizon to shoot for, just as we need its opposite. If we keep both of these in view, we can continue to have new technologies, allowing us to do different things, while at the same time allowing technological advancement to happen sufficiently gradually that we can grow to fully understand it, and hence utilise it fully as well.
My biggest beef with Linus was his brilliant idea of putting the kernel under the GPL in the first place. Thanks to that move, anyone who wants to use Linux now also has to be saddled with Mr. Personality and his Legions of Doom.
That however is only the biggest problem. It's not the only one. Because of several things however, I've done this where Linux is concerned. If I ever use a free UNIX again in the future, it will probably be NetBSD...although in order to avoid these types of problems recurring, I won't be having anything to do with it's developers, either.
I no longer look forward to the day Microsoft goes bankrupt, if such a day comes. Linux is a system written by and for autistic juveniles, and is not going to be remotely close to being ready to replace Windows until that fact changes. I hold out scant hope, however, that it ever will.
I suppose I can't speak for the rest of the population but I don't download new music I've never heard before.
;)
You're missing out. I found most of my current favourite music that way. As an experiment for yourself, search eMule or BT for an mp3 called Crescent Suns, by Shpongle, Slinky Wizard, and Jewel. You might not like it...but then again, you just might.
...if she won the case, but if I had it I'd be willing to bet several thousand dollars that she won't. If one of President "Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangster" Bush's friends on the bench is presiding over the case, she's got no chance. That's what got Microsoft off in the end...the case against them was dropped around five minutes after Bush got elected.
People can forget about any successful criminal cases being brought against corporations for as long as Busholini is in office. The judicial branch is almost entirely in his pocket, and they won't allow it.
RMS: "Our goal should be to spread freedom and then defend it. That is more important than making our software popular, which would just be catering to our egos."
;-)
I guess that's why he came up with the LGPL...because he cares more about copyleft and his principles than he does about feeding his ego.
I will admit that RMS and his cult are the main reason why I'm currently taking a break from Linux at the moment. I'm more thoroughly sick of him and them than I am of anything else associated with the OS. He IMHO is a hypocritical, megalomaniacal narcissist who contrary to the above comments, is no longer motivated by anything other than the gratification of his ego. I no longer consider him any more credible than Bush when he makes use of the word freedom.
The one thing I've always found more nauseating than anything else, however, is the degree to which Stallman is worshipped by the mindless, Trotskyite zombies that make up his "movement." He isn't deserving of worship. In no way is he anything more than a fallible human being, who also continues to insist on trying to take credit for various things which don't belong to him, including his very relevance itself. It's almost certain to my mind that the majority of people who have heard of him would not have if it hadn't been for Linux.
Stallman and the FSF have lately actually started to remind me of the old parable about the frog and the scorpion...He is the scorpion on Linux's back, and thanks to Linus licensing Linux under the GPL more than anything else, I doubt it will be possible to shake him off in the foreseeable future.
Here's another revolutionary idea for the more ovine of the moderators around here, as well; instead of simply modding this into troll oblivion, why not actually display some evidence of having a brain, a spine, and concrete reasons for believing what you do, and refute me? Tell me why I'm wrong, and don't simply rely on the tired old canard (which I've had on LWN and elsewhere) that I'm simply a wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper for daring to speak against the great god RMS.
I really am absolutely fucking sick of him...the pomposity, the continual smug arrogance, the megalomania, and the attempts at taking credit for anything and everything even remotely related to FOSS. I also know I'm not alone, here...I've read about several other people recently who feel the same way. It upsets me because in many other aspects, I do love Linux...but sadly, it seems that at least having anything to do with other people who use Linux online means at some point being subjected to Stallman.
I just hope that those of you who think he's still helping eventually realise just how much damage he's actually doing instead. Part of the reason why a lot of people try and leave Windows is because they're tired of their operating system being associated with megalomaniacs. The last thing they want is to migrate to Linux and discover that they actually have to put up with exactly the same thing with Linux as well, at least in the case of Stallman.
...that any law passed regarding the Internet is completely unenforceable, for the most part. Oh, sure there'll be the token poor soul here or there who gets legally crucified for expressing an opinion which Adolf Bush and crew don't approve of, but for the most part, we can all look forward to business as usual.
There are those of us who believe that God (and not the guy downstairs who Bush pays homage to) actually gave us the Internet at least partially for the purpose of preserving free expression. Short of physically turning it off completely, (and he probably wouldn't find that very easy either) there's precious little he can do about it.
I truly wish Bush would realise that he's no different from Hitler or any other aspirant megalomaniac. They try, and they die, as far as attempts at world domination are concerned. Within a very short space of time, Bush is going to be reduced to nothing more than roadkill by the side of the ten-lane autobahn of history...which is exactly the position he deserves.
...and this is what's hurting them. Not what their competitors are doing.
In The Science Of Getting Rich, Wallace Wattles talks about how money is primarily made on the creative plane rather than the competitive plane; where the focus is on solving problems or adding real value to people's lives, not on knocking everyone else out of the race.
Microsoft's biggest problem in this regard is that everyone is seen as an enemy, and everything is seen as a threat. If Steve Ballmer actually had a brain in his head, he might realise a couple of things:-
1) Microsoft CAN'T be everywhere at once. It isn't possible. They can't be developing new operating systems, upgrading Office, creating development software, and conquering the Web all at once.
2) Because of 1, other companies are going to be in some computer-related niche somewhere.
3) While Microsoft are busy upgrading Windows or Office, if they want to have some kind of online service, what they could do is what I saw Yahoo doing a few years back. Instead of re-inventing the wheel with their own search, outsource to Google as a backend. Google are still going to have their own site, of course, but what this would mean is that Microsoft could market their own content (syndicated news and so on) on top of Google's search, and if Microsoft's extra content was good enough, they might find that MSN became more popular than Google's plain site anywayz.
4) In doing 3, Microsoft would still have a web presence, (which they want) people could keep using Google, (which they want) and both companies would make money. The reason why Steve Ballmer wouldn't accept an idea like this is because he is insistent on Microsoft completely cornering any and every market it enters, and if they keep doing this, eventually they will end up with nothing.
There are other reasons why Steve Ballmer should be fired, as I've said before...but the monopolistic attitude is the main one. If he is allowed to stay in charge and maintain it, it will eventually destroy the company, and possibly hurt a lot of other people in the process. The bottom line is that, contrary to the popular opinion on Slashdot, there was a time when Microsoft actually did do some genuine good...but with Ballmer at the helm, that is no longer possible. All he cares about is monopoly and economic self-preservation...not about providing a service.
What the music industry still doesn't get (or perhaps doesn't want to accept) is that they're not dying because 14 year olds can swap 80s mp3s on IRC or emule. They're dying because of the likes of Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson. For some inexplicable reason, in the last 5-7 years or so, the music industry has become fixated with promoting mindless, soulless, totally artificial whores, singing equally mindless, synthesised crap. Then when hardly anybody wants to buy this sewage, (big surprise) the RIAA stand around screeching that it's because of piracy.
It's not because of piracy. It's because not since the mid 90s have you produced anything that has actually been worth listening to, let alone buying. If you look at what is often the most popular traded music on IRC channels, you'll notice that the vast majority of music being actively transferred is from 1995 or earlier.
If the RIAA want to revive their industry, they can do so very simply. Get rid of the walking blowup dolls a la Jessica Simpson etc, and instead restore the focus on people who actually view music as an art form, and know how to produce it in that context.
Don't cop out by simply resorting to grunge/punk either. Contrary to the opinions of 14 year olds, there are those of us who know that for the most part, these genres do not constitute genuine music, and who also know that the only real reason why these two genres are popular is because most of the people who listen to them aren't old enough to have heard anything else. When I think about it, in my own mind Kurt Cobain probably had just as much to do with the current near-dead state of mainstream music as Britney Spears, if not more.
But who am I fooling? This is Slashdot. Nobody with the power to really change anything reads posts here...so in reality, all this counts as is futile bitching. I get the feeling that even if one of the demoniacs from the RIAA did read this anywayz, they wouldn't care...it's a lot easier for them to keep shovelling out mass-produced crap which nobody likes and then try and force us to buy it anywayz than it is to try and figure out what we actually WANT to listen to.
"A house divided upon itself cannot stand."
Given the amount of competitive progress that Linux has been making recently, it's more than understandable that Microsoft are experiencing some dissention in the ranks. Ballmer isn't anywhere near lucid or flexible enough to genuinely fix the company's problems, either; his tactics can be expected to consist of reassuring the press that everything is fine on the one hand, and then playing business as usual on the other.
Microsoft's most pressing problem is that it desperately needs to get rid of the old guard. Jim Allchin being put out to pasture at the end of 2006 is a step in the right direction; it just needs to be done to a few more people there, Ballmer included.
If at least the majority of the senior management can be persuaded to take their stock nest eggs and ride off into the proverbial sunset, then there might be some hope for the company. They are stuck in their thinking, and more than anything else, Microsoft needs a fundamental paradigm shift in virtually every area if it is going to survive. People need to realise that a very large portion of Microsoft's success has come from marketing. Technically speaking, their software has never been more than barely adequate, and that has been due to some chronic problems with their design philosophy. That design philosophy will not change while the current senior management are still at the helm.
If it's going to happen, however, it needs to happen soon. Microsoft's release cycle is getting longer, and I suspect that if nothing has changed by around 2008-9, the company will reach a tipping point after which, long term, nothing will save it.
I think what you're trying to say is that shitty graphics can be a lot easier for a system to render. *grin*
;)
Quake 2 is/was the single worst FPS in gaming history, for my money...it was complete and utter crap. It became popular I'm assuming because
a) It was the first game IIRC that people could make mods for with a genuine programming language, and
b) Because the graphics were so awful comparitively speaking, it was somewhat more hardware efficient than other games which *didn't* make your eyes bleed if you looked at them.
They talk about Firefox and the Mac being insecure because they *want* them to be...it's wishful thinking.
They're a company that have always made a living out of Windows being so poorly designed. If end users move to operating systems that were designed by people who actually had half an idea what they were doing, business for Symantec is going to dry up.
It's exactly like the pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry...they don't make money from people being healthy. They make money from people being sick.
Symantec trying to give people FUD that other systems are insecure is entirely predictable...they won't make sales unless people believe such things.
My single issue with the LSB was caused when I discovered that compliance with the standard requires RPM. As soon as I saw that, I laughed contemptuously and closed the browser window which had loaded the LSB site.
RPM itself is rubbish, and as I said although I didn't go further, I surmised that a standard that was going to endorse crap like RPM in one area, was almost certain to endorse other such evil crap in other areas.
You've heard the saying:-
Just Say No.
"Only follow the law when the law is just."
Ordinary Americans desperately need, now, to begin to take back their country. If they leave it much longer, they themselves will not be the only ones to suffer consequences at the hands of their government and groups like the RIAA. The Australian government has already begun passing draconian laws of its own, following the cue of Bush, and I have no doubt that more will follow.
Technology is such these days that it is no longer good enough to merely talk about removing a dictatorial regime after it has come to power. In this case, it's not merely prevention being better than cure...Prevention may be our only option.
You've never actually used Windows, have you?
;-)
No...only since 3.1.
...but anyone with a genuine clue knows that comparitive popularity aside, Microsoft do have a truly abysmal philosophy with regards to programming.
I have to wonder when these amoral trolls in the trade press (who somehow think the continuation of their employment is tied into Microsoft remaining a monopoly) are going to give up. Don't they realise that they could still make a living writing stories about Linux?
If I was an editor and had staff pumping out crap like this, it wouldn't matter which side of the fence I was on, opinion wise...they'd get fired.
Maybe it genuinely is true that autism is a prerequisite for considering moral integrity important...because I sure don't know too many muggles (the neurologically typical) who care much about it.
WinFS is about the only thing I would have liked to see in Vista. I've been waiting for that probably almost as long as Bill himself has.
Very little else that I've heard has excited me, though. The 3d additions to the user interface haven't sounded like much more than an excuse to force hardware upgrades.
As someone else said, a decent CLI and scripting language would have been really good, but it's probably true that those of us who want such things are a minority; from Microsoft's perspective, they wouldn't have to care about us.
It's a shame they feel like that, though...because although it might seem to them as though they'll make more money from the home users, the corporate trench coders are probably the people who'll spend the most time using it...so you'd think that they should get some sort of input as to its features.
Either Ballmer, Allchin, and Gates give up control of the company, or Microsoft will be irrelevant (if not bankrupt) by 2012-2015.
Something I've said many times before, and will maintain, is that Microsoft have never had a concrete, long term operating system strategy after Windows NT 4. That is evident from the fact that 2000 and XP were both merely incremental upgrades to NT 4 for the most part.
Vista is going to be comprised of leftovers...Things which Microsoft would have incorporated years ago if it hadn't been for them having to make ship dates. It is also going to be Microsoft's last release that the majority of the computer-using public care about.
Microsoft need to do what Apple have done; move to a BSD core, and thus allow each group to play to its' own strengths. The BSD people are very good at making a core, underlying operating system. Microsoft on the other hand have proven that they're good at UI and glitz. If the two were to be combined, we'd have a system unlike anything we've yet seen...the best of both worlds. This is where the GNU crowd need to see that the BSD license is useful in the grand scheme of things...because it gives companies who want a closed-source product a competently-constructed base.
However, I know that realistically, Microsoft are not going to do this. Gates, Ballmer, and Allchin are going to stay in control, and the company is going to become irrelevant, because they won't let go of their usual, failed way of doing things.
My point, which I think you underestimate, is that he really doesn't NEED to be an EXPERT Linux sys admin to make the conversion. It wouldn't hurt, of course, but it isn't an absolute requirement. And he DOES need to know a certain minimum to be a Linux sys admin at all.
;)) away *until* he'd got himself ready to deploy with Linux. I wouldn't have advocated LFS if I'd thought he was on an urgent timeframe.
For something quick, and for only a few different types of usage, and in a scenario where he most likely does want the type of support that SuSE and such can offer, then yes, I agree.
He can do all the things you suggest EVENTUALLY. I have no problem at all with that - I'd like to do all that myself if I had the time.
Well, yeah, sure. I will admit that part of my reasoning was that I didn't think he was on a hugely urgent timetable anywayz, from the point of view that he made it sound like (to me anyway) they already had a Windows network where he worked and were happy with that...so I was thinking he could have just left the Windows net working (or crashing
I'm not familiar enough with RPM vs non-RPM systems to comment on any issues you have with RPM.
RPM has three fairly critical problems, IMHO. Two of these were meant to be positive features, but unfortunately, like a lot of Microsoft's stuff, people tend to take things which were meant to be used in a positive way and abuse them.
a) It strongly encourages (but doesn't force, granted) a primarily precompiled binary system. My issues with that aren't simply Gentoo-esque hysteria, either...at least two of the variants of the BSD ports system that I've seen have warnings in their documentation about the dangers of installing binaries when you (to quote the saying) don't know where they've been. People can download source, write their own vulnerabilities in, compile a binary with said vulnerabilities, and then distribute said binary. It's been done before. The other benefit to compiling yourself is that with the availability of things like the propolice (and other such patches) patches for gcc, glibc, and the kernel, you can make your system inherently secure from a number of different forms of attack. Vendor-precompiled rpms generally do not make use of such things, at least AFAIK. If they did, I'd have less issue with them on that score.
b) Subpackaging, which allows the ability to split one originally whole package into multiple packages. The reason why that's a bad thing is because it creates needless new dependencies which weren't there to begin with. Libraries are typically shipped in both "runtime" and "devel" versions. The runtime version is enough to run a precompiled binary, but if you want to compile anything yourself, you need the "devel" version, whereas compiling the library ordinarily doesn't create that distinction.
c) A spec format which encourages false listing of dependencies (causing you to download deps that aren't really needed etc) and a very poor standard generally. The Mandrake specfiles I've seen were an absolute mess.
By the time he gets everything learned and converted, the package management scene will have changed again anyway, probably.
Sadly, it may not. RPM and dpkg both seem to have been largely accepted as "just good enough" from what I've seen, despite their problems. Most people therefore seem to have assumed that the package management problem has been solved, when as you say, it most definitely hasn't been.
I'm not sure whether I still consider it a legitimate source of information about a lot of things, either.
It's become horribly insistent on being politically correct, for one thing. I've noticed that if they have to choose between factual or political correctness, anybody with revert priveleges will choose political every time.
One other, more subtle and disturbing thing that I've noticed is that a number of articles have attracted a group to whom the topic (and usually a particular perspective on said topic) is important. Anything written on said topic page which goes against the prevailing opinion held by this group, is more or less guaranteed to get reverted.
For purely technical or scientific information (stuff about different pieces of software, zoology, etc) it can be good, but for anything even remotely dealing with people, (especially politics) forget it. It isn't remotely objective, and shouldn't claim to be...what it does do however is express bias in a very subtle, and often difficult manner to detect.