BSD is Free software. The Mac used to use entirely non-Free software.
# LNUX is worth a few pennies and in danger of being de-listed off the NASDAQ stock exchange
Red Hat made its first profit. IBM's doing great off of its Linux business.
# MCSEs are getting more jobs than Linux sysadmins these days
Whatever. There's probably more MCSEs than qualified Linux sysadmins, so that's to be expected.
# Apple chose Trolltech/KDE over the Gecko/Linux renderer
Both options are Free software. The Apple used to ship with Internet Explorer as its default.
# OS X already won. Any geek or scientist worth their salt who wants a UNIX home computer already has an iBook or a G4.
Can't comment on who "won" when the contest isn't defined very well. Is it the vitally important contest to sell UNIX home computers to geeks and scientists?
Sorry to post a reply to my own posting, but I suffered a brain twitch and wrote about an invasion of Costa Rica instead of Panama. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I now return you to our programming.
"As far as these inevidable [sic] US invasions, you didn't say the word, but essentialy you're accusing us of imperialism, which is complete, utter, delusional nonsense."
Well, there's imperialism of the British Raj type, which is overt and institutionalized, then there's imperialism of the "send a gunboat" kind, by which I mean weaken and destabilize regimes that are not under your control. Where necessary, sponsor a coup d'etat. Only where there is no home-grown support for a coup do you send in your own troops. Imperialism of this kind is relatively cheap and plausibly deniable, which is important if, as the US does, you violate your own people's democratic and humanitarian ideals by these actions.
I'm no historian, but I remember the coup in Peru, the invasions of Costa Rica and Grenada, and the U.S.-sponsored civil war in Nicaragua. A history of such actions makes people suspect that, for example, the troubles in Venezuela now also have their ultimate source in the U.S.
I'm no rabid anti-American. I'm even willing to acknowledge the good that was done by the British Empire. (As a Canadian, I'd be a hypocrite not to). However, denying that the US is an imperial power is, um, "delusional nonsense" of another sort.
You know, I've been reading various comments about when Linux will be ready for broad use. At first it was "when the installer is fixed." From the sound of recent reviews and reports, it is. Then there was "when the interface is usable and consistent." It sounds as though major progress was made with that in the past year. Then there was "When there's an Outlook equivalent." Or "Microsoft Office equivalent." Done and done. Now it's "When there's an Outlook Server equivalent," and there are a few bright johnnies who are right on that job. The roadblocks and bottlenecks are getting fewer and more picayune.
You can say that particular programs are missing (Photoshop) but I can't think of any categories of program that are missing. The important thing is whether a job can get done on your computer and operating system, not whether it gets done with a particular tool.
"They do however refuse to give you free support, unless you cough up some money - which makes perfectly sense to me."
The problem, as others have pointed out is NOT that they sell the manuals. It is that they forbid you to pass on information that you obtained from the manuals.
RMS started the GNU project because NDAs on software made it impossible to "help one's neighbour." NDAs on documentation, Gawd help us, are no different, so this is certainly contrary to the spirit of free software.
Once again, not because of sold documentation, but because of the NDA attached to it.
" Oh, come on, T2 was just like T1, only with better effects, a much, much worse story and Arnie switching sides.
It's the very same scheme:
1) Evil terminator is sent back to kill Connor.
2) Good guy is sent back to protect her/him.
3) Evil terminator and good guy die.
The end. "
Wrong. In the first movie, we had an enemy that was indestructable because it was so strong, so hard. When I heard that a sequel was coming, I was pretty sceptical about it. We'd done the ultimate strength thing: what could be stronger than that? The answer turned out to be really Taoist: water is stronger than rock; liquid is stronger than steel. Thus, the T100 kicked Arnie's butt.
Cameron might have come up with something similarly ingenious for T3, but I've no faith in anyone else doing it. And, from the fact that Cameron isn't involved, I guess he hasn't come up with any great ideas for it, either.
Actually, most of that knowledge did vanish during the Dark Ages. Good luck reading the complete output of, say, Archimedes or Hero. The vast majority of the >500,000 works in the Library of Alexandria have gone.
fmaxwell writes: "I watched every episode of every Star Trek series and I found DS9 to be the least satisfying."
This seems to be a common opinion, but one that I just don't understand. Unlike TNG, which I came to loathe, people in DS9 had _conflict_, internally and externally.
Kira is a terrorist and a blind follower of religious leaders who reforms slowly and with difficulty.
Garak, yeah, I cheered whenever I saw that he was going to be on an episode. A torturer. A traitor. A mind unable to follow any line straight. Ah, loved him!
Odo is the ultimate outsider. He isn't even sure that he likes us solids at first, yet duty holds him to the job of protecting us. One of the episodes shows that, if history had gone slightly differently, he would have been a murdering overseer for the Cardassians.
Dax (the original Dax) was great. A young person with the memories of several lifetimes as both men and women. You'd expect her to be disconcertingly broad-minded, and she was. She thoroughly enjoyed Ferengi, human, transparent-headed dates, and Kingons. She also exuded class and humour.
Sisko was a bit pompous, overacted, and boring... but even he had tragedy in his life, and a conflict between his job and his duty to his son.
I've seen no-one mention how complex the setting was: Not just Bajoran and Cardassian with Federation as a third wheel, but the disputed territory that was handed over to the Cardassians, the Federation citizens who created the Maquis (against Federation law), whatever group Odo represents (we find out later). Much more complex than the neat borders of various empires and federations in the other shows.
Finally, there's religion. Rodenberry wouldn't have it in his show, but it exists in the real universe. DS9 is the first of the Star Treks to include religion as a major theme. Are there actually "prophets," or are they just "worm-hole aliens," or is that a distinction without a difference? It's never resolved, thank heaven.
Conclusion: for me, DS9 is the most consistently good of all the Treks.
"You want hard SF, or at least serious SF, look to Solaris (no, not that Solaris, Tarkovsky's Solaris), 2001, or Alien (maybe Pitch Black; though a lot of it smelled like warmed over Ridley Scott, it did have a good idea behind it and some very interesting performances)."
2001 counts _only_ if you accept Clarke's statement that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Those monoliths were magic, pure and simple, not hard science.
You want hard science? Gattica counts.
-Gareth
Re:Open Source is NOT the issue - it's the IMAGE
on
Largo Loving Linux
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Doing damage to Linux's image is some "laconic, dour nothern European. Not known for his sense of humor..."
I'm not sure who this is, but thank heaven we've got Linus to make up for him! That man's sense of humour is one of his most outstanding traits.
Scanning through the comments, I see nobody mentioning Charles Kingsbury. Courtship Rite is a wonderful, brutal, anthropologically accurate comedy of manners. I think it is not only his best book, but one of the very best science fiction novels I've read. In second place is The Earth Goddess and the Son which, among other things, is about Russian history, the Mongols, Low Earth Orbits, and modelling society.
Recently he seems to want to play in other people's universes. He has two novels in Larry Niven's Kzin War series and has recently done a giant Foundation Series book called Psychohistorical Crisis.
I'm giving you a piece of my mind (my "programmer's intelligence," as you say right now. And I'm not charging you a penny for it. Is that really "soo wrong"?
I can give away what I please, thank you very much.
It sounds as if you have a nice, easily-described, repeatable problem with Open Office. So how about a short trip to the OOo web site and file an "Issue" on IssueZilla? Enough complaints like that, and OOo will converge on perfection.
I was impressed that the WordPerfect Users complaints about the lack of "Show Codes" are having an effect.
For more information on the Apple II program called AppleWorks, have a look at my essay on http://modena.intergate.ca/personal/gslj/applework s.html... and for more on AppleWorks GS, have a look at http://modena.intergate.ca/personal/gslj/awgs.html
An interesting post, but competition in the open marketplace is not the only source of innovation. That doesn't touch mad inventors in their garage (Hi, Woz!) nor the massive numbers of people in universities. The whole idea of a thesis, after all, is that someone has to do some free, original work to give back something for their education before we let them go with a degree. Add up all the universities in the country, and you've got a pretty major force for "innovation." The problem with China is that it doesn't have as many.
You want an emulator to run HyperCard? You got it. Apple actually made two versions of HyperCard: one for the Mac and one for the IIgs. The latter is still a free download as six disk images from Apple's site. Run it with a IIgs emulator such as KeGS or Bernie ][ the Rescue, as I do.
HyperCard IIgs has all the commands of HyperCard 1.1 for the Mac, and quite a few from HyperCard 2.0, plus it has built-in colour support!
I bought the cable you wanted (mini headphone jack one side, two RCA jacks the other) at Radio Shack, no problem, just few weeks back. Fry's, I don't know.
Why make copies of CDs? Well, a friend of mine had his CD collection stolen. He'd have been a few hundred dollars to the better if they'd only been able to get copies because his originals were stored elsewhere. In fact, they probably wouldn't have taken the copies because they couldn't be sold to second-hand shops. Plus, here in Canada, where we pay the equivalent of the RIAA for every blank medium we buy, it is legal to borrow a CD, make a copy for yourself, and return the original. An excellent way to expand your CD collection. And yes, that law runs counter to what everyone thinks of as fair play, but everyone+dog doesn't know about the levy on recording media.
True enough: time travel stories suck (with a very few exceptions, which are among the best episodes ever. Anyone remember the Harlan Ellison episode? Or the Deep Space one involving Tribbles?). Two other entire categories of Star Trek episode are almost entirely vacuuous: "holostories" (pronounced "hollow stories") which take place in holosuites, and anything brought to you by the letter "Q." I boycott both. -Gareth
Re:Open Source will change our civilisation.
on
Rebel Code
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· Score: 1
Just a comment on your definition of communism as "the State owns everything, and directs how it is used." It's one of those unfortunate historical facts (like the fact that electricity flows in the opposite direction than the terms "positive" and "negative" imply") that the word "communism" has come to mean what you say. Marx thought of communism as an "advanced form of socialism" in which the state no longer existed, let alone controlled anything. Yes, that's right: communism is so far left that it's anarchism, libertarianism, and (if you relish ironies) far, far, right.
Marx thought the only way to get there from here, however, was a transitional period of socialism while the state still existed. Communism could only happen, he stated, in wealthy industrial countries that had the infrastructure, e.g. Germany, U.K. It's another historical irony that the only countries that had pro-communist revolutions were poor agricultural societies like Russia. There was nothing to do but hold onto power for dear life and wait for those damned Westerners to get with the prophecy. As it happened, they waited 70 years.
I'm not a communist myself. However, I'll happily argue with anyone who states that communism has failed that it hasn't even been tried on any scale larger than, say, the Oneida Colony.
Yes, modern games tend to use a lot of graphics and music talent as well as programming elan. Yes, you probably aren't going to get a full-time multi-media team together for this unpaid work. (I emphasize "full-time"). However, there's no more reason that you can't get them donating time and taking longer to reach completion.
Interestingly, I encountered an example of this just yesterday: Marathon Rubicon. The time to completion was about four years, but the results are apparently good. Here's a quotation from the web site:
Randy Reddig, the texture artist and a mapmaker for Bungie's original Marathon Infinity, called Rubicon's visuals "...the nicest I've ever seen come out of Marathon."
I don't know if you've ever seen the game show "Whose Line is it Anyway," but that is explicitly non zero-sum. The host introduces it by saying "The game where the points don't matter." He is likely to hand out thousands of points or zero on a whim.
Love is a non zero-sum, as I remarked to a woman friend while I and her husband were hugging her. "A good heart has lots of room in it."
Appearances to the contrary, a mutually destructive war is non zero-sum. The enemy may lose more than you, but you both lose.
thats really interesting. i never thought of it that way. i still have
trouble justifying wrong actions that way. have you ever heard two
wrongs dont make a right?
In fact, when the blank media levy went on in Canada, it simultaneously and explicitly became legal to have music that you never paid for. The details are crazy; I think it goes like this: I can lend you a CD, you can copy it, you give back the original, all is kosher; I cannot, however, make a copy of my CD and give it to you. See Canadian copyright levy on blank audio recording media.
Slashdot Mirror
# Apple chose BSD over Linux
BSD is Free software. The Mac used to use entirely non-Free software.
# LNUX is worth a few pennies and in danger of being de-listed off the NASDAQ stock exchange
Red Hat made its first profit. IBM's doing great off of its Linux business.
# MCSEs are getting more jobs than Linux sysadmins these days
Whatever. There's probably more MCSEs than qualified Linux sysadmins, so that's to be expected.
# Apple chose Trolltech/KDE over the Gecko/Linux renderer
Both options are Free software. The Apple used to ship with Internet Explorer as its default.
# OS X already won. Any geek or scientist worth their salt who wants a UNIX home computer already has an iBook or a G4.
Can't comment on who "won" when the contest isn't defined very well. Is it the vitally important contest to sell UNIX home computers to geeks and scientists?
-Gareth
Sorry to post a reply to my own posting, but I suffered a brain twitch and wrote about an invasion of Costa Rica instead of Panama. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I now return you to our programming.
-Gareth
nathanm writes:
"As far as these inevidable [sic] US invasions, you didn't say the word, but essentialy you're accusing us of imperialism, which is complete, utter, delusional nonsense."
Well, there's imperialism of the British Raj type, which is overt and institutionalized, then there's imperialism of the "send a gunboat" kind, by which I mean weaken and destabilize regimes that are not under your control. Where necessary, sponsor a coup d'etat. Only where there is no home-grown support for a coup do you send in your own troops. Imperialism of this kind is relatively cheap and plausibly deniable, which is important if, as the US does, you violate your own people's democratic and humanitarian ideals by these actions.
I'm no historian, but I remember the coup in Peru, the invasions of Costa Rica and Grenada, and the U.S.-sponsored civil war in Nicaragua. A history of such actions makes people suspect that, for example, the troubles in Venezuela now also have their ultimate source in the U.S.
I'm no rabid anti-American. I'm even willing to acknowledge the good that was done by the British Empire. (As a Canadian, I'd be a hypocrite not to). However, denying that the US is an imperial power is, um, "delusional nonsense" of another sort.
-Gareth
You know, I've been reading various comments about when Linux will be ready for broad use. At first it was "when the installer is fixed." From the sound of recent reviews and reports, it is. Then there was "when the interface is usable and consistent." It sounds as though major progress was made with that in the past year. Then there was "When there's an Outlook equivalent." Or "Microsoft Office equivalent." Done and done. Now it's "When there's an Outlook Server equivalent," and there are a few bright johnnies who are right on that job. The roadblocks and bottlenecks are getting fewer and more picayune.
You can say that particular programs are missing (Photoshop) but I can't think of any categories of program that are missing. The important thing is whether a job can get done on your computer and operating system, not whether it gets done with a particular tool.
-Gareth
Anonymous Coward wrote:
"They do however refuse to give you free support, unless you cough up some money - which makes perfectly sense to me."
The problem, as others have pointed out is NOT that they sell the manuals. It is that they forbid you to pass on information that you obtained from the manuals.
RMS started the GNU project because NDAs on software made it impossible to "help one's neighbour." NDAs on documentation, Gawd help us, are no different, so this is certainly contrary to the spirit of free software.
Once again, not because of sold documentation, but because of the NDA attached to it.
-Gareth
Rseuhs writes:
" Oh, come on, T2 was just like T1, only with better effects, a much, much worse story and Arnie switching sides.
It's the very same scheme:
1) Evil terminator is sent back to kill Connor.
2) Good guy is sent back to protect her/him.
3) Evil terminator and good guy die.
The end. "
Wrong. In the first movie, we had an enemy that was indestructable because it was so strong, so hard. When I heard that a sequel was coming, I was pretty sceptical about it. We'd done the ultimate strength thing: what could be stronger than that? The answer turned out to be really Taoist: water is stronger than rock; liquid is stronger than steel. Thus, the T100 kicked Arnie's butt.
Cameron might have come up with something similarly ingenious for T3, but I've no faith in anyone else doing it. And, from the fact that Cameron isn't involved, I guess he hasn't come up with any great ideas for it, either.
-Gareth
Actually, most of that knowledge did vanish during the Dark Ages. Good luck reading the complete output of, say, Archimedes or Hero. The vast majority of the >500,000 works in the Library of Alexandria have gone.
-Gareth
fmaxwell writes: "I watched every episode of every Star Trek series and I found DS9 to be the least satisfying."
... but even he had tragedy in his life, and a conflict between his job and his duty to his son.
This seems to be a common opinion, but one that I just don't understand. Unlike TNG, which I came to loathe, people in DS9 had _conflict_, internally and externally.
Kira is a terrorist and a blind follower of religious leaders who reforms slowly and with difficulty.
Garak, yeah, I cheered whenever I saw that he was going to be on an episode. A torturer. A traitor. A mind unable to follow any line straight. Ah, loved him!
Odo is the ultimate outsider. He isn't even sure that he likes us solids at first, yet duty holds him to the job of protecting us. One of the episodes shows that, if history had gone slightly differently, he would have been a murdering overseer for the Cardassians.
Dax (the original Dax) was great. A young person with the memories of several lifetimes as both men and women. You'd expect her to be disconcertingly broad-minded, and she was. She thoroughly enjoyed Ferengi, human, transparent-headed dates, and Kingons. She also exuded class and humour.
Sisko was a bit pompous, overacted, and boring
I've seen no-one mention how complex the setting was: Not just Bajoran and Cardassian with Federation as a third wheel, but the disputed territory that was handed over to the Cardassians, the Federation citizens who created the Maquis (against Federation law), whatever group Odo represents (we find out later). Much more complex than the neat borders of various empires and federations in the other shows.
Finally, there's religion. Rodenberry wouldn't have it in his show, but it exists in the real universe. DS9 is the first of the Star Treks to include religion as a major theme. Are there actually "prophets," or are they just "worm-hole aliens," or is that a distinction without a difference? It's never resolved, thank heaven.
Conclusion: for me, DS9 is the most consistently good of all the Treks.
-Gareth
Kalidasa writes:
"You want hard SF, or at least serious SF, look to Solaris (no, not that Solaris, Tarkovsky's Solaris), 2001, or Alien (maybe Pitch Black; though a lot of it smelled like warmed over Ridley Scott, it did have a good idea behind it and some very interesting performances)."
2001 counts _only_ if you accept Clarke's statement that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Those monoliths were magic, pure and simple, not hard science.
You want hard science? Gattica counts.
-Gareth
Doing damage to Linux's image is some "laconic, dour nothern European. Not known for his sense of humor..."
I'm not sure who this is, but thank heaven we've got Linus to make up for him! That man's sense of humour is one of his most outstanding traits.
-Gareth
Scanning through the comments, I see nobody mentioning Charles Kingsbury. Courtship Rite is a wonderful, brutal, anthropologically accurate comedy of manners. I think it is not only his best book, but one of the very best science fiction novels I've read. In second place is The Earth Goddess and the Son which, among other things, is about Russian history, the Mongols, Low Earth Orbits, and modelling society.
Recently he seems to want to play in other people's universes. He has two novels in Larry Niven's Kzin War series and has recently done a giant Foundation Series book called Psychohistorical Crisis.
Worth reading.
-Gareth
I'm giving you a piece of my mind (my "programmer's intelligence," as you say right now. And I'm not charging you a penny for it. Is that really "soo wrong"?
I can give away what I please, thank you very much.
-Gareth
It sounds as if you have a nice, easily-described, repeatable problem with Open Office. So how about a short trip to the OOo web site and file an "Issue" on IssueZilla? Enough complaints like that, and OOo will converge on perfection.
I was impressed that the WordPerfect Users complaints about the lack of "Show Codes" are having an effect.
-Gareth
For more information on the Apple II program called AppleWorks, have a look at my essay on http://modena.intergate.ca/personal/gslj/applework s.html ... and for more on AppleWorks GS, have a look at http://modena.intergate.ca/personal/gslj/awgs.html
-- Gareth
If you'd like an iTunes equivalent that can play (not yet make) Oggs, try Audion. Version 3.0 just came out days ago. (http://www.panic.com)
-Gareth
An interesting post, but competition in the open marketplace is not the only source of innovation. That doesn't touch mad inventors in their garage (Hi, Woz!) nor the massive numbers of people in universities. The whole idea of a thesis, after all, is that someone has to do some free, original work to give back something for their education before we let them go with a degree. Add up all the universities in the country, and you've got a pretty major force for "innovation." The problem with China is that it doesn't have as many.
You want an emulator to run HyperCard? You got it. Apple actually made two versions of HyperCard: one for the Mac and one for the IIgs. The latter is still a free download as six disk images from Apple's site. Run it with a IIgs emulator such as KeGS or Bernie ][ the Rescue, as I do.
HyperCard IIgs has all the commands of HyperCard 1.1 for the Mac, and quite a few from HyperCard 2.0, plus it has built-in colour support!
I bought the cable you wanted (mini headphone jack one side, two RCA jacks the other) at Radio Shack, no problem, just few weeks back. Fry's, I don't know.
Why make copies of CDs? Well, a friend of mine had his CD collection stolen. He'd have been a few hundred dollars to the better if they'd only been able to get copies because his originals were stored elsewhere. In fact, they probably wouldn't have taken the copies because they couldn't be sold to second-hand shops. Plus, here in Canada, where we pay the equivalent of the RIAA for every blank medium we buy, it is legal to borrow a CD, make a copy for yourself, and return the original. An excellent way to expand your CD collection. And yes, that law runs counter to what everyone thinks of as fair play, but everyone+dog doesn't know about the levy on recording media.
I think that makes two very good reasons.
Gareth
True enough: time travel stories suck (with a very few exceptions, which are among the best episodes ever. Anyone remember the Harlan Ellison episode? Or the Deep Space one involving Tribbles?). Two other entire categories of Star Trek episode are almost entirely vacuuous: "holostories" (pronounced "hollow stories") which take place in holosuites, and anything brought to you by the letter "Q." I boycott both. -Gareth
Just a comment on your definition of communism as "the State owns everything, and directs how it is used." It's one of those unfortunate historical facts (like the fact that electricity flows in the opposite direction than the terms "positive" and "negative" imply") that the word "communism" has come to mean what you say. Marx thought of communism as an "advanced form of socialism" in which the state no longer existed, let alone controlled anything. Yes, that's right: communism is so far left that it's anarchism, libertarianism, and (if you relish ironies) far, far, right.
Marx thought the only way to get there from here, however, was a transitional period of socialism while the state still existed. Communism could only happen, he stated, in wealthy industrial countries that had the infrastructure, e.g. Germany, U.K. It's another historical irony that the only countries that had pro-communist revolutions were poor agricultural societies like Russia. There was nothing to do but hold onto power for dear life and wait for those damned Westerners to get with the prophecy. As it happened, they waited 70 years.
I'm not a communist myself. However, I'll happily argue with anyone who states that communism has failed that it hasn't even been tried on any scale larger than, say, the Oneida Colony.
Gareth
Yes, modern games tend to use a lot of graphics and music talent as well as programming elan. Yes, you probably aren't going to get a full-time multi-media team together for this unpaid work. (I emphasize "full-time"). However, there's no more reason that you can't get them donating time and taking longer to reach completion.
Interestingly, I encountered an example of this just yesterday: Marathon Rubicon. The time to completion was about four years, but the results are apparently good. Here's a quotation from the web site:
So it is possible!
-Gareth
I don't know if you've ever seen the game show "Whose Line is it Anyway," but that is explicitly non zero-sum. The host introduces it by saying "The game where the points don't matter." He is likely to hand out thousands of points or zero on a whim.
Love is a non zero-sum, as I remarked to a woman friend while I and her husband were hugging her. "A good heart has lots of room in it."
Appearances to the contrary, a mutually destructive war is non zero-sum. The enemy may lose more than you, but you both lose.
-Gareth
In fact, when the blank media levy went on in Canada, it simultaneously and explicitly became legal to have music that you never paid for. The details are crazy; I think it goes like this: I can lend you a CD, you can copy it, you give back the original, all is kosher; I cannot, however, make a copy of my CD and give it to you. See Canadian copyright levy on blank audio recording media.
-Gareth
Visit me at my site.
Or, if they wanted a non-Linux kernal, they could go with another one entirely. HURD, anyone? -Gareth