How could that be a problem? I'm thinking if they don't mind continuing to use GPL/GNU/OSS whatever software that they could keep getting it by paying people to inspire young, impressionable developers.
I hope it does. My only concern is that there'd have to be a really extended depression/recession where even college kids are forced to get jobs & support themselves and their families. Otherwise, I see a continually renewing wave of young, naive, college kids who buy into this stuff and who have free time and effort to waste.
Heck, if the big companies (IBM, Oracle) get smart, they'll recruit rabble rousers and pay them to keep indoctrinating the kids with the so called "freedom" mentality so the big companies will have a continuous stream of free code coming to them. After all, I don't blame the large companies for taking advantage of the software. If someone wanted to give me something for free, I'd be stupid not to take it. Now, I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but I wouldn't be that surprised to find out that IBM or someone who makes use of "free" software actually was paying someone like RMS under the table. Large companies like that are benefitting tremendously on the work done 'for the community'.
But that's another possibility too... maybe the developers will wake up one day to realize that right this second, IBM & Oracle and many others are making many, many millions of dollars from their free development, and not giving the developers so much as a "thank you." Maybe they'll realize that the biggest benefactors of their free work are just the kind of organizations (aka "The Man") that they were attempting to undermine. Maybe they'll realize that by producing a good product, and offering it at a good price, they are contributing. Hell, I run a brick-and-mortar business myself. It's a business. I make a (small) profit, but I'm definitely contributing to the community in a very real way.
There are millions of 'em. In the US, for the most part you're given the benefit of the doubt when you're born. As you get older, you make decisions. If one of your decisions is to harm another person or group of people in some way, then your freedom starts going away, whether it's via legal injunctions, lawsuits, prison, miscellaneous legal orders, etc. He broke the law, so he loses some of his privileges in the US. He is, by no means, being denied the opportunity to make a living. He just can't make a living in any way he chooses. Hell, I'd love to be able to make living selling pot. But, I can't because it's illegal.
Well, thinking about it, what I'd love to do is this: If I were to become some kind of insanely rich bazillionaire (not gonna happen), I'd love to pick out a very vocal OSS person, go to wherever he/she works, and offer to do their same job for free. $0. No pay, no benefits, nothing. After all, information wants to be free, right? And if they can't compete, that's their problem, right? Kind of like poor Dan Akroyd's character in Trading Places. Every time they get some sysadmin or fry cook, or whatever king of job they pick, I'd love to be wealthy enough (and bored enough) to walk in to where they work and say, "I'll do the same job for free. Just because I like to do it. Plus, I'm doing it for the good of the 'community'." Then maybe, just maybe, they'll have an inkling of what OSS is doing to people and businesses. THEN they can tell me all they want that it's the "free market" at work.
The people of the US are not even close to being the wealthiest on the planet. A small percentage control the vast majority of the wealth and skew the averages.
Well, I'm pretty poor right now, but last time I flipped on my TV, I remember seeing a good part of South America, Africa, and Asia still doesn't have electricity, never mind television sets. Most Americans own a computer. Virtually all Americans have running water. Most even have a car! Compared to the rest of the world, the US is a very wealthy nation. I don't know where you're getting the idea that the US is full of people living in mud huts, getting their drinking water from raw sewage like so much of the rest of the world.
But in the end, I don't care about any of that. I want to be able to feed my family and live a good life.
Waah. You're telling me that you couldn't feed your family on even $10/hour? Bullshit. Tha'ts bullshit and you know it. Maybe you couldn't bring your family to McDonald's every day, or drive that big giant SUV, but you'd do just fine on much, much less (like the rest of the world) if you'd just eat a few less Twinkies every day. Take a trip around the world. Go to ANY country. We have it good, and people such as yourself who are spoiled beyond belief are embarassing to the US.
Any political system that rewards the few at the expense of the many
Last I checked, the political system has little to nothing to do with the economic system.
And since you're talking about simplicity and how a system works, here it is. In the US, you can do whatever you want to make a living, including renting yourself out by the hour, the year, buying and selling goods, performing services, begging, or anything else you can think of.
This is the first market in history that I can recall where people producing useful things have to compete against rich, spoiled, bored, children who are producing the same product and giving it away for free. I don't think that *anybody* owning a business can expect that. Do you really think that the guy owning the tire company is thinking, "Jeez, you know, I really should get ready in case a bunch of college kids decide to make tires in their free time and give them away. I won't be able to sell any!"? I doubt it. Why? It's crazy. Fucking crazy.
The open source kiddies are contributing to the problem. But, I see it going away once the economy gets *really* bad, and people (even college kids) no longer have free time to sit around and write software for free. They'll be working like the rest of us. The OS thing is gonna wither and die, but not until the economy bottoms out. Until then, there will always be a glut of moderately educated, wealthy people with lots of free time on their hands.
Nope. You're wrong. You're not unable to pay rent, just unable to pay rent in a place you'd be happy in. You obviously haven't seen how any H1B Indians live in the US. Their standard of living is low. Very low. They generally don't have cars (try the bus). They live in shithole apartment, 2 or 3 to a bedroom. They make their own food. They are willing to live like that. That is the difference.
You're exactly right. That's why I got out of development. I really wanted to have a life outside of the computer section of Barnes and Noble. My Development/Engineering career lasted 6 years.
Every Fortune 500 company is constantly in court. That's why "corporate lawyers" exist. I would guess that most companies the size of Microsoft have hundreds if not thousands of lawyers working for them full time. Jesus, not even the Wall Street Journal reports on every little piddling lawsuit that every single Fortune 500 company is involved in.
Re:"artificial turkey for the vegetarians"
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Christmas in 2050
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· Score: 1
Homo sapiens are omnivores. It's hard to imagine a human honestly not craving meat. It's like saying, "nope, I've never wanted to have sex in my life. Haven't for four generations... oops." I personally don't believe people who say, "I love veggies. I hate meat." I can't believe it. Those people usually just have something to prove, anyway.
I eat whatever I want and I'm healthy as an ox. In my opinion A. It's mental. If you spend all of your time worrying about what you eat and being healthy, then you WILL be sick (and neurotic) B. It's exercise. I work all day, every day. I could eat nothing but fatback all day and not gain a pound. Actually, since I've started working all day every day, I now eat one large cheese pizza a day, Wendy's a few times, and other random food that comes by. I've also lost 5 pounds.
Must be nice to have the time and money to worry about how your meat is raised. I'm just happy to be able to afford to buy meat. I have a lot of customers who are vegan or vegetarian, or who want to meet the meat before they eat it (what's his name? how big was his pen? what did he eat? Did he heat only organcally grown corn? Can I see where the corn was grown?). Without fail, those people are wealthy, in that they have plenty of money and time to waste worrying about shit like this. While I envy their resources, I can definitely say that if I had time and money enough like they do, I wouldn't waste it worrying about every little fucking molecule that enters my body. They're all fucking neurotic. If you ask me, life is too short to be neurotic. Eat & be happy.
I find it appropriate that in the PS2 category (fuck PC's... I don't have time to dink around with installers, expensive video cards, etc), Gamespot nominated GTA: VC in every category that it didn't win in. I noticed that the other one seemed to exclude GTA:VC altogether. Kinda' say something about the websites... Gamespot is straight up with their reviews. I expect the guys at Gamespy are the kind of guys who sit around and say, "We can't say that GTA:VC was the best. It's so October. It's for the masses. Let's pick really, really obscure stuff, cause then we'll be l337. Sorry guys. GTA: VC wins hands down, whether or not it was popular. I've been playing video games for more than 20 years, and GTA: VC is the best ever. PC or console. Action or adventure. Hands down.
I know that I'm not the oldest one here, but I'm probably relatively old... I'm still gateful for hard drives. I probably had 4-5 PC's before I got one with a "hard drive". It was pretty amazing to have a 10 meg hard drive (that's almost 30 5 1/4 disks!!! wow!!)
Another case: Since the release of Windows 2000, Outlook Express has been integrated so tightly in the Windows code that it is near impossible to remove it (from a typical user's standpoint, n00b?). I have installed The Bat! [ritlabs.com] as my default email client, but OE always retakes files with.MSG extension everytime I close The Bat!. Isn't this, too, considered misuse of monopoly in one area to gain market leverage in another?
I hate to break it to ya', but it's Control Panel, Add Remove Programs, Add/Remove Windows Components. True, there isn't an icon on the desktop saying "Click Here to uninstall Outlook Express", but it's far from "impossible".
The only reason that Sun would lose is because there's no compelling reason for most people to use it. They've completely failed to build a user and developer base on their own, so they instead go to the government for help. Scott McNealy is simply inept. That's why Sun would fail.
A zombie!!! A zombie!!!
on
Linus Is A Hero
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· Score: 3, Funny
Did anybody else notice that one of their "heroes" is a ZOMBIE!!!?? It looks like one of the zombies from the "Living Dead" series. I expect him to say "Braaaaiiiinnnns" (in Dutch, of course).
Search-wise, Yahoo is number two behind Google. From what I can tell, their search engine gets about half the traffic that Google gets. But, that being said, Yahoo's searches are a combination of their hand picked lists and Google searches. So say, a site listed in Google, but not in Yahoo may be ranked #10 in Google, but #20 in Yahoo. So, if Yahoo does drop Google, I suspect that Google will initally lose a bit of weight, but since Inktomi doesn't spider or search as well as Google, Yahoo's front end will progressively lose more and more people to Google. For web site owners, I think this is a zero sum result. They'll lose Yahoo searches, but gain a good bit more Google from users migrating. Personally, I'm not too concerned about it one way or the other.
At *some* point, you have to believe something, otherwise you wouldn't be able to function. How do you know, really know that you car runs on gas? Maybe the gas is used to feed aliens in your engine that in turn use their magic powers to make the wheels go. Have you actually seen the gas burned in your engine, and the entire process working? Have you actually seen a piston in your engine, not another one (that's rigged) burn fuel? Or do you just accept it because you're gullible?
And what's wrong with 30+ year old technology? Why the hell are we using "DVD"s when we should be using videotapes?? CD's? Screw that. I want records. Anti-lock brakes and fuel injectors in cars? No way. I want 2 drum brakes and a carbureator. What's with this "progress" thing, anyway? Computers shouldn't be any easier to use. They should be just as difficult as they were in the 1970's. After all, that's what technology is all about. Not changing. Not progressing. Now damn it, where's my reel to reel tape drive and my 300 baud modem?
With Linux I don't have some corp looking over my shoulder telling me how I can use their software and asking me to upgrade every 2 years for large sums of cash.
I bought my W2K licenses, and I'm not upgrading. Not until I have a very, very good reason to. MS isn't holding a gun to my head to upgrade. For the quality of the software and the ease of use, I think that their price is very fair.
What's driving the economy isn't the software business, it's businesses using software. When businesses use open source software they can take ownership of it in ways they never could with proprietary software.
My business is non-IT. But to say that software companies don't contribute significantly to the economy is silly. MS, Oracle, and IBM are all very large companies that provide a good percentage of the GDP. That being said, I need a solid, reliable, easy to use system that I don't have to fuss with. That's what I've got.
If Linux wasn't helping to drive the US economy, then Oracle and IBM wouldn't be standing behind it.
Right now, I see a lot of PR coming out of those companies as far as Linux backing. How much they actually sell of Linux products, I have no clue.
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Well, if the GPL holds up that could be a problem
How could that be a problem? I'm thinking if they don't mind continuing to use GPL/GNU/OSS whatever software that they could keep getting it by paying people to inspire young, impressionable developers.
I hope it does. My only concern is that there'd have to be a really extended depression/recession where even college kids are forced to get jobs & support themselves and their families. Otherwise, I see a continually renewing wave of young, naive, college kids who buy into this stuff and who have free time and effort to waste.
Heck, if the big companies (IBM, Oracle) get smart, they'll recruit rabble rousers and pay them to keep indoctrinating the kids with the so called "freedom" mentality so the big companies will have a continuous stream of free code coming to them. After all, I don't blame the large companies for taking advantage of the software. If someone wanted to give me something for free, I'd be stupid not to take it. Now, I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but I wouldn't be that surprised to find out that IBM or someone who makes use of "free" software actually was paying someone like RMS under the table. Large companies like that are benefitting tremendously on the work done 'for the community'.
But that's another possibility too... maybe the developers will wake up one day to realize that right this second, IBM & Oracle and many others are making many, many millions of dollars from their free development, and not giving the developers so much as a "thank you." Maybe they'll realize that the biggest benefactors of their free work are just the kind of organizations (aka "The Man") that they were attempting to undermine. Maybe they'll realize that by producing a good product, and offering it at a good price, they are contributing. Hell, I run a brick-and-mortar business myself. It's a business. I make a (small) profit, but I'm definitely contributing to the community in a very real way.
Landscaper.
Baker.
Dry cleaner.
Barber.
Farmer.
Artist.
Cook.
Cattle herder.
Athlete.
Truck driver.
Taxi driver.
blah blah blah.
There are millions of 'em. In the US, for the most part you're given the benefit of the doubt when you're born. As you get older, you make decisions. If one of your decisions is to harm another person or group of people in some way, then your freedom starts going away, whether it's via legal injunctions, lawsuits, prison, miscellaneous legal orders, etc. He broke the law, so he loses some of his privileges in the US. He is, by no means, being denied the opportunity to make a living. He just can't make a living in any way he chooses. Hell, I'd love to be able to make living selling pot. But, I can't because it's illegal.
Well, thinking about it, what I'd love to do is this: If I were to become some kind of insanely rich bazillionaire (not gonna happen), I'd love to pick out a very vocal OSS person, go to wherever he/she works, and offer to do their same job for free. $0. No pay, no benefits, nothing. After all, information wants to be free, right? And if they can't compete, that's their problem, right? Kind of like poor Dan Akroyd's character in Trading Places. Every time they get some sysadmin or fry cook, or whatever king of job they pick, I'd love to be wealthy enough (and bored enough) to walk in to where they work and say, "I'll do the same job for free. Just because I like to do it. Plus, I'm doing it for the good of the 'community'." Then maybe, just maybe, they'll have an inkling of what OSS is doing to people and businesses. THEN they can tell me all they want that it's the "free market" at work.
Ah, to be wealthy...
The people of the US are not even close to being the wealthiest on the planet. A small percentage control the vast majority of the wealth and skew the averages.
Well, I'm pretty poor right now, but last time I flipped on my TV, I remember seeing a good part of South America, Africa, and Asia still doesn't have electricity, never mind television sets. Most Americans own a computer. Virtually all Americans have running water. Most even have a car! Compared to the rest of the world, the US is a very wealthy nation. I don't know where you're getting the idea that the US is full of people living in mud huts, getting their drinking water from raw sewage like so much of the rest of the world.
But in the end, I don't care about any of that. I want to be able to feed my family and live a good life.
Waah. You're telling me that you couldn't feed your family on even $10/hour? Bullshit. Tha'ts bullshit and you know it. Maybe you couldn't bring your family to McDonald's every day, or drive that big giant SUV, but you'd do just fine on much, much less (like the rest of the world) if you'd just eat a few less Twinkies every day. Take a trip around the world. Go to ANY country. We have it good, and people such as yourself who are spoiled beyond belief are embarassing to the US.
Any political system that rewards the few at the expense of the many
Last I checked, the political system has little to nothing to do with the economic system.
And since you're talking about simplicity and how a system works, here it is. In the US, you can do whatever you want to make a living, including renting yourself out by the hour, the year, buying and selling goods, performing services, begging, or anything else you can think of.
This is the first market in history that I can recall where people producing useful things have to compete against rich, spoiled, bored, children who are producing the same product and giving it away for free. I don't think that *anybody* owning a business can expect that. Do you really think that the guy owning the tire company is thinking, "Jeez, you know, I really should get ready in case a bunch of college kids decide to make tires in their free time and give them away. I won't be able to sell any!"? I doubt it. Why? It's crazy. Fucking crazy.
The open source kiddies are contributing to the problem. But, I see it going away once the economy gets *really* bad, and people (even college kids) no longer have free time to sit around and write software for free. They'll be working like the rest of us. The OS thing is gonna wither and die, but not until the economy bottoms out. Until then, there will always be a glut of moderately educated, wealthy people with lots of free time on their hands.
Nope. You're wrong. You're not unable to pay rent, just unable to pay rent in a place you'd be happy in. You obviously haven't seen how any H1B Indians live in the US. Their standard of living is low. Very low. They generally don't have cars (try the bus). They live in shithole apartment, 2 or 3 to a bedroom. They make their own food. They are willing to live like that. That is the difference.
You can look back on a lifetime of discomfort and wonder what exactly it was that you were thinking...
I only did it for 6 years, and I felt like a damn hamster in a wheel the whole time. Development is a rat race in the truest sense of the phrase.
You're exactly right. That's why I got out of development. I really wanted to have a life outside of the computer section of Barnes and Noble. My Development/Engineering career lasted 6 years.
Every Fortune 500 company is constantly in court. That's why "corporate lawyers" exist. I would guess that most companies the size of Microsoft have hundreds if not thousands of lawyers working for them full time. Jesus, not even the Wall Street Journal reports on every little piddling lawsuit that every single Fortune 500 company is involved in.
Homo sapiens are omnivores. It's hard to imagine a human honestly not craving meat. It's like saying, "nope, I've never wanted to have sex in my life. Haven't for four generations... oops." I personally don't believe people who say, "I love veggies. I hate meat." I can't believe it. Those people usually just have something to prove, anyway.
I eat whatever I want and I'm healthy as an ox. In my opinion A. It's mental. If you spend all of your time worrying about what you eat and being healthy, then you WILL be sick (and neurotic) B. It's exercise. I work all day, every day. I could eat nothing but fatback all day and not gain a pound. Actually, since I've started working all day every day, I now eat one large cheese pizza a day, Wendy's a few times, and other random food that comes by. I've also lost 5 pounds.
Must be nice to have the time and money to worry about how your meat is raised. I'm just happy to be able to afford to buy meat. I have a lot of customers who are vegan or vegetarian, or who want to meet the meat before they eat it (what's his name? how big was his pen? what did he eat? Did he heat only organcally grown corn? Can I see where the corn was grown?). Without fail, those people are wealthy, in that they have plenty of money and time to waste worrying about shit like this. While I envy their resources, I can definitely say that if I had time and money enough like they do, I wouldn't waste it worrying about every little fucking molecule that enters my body. They're all fucking neurotic. If you ask me, life is too short to be neurotic. Eat & be happy.
Oh, well that clears it up. What the fuck is a "Manga"?
I find it appropriate that in the PS2 category (fuck PC's... I don't have time to dink around with installers, expensive video cards, etc), Gamespot nominated GTA: VC in every category that it didn't win in. I noticed that the other one seemed to exclude GTA:VC altogether. Kinda' say something about the websites... Gamespot is straight up with their reviews. I expect the guys at Gamespy are the kind of guys who sit around and say, "We can't say that GTA:VC was the best. It's so October. It's for the masses. Let's pick really, really obscure stuff, cause then we'll be l337. Sorry guys. GTA: VC wins hands down, whether or not it was popular. I've been playing video games for more than 20 years, and GTA: VC is the best ever. PC or console. Action or adventure. Hands down.
I know that I'm not the oldest one here, but I'm probably relatively old... I'm still gateful for hard drives. I probably had 4-5 PC's before I got one with a "hard drive". It was pretty amazing to have a 10 meg hard drive (that's almost 30 5 1/4 disks!!! wow!!)
OK, I may be out of the loop a bit, but does anybody else know who or what "Gundam" is?
Another case: Since the release of Windows 2000, Outlook Express has been integrated so tightly in the Windows code that it is near impossible to remove it (from a typical user's standpoint, n00b?). I have installed The Bat! [ritlabs.com] as my default email client, but OE always retakes files with .MSG extension everytime I close The Bat!. Isn't this, too, considered misuse of monopoly in one area to gain market leverage in another?
I hate to break it to ya', but it's Control Panel, Add Remove Programs, Add/Remove Windows Components. True, there isn't an icon on the desktop saying "Click Here to uninstall Outlook Express", but it's far from "impossible".
The only reason that Sun would lose is because there's no compelling reason for most people to use it. They've completely failed to build a user and developer base on their own, so they instead go to the government for help. Scott McNealy is simply inept. That's why Sun would fail.
Did anybody else notice that one of their "heroes" is a ZOMBIE!!!?? It looks like one of the zombies from the "Living Dead" series. I expect him to say "Braaaaiiiinnnns" (in Dutch, of course).
Search-wise, Yahoo is number two behind Google. From what I can tell, their search engine gets about half the traffic that Google gets. But, that being said, Yahoo's searches are a combination of their hand picked lists and Google searches. So say, a site listed in Google, but not in Yahoo may be ranked #10 in Google, but #20 in Yahoo. So, if Yahoo does drop Google, I suspect that Google will initally lose a bit of weight, but since Inktomi doesn't spider or search as well as Google, Yahoo's front end will progressively lose more and more people to Google. For web site owners, I think this is a zero sum result. They'll lose Yahoo searches, but gain a good bit more Google from users migrating. Personally, I'm not too concerned about it one way or the other.
At *some* point, you have to believe something, otherwise you wouldn't be able to function. How do you know, really know that you car runs on gas? Maybe the gas is used to feed aliens in your engine that in turn use their magic powers to make the wheels go. Have you actually seen the gas burned in your engine, and the entire process working? Have you actually seen a piston in your engine, not another one (that's rigged) burn fuel? Or do you just accept it because you're gullible?
And what's wrong with 30+ year old technology? Why the hell are we using "DVD"s when we should be using videotapes?? CD's? Screw that. I want records. Anti-lock brakes and fuel injectors in cars? No way. I want 2 drum brakes and a carbureator. What's with this "progress" thing, anyway? Computers shouldn't be any easier to use. They should be just as difficult as they were in the 1970's. After all, that's what technology is all about. Not changing. Not progressing. Now damn it, where's my reel to reel tape drive and my 300 baud modem?
... who hasn't ever heard of these things?
With Linux I don't have some corp looking over my shoulder telling me how I can use their software and asking me to upgrade every 2 years for large sums of cash.
I bought my W2K licenses, and I'm not upgrading. Not until I have a very, very good reason to. MS isn't holding a gun to my head to upgrade. For the quality of the software and the ease of use, I think that their price is very fair.
What's driving the economy isn't the software business, it's businesses using software. When businesses use open source software they can take ownership of it in ways they never could with proprietary software.
My business is non-IT. But to say that software companies don't contribute significantly to the economy is silly. MS, Oracle, and IBM are all very large companies that provide a good percentage of the GDP. That being said, I need a solid, reliable, easy to use system that I don't have to fuss with. That's what I've got.
If Linux wasn't helping to drive the US economy, then Oracle and IBM wouldn't be standing behind it.
Right now, I see a lot of PR coming out of those companies as far as Linux backing. How much they actually sell of Linux products, I have no clue.