The entire system of the electoral college was supposed to shield the decision of selecting a president from an ignorant public. In my opinion, the situation in Florida in 2000 was a perfect example of the sort of buffer it provides. I desperately wished that Florida's electoral college representatives would have just split their votes and given the odd one to Bush. That would have been a fair resolution to all the recounting. If it really was too close to call, then make it up in the electoral vote. If it was due to Republicans trying to disenfranchise black voters, if it was due to Democrats trying to disenfranchise military absentee voters, if it was due to Dan Rather calling the election for Gore an hour before the polls closed, whatever the case, make it up in the electoral vote. If all of these battleground states -- if ALL the states -- would cast their votes according to the percentage of the votes that go towards the candidates, we'd have a system that could still correct this sort of confusion, and would still get really close to a system of a popular vote. Don't let anyone fool you, we've had craziness in our voting all along. It's just that technology has provided both the insight to catch it and, more importantly, the means to communicate it immediately. The electoral college may be even more forward-thinking than we knew, but the people who make up the system are going to have to change their attitudes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's only tradition that keeps things the way they are. I don't know of any laws that force the delegates to cast their votes a certain way. If they think that the public of their state has made a mistake, it's their duty to cast their vote according to their conscience. (But then we get into a situation were we need to examine how those people get into the position of casting their vote. I have no idea how they are selected.)
Bah. I had a great time living in the dorm. I did all 4 years in one, and got my name on a plaque on the door. Seriously, unless you want to major in anarchy, it's not much of a hassle. The upsides -- which still outweigh everything else in my 20/20 hindsight -- are that the food was right down below, and someone else was cooking it and doing the dishes (even if that was me for 3 semesters), and the bathroom is just down the hall and someone else is cleaning it every day. I guess some of the newer arrangments are much more "progressive," what with co-ed's sharing bathrooms and such, and I hear there are campus-wide eating halls now (pick your favorite and use a credit), so maybe my 15 year memories wouldn't find purchase in the new scheme of things, but I still think it was pretty swell.
... while the legitimate and paying user is bothered, treated like a soon to be criminal, and that legitimate uses of the software are at times prevented.
Wrong again. Only the person who lets their copy of their.tgz file out into the wilderness of P2P is going to be treated as a criminal.
I see a lot of people reacting from something that can only be called a guilty conscience...
Yeah, and it's more than just about the money. I think the FOSS world could band together to fight such a thing on the cheap. Take GrokLaw for instance. A small team could post everything that happens to a web site, everyone else could apply their particular skills to the problem, and the team could take the best thinking back into the courtroom. However, if the system were allowed to work that way, it would hobble the entire legal structure. Think of it. Chaos! People with only a rudimentary understanding of law litigating cases with millions or billions of dollars at stake. What would a law degree be worth at that point? Do you think that other lawyers, judges, or especially all of our federal elected officials (most all of whom have law degrees) would let this stand?
"However, building a product that starts with the accomplishment of others and announcing it as completely your own work product, is not invention, nor is it innovation. Innovation can only work properly if innovators properly credit the work of others, especially if the innovator has decided to introduce the product into the marketplace for commercial gain."
Why not go after, say, Microsoft, then, if this is the real problem? That's been their operational model since they started their business, and they're a much bigger problem, and, therefore, target.
But seriously, I had a very high-level IT manager complain that she wanted to replace a home-grown collaboration-site-creation web application with the more polished and integrated SharePoint, but that the costs were enormous. (If you really have installed it for clients, you have already gone through this exercise. For my Fortune 250 company, this is going to range into about a half a million dollars, not counting the hardware and other infrastructure.) Unfortunately, Plone only does a little more than what our home-grown app does, but I throw this out there so that other people can benefit from the technology that 1) don't have a ton of money for it and 2) don't have a talented web development group. Plone does most of what SharePoint does. It only lacks the usual Microsoft lockin..., er, integration.
Wow. You have some good things to say, but you're comparing run times between apples and oranges. Try running a copy of Red Hat 6.2 (for '97, you may even need to go back to 5.2) and using it's versions of file manager, web browser, and word processor. You say you would, but what about security patches? None of Microsoft's products from the period are still supported either. (At least with Linux, you could do it if you must.) I happily run Debian (shudder, I *hate* Debian) on an old P100 laptop. But that's okay, because the software in Debian is about that old, and still being updated! I barely manage to run Netscape 4 with it. (Mozilla runs, but it takes about 10 minutes to start.) I should really be finding a copy of Netscape *3* for that thing. Will I get plugins working? No, but I can't expect that. Neither should you.
SuSE, polished, stable, professional, user friendly, but with closed source bits preventing widespread use.
Here we go. Again.
THERE WERE NO "CLOSED SOURCE BITS" IN SUSE!
YaST has always been open source, they just encumbered the distribution of the branded tool for money. Note: 1) distribution, 2) branded, 3) for money. It took all three to run afoul of their stipulation. Repeating: YaST was always open source; it simply had not been (until now) free software. (Actually reading the license does wonders to clear up the FUD, you know?)
YaST has now been GPL'ed by Novell. Please move on.
Redhat still supports development in Fedora, and even funds it. Funny I've been noticing only improvements (since the change) and no stepbacks. Fedora is just as supported as RH ever was, no better, no worse (except there's much more choices now, yum instead up2date, and more public repositories).
Well, "stepbacks" is sort of relative, isn't it? I mean, I left Red Hat after being a die hard user since the 6.2 days when 8.0 came out. My decision was confirmed with 9. Given the quality of those releases, it was obvious long before the official announcement that what they were peddling as a "consumer" distro was becoming a rolling beta. I've been deliriously happy with SuSE, and, frankly, I'm glad that Red Hat gave me the excuse to switch. It's been everything Red Hat should have been post-7.3.
Ah, the obligatory apt-get advertisement. Never mind the fact that it will take even a seasoned Linux user several days to sort out how Debian works. Apt is like Windows. It's only intuitive and easy after you've been abused by it for long enough. I dare any Debian user to try to stick up for the "ease" pinning hand-picked packages to mix various states of stable and unstable so as to keep a system useable but not a minimum of 2 years behind the times. Yikes!
And yeah, someone can flame me with the, "Ah, the Debian's-out-of-date rant."
Why in the world would you HAVE lib-whatever-3.1.18 on your system, yet have compiled AGAINST lib-whatever-3.1.17?! Are you trying to move binaries across systems or something?
And it's been my experience that if you have the version called for OR GREATER, you'll be fine. Most libraries maintain backwards compatibility. (People usually start a new library if they can't.)
I use SuSE (formerly RH), so I'm "into" using RPM. OTOH, I usually only like RPM's that have been built by the distro's creator. (Noteable exception: PackMan RPM's for Xine.) Anything else, I usually compile from source and stick in/usr/local. Checkinstall is what you need here. After configure and make, you ``checkinstall -R'', and it makes an RPM of whatever would be installed with ``make install''. That way you can take it back out very easily.
If an RPM has dependancies, I'm willing to bet that those dependencies have also been compiled and packaged as RPM's by the same person who made the original. Did you look around for that?
I think one real issue, that people are skirting, is who will be the ultimate guarantor of IP-related issues in a world that is governed by the GPL and GPL-like licenses. I could easily see IBM, HP, Sun, and many of the other large hardware players solving this problem tomorrow by settling the dispute with SCO and maybe even taking the entire code base and donating it into the public domain.
Many speculated this was the case, but here we have confirmation that the intent all along was to sucker-punch the big boys into settling. And once again, we need to point out that the "suits" on SCO's side just don't "get it." If they did, they would have expected exactly the response that they've gotten.
I was going to say Journyx. It's built on open source as well, but it's pricing is a little steep, IMO. (Hey, no one said the OSS here had to be free, did they?) However, the first 10 users are free, and the setup takes about 5 minutes. (I'm going to demo it for some managers this week.)
I'm also going to take a look at this one, and see how it stacks up...
I am fully aware of the old adage likening the discussion of religion on the internet to running a race in the Special Olympics, but I feel a duty to clarify this point. Christians are very much obligated to live by the morals of the Old Testament. However, the act of propitiation (look it up) accomplished by Christ's crucifiction had provided us with a "dispensation" of grace. Meaning: now we are living in a time of delayed punishment. Jesus didn't say that "the Law and the Prophets" were over. If anything, He underscored that, because of the amount of grace under which would we would be living after His death, we would be held to an even higher standard than before. For instance, witness His comment to the effect that just looking upon a woman to lust after her is equivalent to committing adultery. Many people seem to have the opinion that God doesn't care about the things He used to care about because of Christ's sacrifice. This is not true at all. Rather, He has declared a "new deal." The Jewish theocracy-by-birthright has given way so that each of us could enter the "Holy of Holies" ourselves in the form of being filled with the Holy Ghost and being able to speak with God directly. Along with this "new testament" comes a more direct responsibility to hold yourself to the ideals of holiness. So, no more stonings at the edge of town, but God expects each of us to live His teachings on our own, enjoying the benefits thereof (c.f. the "fruit of the Spirit), and giving us a "space of grace" in case we blow it.
Would you care to share your formulation of rules that block this particular virus? I don't want to simply stop.zip file attachments, nor can I stop this virus based on sender, subject (especially), or size, since they're all variable. In short, I don't know where to start.
And when a DEMOCRAT was in the White House, he and the leaders of the DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS said all the same things about Saddam Hussein and his WMD that the REPUBLICANS are saying now. It would seem that EVERYONE was wrong about that, but it doesn't change the fact that BOTH sides have called for the removal of Hussein BEFORE there was a "smoking gun" to deal with. It would appear that you're simply not paying attention. The difference is that one side had the balls to actually do something about it. In any case, Bush never staked the war on the basis of WMD's alone. Again, if you think that, you're not really paying attention to the debate. You're just trying to twist this issue to attempt to persuade uneducated people to your cause: Bush is teh Evil. I'm sorry, but there's no way that you can defend the regime that was ousted, WMD's or no.
And, maybe, after two centuries, our policies and philosophy are due for a reconsideration?
Next on the block: North Korea. Again, I would really hope that no one would honestly condone that regime's actions, starving out the entire country in favor of political despotism.
Slashdot Mirror
The entire system of the electoral college was supposed to shield the decision of selecting a president from an ignorant public. In my opinion, the situation in Florida in 2000 was a perfect example of the sort of buffer it provides. I desperately wished that Florida's electoral college representatives would have just split their votes and given the odd one to Bush. That would have been a fair resolution to all the recounting. If it really was too close to call, then make it up in the electoral vote. If it was due to Republicans trying to disenfranchise black voters, if it was due to Democrats trying to disenfranchise military absentee voters, if it was due to Dan Rather calling the election for Gore an hour before the polls closed, whatever the case, make it up in the electoral vote. If all of these battleground states -- if ALL the states -- would cast their votes according to the percentage of the votes that go towards the candidates, we'd have a system that could still correct this sort of confusion, and would still get really close to a system of a popular vote. Don't let anyone fool you, we've had craziness in our voting all along. It's just that technology has provided both the insight to catch it and, more importantly, the means to communicate it immediately. The electoral college may be even more forward-thinking than we knew, but the people who make up the system are going to have to change their attitudes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's only tradition that keeps things the way they are. I don't know of any laws that force the delegates to cast their votes a certain way. If they think that the public of their state has made a mistake, it's their duty to cast their vote according to their conscience. (But then we get into a situation were we need to examine how those people get into the position of casting their vote. I have no idea how they are selected.)
Bah. I had a great time living in the dorm. I did all 4 years in one, and got my name on a plaque on the door. Seriously, unless you want to major in anarchy, it's not much of a hassle. The upsides -- which still outweigh everything else in my 20/20 hindsight -- are that the food was right down below, and someone else was cooking it and doing the dishes (even if that was me for 3 semesters), and the bathroom is just down the hall and someone else is cleaning it every day. I guess some of the newer arrangments are much more "progressive," what with co-ed's sharing bathrooms and such, and I hear there are campus-wide eating halls now (pick your favorite and use a credit), so maybe my 15 year memories wouldn't find purchase in the new scheme of things, but I still think it was pretty swell.
Wrong again. Only the person who lets their copy of their .tgz file out into the wilderness of P2P is going to be treated as a criminal.
I see a lot of people reacting from something that can only be called a guilty conscience...
Look, he even has a low Slashdot id number. That's proof positive that he's a true hacker!
Well WHOOPADEEDO!
Yeah, and it's more than just about the money. I think the FOSS world could band together to fight such a thing on the cheap. Take GrokLaw for instance. A small team could post everything that happens to a web site, everyone else could apply their particular skills to the problem, and the team could take the best thinking back into the courtroom. However, if the system were allowed to work that way, it would hobble the entire legal structure. Think of it. Chaos! People with only a rudimentary understanding of law litigating cases with millions or billions of dollars at stake. What would a law degree be worth at that point? Do you think that other lawyers, judges, or especially all of our federal elected officials (most all of whom have law degrees) would let this stand?
No. The proof is left as an exercise to the reader.
Why not go after, say, Microsoft, then, if this is the real problem? That's been their operational model since they started their business, and they're a much bigger problem, and, therefore, target.
And I lost 20 pounds by using it! You can too! Here's how...
Plone. Now start deploying that.
But seriously, I had a very high-level IT manager complain that she wanted to replace a home-grown collaboration-site-creation web application with the more polished and integrated SharePoint, but that the costs were enormous. (If you really have installed it for clients, you have already gone through this exercise. For my Fortune 250 company, this is going to range into about a half a million dollars, not counting the hardware and other infrastructure.) Unfortunately, Plone only does a little more than what our home-grown app does, but I throw this out there so that other people can benefit from the technology that 1) don't have a ton of money for it and 2) don't have a talented web development group. Plone does most of what SharePoint does. It only lacks the usual Microsoft lockin..., er, integration.
Wow. You have some good things to say, but you're comparing run times between apples and oranges. Try running a copy of Red Hat 6.2 (for '97, you may even need to go back to 5.2) and using it's versions of file manager, web browser, and word processor. You say you would, but what about security patches? None of Microsoft's products from the period are still supported either. (At least with Linux, you could do it if you must.) I happily run Debian (shudder, I *hate* Debian) on an old P100 laptop. But that's okay, because the software in Debian is about that old, and still being updated! I barely manage to run Netscape 4 with it. (Mozilla runs, but it takes about 10 minutes to start.) I should really be finding a copy of Netscape *3* for that thing. Will I get plugins working? No, but I can't expect that. Neither should you.
Here we go. Again.
THERE WERE NO "CLOSED SOURCE BITS" IN SUSE!
YaST has always been open source, they just encumbered the distribution of the branded tool for money. Note: 1) distribution, 2) branded, 3) for money. It took all three to run afoul of their stipulation. Repeating: YaST was always open source; it simply had not been (until now) free software. (Actually reading the license does wonders to clear up the FUD, you know?)
YaST has now been GPL'ed by Novell. Please move on.
Well, "stepbacks" is sort of relative, isn't it? I mean, I left Red Hat after being a die hard user since the 6.2 days when 8.0 came out. My decision was confirmed with 9. Given the quality of those releases, it was obvious long before the official announcement that what they were peddling as a "consumer" distro was becoming a rolling beta. I've been deliriously happy with SuSE, and, frankly, I'm glad that Red Hat gave me the excuse to switch. It's been everything Red Hat should have been post-7.3.
Please mod parent up!!!
Well, it's certainly better than reinstalling DEBIAN, anyway...
Ah, the obligatory apt-get advertisement. Never mind the fact that it will take even a seasoned Linux user several days to sort out how Debian works. Apt is like Windows. It's only intuitive and easy after you've been abused by it for long enough. I dare any Debian user to try to stick up for the "ease" pinning hand-picked packages to mix various states of stable and unstable so as to keep a system useable but not a minimum of 2 years behind the times. Yikes!
And yeah, someone can flame me with the, "Ah, the Debian's-out-of-date rant."
Why in the world would you HAVE lib-whatever-3.1.18 on your system, yet have compiled AGAINST lib-whatever-3.1.17?! Are you trying to move binaries across systems or something?
And it's been my experience that if you have the version called for OR GREATER, you'll be fine. Most libraries maintain backwards compatibility. (People usually start a new library if they can't.)
I use SuSE (formerly RH), so I'm "into" using RPM. OTOH, I usually only like RPM's that have been built by the distro's creator. (Noteable exception: PackMan RPM's for Xine.) Anything else, I usually compile from source and stick in /usr/local. Checkinstall is what you need here. After configure and make, you ``checkinstall -R'', and it makes an RPM of whatever would be installed with ``make install''. That way you can take it back out very easily.
Sigh. Here we go again.
If an RPM has dependancies, I'm willing to bet that those dependencies have also been compiled and packaged as RPM's by the same person who made the original. Did you look around for that?
From the article:
Many speculated this was the case, but here we have confirmation that the intent all along was to sucker-punch the big boys into settling. And once again, we need to point out that the "suits" on SCO's side just don't "get it." If they did, they would have expected exactly the response that they've gotten.
I was going to say Journyx. It's built on open source as well, but it's pricing is a little steep, IMO. (Hey, no one said the OSS here had to be free, did they?) However, the first 10 users are free, and the setup takes about 5 minutes. (I'm going to demo it for some managers this week.)
I'm also going to take a look at this one, and see how it stacks up...
I am fully aware of the old adage likening the discussion of religion on the internet to running a race in the Special Olympics, but I feel a duty to clarify this point. Christians are very much obligated to live by the morals of the Old Testament. However, the act of propitiation (look it up) accomplished by Christ's crucifiction had provided us with a "dispensation" of grace. Meaning: now we are living in a time of delayed punishment. Jesus didn't say that "the Law and the Prophets" were over. If anything, He underscored that, because of the amount of grace under which would we would be living after His death, we would be held to an even higher standard than before. For instance, witness His comment to the effect that just looking upon a woman to lust after her is equivalent to committing adultery. Many people seem to have the opinion that God doesn't care about the things He used to care about because of Christ's sacrifice. This is not true at all. Rather, He has declared a "new deal." The Jewish theocracy-by-birthright has given way so that each of us could enter the "Holy of Holies" ourselves in the form of being filled with the Holy Ghost and being able to speak with God directly. Along with this "new testament" comes a more direct responsibility to hold yourself to the ideals of holiness. So, no more stonings at the edge of town, but God expects each of us to live His teachings on our own, enjoying the benefits thereof (c.f. the "fruit of the Spirit), and giving us a "space of grace" in case we blow it.
Would you care to share your formulation of rules that block this particular virus? I don't want to simply stop .zip file attachments, nor can I stop this virus based on sender, subject (especially), or size, since they're all variable. In short, I don't know where to start.
And when a DEMOCRAT was in the White House, he and the leaders of the DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS said all the same things about Saddam Hussein and his WMD that the REPUBLICANS are saying now. It would seem that EVERYONE was wrong about that, but it doesn't change the fact that BOTH sides have called for the removal of Hussein BEFORE there was a "smoking gun" to deal with. It would appear that you're simply not paying attention. The difference is that one side had the balls to actually do something about it. In any case, Bush never staked the war on the basis of WMD's alone. Again, if you think that, you're not really paying attention to the debate. You're just trying to twist this issue to attempt to persuade uneducated people to your cause: Bush is teh Evil. I'm sorry, but there's no way that you can defend the regime that was ousted, WMD's or no.
And, maybe, after two centuries, our policies and philosophy are due for a reconsideration?
Next on the block: North Korea. Again, I would really hope that no one would honestly condone that regime's actions, starving out the entire country in favor of political despotism.
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