1) The Rio doesn't have enough storage The Rio is not MP3. Empeg looks promising but still too expensive probably (I haven't checked because it doesn't interest me). For all we know there could be a portable player coming out tomorrow that will be a good MP3 player. The only two places I listen to pre-recorded music are at home and in the car (and I drive very seldomly), and there must be some other people like me. Portable players would be nice but not crucial to the MP3 format.
Disclaimer: if you have a problem with me forcing my opinions on you RMS-style, skip this section 2) "Near CD-Quality" isn't good enough Yes it is. I don't know this fucking lame euro-american society came up with the idea that if the quality of something sucks, it must be no good. I'm sorry, but all the true-colour 3D shooters, Myst and rip-offs, driving simulators, and all 5000 games that fit into all of about 3 genres aren't half as good as Pac-Man. The same holds for movies and of course music. Music technology is not something worth complaining about, especially considering how well we have it. Am I saying that we should just give up and stop trying to improve audio quality? Ya, more or less.
3) Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth - need more of it This will only become an issue when there's something to replace it. What are our options? Real audio? PCM? MP3 is looking pretty good. People need to share music, and MP3 is arguably the best we have at the moment. It does streaming, it's fairly scalable in terms of bitrates. It'll stick around till another format comes out at least, which hopefully won't be MP4.
Uhh you're saying that anything with 'GNU' in its name is part of the GNU project? That may work in most cases, but probably not for all. Yes, you're right that the GNU project extends beyond that of the FSF. RMS said something about this on the linux-kernel mailing list a while back. I think to become part of the GNU project, you and GNU just have to come to some sort of agreement, and then RMS can say "ph3ar, an0+her oNE!!!111" I think he said that even XFree86 is part of the GNU project. I wouldn't be too surprised if GNU software ended up becoming the majority of most Linux distributions.
I don't see how this is a good idea. The only person you're hindering is yourself by giving up all the GNU tools. RMS doesn't care if 2 people are 2 million people use his software; this isn't a popularity contest for him. If you've followed his whole 'open-source' vs 'free' debate, you can see that quite clearly. The 'open-source' advocates think that it (OSS/FS) is good if lots of people end up using it, whereas RMS seems to think it's good per se.
This I can guarantee you if enough people start boycotting GNU: (a) they won't have a system to run for about five years (b) the GNU project will carry on like it did before, as if nothing had ever happened (c) people will start to try to use Perl for something useful *shudder*
Anyway, if you haven't noticed, boycottition is a predominantly capitalist idea, and seems to work the best in a capitalist setting (i.e. a big popularity contest). It's normally used to send a message to someone, but it seems to all go in vain when the other side barely notices, let alone addresses it.
And don't get me started on how childish this seems. RMS says something you don't like, so you get 5 of your friends to beat him up after school. I cannot think of anything more trivial than the name of an operating system. If he wants to call Linux "GNU rules over all with infinite wisdom", I don't see what the deal is. Yes, whenever the media talks to him he tries to force them to call it GNU/Linux, too, who cares? Has anyone noticed that no one has ever tried to talk to him about it without using the using the phrases "psycho", "fanatic" or "get lost"?
If I go and shoot somone, who in their right mind would blame Smith and Wesson?? Uh oh bad analogy. The guy who released the virus was also the guy who manufactured the virus. To use your analogy, it would be like holding Microsoft responsible for creating humans that were able to be killed via bullets, even though a cure for bullet-death had been discovered years prior. If Microsoft has control over the population of 80% of the people, and they have the power to make them invulnerable to bullets, it sounds like a pretty keen thing of them to do in my books.
Bah OK fair enough. They don't make a profit, but they do make money, and there are a few people there who get paid for it as their full-time job. Anyway my original point was, uhhh, oh ya that it was indeed true that the FSF wasn't created to give people cheaper software. I guess one could argue that they made the FSF so that they could still give the software away gratis, but somehow I don't think that was the intention at all. Hmm I don't think I made a single point in this comment.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, RMS founded the FSF for the sole purpose of making money. People wanted Emacs, but didn't have FTP access, so he sold them tapes for $150. Now it's an organisation to give money to lots of free software authors. Unfortunately the essay was far too boring for me to read more than about a page, so I don't know what he said exactly, but I'd be curious to thinks what the FSF does.
Agreed. I have no idea what they're trying to accomplish except possibly publicity (hoorah for the media). I can just see some PHB sitting in his office thinking "Damn, 1/3 of my people didn't show up today. Maybe capitalism is all wrong after all."
Uhh I hate to burst your bubble, but there's more to the world than capitalism and communism. This article makes no mention of communism...it just seems to take a strong stance against capitalism. For all I know these guys could be communists, but it's darn near impossible to tell for sure.
Although (hopefully I won't offend any communists here:P), but this seems like the kind of "cheap-shot" that communists are known to do to bring down capitalism. I agree capitalism is pretty heinous, but organising meaningless "protests" like this just makes things worse. And quite frankly I'd rather have capitalism or whatever the hell this is called than have communism.
And free software isn't necessarily communist-like. Communism was still just an oligarchy trying to control one big-ass nation of far too many people, and being mighty restrictive as well. It was still based on currency and money, but the government had control over it. Money doesn't factor in at all with free software -- communism, socialism, capitalism, feudalism, monarchy, you name it, any political system that's been devised doesn't really lend itself to or away from free software as far as I can see.
Well I've patented software, so I agree: they will need some good lawyers. Really though, I don't think they could get hold up a patent for virtualisation very well since they didn't invent it and it was invented over 20 years ago.
Agreed, but just I need to take just one little chink out of your argument:). When he was talking about needing the high level of expertise, I think he was talking about Linux getting more desktop/client support, since there's already an unreal amount of growth in the server market. Desktop/client people normally aren't sysadminny types of people:)
Isn't part of freedom the freedom to call a given piece of software whatever the hell **I** want to? Yes, he's many times before that he doesn't want to, and can't, force people to call it GNU/Linux. He's aggressive, but he's not forcing you. It would seem odd that you would have a problem with *him* calling it whatever he wants, though. In this interview, there was *none* of his infamous "call it GNU/Linux or I won't listen to you" talk, but rather he simply called it what he wanted to call it. Just because you don't agree with him, doesn't mean you can force him to call what you want.
Haha because that would cover all of about 3% of the GNU/Linux users. I guess I could say I use the used-to-be-Slackware-about-a-year-ago-before-I-cle aned-everything-off-and-borrowed-stuff-f rom-about-4-different-distributions-and-wrote-my-o wn-software operating system, but it's even harder to say than GNU/Linux I'm afraid.
Cookies - now *that's* geek humor!
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I also have mother's maiden name, IQ, and "income bracket".
If urandom doesn't do it, you can just leave the drive a little too close to your favourite woofer. Really, though, it seems a little bit extreme. So you sell your drive and the person you sell it to gets your child pr0n, big deal.
downloading on the loo?
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I think you mean "uploading", unless you have strange habits on the loo.
Even worse than no package manager is a package manager that isn't. If you've installed Slackware 3.6 (and probably 3.5 and before), you'll know you have to rm -rf a whole bunch of/var/packages,/var/setup, etc. shit. I think Slackware expects you to use setup to install everything or something (is there any use to that program?
"We still don't get to marry supermodels"
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It's the only way to true salvation.
Actually these "good" points are pretty bad.
1) The Rio doesn't have enough storage
The Rio is not MP3. Empeg looks promising but still too expensive probably (I haven't checked because it doesn't interest me). For all we know there could be a portable player coming out tomorrow that will be a good MP3 player. The only two places I listen to pre-recorded music are at home and in the car (and I drive very seldomly), and there must be some other people like me. Portable players would be nice but not crucial to the MP3 format.
Disclaimer: if you have a problem with me forcing my opinions on you RMS-style, skip this section
2) "Near CD-Quality" isn't good enough
Yes it is. I don't know this fucking lame euro-american society came up with the idea that if the quality of something sucks, it must be no good. I'm sorry, but all the true-colour 3D shooters, Myst and rip-offs, driving simulators, and all 5000 games that fit into all of about 3 genres aren't half as good as Pac-Man. The same holds for movies and of course music. Music technology is not something worth complaining about, especially considering how well we have it. Am I saying that we should just give up and stop trying to improve audio quality? Ya, more or less.
3) Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth - need more of it
This will only become an issue when there's something to replace it. What are our options? Real audio? PCM? MP3 is looking pretty good. People need to share music, and MP3 is arguably the best we have at the moment. It does streaming, it's fairly scalable in terms of bitrates. It'll stick around till another format comes out at least, which hopefully won't be MP4.
Uhh you're saying that anything with 'GNU' in its name is part of the GNU project? That may work in most cases, but probably not for all. Yes, you're right that the GNU project extends beyond that of the FSF. RMS said something about this on the linux-kernel mailing list a while back. I think to become part of the GNU project, you and GNU just have to come to some sort of agreement, and then RMS can say "ph3ar, an0+her oNE!!!111" I think he said that even XFree86 is part of the GNU project. I wouldn't be too surprised if GNU software ended up becoming the majority of most Linux distributions.
Might I suggest you start asking human beings for help?
I don't see how this is a good idea. The only person you're hindering is yourself by giving up all the GNU tools. RMS doesn't care if 2 people are 2 million people use his software; this isn't a popularity contest for him. If you've followed his whole 'open-source' vs 'free' debate, you can see that quite clearly. The 'open-source' advocates think that it (OSS/FS) is good if lots of people end up using it, whereas RMS seems to think it's good per se.
This I can guarantee you if enough people start boycotting GNU:
(a) they won't have a system to run for about five years
(b) the GNU project will carry on like it did before, as if nothing had ever happened
(c) people will start to try to use Perl for something useful *shudder*
Anyway, if you haven't noticed, boycottition is a predominantly capitalist idea, and seems to work the best in a capitalist setting (i.e. a big popularity contest). It's normally used to send a message to someone, but it seems to all go in vain when the other side barely notices, let alone addresses it.
And don't get me started on how childish this seems. RMS says something you don't like, so you get 5 of your friends to beat him up after school. I cannot think of anything more trivial than the name of an operating system. If he wants to call Linux "GNU rules over all with infinite wisdom", I don't see what the deal is. Yes, whenever the media talks to him he tries to force them to call it GNU/Linux, too, who cares? Has anyone noticed that no one has ever tried to talk to him about it without using the using the phrases "psycho", "fanatic" or "get lost"?
I hope you mean modprobe. Get into the 90's.
If I go and shoot somone, who in their right mind would blame Smith and Wesson??
Uh oh bad analogy. The guy who released the virus was also the guy who manufactured the virus. To use your analogy, it would be like holding Microsoft responsible for creating humans that were able to be killed via bullets, even though a cure for bullet-death had been discovered years prior. If Microsoft has control over the population of 80% of the people, and they have the power to make them invulnerable to bullets, it sounds like a pretty keen thing of them to do in my books.
Me thinks someone needs a lesson in sarcasm.
Bah OK fair enough. They don't make a profit, but they do make money, and there are a few people there who get paid for it as their full-time job. Anyway my original point was, uhhh, oh ya that it was indeed true that the FSF wasn't created to give people cheaper software. I guess one could argue that they made the FSF so that they could still give the software away gratis, but somehow I don't think that was the intention at all. Hmm I don't think I made a single point in this comment.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, RMS founded the FSF for the sole purpose of making money. People wanted Emacs, but didn't have FTP access, so he sold them tapes for $150. Now it's an organisation to give money to lots of free software authors. Unfortunately the essay was far too boring for me to read more than about a page, so I don't know what he said exactly, but I'd be curious to thinks what the FSF does.
Agreed. I have no idea what they're trying to accomplish except possibly publicity (hoorah for the media). I can just see some PHB sitting in his office thinking "Damn, 1/3 of my people didn't show up today. Maybe capitalism is all wrong after all."
Uhh I hate to burst your bubble, but there's more to the world than capitalism and communism. This article makes no mention of communism...it just seems to take a strong stance against capitalism. For all I know these guys could be communists, but it's darn near impossible to tell for sure.
:P), but this seems like the kind of "cheap-shot" that communists are known to do to bring down capitalism. I agree capitalism is pretty heinous, but organising meaningless "protests" like this just makes things worse. And quite frankly I'd rather have capitalism or whatever the hell this is called than have communism.
Although (hopefully I won't offend any communists here
And free software isn't necessarily communist-like. Communism was still just an oligarchy trying to control one big-ass nation of far too many people, and being mighty restrictive as well. It was still based on currency and money, but the government had control over it. Money doesn't factor in at all with free software -- communism, socialism, capitalism, feudalism, monarchy, you name it, any political system that's been devised doesn't really lend itself to or away from free software as far as I can see.
Well I've patented software, so I agree: they will need some good lawyers. Really though, I don't think they could get hold up a patent for virtualisation very well since they didn't invent it and it was invented over 20 years ago.
Agreed, but just I need to take just one little chink out of your argument :). When he was talking about needing the high level of expertise, I think he was talking about Linux getting more desktop/client support, since there's already an unreal amount of growth in the server market. Desktop/client people normally aren't sysadminny types of people :)
What gives him the right to make a statement like that?
Free speech. Please read my post before responding to it.
Isn't part of freedom the freedom to call a given piece of software whatever the hell **I** want to?
Yes, he's many times before that he doesn't want to, and can't, force people to call it GNU/Linux. He's aggressive, but he's not forcing you. It would seem odd that you would have a problem with *him* calling it whatever he wants, though. In this interview, there was *none* of his infamous "call it GNU/Linux or I won't listen to you" talk, but rather he simply called it what he wanted to call it. Just because you don't agree with him, doesn't mean you can force him to call what you want.
Oh gee doesn't this agrument sound familiar.
Haha because that would cover all of about 3% of the GNU/Linux users. I guess I could say I use the used-to-be-Slackware-about-a-year-ago-before-I-cle aned-everything-off-and-borrowed-stuff-f rom-about-4-different-distributions-and-wrote-my-o wn-software operating system, but it's even harder to say than GNU/Linux I'm afraid.
I also have mother's maiden name, IQ, and "income bracket".
I believe the 'customer advantage' is that Windows is an enormous pile of dung.
If urandom doesn't do it, you can just leave the drive a little too close to your favourite woofer. Really, though, it seems a little bit extreme. So you sell your drive and the person you sell it to gets your child pr0n, big deal.
I think you mean "uploading", unless you have strange habits on the loo.
Not to go completely off topic, but how do you get a 'K' out of a '4'?
Even worse than no package manager is a package manager that isn't. If you've installed Slackware 3.6 (and probably 3.5 and before), you'll know you have to rm -rf a whole bunch of /var/packages, /var/setup, etc. shit. I think Slackware expects you to use setup to install everything or something (is there any use to that program?
Excercise and sunshine on a friday night?
He means that the media goes nuts on every little "update" which has nothing to do with the trial itself. Very silly.