>I road the DC blue line a few times during rush hour
s/road/rode/
I have ridden it frequently, as well.
This raises the issue of monopolistic behavior.
Unless things have changed, you can use Verizon, Verizon, or Verizon within the Metro tunnels/stations.
T-Mobile, at least, dies at roughly the speed of critical thinking within the DC beltway.
Actual solutions need to be implemented in a let-us-play-nicely-now way.
Got to have some manufacturers with enough sack to GPL the driver.
Then, the market needs to buy lots of them, so that the video chip and hard drive manufacturers will also get the clue.
Loadshedding these godforsaken software patents will certainly abet the effort, but that front takes serious political will.
Summary: economic and political effort required, golden future to follow.
</rose-colored glasses>
I generally concur with what you say: the FSF is basically the academic community re-stated, to good effect. However:
If I went to a restaurant and consumed their fare, and then attempted to stiff them on the bill, I would end up washing dishes to make up the difference.
I'm no' so sure this analogy helps. I think that (to the extent we can drive a metaphor, which have lower mileage than an SUV) the source code corresponds to the recipe for the fare. Calling the recipe 'fare' is unfair.
Offtopic, what is the English translation of your Gealic(?) login?
Oh, I think the Sony DRM roll was just one point along a lengthy path. Andy Oram had a nice blog entry on the whole topic, in particular, towards the bottom:
I hope FSF spokesperson Peter Brown is right in saying that we have a great opportunity to explain the benefits of freedom to the public over the coming year. I also sympathize with his claim that one must use the term "freedom" instead of focusing on "open source."
But opponents of the "open source" terminology always caricature the term and its supporters. Those who pushed for open source have promoted its ethics and community benefits just as free software proponents have. The virtue of "openness" as a general principle is powerful, and has brought people out on the streets in many countries. I admit that the words "open source" do not slam the ethical challenge down on the table the way the word "freedom" does. But "open source" has helped free software spread to far more places in business and public organization. Now many more people have something to defend when the free software proponents warn them they're in danger of losing it.
The GPL is swell. I can agree that abdicating freedom through the use of proprietary software is stupid. Deeming the sale of such "unethical" seems subjective. More generally, fretting about the motives of others seems a collosal distraction. I dunno.
I wonder if the Free Software and Open Source communities don't have greater effect in combination than either would have had in isolation.
I also wonder if the chief benefactor of all the theological thumb-wrestling isn't sitting in Redmond.
You must have teh mad skillz to stay continuously employed, boss.
Me, I just printed out the proxy server settings, so that, when whichever asshatically configured server it is that can't cough up my roaming profile, I can at least get a browser to function somehow.
Uber-consultants can surf teh jobz, if they're that good. Most of us have to bite off the tongue and swallow the blood, as they used to say.
Well, I wouldn't accuse MS of not trying to drive hardware sales, but, maybe there isn't a business case to change the application? I'm sure the market is well-modeled in a spreadsheet somewhere in Redmont.;)
It's really great, within its range.
If you use ADODB to query a spreadsheet (as in through a linked table within Access, for example), you start to see "interesting" behavior for cells with >255 characters. Got to use the API and touch each cell explicitely.
Is that bad? No: if your PHB uses Excel to paper over his non-command of Word tables, you've probably got bigger headaches.;)
Excel has reasonable max column/row limitations. If you're encountering them on any regular basis, you application may require a proper database.
This is just capitalism at its worst.
Their personal spiritual outlet, diet, exercise, and positive social contact are what people require.
Given the lack of deep understanding of how the brain works, I'm perfectly content to watch other people spend a lot of money experimenting with their body chemistry.
Not that these daredevils are operating in isolation. The insurance companies, alas, spread the costs around the economy to a painful extent.
Thus, grandma should take to heart the wisdom of the C++ community, and not make the private members public.
Keep a weather eye on those friends, too.
If her compiler is a little dusty, compile-time meta-programming is definitely out.
Bingo is a sufficiently 'edgy' activity for gamgams, think you not?
Doing something right would imply a proactive organization reducing flaws, and the development patterns that implement them, over time.
I would not accuse Mr. Softy of being a proactive organization.
Mr. Softy targets the dumb mean of the user distribution, +/- a couple of standard deviants on either side.
The *nix philosophy requires a great deal more learning on the part of the user.
Education can't stop a quality cock-up, but it certainly filters a great deal of blatant boo-boos, like coughing up a root password to www.passwordstorage.com.
What an interesting comparison.
Does that imply that the Empire will be divided, say, an OS in the West, and an Office suite in the East, and the East hang around for another thousand years after the FOSSian hordes have crossed the Columbia to re-partition the buggy carcass of the West?
Oh, my HP-6110 and -1320nw both print well enough under Linux, but the fact is that the scanning for the former, and duplex/booklet printing on either, is problematic. Actually, the HP software under Windows doesn't work that well, either--the concept of admin/user accounts seems to have escaped the vendors, as well as the user base. This is not a troll: I'm a happy Gentoo/GNUEmacs user. Hardware drivers are unsexy, and will probably never be as good in a FOSS setting, although they'll converge over time.
Call me a cynic, but I halfway suspect that the position is something of a "forbidden fruit" advertising campaign: manage support costs by officially refusing something, so that people are on their own dime for doing it. 'Twould seem to have nice legal side-effects, as well: "Your Honor, the EULA saith, with the utmost clarity: 'Thou shalt not run this software product on any unclean hardware, yea, even that which is despised of Steve Jobs, having been touched by the finger of evil extended from that pit of Beelze-Bill, beyond the northern shore of the Columbia River.'"
Sure, there will be some lawsuits--got to keep the sharks in Gucci. But come on, sales is sales...
The Anything But Microsoft (ABM) treaty will be greatly served if this pans out...
Apple won't offer versions of OS X for generic Intel hardware because the
drivers and the support obligation would be too huge. But just as you can buy a
shrink-wrapped copy of 10.4 for your iMac, they'll gladly sell you a shrink-wrapped
Intel version intended for an Intel Mac, but of course YOU CAN PUT IT ON ANY MACHINE
YOU LIKE. The key here is to offer no guarantees and only limited support, patterned
on the kind you get for most Open Source packages -- a web site, forums, download
section. and a wiki. Apple will help users help themselves. With two to three
engineers and some outreach to hackers and hardware makers, Apple could put together
an unofficial program that could easily attract two to three million Windows users
per year to migrate their old machines to the new OS. Imagine the profit margins of
three engineers effectively generating $300-plus million per year in sales.
Holy balls, that's interesting speculation.
About the only thing worth doing under 'Doze anymore is running certain peripherals,
like the printer and scanner, that are fairly low-usage, with crappy FOSS driver
support.
More intriguing, though, is exposing more people to the FOSS tradition of helping
people without picking their pockets.
Not everyone is going to get all excited: plenty of users prefer the automatic-transmission
feel of these commercial GUI offerings, but some will be seduced by the manual
transmission sexiness of an operating system that doesn't leave the user stupider at logout
than at login.
And, for the truly blessed, there is emacs...;)
Right, but will it be on BBC America immediately? I can foresee myself actually arranging my schedule around a show for the first time in...wait, I don't care to make myself feel that old...
...and dreamt of being at a Black Sabbath concert. They were grinding out "Iron Man", and I was in front, doing some mighty head-banging.
Things turned literal when my head met the window sill against which my bed lay.
I became semi-conscious, with blood streaming from my forhead, but couldn't move well because my right arm was still asleep.
Almost deathly so: my sleeping position had cut off circulation to the arm, apparently for a long time. The Sabbath dream had been my subconscious trying to 'rock' me into a different position. Later, when my arm functioned again and the bleeding stopped I thought, wow, that would have been pretty funny, if it hadn't happened to me...
...co-owns http://lossen-fotografie.de/e5/index_ger.html. She is under the impression that the demand for traditional film work is dwindling. Bernie mostly works digitally these days.
Well, we can at least partially thank the great O'Reilly Hacks series for de-criminalizing the word.
One wonders if a sufficient population of Hacks tomes in the market will convince people that emancipation from Redmond is possible...
If K5's readership wanted a group political blog, that's fine.
Sites I view regularly include lambda-the-ultimate.org, osnews.com, and lwn.net
lambda is academic geekery
osnews is like/. with more of an operating system bias, but a decreasing signal-to-noise ratio.
lwn tends to be more refined, but with more of a technical slant, and fewer idiot posts.
Whither/.? It's mostly an entertainment free-for-all, anymore. Not necessarily bad, just different. I would love to rate the content more, and help drive it away from the blatant ads, toward technical stuff. If it goes off the political deep end, oh, well; there will be a successor.
Slashdot Mirror
>I road the DC blue line a few times during rush hour
s/road/rode/
I have ridden it frequently, as well.
This raises the issue of monopolistic behavior.
Unless things have changed, you can use Verizon, Verizon, or Verizon within the Metro tunnels/stations.
T-Mobile, at least, dies at roughly the speed of critical thinking within the DC beltway.
Actual solutions need to be implemented in a let-us-play-nicely-now way.
You sad little Titorian wannabee.
You think I don't know that the Treaty of Piddletrenthide doesn't snuff all patents in 2732?
Off with you!
Got to have some manufacturers with enough sack to GPL the driver.
Then, the market needs to buy lots of them, so that the video chip and hard drive manufacturers will also get the clue.
Loadshedding these godforsaken software patents will certainly abet the effort, but that front takes serious political will.
Summary: economic and political effort required, golden future to follow.
</rose-colored glasses>
Offtopic, what is the English translation of your Gealic(?) login?
Andy Oram had a nice blog entry on the whole topic, in particular, towards the bottom: The GPL is swell. I can agree that abdicating freedom through the use of proprietary software is stupid. Deeming the sale of such "unethical" seems subjective. More generally, fretting about the motives of others seems a collosal distraction. I dunno.
I wonder if the Free Software and Open Source communities don't have greater effect in combination than either would have had in isolation.
I also wonder if the chief benefactor of all the theological thumb-wrestling isn't sitting in Redmond.
+5 Funny? Disturbing, certainly...
You must have teh mad skillz to stay continuously employed, boss.
Me, I just printed out the proxy server settings, so that, when whichever asshatically configured server it is that can't cough up my roaming profile, I can at least get a browser to function somehow.
Uber-consultants can surf teh jobz, if they're that good. Most of us have to bite off the tongue and swallow the blood, as they used to say.
Well, I wouldn't accuse MS of not trying to drive hardware sales, but, maybe there isn't a business case to change the application? I'm sure the market is well-modeled in a spreadsheet somewhere in Redmont. ;)
It's really great, within its range. ;)
If you use ADODB to query a spreadsheet (as in through a linked table within Access, for example), you start to see "interesting" behavior for cells with >255 characters. Got to use the API and touch each cell explicitely.
Is that bad? No: if your PHB uses Excel to paper over his non-command of Word tables, you've probably got bigger headaches.
Excel has reasonable max column/row limitations. If you're encountering them on any regular basis, you application may require a proper database.
This is just capitalism at its worst.
Their personal spiritual outlet, diet, exercise, and positive social contact are what people require.
Given the lack of deep understanding of how the brain works, I'm perfectly content to watch other people spend a lot of money experimenting with their body chemistry.
Not that these daredevils are operating in isolation. The insurance companies, alas, spread the costs around the economy to a painful extent.
Please review http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml
Thus, grandma should take to heart the wisdom of the C++ community, and not make the private members public.
Keep a weather eye on those friends, too.
If her compiler is a little dusty, compile-time meta-programming is definitely out. Bingo is a sufficiently 'edgy' activity for gamgams, think you not?
I would not accuse Mr. Softy of being a proactive organization.
Mr. Softy targets the dumb mean of the user distribution, +/- a couple of standard deviants on either side.
The *nix philosophy requires a great deal more learning on the part of the user.
Education can't stop a quality cock-up, but it certainly filters a great deal of blatant boo-boos, like coughing up a root password to www.passwordstorage.com.
What an interesting comparison.
Does that imply that the Empire will be divided, say, an OS in the West, and an Office suite in the East, and the East hang around for another thousand years after the FOSSian hordes have crossed the Columbia to re-partition the buggy carcass of the West?
Truly an interesting slant on the situation.
Redmond does have a stick to swing against Cupertino: MS Office.
Will Redmond let MSO die like IE?
Oh, my HP-6110 and -1320nw both print well enough under Linux, but the fact is that the scanning for the former, and duplex/booklet printing on either, is problematic. Actually, the HP software under Windows doesn't work that well, either--the concept of admin/user accounts seems to have escaped the vendors, as well as the user base.
This is not a troll: I'm a happy Gentoo/GNUEmacs user. Hardware drivers are unsexy, and will probably never be as good in a FOSS setting, although they'll converge over time.
Call me a cynic, but I halfway suspect that the position is something of a "forbidden fruit" advertising campaign: manage support costs by officially refusing something, so that people are on their own dime for doing it.
'Twould seem to have nice legal side-effects, as well: "Your Honor, the EULA saith, with the utmost clarity: 'Thou shalt not run this software product on any unclean hardware, yea, even that which is despised of Steve Jobs, having been touched by the finger of evil extended from that pit of Beelze-Bill, beyond the northern shore of the Columbia River.'"
Sure, there will be some lawsuits--got to keep the sharks in Gucci. But come on, sales is sales...
About the only thing worth doing under 'Doze anymore is running certain peripherals, like the printer and scanner, that are fairly low-usage, with crappy FOSS driver support.
More intriguing, though, is exposing more people to the FOSS tradition of helping people without picking their pockets.
Not everyone is going to get all excited: plenty of users prefer the automatic-transmission feel of these commercial GUI offerings, but some will be seduced by the manual transmission sexiness of an operating system that doesn't leave the user stupider at logout than at login.
And, for the truly blessed, there is emacs...
Mathematics - ematic = Maths
Right, but will it be on BBC America immediately? I can foresee myself actually arranging my schedule around a show for the first time in...wait, I don't care to make myself feel that old...
...and dreamt of being at a Black Sabbath concert. They were grinding out "Iron Man", and I was in front, doing some mighty head-banging.
Things turned literal when my head met the window sill against which my bed lay.
I became semi-conscious, with blood streaming from my forhead, but couldn't move well because my right arm was still asleep.
Almost deathly so: my sleeping position had cut off circulation to the arm, apparently for a long time. The Sabbath dream had been my subconscious trying to 'rock' me into a different position. Later, when my arm functioned again and the bleeding stopped I thought, wow, that would have been pretty funny, if it hadn't happened to me...
...co-owns http://lossen-fotografie.de/e5/index_ger.html. She is under the impression that the demand for traditional film work is dwindling. Bernie mostly works digitally these days.
Well, we can at least partially thank the great O'Reilly Hacks series for de-criminalizing the word.
One wonders if a sufficient population of Hacks tomes in the market will convince people that emancipation from Redmond is possible...
If K5's readership wanted a group political blog, that's fine. /. with more of an operating system bias, but a decreasing signal-to-noise ratio. /.? It's mostly an entertainment free-for-all, anymore. Not necessarily bad, just different. I would love to rate the content more, and help drive it away from the blatant ads, toward technical stuff. If it goes off the political deep end, oh, well; there will be a successor.
Sites I view regularly include lambda-the-ultimate.org, osnews.com, and lwn.net
lambda is academic geekery
osnews is like
lwn tends to be more refined, but with more of a technical slant, and fewer idiot posts.
Whither