This shows me that RMS was right: open source is too lose term. 100 businesses making similar modifications to the source code of a single program on their own, fixing the same bugs, adding the same features is a waste of time. Also they may begin suing each other eventually. Libre Software is all about cooperation, and source availability is just a technical requirement for that.
Yeah I think the same. Things like Wikipedia and Creative Commons are helping to promote this model. I think people are 'by default' thinking the copyleft way, we just need to show them there's nothing wrong with their thinking, and show how it might work ethically:)
It would be great if Free Software Foundation and OpenSource Initiative worked together to minimize the differences and together support the critical projects like a free/open source Skype replacement.
P.S. I personally would be very happy to see the term "Libre Software" to become the common denominator. Open source sounds cool and everyone knows it, but the name only says the source has to be open, that's only a part of what we all mean by it, and FSF is opposing it. Free software, on the other hand, is a little ambiguous in the meaning of the word 'free'. Also I don't like that FSF only says a system is free if it doesn't provide tools to install non-free software, and thus excludes Debian. User must be free to make the choise on his own (oh I mean her own:), while understanding the risks.
Linus doesn't like C++ because he's a kernel programmer. It's important to him what the CPU actually does, i.e. what machine code gets produced (more or less). RMS may not like C++ because he's from the old generation of programmers who were dealing with all the slow and big machines and for whom object oriented programming may seem just too abstract, too conceptual and far from the machine code... RMS also likes Lisp more than Python, and Lisp is also a very old language.
A recent TED talk showed me how far patents can go. Patenting obvious things which give convenience is bad. But patenting something which saves lives is... I don't know apropriate word for this. But this is reality. And we must be changing that.
I agree with you. All these ads, "for purchase" software, give-us-money-with-one-click stuff just takes away the spirit that was always important to me: it used to make me feel like they (the individual developers) really want the software to be useful because they do it for themselves and/or their close people, and because they just love doing it. Now Ubuntu is showing an example of doing free software the way proprietary software is done: for some abstract success of some corpocation. But luckily it's still free software every one can fork.
P.S. Actually, I've newer used Ubuntu, because this extra-user-friendliness was looking like too much for me. Despite this, they've undoubtely made a significant contribution to development of desktop gnu/linux (and now we have Mint, xubuntu, kubuntu which are built on foundations provided by Ubuntu).
Yes, but be careful with the GMA 3600/3650 included in the Intel Atom N2600 and Atom D2500 and used on the many new netbooks today. The driver status is not that good (may even fall back to vesa), but may change in the near future.
Look, if people are inventing new free formats, probably there's a reason for that. Did you know that to distribute a software or hardware encoder or decoder of mp3 one has to pay at least $15,000 a year? And what if the program is free? So there is a reason. Also, have you tried to encode a file with the same bitrate to mp3 and ogg and then compare the spectrum of those files to the original high-quality one? You'll see a big difference (try 128kbits/sec for instance.) Guess which file will be closer to the original.
It seems that only Firefox supports all the three free formats on mobile (if html5test is not misinforming). For some reason Chrome Mobile doesn't like Theora and Opera Mobile is missing WebM as well as Theora support. Quite sad. But one ogg-enabled mobile browser is still better than no such browser.
I want to help some of my friends to start using free software (including operating system.) Yet using something other than Windows feels really scary for non-tech people. But since I know it doesn't hurt but rather feels great, and they're my friends, I want to comunicate that to them so they could try that too if they want. Dear RMS, my question is: how would you communicate that free software is great to a 10-year-old girl? (my friends are twice as old, but I want it to be that way.)
A good TED talk in itself, but around 2:55 the speaker shows a video of a crow creating a tool: Joshua Klein: The intelligence of crows. I like his conclusion: instead of killing crows (and other non-human species which have adapted to live in cities), we should think how we can use their adaptive skills to train them to do some work for us, i.e. to try to cooperate with them.
Just curious, why would one try to port a distribution if there's already a ported one? Or the debian's ARM is something different (unfortunately I know very little about processor architectures)?
Sometimes such a "piece of shit" is just enough. I've spent $30 on it plus some $5 on additional RAM and $15 on a DVD burner. In fact, I still have a Pentium II (350 MHz), and it's able to serve very well as a NAT and a small web server for personal purposes. I just think that if machine works and can be useful, why not use it? Of course I don't run Windows 7 on that machine (and I have no interest in doing that), but for what I need it for, it's just perfect.
By the way, recently bought a used machine without sse2 and found that Adobe has "improved" their flash player not to execute on machines without sse2 (I've heard that they were able to make this a linux-only issue which is especially illustrative of how they're doing their cross-platform work.)
I'm writing just to tell that I'm too in need of the ability to kick out that flash player, this time because my netbook screen's 1024px width is just cutting off approximately 30% of the flash player fixed-width box here... If it was html5, it would have been a completely different story. Let's begin making the world better by making small better:)
I agree, this is a stupid question. We have different DE's, and we have varying number of software options per task... But I'd say that if we had different, more thoughtful and creative culture of computer use (when the program is not supposed to be smarter than the user, but just to work well), people would appreciate free software much more, and some of the free software would have been better. But the fact we have it now, and that the industry is counting free software users as a significant part (by providing critical software for linux like Skype, Flash player, Nvidia drivers, etc) is good, although I'd want more openness from them.
Yep, I'm using it mostly in Emacs and a little bit in LilyPond, but Guile might give me the possibility to do other things when I'll need (I'm excited about Guile bindings to Gtk).
I cited only one of these things ESR said;) But back to Lisp... I think Guile (and Scheme in general) can be a good modern incarnation of Lisp. Lisp (and Scheme) are somewhat underscored because of ther stangeness to eyes of people who have been learning algorithmic languages. But this is more the matter of what one have learned first: for someone (this (is (strange))) and for some other person { $this->migth("be", strange()); }...:) If we can write apps in Java or Python (interpreted languages, right?), why not Scheme? Only maturity of the implementation may be a criteria here, but the language itself seems to be quite useful.
Eric S Raymond wrote in "How to become a hacker" that Lisp is worth learning for "the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it". It's true (although I'm still a newbie with it).
Yes, this is a wonderful tool. I use it all the time and find it very efficient thanks to the simple yet powerful keyboard shortcut system. Org-Mode is written by a scientist with PhD in physics, that's why it's aimed at people who have to deal with big amount of notes:)
You don't have to run Linux by the way, Org-mode works on Windows and Mac too.
When studying my country's history and the bloody things done by the NKVD (and it's predecessors) I was always having this question: "How could that happen?". I simply couldn't believe so many people could simply serve Stalin and do all the violent things in such big scale (millions of victims.) The violence often highly exceeded what was required by the order. But then I found something close to an explanation of that by Philip Zimbardo in a TED talk. He argues that structures where people have a uniform, orders, hierarchy, power over others (like in this case when one can even cross the law's edges), and racism, seem to provide the grounds for violent behaior.
Please sorry for my unclear language... I tried to say that jokes and discussions about 'which prostitutes are better' make me sad because of the injustice which the actual prostitutes experience: sometimes they are simply taken into slavery...
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This shows me that RMS was right: open source is too lose term. 100 businesses making similar modifications to the source code of a single program on their own, fixing the same bugs, adding the same features is a waste of time. Also they may begin suing each other eventually. Libre Software is all about cooperation, and source availability is just a technical requirement for that.
Yeah I think the same. Things like Wikipedia and Creative Commons are helping to promote this model. I think people are 'by default' thinking the copyleft way, we just need to show them there's nothing wrong with their thinking, and show how it might work ethically:)
It would be great if Free Software Foundation and OpenSource Initiative worked together to minimize the differences and together support the critical projects like a free/open source Skype replacement.
P.S. I personally would be very happy to see the term "Libre Software" to become the common denominator. Open source sounds cool and everyone knows it, but the name only says the source has to be open, that's only a part of what we all mean by it, and FSF is opposing it. Free software, on the other hand, is a little ambiguous in the meaning of the word 'free'. Also I don't like that FSF only says a system is free if it doesn't provide tools to install non-free software, and thus excludes Debian. User must be free to make the choise on his own (oh I mean her own:), while understanding the risks.
Linus doesn't like C++ because he's a kernel programmer. It's important to him what the CPU actually does, i.e. what machine code gets produced (more or less). RMS may not like C++ because he's from the old generation of programmers who were dealing with all the slow and big machines and for whom object oriented programming may seem just too abstract, too conceptual and far from the machine code... RMS also likes Lisp more than Python, and Lisp is also a very old language.
A recent TED talk showed me how far patents can go. Patenting obvious things which give convenience is bad. But patenting something which saves lives is... I don't know apropriate word for this. But this is reality. And we must be changing that.
I agree with you. All these ads, "for purchase" software, give-us-money-with-one-click stuff just takes away the spirit that was always important to me: it used to make me feel like they (the individual developers) really want the software to be useful because they do it for themselves and/or their close people, and because they just love doing it. Now Ubuntu is showing an example of doing free software the way proprietary software is done: for some abstract success of some corpocation. But luckily it's still free software every one can fork. P.S. Actually, I've newer used Ubuntu, because this extra-user-friendliness was looking like too much for me. Despite this, they've undoubtely made a significant contribution to development of desktop gnu/linux (and now we have Mint, xubuntu, kubuntu which are built on foundations provided by Ubuntu).
Yes, but be careful with the GMA 3600/3650 included in the Intel Atom N2600 and Atom D2500 and used on the many new netbooks today. The driver status is not that good (may even fall back to vesa), but may change in the near future.
Look, if people are inventing new free formats, probably there's a reason for that. Did you know that to distribute a software or hardware encoder or decoder of mp3 one has to pay at least $15,000 a year? And what if the program is free? So there is a reason. Also, have you tried to encode a file with the same bitrate to mp3 and ogg and then compare the spectrum of those files to the original high-quality one? You'll see a big difference (try 128kbits/sec for instance.) Guess which file will be closer to the original.
It seems that only Firefox supports all the three free formats on mobile (if html5test is not misinforming). For some reason Chrome Mobile doesn't like Theora and Opera Mobile is missing WebM as well as Theora support. Quite sad. But one ogg-enabled mobile browser is still better than no such browser.
I want to help some of my friends to start using free software (including operating system.) Yet using something other than Windows feels really scary for non-tech people. But since I know it doesn't hurt but rather feels great, and they're my friends, I want to comunicate that to them so they could try that too if they want. Dear RMS, my question is: how would you communicate that free software is great to a 10-year-old girl? (my friends are twice as old, but I want it to be that way.)
A good TED talk in itself, but around 2:55 the speaker shows a video of a crow creating a tool: Joshua Klein: The intelligence of crows. I like his conclusion: instead of killing crows (and other non-human species which have adapted to live in cities), we should think how we can use their adaptive skills to train them to do some work for us, i.e. to try to cooperate with them.
Just curious, why would one try to port a distribution if there's already a ported one? Or the debian's ARM is something different (unfortunately I know very little about processor architectures)?
Sometimes such a "piece of shit" is just enough. I've spent $30 on it plus some $5 on additional RAM and $15 on a DVD burner. In fact, I still have a Pentium II (350 MHz), and it's able to serve very well as a NAT and a small web server for personal purposes. I just think that if machine works and can be useful, why not use it? Of course I don't run Windows 7 on that machine (and I have no interest in doing that), but for what I need it for, it's just perfect.
By the way, recently bought a used machine without sse2 and found that Adobe has "improved" their flash player not to execute on machines without sse2 (I've heard that they were able to make this a linux-only issue which is especially illustrative of how they're doing their cross-platform work.)
I'm writing just to tell that I'm too in need of the ability to kick out that flash player, this time because my netbook screen's 1024px width is just cutting off approximately 30% of the flash player fixed-width box here... If it was html5, it would have been a completely different story. Let's begin making the world better by making small better:)
I agree, this is a stupid question. We have different DE's, and we have varying number of software options per task... But I'd say that if we had different, more thoughtful and creative culture of computer use (when the program is not supposed to be smarter than the user, but just to work well), people would appreciate free software much more, and some of the free software would have been better. But the fact we have it now, and that the industry is counting free software users as a significant part (by providing critical software for linux like Skype, Flash player, Nvidia drivers, etc) is good, although I'd want more openness from them.
Yep, I'm using it mostly in Emacs and a little bit in LilyPond, but Guile might give me the possibility to do other things when I'll need (I'm excited about Guile bindings to Gtk).
I cited only one of these things ESR said;) But back to Lisp... I think Guile (and Scheme in general) can be a good modern incarnation of Lisp. Lisp (and Scheme) are somewhat underscored because of ther stangeness to eyes of people who have been learning algorithmic languages. But this is more the matter of what one have learned first: for someone (this (is (strange))) and for some other person { $this->migth("be", strange()); }...:) If we can write apps in Java or Python (interpreted languages, right?), why not Scheme? Only maturity of the implementation may be a criteria here, but the language itself seems to be quite useful.
Eric S Raymond wrote in "How to become a hacker" that Lisp is worth learning for "the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it". It's true (although I'm still a newbie with it).
Yes, this is a wonderful tool. I use it all the time and find it very efficient thanks to the simple yet powerful keyboard shortcut system. Org-Mode is written by a scientist with PhD in physics, that's why it's aimed at people who have to deal with big amount of notes:) You don't have to run Linux by the way, Org-mode works on Windows and Mac too.
When studying my country's history and the bloody things done by the NKVD (and it's predecessors) I was always having this question: "How could that happen?". I simply couldn't believe so many people could simply serve Stalin and do all the violent things in such big scale (millions of victims.) The violence often highly exceeded what was required by the order. But then I found something close to an explanation of that by Philip Zimbardo in a TED talk. He argues that structures where people have a uniform, orders, hierarchy, power over others (like in this case when one can even cross the law's edges), and racism, seem to provide the grounds for violent behaior.
Thank you for the information.
...If everything goes well. Also, how much it may cost then?
He has two videos on TED, here's his TED profile.
Please sorry for my unclear language... I tried to say that jokes and discussions about 'which prostitutes are better' make me sad because of the injustice which the actual prostitutes experience: sometimes they are simply taken into slavery...