Writing proprietary software is perfectly okay. I don't have to give away my work for free, although sometimes I do.
Incorrect. Proprietary software is not synonymous with being paid for it, and Free Software (in the GNU/FSF sense) is not synonymous with not being paid for it. Some proprietary software gets provided without financial compensation, some with. Some Free Software is written without financial compensation, some with. And in the long run, Free Software is better for society as a whole than proprietary software is. Unlike Stallman, I do accept that there are exceptions to be made, mostly where networked games are concerned, but hardware drivers should absolutely be Free Software.
No surprise the only people who think that this monstrosity is good for anything are people with the same mentality - people who put together distros based on.deb package system - similar piece of carp that should not have existed in the first place - another subsystem that rams someone's ideology on "how software must be done" down my throat.
I have to disagree there. The.deb packaging system gave the world apt-get, which pioneered the idea of telling your package manager "right, I want this software, download and install it along with anything it needs to run." This was a fucking godsend to those of us who previously had to manually download and attempt to install.rpm after.rpm, reading error message after error message to see what else we needed to download and install. Both for initial install and upgrades.
And for that matter, I have to disagree that thinking.deb is a good idea and thinking GNOME is a good idea go hand in hand. I've been using.deb-based distros for so long I can't even remember when it was I first saw apt-get in action and thought "I have to switch to that." Certainly more than a decade, but how much longer I'm not sure. I've also been using KDE for longer than that, occasionally exploring other desktop environments or window managers but always coming back to KDE before long.
You know what? At this point, I don't even care whether or not it's Linux, as long as some operating system other than Windows gets a decent foothold on PCs, and when you buy a new computer the question of what OS it comes with is not simply which edition of Windows.
In reality, I think a BSD fork a la Mac OS X (though not OS X itself, obviously) would be the best bet for it. It'd just take a bit of effort from one of the PC manufacturers, or maybe a coalition of some of them, for it to happen.
The computing world will be a better place when hardware manufacturers no longer simply release a product, shit out a Windows driver and leave it at that.
And it makes sense, why would someone not want to join a site where all your friends are? It's 2012 equivalent to a shut-in or recluse. People are naturally suspicious of someone that chooses not to join normal society.
You know another "site" where all my friends are? Gatherings of people at physical locations nearby to us. I have emails and phone numbers of the people I care about, and make appropriate use of them when I want to communicate. Just because I don't have a Facebook page doesn't mean I, or any of my non-Facebooking friends, are a recluse in all ways. Or even that many ways. Or more ways than one highly specific definition.
Or even allow edits, but show a history of what the post used to look like so it's clear whether edits are being used to "change history" or just correct a spelling fuckup.
Yeah, I totally want to replace my 3.3GHz quad-core i5 system with an ARM that's a tiny fraction of the speed, just because Microsoft lock me out of the new motherboards.
You may disagree, but I honestly think that buying much slower (though also much cheaper) ARM hardware is a lesser evil than being unable to choose what operating system I run on new fast hardware.
We would instead need to special order a linux capable product, and use it for that purpose. Its not the end of the world, but it would be the end of an era that would be greatly missed by those of us that care.
Dual boot really only has any relevance when it is impractical, either due to lack of space or money, to own multiple computers. Computers these days are small and cheap enough that not only is it practical to have two or more, but even many non-geeks do.
Even - in fact especially - computers made to be capable of running Linux, with the rise of things like the Raspberry Pi.
I don't think there is any such thing as a fully open source hardware computer
If not absolutely open in all ways, I believe the Lemote Yeeloong is the closest it's possible to get to it; its firmware is entirely free software, and it's the only hardware RMS will endorse.
and he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process."
I'm completely in favour of free/open source software and related concepts wherever possible, but there is such a thing as taking it too far. Wherever the line is, demanding open source toilet paper is way over it.
Well, with how malware works and how Windows autorun works, they wouldn't need to deliberately run it, just mount it. As for why someone would pick it up and mount it, I expect the malware distributors here were operating on the assumption that anyone who found a USB stick in a parking lot would assume that someone else at the company dropped it when they were getting their car keys out of their pocket or something, and would therefore probably be safe.
Just let everyone board the plane and be on their way -or- we'll start scanning people boarding buses next.
Yeah, the former option is never going to happen. No authorities ever give up powers like that without a very good fight, and usually expand them bit by bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Writing proprietary software is perfectly okay. I don't have to give away my work for free, although sometimes I do.
Incorrect. Proprietary software is not synonymous with being paid for it, and Free Software (in the GNU/FSF sense) is not synonymous with not being paid for it. Some proprietary software gets provided without financial compensation, some with. Some Free Software is written without financial compensation, some with. And in the long run, Free Software is better for society as a whole than proprietary software is. Unlike Stallman, I do accept that there are exceptions to be made, mostly where networked games are concerned, but hardware drivers should absolutely be Free Software.
No surprise the only people who think that this monstrosity is good for anything are people with the same mentality - people who put together distros based on .deb package system - similar piece of carp that should not have existed in the first place - another subsystem that rams someone's ideology on "how software must be done" down my throat.
I have to disagree there. The .deb packaging system gave the world apt-get, which pioneered the idea of telling your package manager "right, I want this software, download and install it along with anything it needs to run." This was a fucking godsend to those of us who previously had to manually download and attempt to install .rpm after .rpm, reading error message after error message to see what else we needed to download and install. Both for initial install and upgrades.
And for that matter, I have to disagree that thinking .deb is a good idea and thinking GNOME is a good idea go hand in hand. I've been using .deb-based distros for so long I can't even remember when it was I first saw apt-get in action and thought "I have to switch to that." Certainly more than a decade, but how much longer I'm not sure. I've also been using KDE for longer than that, occasionally exploring other desktop environments or window managers but always coming back to KDE before long.
You know what? At this point, I don't even care whether or not it's Linux, as long as some operating system other than Windows gets a decent foothold on PCs, and when you buy a new computer the question of what OS it comes with is not simply which edition of Windows.
In reality, I think a BSD fork a la Mac OS X (though not OS X itself, obviously) would be the best bet for it. It'd just take a bit of effort from one of the PC manufacturers, or maybe a coalition of some of them, for it to happen.
The computing world will be a better place when hardware manufacturers no longer simply release a product, shit out a Windows driver and leave it at that.
And it makes sense, why would someone not want to join a site where all your friends are? It's 2012 equivalent to a shut-in or recluse. People are naturally suspicious of someone that chooses not to join normal society.
You know another "site" where all my friends are? Gatherings of people at physical locations nearby to us. I have emails and phone numbers of the people I care about, and make appropriate use of them when I want to communicate. Just because I don't have a Facebook page doesn't mean I, or any of my non-Facebooking friends, are a recluse in all ways. Or even that many ways. Or more ways than one highly specific definition.
Or even allow edits, but show a history of what the post used to look like so it's clear whether edits are being used to "change history" or just correct a spelling fuckup.
Yeah, I totally want to replace my 3.3GHz quad-core i5 system with an ARM that's a tiny fraction of the speed, just because Microsoft lock me out of the new motherboards.
You may disagree, but I honestly think that buying much slower (though also much cheaper) ARM hardware is a lesser evil than being unable to choose what operating system I run on new fast hardware.
You say that like very cheap Linux-capable hardware does not currently exist.
It does. We've even had way too many stories about one example of it here on Slashdot of late...
We would instead need to special order a linux capable product, and use it for that purpose. Its not the end of the world, but it would be the end of an era that would be greatly missed by those of us that care.
Dual boot really only has any relevance when it is impractical, either due to lack of space or money, to own multiple computers. Computers these days are small and cheap enough that not only is it practical to have two or more, but even many non-geeks do.
Even - in fact especially - computers made to be capable of running Linux, with the rise of things like the Raspberry Pi.
Not really. It's an age-old concept, not innovative in the least.
I don't think there is any such thing as a fully open source hardware computer
If not absolutely open in all ways, I believe the Lemote Yeeloong is the closest it's possible to get to it; its firmware is entirely free software, and it's the only hardware RMS will endorse.
and he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process."
I'm completely in favour of free/open source software and related concepts wherever possible, but there is such a thing as taking it too far. Wherever the line is, demanding open source toilet paper is way over it.
Well, with how malware works and how Windows autorun works, they wouldn't need to deliberately run it, just mount it. As for why someone would pick it up and mount it, I expect the malware distributors here were operating on the assumption that anyone who found a USB stick in a parking lot would assume that someone else at the company dropped it when they were getting their car keys out of their pocket or something, and would therefore probably be safe.
Just let everyone board the plane and be on their way -or- we'll start scanning people boarding buses next.
Yeah, the former option is never going to happen. No authorities ever give up powers like that without a very good fight, and usually expand them bit by bit.