> The money is NOT with personal PCs - hell half are using pirated software anyway!
> Its the business customers.
Are you kidding? Music, movies, television... that's what this is about; it isn't about "office productivity" anymore, it's the entertainment industry. This is about MSNBC, and Disney, and Sony, and all those people.
1000 comments for a story about support for evolution??? What the heck, you'd think this was a hot debate on Slashdot or something! When was the last time we hit 1000 comments? About something pretty much everyone here agrees about?
I've had this same experience with Netscape 6, but I also have had it happen on several occasions with Netscape 4.7. I was really hoping the new code would do away with this very nasty behaviour.
If you can land a probe on a rock, how about just leaving it there, and use it as a cheap system to get around the solar system at whatever weird orbit the thing is doing?
LambdaMOO has been online for more than 10 years now -- meaning some of those objects have been instantiated for 10 years straight (minus some server reboots, etc.) -- that's kind of a neat thought, actually. Some of those objects are probably older than some of the kids who are in there.
Re:Apple's participation in the community
on
No Love For Darwin?
·
· Score: 1
Bang on! Apple's completely missed the point, and is (was, perhaps, given how low profile this is now) just riding on the Linux PR wave.
Dammit, how is it that Apple managed to create a Finder (in 1984 for god's sake) that ran in about half a teaspoon of RAM and presented none of this sluggishness and bloat that every single graphical file manager created since, regardless of which OS, displays? What the hell!
The strength of the Linux movement, to me, is that it is a forward-thinking project that takes its heritage and culture seriously. It's that heritage that ties the community together.
... and that's why I am sceptical about Apple's aproach to UNIX being anywhere near as successful.
Which is, I'm going to venture, its most important feature -- the thing that REALLY distinguishes it from the Mac and Windows worlds. These commercial PC OSes try extremely hard to make the past invisible, so that you're always living in the now, or the future, looking to the next upgrade. UNIX, on the other hand, embraces its heritage. When you type 'ls', you're tapping into parts of the OS that are decades old. They're not just part of the functionality of UNIX, they're part of its *culture*.
The strength of the Linux movement, to me, is that it is a forward-thinking project that takes its heritage and culture seriously. It's that heritage that ties the community together.
The whole issue of many eyeballs finding bugs in OSS code only works if people are actually looking. Just because the code is open does not mean thousands of developers are looking at it/working on it. How many people are actively looking at something like Apache, compared with PGP?
You have to remember that the reason ony piece of Open Source software is successful (meaning popular, reliable, high-performance) is that people are actively interested in it. A year ago, when Apple decided to open up their Darwin components, there was this big hoopla, but in the end, how many people really cared about it, compared with, say, existing GNU/Linux projects?
Open Source is a social phenomenon more than a technical one.
For a case in point, take a quick look at this Slashdot discussion -- just the subject lines, even. Is it at all surprising that women aren't attracted to technology when this is what they have to expect from the discourse? Stupid, sexist jokes; uninformed opinions about biological determinism; arguments for why women aren't good at computing. Why on earth would a women find such a field interesting when it's so hostile?
Maybe instead of arguing all these external reasons for why women are this and that, we ought to take a look in the mirror at the kind of environment we're creating.
A book that makes a similar argument (though from a completely different place) is The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (Harvard Bus. School Press, 2000).
Brown is the head guy at Xerox PARC, and his critique of process management and re-engineering centers on how these top-down models ignore the actual, situated practice of people doing their jobs. A lot of the examples come from Xerox' service reps, who have been studied extensively over the last couple of decades.
Something I've wondered since going through the hassle of getting X to work properly with my AcerNote 373 (800x600, 65550 C&T) is what do I have to do to get it to talk to an external.. particularly the nice Proxima projector at the office. Under Win, I just plugged the thing in, hit the key combination, and I had both displays up.
Will the basic XF86Config I have drive the external without modification, or will I have to modify it?
I have had on and off near-debilitating pain and stiffness in the mouse hand and forearn for a year or so, but I have now found a physiotherapist who has (correctly, I think) identified the problem in an imbalance of muscules in my right shoulder, which ends up pinching nerves and causing all kinds of havoc in my arm.
Stretching, limbering up, and getting some muscle tone back in the shoulderblades is working wonders.
Remember, geeks, your hands are not the only muscles in your body!
> That's the message I'd like to carry to the > press: having a commons, helping our neighbors, > and protecting our freedoms should not be > equated to communism.
It's hard to equate it to present-day capitalism, either, especially in the version espoused by megacorporations and the WTO these days -- and it makes me wonder if that's not what makes Linux a good choice for China, or ANY country trying not to get completely bulldozed under by monopolistic global corporatism. Remember Microsoft?
I've owned several copies of this book since I first read it in the 80s... all of them lent out and never returned. This looks like a good opportunity to add it to my bookshelf again (as a shiny new one, and not a ragged second-hander like most of the other copies I've had).
To those who haven't read it, I can't recommend it highly enough. Yes it's a hard (or at least long) read, but is it EVER worth it! This thing is a complete masterpiece, in places an absolutely dizzying display of inspiration and genius.
If the indexed version of the comments had a bytecount next to each one, you could pick through the really long lists better, and manage to avoid the "me too"s.
Slashdot Mirror
baptiste wrote:
> The money is NOT with personal PCs - hell half are using pirated software anyway!
> Its the business customers.
Are you kidding? Music, movies, television... that's what this is about; it isn't about "office productivity" anymore, it's the entertainment industry. This is about MSNBC, and Disney, and Sony, and all those people.
Would these be the same wise Islamic scholars who torched the library at Alexandria?
Maybe. Could also be the the ones who invented algebra, too.
Yo, MOD this up even higher. This is the smartest post I've seen on /. in ages.
Well, CGI... But I can certainly see pulling Zope objects around with a stylus.
1000 comments for a story about support for evolution??? What the heck, you'd think this was a hot debate on Slashdot or something! When was the last time we hit 1000 comments? About something pretty much everyone here agrees about?
I've had this same experience with Netscape 6, but I also have had it happen on several occasions with Netscape 4.7. I was really hoping the new code would do away with this very nasty behaviour.
If you can land a probe on a rock, how about just leaving it there, and use it as a cheap system to get around the solar system at whatever weird orbit the thing is doing?
LambdaMOO has been online for more than 10 years now -- meaning some of those objects have been instantiated for 10 years straight (minus some server reboots, etc.) -- that's kind of a neat thought, actually. Some of those objects are probably older than some of the kids who are in there.
Bang on! Apple's completely missed the point, and is (was, perhaps, given how low profile this is now) just riding on the Linux PR wave.
"not exactly zippy" - Sheesh.
Dammit, how is it that Apple managed to create a Finder (in 1984 for god's sake) that ran in about half a teaspoon of RAM and presented none of this sluggishness and bloat that every single graphical file manager created since, regardless of which OS, displays? What the hell!
Haha. That's just Jello.
I keep waiting for him to say "Thufferin' Thuccotash" thometime
The strength of the Linux movement, to me, is that it is a forward-thinking project that takes its heritage and culture seriously. It's that heritage that ties the community together.
... and that's why I am sceptical about Apple's aproach to UNIX being anywhere near as successful.
UNIX has had a mythos from long ago.
Which is, I'm going to venture, its most important feature -- the thing that REALLY distinguishes it from the Mac and Windows worlds. These commercial PC OSes try extremely hard to make the past invisible, so that you're always living in the now, or the future, looking to the next upgrade. UNIX, on the other hand, embraces its heritage. When you type 'ls', you're tapping into parts of the OS that are decades old. They're not just part of the functionality of UNIX, they're part of its *culture*.
The strength of the Linux movement, to me, is that it is a forward-thinking project that takes its heritage and culture seriously. It's that heritage that ties the community together.
The whole issue of many eyeballs finding bugs in OSS code only works if people are actually looking. Just because the code is open does not mean thousands of developers are looking at it/working on it. How many people are actively looking at something like Apache, compared with PGP?
You have to remember that the reason ony piece of Open Source software is successful (meaning popular, reliable, high-performance) is that people are actively interested in it. A year ago, when Apple decided to open up their Darwin components, there was this big hoopla, but in the end, how many people really cared about it, compared with, say, existing GNU/Linux projects?
Open Source is a social phenomenon more than a technical one.
For a case in point, take a quick look at this Slashdot discussion -- just the subject lines, even. Is it at all surprising that women aren't attracted to technology when this is what they have to expect from the discourse? Stupid, sexist jokes; uninformed opinions about biological determinism; arguments for why women aren't good at computing. Why on earth would a women find such a field interesting when it's so hostile?
Maybe instead of arguing all these external reasons for why women are this and that, we ought to take a look in the mirror at the kind of environment we're creating.
A book that makes a similar argument (though from a completely different place) is The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (Harvard Bus. School Press, 2000).
Brown is the head guy at Xerox PARC, and his critique of process management and re-engineering centers on how these top-down models ignore the actual, situated practice of people doing their jobs. A lot of the examples come from Xerox' service reps, who have been studied extensively over the last couple of decades.
Something I've wondered since going through the hassle of getting X to work properly with my AcerNote 373 (800x600, 65550 C&T) is what do I have to do to get it to talk to an external.. particularly the nice Proxima projector at the office. Under Win, I just plugged the thing in, hit the key combination, and I had both displays up.
Will the basic XF86Config I have drive the external without modification, or will I have to modify it?
jmax @ portal.ca
I have had on and off near-debilitating pain and stiffness in the mouse hand and forearn for a year or so, but I have now found a physiotherapist who has (correctly, I think) identified the problem in an imbalance of muscules in my right shoulder, which ends up pinching nerves and causing all kinds of havoc in my arm.
Stretching, limbering up, and getting some muscle tone back in the shoulderblades is working wonders.
Remember, geeks, your hands are not the only muscles in your body!
> That's the message I'd like to carry to the
> press: having a commons, helping our neighbors,
> and protecting our freedoms should not be
> equated to communism.
It's hard to equate it to present-day capitalism, either, especially in the version espoused by megacorporations and the WTO these days -- and it makes me wonder if that's not what makes Linux a good choice for China, or ANY country trying not to get completely bulldozed under by monopolistic global corporatism. Remember Microsoft?
I've owned several copies of this book since I first read it in the 80s... all of them lent out and never returned. This looks like a good opportunity to add it to my bookshelf again (as a shiny new one, and not a ragged second-hander like most of the other copies I've had).
To those who haven't read it, I can't recommend it highly enough. Yes it's a hard (or at least long) read, but is it EVER worth it! This thing is a complete masterpiece, in places an absolutely dizzying display of inspiration and genius.
I applaud the 12/10 rating!
If the indexed version of the comments had a bytecount next to each one, you could pick through the really long lists better, and manage to avoid the "me too"s.