...unless Natalie Portman is playing one of the trolls who gets petrified, and who insists that the best way of cooking the dwarves is by pouring hot grits down their pants.
Also, Frodo would have to be escorted to the Cracks of Doom by a whole team lead by Beowulf (IOW, a Beowulf cluster).
Finally, this would have to be distinguished from the novels and the cartoons, not as the "live action movie", but as the "post-Columbine version".
I'm not sure if a penis-bird would have to be somehow involved, but it would help.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
On the contrary, America had BIG business there. You practically own Kuwait now, not a bad prize for an easily-won war, especially considering that your armies needed the practice.
To misquote a line from Dune:
The oil must flow.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
They are using this to produce the perfect soldiers, whose minds focus to perfect clarity when they are told to kill something, but have no ability to concentrate the rest of the time, so they can't question the morality of their actions or consider disobedience.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
As it stands they are competing with their paying customers.
They needed google.com initially to become famous as the best way to run a search engine. It worked. Now, google.com has become a liability, a free service that hurts their customers.
Why on Earth would Google, as a for-profit business, continue to run their ad-free direct interface?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Services like google have to be paid for. Who do you want to do it?
Your initial answer might be "someone, anyone else!" which makes sense, in a way. I'd rather have the dollars come out of someone else's pocket, too. But then whose interests will google be serving? If they're being paid by advertisers, they're working for them, and they will strike the most profitable balance between flooding you with ads and keeping you coming back. It's happened to every other search engine, and it will happen to google.
However, divided amongst all us users, the cost of google is next to nothing. If everyone who uses it sends them a few bucks per year, they'll have plenty of money to keep things exactly the way we want.
But isn't there an advantage to being a freeloader and being the only one who isn't paying among a group of millions? Don't you get all the service with none of the cost? Perhaps not.
If only some of the people are paying, and this money is their sole revenue source, then google should ignore the wishes of all the people who don't pay. So payment buys you a privileged position as a relevant person.
This is the logic behind mass market busking. Take control by paying your fair share.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
What's wrong? The end results, of course.
on
KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 2
The problem here is that the free software producers are not producing a net benefit to the end user by copying every advance as quickly as they can.
They blatantly copy good ideas as soon as they appear, producing nothing new of value, just spending their own effort to keep people from having to pay the people who had the good ideas. This is mostly what free software developers do, they duplicate effort to get around IP restrictions (yes, of course, there are exceptions, but the high-profile stuff is all duplication).
Knowing that this will happen, people don't bother developing their software ideas, because they know they can't get paid. Instead, they end up making a living doing system administration or some such thing, and creative talent gets wasted on unoriginal work.
There's a way out, though. In mass market busking, the users decide who and how much to pay, and are therefore free to pay whoever has the good idea first, and not bother paying people who just duplicate effort or slap a new interface on public domain code. This actually gives people a profit motive to write innovative free software for the general public. Integrators of all the good ideas can also get paid without usurping the income of the originators of the ideas, because it is in the best interests of the people who are paying to and they have control of their payments.
This also deals with the problem of 800-pound gorillas like MS screwing original people even worse than the free software community does.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
That's nothing how about:
FD(fighter dude)1:"Your power is nothing compared to me."
FD2:"Hah! I am much stronger than you"
(fight for a while)
FD1:"Hah! I was only playing with you,"
FD2:"Hah! I was only playing with you."
FD1:"So the kid gloves are off, let's fight all-out."
FD2:"Agreed!"
(fight for a while)
FD2: "Hah! You think I was fighting as hard as I could, but I was only using a tenth of my power, now I will show you no mercy!"
FD1: "Haha! I am actually using only 1% of my incredible fighting power!"
FD2: "That's impossible! You're bluffing!"
(fight for a while, FD2 is getting beaten badly)
FD3: "Now you must face me! I am a thousand times stronger than my friend!"
FD1: "That's okay, I was really only using a millionth of my power!"
...and so it goes.
It is the Princess Bride "I am not left handed!" "Me neither!" seen stretched out a hundred times. It's insane.
Considering that this was originally a weekly series, the pre-fight trash-talk session alone could take a month.
They seriously need to spice it up a bit with comments from the Jerry Springer peanut gallery. "I have crushed worlds with one flick of my tail!" "You go girl! Planets are pigs!" "But can you satisfy your woman?" "Get a real job!"
"Can Goku possibly come up with a witty retort to that challenge? Tune in next week to hear how he finishes the sentence!"
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Re:freedom: nonsense sound with positive connotati
on
Men of Zeal
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· Score: 2
Bread and cheese are food.
God is a powerful, possibly fictional, being who may have created the universe and may be running it.
Love is an emotional bond to a person.
Happiness is a desirable emotional state.
They're all vague, but you can draw a broad enough circle that they make some sense in their most general usage.
Freedom? Freedom means that someone or something won't interfere with something that you're doing. It doesn't make any sense unless you specify what (and possibly who). Use of the word by itself, without this necessary specifier, carries the implication "The freedom you want!" without bothering to ask what that is. It's inherently an act of manipulative deception, used to create fanatic unconditional supporters.
I like open source software. I hate the FSF because they try to treat it as an important moral issue rather than an economic and technical one.
If you cannot accept the views of others, I recommened that you start devising a means of destroying all life in the universe,
I'm working on it. Give me a year or two. I will start with the Anonymous Cowards...
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
These are the guys who, aside from inexplicable decisions like considering the F-16 a suitable replacement for an A-10, put Windows NT in charge of a cruiser.
The ones in charge clearly don't have any clue whatsoever.
Besides, do you want free software considered to be vital military equipment? That's kind of a scary thought. A little close to the "munitions" argument over encryption software.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Re:use is not proof of necessity
on
KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 2
Copyleft is good, copyright (normally) bad, and you just have to wrap your mind around that fact.
Wow, thanks for explaining that your value judgements are universal facts. Now I see clearly through your filter of blind faith.
There will be (and IS) a lot of software written just because the GPL stops companies from taking your work and not communicating the changes back to the public, hopefully eventually to you.
This is the thin justification I hear over and over again. It's garbage.
I say extremely little GPL'd software was written because people were forced to by the GPL, though many companies (who were doing real, innovative work) have undoubtedly been driven out of business by competition from unoriginal GPL'd software, even when they're making better products. But this would happen somewhat with public domain software, too (it's hard to sell when you're competing against free products).
People who make money from selling copies of their software don't just change their mind and decide that they'll write free software because then they can toss in some nifty code they didn't write themselves. They either set out to write free software, or they don't. Nobody gets sucked into it. A few distributor/supporters who do make a profit from your work, "As if you're an unpaid slave." make a token effort of contributing to development, but strictly for PR purposes. Mostly, though, free software is not profitable, it is done by hobbyists, people who consider the cost of development less than the value of the software for their personal use, or people who buy the hype and start unprofitable for-profit free software companies (unless you consider scamming thousands of investors with trading-card stock "profit").
XFree86 and the BSDs are doing just fine without forcing people to give away their own additions. IMHO, Linux is doing better because of the "free software" propaganda, not because it is superior to the BSDs. They are proof that free software would still be around without the GPL or any similar licence.
So there are better X servers than the free one, based on the code. So what? It hasn't hurt the free version any.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Secondly, it's "PNG's Not GIF" (they changed it officially). Yeah, they added a pile of features (too damned many features; it's an immense pain in the butt to implement, and arguably not much of an improvement over a gzipped bmp file), and left others out, but it's still basically a GIF clone.
Third, I believe it's becoming an ISO spec, so you'll have to pay to buy a copy of the copyrighted official specification if you want to write "real" PNG software.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
distribution is a type of use (NT)
on
KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
Nitpicking j/k.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I didn't compare it to communism...
on
Men of Zeal
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· Score: 2
...but only listed it among hypocritical ideological movements.
I find their use of the term "free" offensive and misleading.
While I have a moderate dislike for the GPL, and release my own "free" software into the public domain, I do like freely distributable software, especially distributed in source form.
I like gratis software, I like the debugging benefits, and I like reading source. There are many benefits to "free software" without having to apply moralistic nonsense to engineering and economic decisions.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
freedom: nonsense sound with positive connotations
on
Men of Zeal
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· Score: 2
When people talk about "freedom" they usually mean security, or material wealth, or anything else they want and don't have.
Apparently, the FSF believes "freedom" means no selling a product without giving away the documentation unconditionally (except for the condition that it must always be "free"). That's what source code is: documentation, plans, explanations of how to change the product. Source code is speech, object code is mechanism.
That's what they want, so they call it "freedom". Never mind the people who believe they have a right to control and make a direct profit from what they produce; they're wrongheaded and evil enemies of "freedom".
Just as communists call having centralized government control of production and distribution "freedom". The poor people fight the rich people and take their money, and that's "freedom". Never mind the competent managers who increase the value of anything they own, and (by the nature of trade) always provide the other party in any exchange with goods or services of greater perceived value than they must part with; they're wrongheaded and evil enemies of "freedom".
Just as the Americans and the French called having a republican government "freedom". The majority asserted it's control when education became cheap and firearms made fighting men of women and weaklings, and that's "freedom". Never mind the people who believe that the majority is incompetent to rule; they are wrongheaded and evil enemies of "freedom".
Freedom only has real meaning when it's used in a phrase, such as "freedom to...". For example "freedom to walk down a street safely at night without fear of being mugged", "freedom to distribute a product for profit without fear of losing control of it", "freedom to modify or redistribute any products that come into your hands", "freedom to drink either Coca Cola or Pepsi", "freedom to use our arms to take what we deserve by force", "freedom to cleanse our proud race", "freedom from the weakness of morality", "freedom to kill without fear of retribution", "freedom to eat babies and pick my teeth with their bones"...
"Freedom" shouldn't have positive connotations. We don't think it's a good thing for criminals to be free.
Anyone who describes their cause as being about "freedom" is deceiving and manipulating you. The FSF's very name should be a badge of shame. Their "free as in speech" argument is a blatant lie, as few people outside the FSF think "free speech" means an obligation to repeat your notes to everybody who receives a work of yours which is based on those notes, or that "free speech" means giving up your copyright (after all, most Americans claim that they have free speech, but they also have copyright, and don't see a conflict; free speech generally means freedom to state your beliefs, not to make perfect copies of the writings of others).
But I'm getting off track. Other uses of "freedom" in a general sense are just as hypocritical. It always means something else, and usually something that people wouldn't get so worked up over if it was stated plainly.
Say, "I want software that I don't have to pay for and that comes with source code." not "I want free software.". Or say "I want the soldiers to stop stealing my food, burning my books, and teaching my children to rat me out whenever I break one of their stupid little rules." not "I want a free society.". Or "I want to be allowed to make monopolistic business deals, tie my products closely together to leverage one near-monopoly into another, and still have the police arrest anyone who makes copies of them that I didn't approve." not "I want freedom to innovate." If what you want is really admirable, it will shine through without having to use nonsense words like "free".
Of course, honesty may not always be in your best interests, if your goal isn't so admirable, but it's what you need if you don't want people like me as your sworn enemies.
OTOH, the torture/execution Braveheart finale wouldn't have been so dramatic if he had shouted out "Scottish rulers in Scotland!".
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
That important code is available under the GPL is not proof that it would not be available without the GPL.
How many programmers who would have written public domain code decided to use the GPL just because "that's what all free software is written in"? RMS didn't invent free software, he distorted the name Free Software for his own purposes ("it's not really free unless you place restrictions on how you can use it" - good logic, Mr. Stallman).
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
That doesn't explain why Tetris needs File- Save
on
KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 2
Not every application is an editor. Including editor commands in every application is ridiculous, and can be misleading.
And for the Blender example, what does File- Save save? The entire scene? The current object? A texture?
You simply can't have a consistent interface for any and all programs. Even something like "Exit" can have different meanings. Sometimes it means "close this window", sometimes it means "shutdown the app and close a whole slew of windows". It may have a consistent meaning for the programmer, but it can have many for the user.
As for scripting, I personally believe that engine and interface should always be completely seperated for tools (for toys it doesn't matter so much). I'm going to try very hard not to launch into my usual tirade against XML.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
FUD, COUNTER-FUD, FUD, COUNTER-FUD...
on
KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
I think he's trying to start wars on just about every subject
More like he's firing back another volley in the wars.
They've been at it from day 1, and they never stop this crap.
To be fair, most of what he says is technically true: KDE was out first, Gnome was not started because of technical flaws in KDE but political issues, KDE has a nice office suite, KDE is probably the better built of the two especially if you can handle C++, etc. But it's all delivered intermixed with little digs and a heavy slant, adding fuel to the fire. I certainly don't think the KDE licensing issues are trivial, but I never liked the GPL, either.
Personally, I don't use either, I use a fast, efficent windows manager that doesn't grab any of my screen space and starts in a blink. I resent it when someone makes an application that requires one or the other, without needing any of the features. I feel it is often done as part of this battle. "Look Gnome is good because I wrote this app which you can't run under KDE." or vice versa.
That's dirty pool in my books.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I am a little confused why a single article like this (even one by the esteemed Mr. McCullagh) gets posted. There's been plenty of other coverage of this in other media, much of it just as pro-DeCSS:
They don't care about the quality of the initial posts, because all they do is set a topic. The readers do the research, and then discussion and moderation brings up all the relevant information.
They could post things like "Someone said Linux sucks!" or "This judge made it illegal to link to DeCSS!" and all the good stuff would still come out in the discussion.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The master control is made up of no fewer than 50 redundant processors, each smaller than a millimeter cube and much faster than a modern computer, though they vary somewhat in their contruction, scattered about my reinforced skull. There is no way for all of them to be damaged while I remain alive.
The workhorse of the system responsible for archiving and heavy processing, a solid-state homogenous massively parallel connection machine about the size of my fist, is tucked away in my chest cavity between my oxygen-storage organ and my 2nd and 3rd backup hearts (cylinders about the size of a thumb).
The interface can take any form, since the system has full access to all nerves leading into my brain, and has plenty of power to simulate a believable environment; it can be superimposed atop real-world data or it can be fully immersive. The failsafes are carefully trained (in a process taking months of daily feedback training) direct neural connections to the master control, which can be used to cut off any problematic computer functions and reconnect my mind to my body; a spare nervous system is tatooed across my skin so there is no single point of failure. I'd have to be almost fully decapitated to lose control of my body (not likely to occur accidentally, thanks to carbon microfiber reinforcements). I'd certainly be dead before my connections were disabled, unless a very careful surgery was undertaken.
Connections to other computers can be made by many different forms of electromagnetic transmission, or by tiny electrical currents through contact on any of hundreds of points on my body.
Power is available through the main storage battery of my body (a distributed system with surprising capacity), but essential functions, such as the master control, can be supported by generation of minute amounts of power from the glucose and oxygen in my blood.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Clearly, the form-over-function /Apple/ of 2010
on
The Computer of 2010
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· Score: 2
After all, who else makes a computer's looks its main selling point?
Aside from the design of a pretty box to put the computer in, this article might have gotten 3rd place in a local Junior Highschool science fair.
It's a set of extrapolative predictions that could have been put together by a layman in a couple of hours of seaching the internet. This falls short of what most of us here could probably just sit down and type out without doing any research at all.
For example, there are no guesses about what specialized coprocessors will be the rage in 2010. Will 3D be the big thing, like now, or will acceleration for certain AI functions be the cool off-CPU gadget? Will we still think a big specialized FPU is a big deal, or will we just have a whole pile of small, parallel integer units?
This is the interesting kind of question about future computers. We know they'll go faster, use less power, and store more data, and we can put them in any damn box we please - that kind of speculation is as bootless as it gets.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Slashdot Mirror
...unless Natalie Portman is playing one of the trolls who gets petrified, and who insists that the best way of cooking the dwarves is by pouring hot grits down their pants.
Also, Frodo would have to be escorted to the Cracks of Doom by a whole team lead by Beowulf (IOW, a Beowulf cluster).
Finally, this would have to be distinguished from the novels and the cartoons, not as the "live action movie", but as the "post-Columbine version".
I'm not sure if a penis-bird would have to be somehow involved, but it would help.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
WE HAD NO BUSINESS THERE.
On the contrary, America had BIG business there. You practically own Kuwait now, not a bad prize for an easily-won war, especially considering that your armies needed the practice.
To misquote a line from Dune:
The oil must flow.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
They are using this to produce the perfect soldiers, whose minds focus to perfect clarity when they are told to kill something, but have no ability to concentrate the rest of the time, so they can't question the morality of their actions or consider disobedience.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The games aren't the cure, they are just the figurative carrot-on-a-stick.
If the kid concentrates and his brainwaves act "normal" his control pad works better.
Thwapp!
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...but wouldn't little doses of heroin work even better? Now that's an incentive to control your brain waves.
Or better yet, combine the two. Give them control when they concentrate and the heroin when they make a kill in the game.
They would be the perfect soldiers. We could build our very own force of Jem'Hadar!
Muahahahaha!
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
scratch "ad-free"
I meant that they're not choked with ads like their customers (yet).
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
As it stands they are competing with their paying customers.
They needed google.com initially to become famous as the best way to run a search engine. It worked. Now, google.com has become a liability, a free service that hurts their customers.
Why on Earth would Google, as a for-profit business, continue to run their ad-free direct interface?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Services like google have to be paid for. Who do you want to do it?
Your initial answer might be "someone, anyone else!" which makes sense, in a way. I'd rather have the dollars come out of someone else's pocket, too. But then whose interests will google be serving? If they're being paid by advertisers, they're working for them, and they will strike the most profitable balance between flooding you with ads and keeping you coming back. It's happened to every other search engine, and it will happen to google.
However, divided amongst all us users, the cost of google is next to nothing. If everyone who uses it sends them a few bucks per year, they'll have plenty of money to keep things exactly the way we want.
But isn't there an advantage to being a freeloader and being the only one who isn't paying among a group of millions? Don't you get all the service with none of the cost? Perhaps not.
If only some of the people are paying, and this money is their sole revenue source, then google should ignore the wishes of all the people who don't pay. So payment buys you a privileged position as a relevant person.
This is the logic behind mass market busking. Take control by paying your fair share.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The problem here is that the free software producers are not producing a net benefit to the end user by copying every advance as quickly as they can.
They blatantly copy good ideas as soon as they appear, producing nothing new of value, just spending their own effort to keep people from having to pay the people who had the good ideas. This is mostly what free software developers do, they duplicate effort to get around IP restrictions (yes, of course, there are exceptions, but the high-profile stuff is all duplication).
Knowing that this will happen, people don't bother developing their software ideas, because they know they can't get paid. Instead, they end up making a living doing system administration or some such thing, and creative talent gets wasted on unoriginal work.
There's a way out, though. In mass market busking, the users decide who and how much to pay, and are therefore free to pay whoever has the good idea first, and not bother paying people who just duplicate effort or slap a new interface on public domain code. This actually gives people a profit motive to write innovative free software for the general public. Integrators of all the good ideas can also get paid without usurping the income of the originators of the ideas, because it is in the best interests of the people who are paying to and they have control of their payments.
This also deals with the problem of 800-pound gorillas like MS screwing original people even worse than the free software community does.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
That's nothing how about:
FD(fighter dude)1:"Your power is nothing compared to me."
FD2:"Hah! I am much stronger than you"
(fight for a while)
FD1:"Hah! I was only playing with you,"
FD2:"Hah! I was only playing with you."
FD1:"So the kid gloves are off, let's fight all-out."
FD2:"Agreed!"
(fight for a while)
FD2: "Hah! You think I was fighting as hard as I could, but I was only using a tenth of my power, now I will show you no mercy!"
FD1: "Haha! I am actually using only 1% of my incredible fighting power!"
FD2: "That's impossible! You're bluffing!"
(fight for a while, FD2 is getting beaten badly)
FD3: "Now you must face me! I am a thousand times stronger than my friend!"
FD1: "That's okay, I was really only using a millionth of my power!"
...and so it goes.
It is the Princess Bride "I am not left handed!" "Me neither!" seen stretched out a hundred times. It's insane.
Considering that this was originally a weekly series, the pre-fight trash-talk session alone could take a month.
They seriously need to spice it up a bit with comments from the Jerry Springer peanut gallery. "I have crushed worlds with one flick of my tail!" "You go girl! Planets are pigs!" "But can you satisfy your woman?" "Get a real job!"
"Can Goku possibly come up with a witty retort to that challenge? Tune in next week to hear how he finishes the sentence!"
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
dd/sh don't you?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Bread and cheese are food.
God is a powerful, possibly fictional, being who may have created the universe and may be running it.
Love is an emotional bond to a person.
Happiness is a desirable emotional state.
They're all vague, but you can draw a broad enough circle that they make some sense in their most general usage.
Freedom? Freedom means that someone or something won't interfere with something that you're doing. It doesn't make any sense unless you specify what (and possibly who). Use of the word by itself, without this necessary specifier, carries the implication "The freedom you want!" without bothering to ask what that is. It's inherently an act of manipulative deception, used to create fanatic unconditional supporters.
I like open source software. I hate the FSF because they try to treat it as an important moral issue rather than an economic and technical one.
If you cannot accept the views of others, I recommened that you start devising a means of destroying all life in the universe,
I'm working on it. Give me a year or two. I will start with the Anonymous Cowards...
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
These are the guys who, aside from inexplicable decisions like considering the F-16 a suitable replacement for an A-10, put Windows NT in charge of a cruiser.
The ones in charge clearly don't have any clue whatsoever.
Besides, do you want free software considered to be vital military equipment? That's kind of a scary thought. A little close to the "munitions" argument over encryption software.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Copyleft is good, copyright (normally) bad, and you just have to wrap your mind around that fact.
Wow, thanks for explaining that your value judgements are universal facts. Now I see clearly through your filter of blind faith.
There will be (and IS) a lot of software written just because the GPL stops companies from taking your work and not communicating the changes back to the public, hopefully eventually to you.
This is the thin justification I hear over and over again. It's garbage.
I say extremely little GPL'd software was written because people were forced to by the GPL, though many companies (who were doing real, innovative work) have undoubtedly been driven out of business by competition from unoriginal GPL'd software, even when they're making better products. But this would happen somewhat with public domain software, too (it's hard to sell when you're competing against free products).
People who make money from selling copies of their software don't just change their mind and decide that they'll write free software because then they can toss in some nifty code they didn't write themselves. They either set out to write free software, or they don't. Nobody gets sucked into it. A few distributor/supporters who do make a profit from your work, "As if you're an unpaid slave." make a token effort of contributing to development, but strictly for PR purposes. Mostly, though, free software is not profitable, it is done by hobbyists, people who consider the cost of development less than the value of the software for their personal use, or people who buy the hype and start unprofitable for-profit free software companies (unless you consider scamming thousands of investors with trading-card stock "profit").
XFree86 and the BSDs are doing just fine without forcing people to give away their own additions. IMHO, Linux is doing better because of the "free software" propaganda, not because it is superior to the BSDs. They are proof that free software would still be around without the GPL or any similar licence.
So there are better X servers than the free one, based on the code. So what? It hasn't hurt the free version any.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Most arguably.
First of all, it's not software. It's a standard.
Secondly, it's "PNG's Not GIF" (they changed it officially). Yeah, they added a pile of features (too damned many features; it's an immense pain in the butt to implement, and arguably not much of an improvement over a gzipped bmp file), and left others out, but it's still basically a GIF clone.
Third, I believe it's becoming an ISO spec, so you'll have to pay to buy a copy of the copyrighted official specification if you want to write "real" PNG software.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Nitpicking j/k.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...but only listed it among hypocritical ideological movements.
I find their use of the term "free" offensive and misleading.
While I have a moderate dislike for the GPL, and release my own "free" software into the public domain, I do like freely distributable software, especially distributed in source form.
I like gratis software, I like the debugging benefits, and I like reading source. There are many benefits to "free software" without having to apply moralistic nonsense to engineering and economic decisions.
It doesn't rule out making a profit.
I am well aware of that.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
When people talk about "freedom" they usually mean security, or material wealth, or anything else they want and don't have.
Apparently, the FSF believes "freedom" means no selling a product without giving away the documentation unconditionally (except for the condition that it must always be "free"). That's what source code is: documentation, plans, explanations of how to change the product. Source code is speech, object code is mechanism.
That's what they want, so they call it "freedom". Never mind the people who believe they have a right to control and make a direct profit from what they produce; they're wrongheaded and evil enemies of "freedom".
Just as communists call having centralized government control of production and distribution "freedom". The poor people fight the rich people and take their money, and that's "freedom". Never mind the competent managers who increase the value of anything they own, and (by the nature of trade) always provide the other party in any exchange with goods or services of greater perceived value than they must part with; they're wrongheaded and evil enemies of "freedom".
Just as the Americans and the French called having a republican government "freedom". The majority asserted it's control when education became cheap and firearms made fighting men of women and weaklings, and that's "freedom". Never mind the people who believe that the majority is incompetent to rule; they are wrongheaded and evil enemies of "freedom".
Freedom only has real meaning when it's used in a phrase, such as "freedom to...". For example "freedom to walk down a street safely at night without fear of being mugged", "freedom to distribute a product for profit without fear of losing control of it", "freedom to modify or redistribute any products that come into your hands", "freedom to drink either Coca Cola or Pepsi", "freedom to use our arms to take what we deserve by force", "freedom to cleanse our proud race", "freedom from the weakness of morality", "freedom to kill without fear of retribution", "freedom to eat babies and pick my teeth with their bones"...
"Freedom" shouldn't have positive connotations. We don't think it's a good thing for criminals to be free.
Anyone who describes their cause as being about "freedom" is deceiving and manipulating you. The FSF's very name should be a badge of shame. Their "free as in speech" argument is a blatant lie, as few people outside the FSF think "free speech" means an obligation to repeat your notes to everybody who receives a work of yours which is based on those notes, or that "free speech" means giving up your copyright (after all, most Americans claim that they have free speech, but they also have copyright, and don't see a conflict; free speech generally means freedom to state your beliefs, not to make perfect copies of the writings of others).
But I'm getting off track. Other uses of "freedom" in a general sense are just as hypocritical. It always means something else, and usually something that people wouldn't get so worked up over if it was stated plainly.
Say, "I want software that I don't have to pay for and that comes with source code." not "I want free software.". Or say "I want the soldiers to stop stealing my food, burning my books, and teaching my children to rat me out whenever I break one of their stupid little rules." not "I want a free society.". Or "I want to be allowed to make monopolistic business deals, tie my products closely together to leverage one near-monopoly into another, and still have the police arrest anyone who makes copies of them that I didn't approve." not "I want freedom to innovate." If what you want is really admirable, it will shine through without having to use nonsense words like "free".
Of course, honesty may not always be in your best interests, if your goal isn't so admirable, but it's what you need if you don't want people like me as your sworn enemies.
OTOH, the torture/execution Braveheart finale wouldn't have been so dramatic if he had shouted out "Scottish rulers in Scotland!".
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
That important code is available under the GPL is not proof that it would not be available without the GPL.
How many programmers who would have written public domain code decided to use the GPL just because "that's what all free software is written in"? RMS didn't invent free software, he distorted the name Free Software for his own purposes ("it's not really free unless you place restrictions on how you can use it" - good logic, Mr. Stallman).
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Not every application is an editor. Including editor commands in every application is ridiculous, and can be misleading.
And for the Blender example, what does File- Save save? The entire scene? The current object? A texture?
You simply can't have a consistent interface for any and all programs. Even something like "Exit" can have different meanings. Sometimes it means "close this window", sometimes it means "shutdown the app and close a whole slew of windows". It may have a consistent meaning for the programmer, but it can have many for the user.
As for scripting, I personally believe that engine and interface should always be completely seperated for tools (for toys it doesn't matter so much). I'm going to try very hard not to launch into my usual tirade against XML.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I think he's trying to start wars on just about every subject
More like he's firing back another volley in the wars.
They've been at it from day 1, and they never stop this crap.
To be fair, most of what he says is technically true: KDE was out first, Gnome was not started because of technical flaws in KDE but political issues, KDE has a nice office suite, KDE is probably the better built of the two especially if you can handle C++, etc. But it's all delivered intermixed with little digs and a heavy slant, adding fuel to the fire. I certainly don't think the KDE licensing issues are trivial, but I never liked the GPL, either.
Personally, I don't use either, I use a fast, efficent windows manager that doesn't grab any of my screen space and starts in a blink. I resent it when someone makes an application that requires one or the other, without needing any of the features. I feel it is often done as part of this battle. "Look Gnome is good because I wrote this app which you can't run under KDE." or vice versa.
That's dirty pool in my books.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I am a little confused why a single article like this (even one by the esteemed Mr. McCullagh) gets posted. There's been plenty of other coverage of this in other media, much of it just as pro-DeCSS:
They don't care about the quality of the initial posts, because all they do is set a topic. The readers do the research, and then discussion and moderation brings up all the relevant information.
They could post things like "Someone said Linux sucks!" or "This judge made it illegal to link to DeCSS!" and all the good stuff would still come out in the discussion.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
There's nothing illegal about having a monopoly, but it's illegal to try to leverage a monopoly in one field to attempt to gain a monopoly in another.
Since there has already been a court decision that they have a monopoly, they had better be very careful about this sort of thing.
If they have any slight special preferential treatment between their software and hardware, it will almost certainly have disastrous consequences.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The master control is made up of no fewer than 50 redundant processors, each smaller than a millimeter cube and much faster than a modern computer, though they vary somewhat in their contruction, scattered about my reinforced skull. There is no way for all of them to be damaged while I remain alive.
The workhorse of the system responsible for archiving and heavy processing, a solid-state homogenous massively parallel connection machine about the size of my fist, is tucked away in my chest cavity between my oxygen-storage organ and my 2nd and 3rd backup hearts (cylinders about the size of a thumb).
The interface can take any form, since the system has full access to all nerves leading into my brain, and has plenty of power to simulate a believable environment; it can be superimposed atop real-world data or it can be fully immersive. The failsafes are carefully trained (in a process taking months of daily feedback training) direct neural connections to the master control, which can be used to cut off any problematic computer functions and reconnect my mind to my body; a spare nervous system is tatooed across my skin so there is no single point of failure. I'd have to be almost fully decapitated to lose control of my body (not likely to occur accidentally, thanks to carbon microfiber reinforcements). I'd certainly be dead before my connections were disabled, unless a very careful surgery was undertaken.
Connections to other computers can be made by many different forms of electromagnetic transmission, or by tiny electrical currents through contact on any of hundreds of points on my body.
Power is available through the main storage battery of my body (a distributed system with surprising capacity), but essential functions, such as the master control, can be supported by generation of minute amounts of power from the glucose and oxygen in my blood.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
After all, who else makes a computer's looks its main selling point?
Aside from the design of a pretty box to put the computer in, this article might have gotten 3rd place in a local Junior Highschool science fair.
It's a set of extrapolative predictions that could have been put together by a layman in a couple of hours of seaching the internet. This falls short of what most of us here could probably just sit down and type out without doing any research at all.
For example, there are no guesses about what specialized coprocessors will be the rage in 2010. Will 3D be the big thing, like now, or will acceleration for certain AI functions be the cool off-CPU gadget? Will we still think a big specialized FPU is a big deal, or will we just have a whole pile of small, parallel integer units?
This is the interesting kind of question about future computers. We know they'll go faster, use less power, and store more data, and we can put them in any damn box we please - that kind of speculation is as bootless as it gets.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.