Your warning's not for the humour-impaired; it's for those who don't follow sports. I read the column in question, and saw nothing particularly absurd. I did skim over a few bits, though. Why should one assume that anyone, especially on this site of all sites, is sufficiently well-versed with sports of all things to detect a fraud? Much like the hoi polloi cannot tell when a computer in a movie is laughable, neither can we the literati distinguish the nuances of the pastime of thugs.
I'd an English professor once whose theory was that football served one redeeming social purpose: keeping criminals off the streets. I think it serves another: it keeps the proles happy. Feed them their watery beer, let them watch a bunch of beasts assault one another for a few hours and allow their energies be channeled into that most pointless of acts--rooting for their teams. It also serves as a warning for us: if one sees a picture of one's co-worker stripped to the waist, painted with obscure symbols and numbers, wearing a ridiculous head-piece, one knows that he can hardly be taken seriously.
Of course we've not noticed--how many of us on Slashdot care for sports? A bunch of grown men running around in Spandex, chasing a little ball and patting one another on the rear. That's surely the way I want to spend my free time!
Not that I'm against sports qua sports. It's no doubt very useful to the constitution to get outdoors and play. I myself enjoy fencing very much: the only exercise of the gentleman. No, what upsets me is the idolatry of sports. Why must taxpayers finance stadiums? Why must grown men derive their pride not from their own actions, or those of their and family and circle of aquaintance, but rather from the illusory gains of strangers?
Pro `wrestling' is the reductio ad absurdem of professional sports in general. The players aren't even really playing: it is drama for the postliterate, a bestial form of primitive theatre.
If the time and energy spent on sports in this country were instead spent on, say, feeding the poor and other charities, we would have a much better world.
And I'd never have to find a favourite television programme interrupted, a sales tax raised to fund a stadium I'll never visit or traffic jam on an otherwise fine day.
Read the GPL--which Qt is now offered under. As long as you abide by th (well-known and acceptable to many) terms of the GPL, it doesn't matter what you do.
If you wish to offer non-GPLed code to the world, then yes, you'll need to purchase a license from TrollTech (a great company, from everything I hear). Personally, I really do hope that things go well for them. They're good guys. Does the KDE project have any plans to donate money in their direction?
Personally, I'm a gtk+ man, simply because I prefer C development, and like gtk's handling of classes, types and all that. I also prefer GNOME as a desktop environment. But KDE is sweet, to be sure. It just doesn't do quite what I like. Choice is a Good Thing(tm). I look forward to many years of desktop competition. It should be interesting.
The Linux gift culture cannot be sustained by interests desiring to make money from proprietary (i.e. non-gift) software. It can, however, last bloody forever on the rest of us. There are enough programmers who do this in their free time and enough large companies which are beginning to rely on Linux (IBM, anyone?) to keep it alive and well for a foreseeable eternity.
The thing is, for any company which produces OSes, supporting a kernel hacker or ten is cheap compared to the old OS development they did. And for a programmer, coding is fun. Most any company (the Beast is probably different) is happy to let its employees work on Open Source/Free Software projects at home, away from work. These two factors are all we need for Linux (and every other free/open system) to survive.
How can it die, when you have the code on your machine? How can it die, when I can modify it to suit my needs? How can it die, when you can add support for a needed driver? How can it die, when I would die before putting Windows on my box? How can it die, when any tech worth his weight in sand recognises its technical superiority? How can it die, when any MBA worth his weight in gold recognises its benefits to the enterprise?
That would be the good thing about the idea. They're a bunch of folks who need to eat. They're a bunch of folsk who'd like to have a few luxuries. Whom are they more likely to listen to: the folks who line their wallets and pad their bellies, or the freeloaders? Whom should they listen to? Obviously, the folks who are willing to do something for them.
Yeah, your $5 doesn't go very far. But it arguably goes further than your one vote in any election or referendum. And you are on a completely equal basis with everyone else: neither your race, nor your sex, nor your creed matters. All that counts is the colour of your cash.
Cool. More than anything, I believe that this indicates their essential seriousness in wishing to do this right. I imagine that they must be a pretty level-headed bunch. Best of luck to them.
Actually, I daresay that xbill could be ported to Cygwin/XFree86 more than a little easily. Perhaps I'll give it a shot when my own project[1] is done. I'm already looking into Cygwin/XFree86 as a replacement for the infernally buggy eXceed.
[1] I'm working on travtrack and travlib. Travtrack is a programme to manipulate a Traveller universe. Travlib is a library of functions and classes (using C/gtk+) which represent a Traveller universe. Traveller was a great old science-fiction game from the 70s which has been given a new lease on life with GURPS Traveller from Steve Jackson Games.
Sony says retail is $1,999, but I've seen it for much less.
Of course, the problem is that at $1,999 there's a lot of room to go much less. What I'd like to see is a decent-quality $200 19" or 21" monitor. I'm sure that in a few years we'll be there, of course. But right now it is horrid to be stuck with a 17". Of course, had I gone with the 15" option when I picked up my last machine I think that I'd bee well-nigh suicide now...
And of course resolution is a massively important thing as well. No good having lots of inches with big pixels. That's why I stated decent-quality above. Nothing great, nothing wonderful--but soemthing good, which gets the job done and doesn't hurt the eyes.
I've had at least a dozen packages ordered online and delivered. Some used UPS, some used FedEx; none used the postal service.
The unfortunate thing is that almost everyone uses UPS, and that UPS is the worst carrier out there. They damage goods--and never pay the claim! Their delivery system is atrocious--three tries, and then I get to drive two hours from where I live in the heart of Denver, the capital city of Colorado and largest town for about 8 hours in any direction.
But what upsets me most is that they will not deliver easily to my apartment building. The post office can enter, but UPS cannot. So I have to have things delivered care of my landlady, who may not always be home. And then I get the joy and fun of driving two hours out.
I'd take USPS for a buck more a package and another two days delivery time any day of the week. At least my packages make it to my door.
The money (aprox $825,000.00 US) is split three ways, so RMS, Linus and Mr. Sakamura will each be getting about $275,000.00 US.
Nope; they'll each be getting about $165,000. Uncle Sam will be taking $110,000. Of course, RMS lives in Taxachusetts, so he'll be getting even less. I'm not sure what California's taxes are like, so I dunno how Torvalds will be affected. Who th heck is Sakamura? I'm afraid I'm drawing a blank. Possibly my brain has simply skipped a groove.
Thanks to units (a great little prog, even if it does believe that the metre is a fundamental unit), I am happy to report that the 3 lb toy masses all of.0932 slugs.
The attacks on 9-11 have nothing to do with revenge. They were not "crimes of passion." The terrorist leaders may toss around the word "revenge" in the propaganda they use to recruit throw-away agents, but the fact is that such terrorist acts are cooly calculated attempts at political manipulation.
Surely you've heard the saying that revenge is a dish best served cold? Haven;t you read the Cask of Amontillado? Revenge is a crime of cold passion, of rational hatred.
And that is what we're doing now. Only we're hitting military targets, doing our best to avoid civilian casualties, and dropping food as well as bombs. Al Qaida slew civilians; we feed them.
Tony Blair's an evil republican (note the little r) out to destroy Britain. He's done very well so far, with the disenfranchisement of the Lords, the gun control, the cameras on the streets. Modern Britain is a police state, and much of that is attributable to Blair. The man is a modern day Cromwell.
But see, the aforementioned hippy was protesting against hitting the right people. The `Give Peace a Chance' crowd don't understand the necessity of war anymore than the redneck crowd understand the need for peace. They do not accept the validity of violence, ever. And they're wrong. Which is their right, of course.
Anti-war marches wouldn't have stopped WWII. But then again we would never have had to have gotten involved if we hadn't been so good at financing and arming both sides of the conflict.
You mean, were we not human. We are by our natures a violent species. Observe children--the most natural of men. Observe savages. We are a brutal, bloodthirsty species. I have no doubt that the first tools we fashioned were clubs to kill our fellows. Just look at chimpanzees.
It is religion which civilises us, which encultures us, which teaches us that just maybe slaying our neighbour is not the best of ideas. It is civilisation which codifies and restricts murder to the few.
Financing and arming are no more than eating and fashioning tools. They are what we excel at. War is the great shame of our race--but we can no more avoid it than can the Earth reverse in her course. All we can do is to try to minimise its likelihood, make it unprofitable and otherwise attempt to avoid it. But make no mistake: their will be war as long as there are men upon the earth.
That's why we need a military. That's why we need, sometimes, to fight and to kill. Because if we don't, the other guy will. The pacifist's dream--that if we don't, the other guy won't--is just that: a dream. It's a noble dream, but a dream nonetheless.
They have every right to protest--that is what freedom is about. But they happen to be wrong. Freedom does not mean that everyone is right; it means that no-one tries to force his idea of what is right on other. Tolerance is not acceptance; it is tolerating the unacceptable. They are wrong, an unacceptably so. We tolerate them because it is a human right to be wrong.
By the same token, I may believe them incorrect, even though they hold rather the opposite view.
Now we should check it out to make sure there are no instellar cruisers or bases under that sand. Don't want to piss off the neighbors, especially if they are better armed.
We've got Texas and the South--no way the Martians are any better armed...
Give me half-a-hundred good ol' boys and I'll deliver you Mars sliced, diced and and packaged in individual bubble-wrapped servings.
One of the neatest Forth dialects I eve rplayed with was MOPS, a really cool little tool for the Mac. Unfortunately, it appears that development on it has stalled, which is indeed a pity--it deserved far more press than ever it got. Nicely OOP, interfaced with the OS properly &c. In every way an excellent tool.
I wish it had a Linux port, since that's what I use exclusively these days.
I really feel sorry for the people behind the companies which write proprietary Linux apps. Chillisoft made some great looking products--but why buy the equivalent of free software? Gobe Productive looks like a great piece of work, but is there much market for such a thing? I took a look at the page, and it seemed like a Word-PageMaker-Quark sort of a thing. Very nice, very pretty, very well done. The picture of the guys behind it was heart-rending. I just don't see how they're going to make it.
This is where I part ways with the FSF. I agree that it makes sense to have source code. I think that one should have access to the source code for any app on one's computer. I think that one should be able to distribute of the software, or even sell them. I even believe that software copyrights should be shorter than normal ones--perh. 3 years. Look at GhostScript. Those guys make money, and they support Free Software (not just Open Source).
Programmers need to make money. They are highly trained, and their labour is valuable. The methods that the FSF suggests do not seem to cut it for me. We don't need a computer tax to pay the enlightened to program--it would fall prey to all the pitfalls of any other brain-dead socialist programme. Saying `just write for industry' sidesteps the question. I really like the idea of short-term copyright; allow the producers to make money, but then allow for freedom.
The FSF is big on freedom, but short on realism.
I just hope that these Gobe fellows do well; I really do. They look like a nice bunch, and their product looks great. I'd hate to see it and their dreams die.
Although it seems unfair that the engineers have such a small share in the company stockwise, what is their share in the company itself? Obviously they've brought talent and intellectual property to the table. They've certainly brought some amount of money to the table as well. But how much money have the venture capitalists brought to the table? The talent's being paid for, so let's ignore it for a moment. The intellectual property might be worth several millions; the engineers maybe raised one or two million. The VCs raised $100 million. So in fairness the engineers wouldn't even have a 10% stake in the company--anything more than that which they have is a kindness.
Now, I'm sure that in the Real World it's more often that the IP would be worth $150 million, and the engineers brought in maybe $5 million, and the VCs only pitched in $50 million, and the engineers end up with a 15% share of something they conributed 75% of.
It takes money to make money. You might have a great idea, but generally great ideas need financing. I might make the world's greatest cheesecake, but without the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to buy a restaraunt, outfit it properly, fill the pantries and larders, hire and train employees, purchase advertising, invite the media &c. my idea is worth very little indeed. Someone needs to finance me--and he's taking a huge risk. That costs me.
The best solution is to finance your activities yourself. If you cannot, sell the rights to your IP to others. You lose the opportunity to become the leader and known name in that market (which one needs to survive after the patents expire), but you turn your idea into cash. You might then use this cash to fund another idea, and this manner become the market leader. When the patent expires, it doesn't matter, because everyone knows and trusts the Smith family of widgets. And then you'll have a profitable corporation.
Remember, though, that it's more lucrative to have a 1% share of a $100 million concern than it is a 10% of a $5 million concern.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd an English professor once whose theory was that football served one redeeming social purpose: keeping criminals off the streets. I think it serves another: it keeps the proles happy. Feed them their watery beer, let them watch a bunch of beasts assault one another for a few hours and allow their energies be channeled into that most pointless of acts--rooting for their teams. It also serves as a warning for us: if one sees a picture of one's co-worker stripped to the waist, painted with obscure symbols and numbers, wearing a ridiculous head-piece, one knows that he can hardly be taken seriously.
Not that I'm against sports qua sports. It's no doubt very useful to the constitution to get outdoors and play. I myself enjoy fencing very much: the only exercise of the gentleman. No, what upsets me is the idolatry of sports. Why must taxpayers finance stadiums? Why must grown men derive their pride not from their own actions, or those of their and family and circle of aquaintance, but rather from the illusory gains of strangers?
Pro `wrestling' is the reductio ad absurdem of professional sports in general. The players aren't even really playing: it is drama for the postliterate, a bestial form of primitive theatre.
If the time and energy spent on sports in this country were instead spent on, say, feeding the poor and other charities, we would have a much better world.
And I'd never have to find a favourite television programme interrupted, a sales tax raised to fund a stadium I'll never visit or traffic jam on an otherwise fine day.
In other words, `the more you tighten your grasp, the more consumers slip through your fingers, Lord RIAAder'?
If you wish to offer non-GPLed code to the world, then yes, you'll need to purchase a license from TrollTech (a great company, from everything I hear). Personally, I really do hope that things go well for them. They're good guys. Does the KDE project have any plans to donate money in their direction?
Personally, I'm a gtk+ man, simply because I prefer C development, and like gtk's handling of classes, types and all that. I also prefer GNOME as a desktop environment. But KDE is sweet, to be sure. It just doesn't do quite what I like. Choice is a Good Thing(tm). I look forward to many years of desktop competition. It should be interesting.
The thing is, for any company which produces OSes, supporting a kernel hacker or ten is cheap compared to the old OS development they did. And for a programmer, coding is fun. Most any company (the Beast is probably different) is happy to let its employees work on Open Source/Free Software projects at home, away from work. These two factors are all we need for Linux (and every other free/open system) to survive.
How can it die, when you have the code on your machine? How can it die, when I can modify it to suit my needs? How can it die, when you can add support for a needed driver? How can it die, when I would die before putting Windows on my box? How can it die, when any tech worth his weight in sand recognises its technical superiority? How can it die, when any MBA worth his weight in gold recognises its benefits to the enterprise?
Short answer: it can't.
Yeah, your $5 doesn't go very far. But it arguably goes further than your one vote in any election or referendum. And you are on a completely equal basis with everyone else: neither your race, nor your sex, nor your creed matters. All that counts is the colour of your cash.
I believe that that's a truly valuable idea.
Cool. More than anything, I believe that this indicates their essential seriousness in wishing to do this right. I imagine that they must be a pretty level-headed bunch. Best of luck to them.
[1] I'm working on travtrack and travlib. Travtrack is a programme to manipulate a Traveller universe. Travlib is a library of functions and classes (using C/gtk+) which represent a Traveller universe. Traveller was a great old science-fiction game from the 70s which has been given a new lease on life with GURPS Traveller from Steve Jackson Games.
Of course, the problem is that at $1,999 there's a lot of room to go much less. What I'd like to see is a decent-quality $200 19" or 21" monitor. I'm sure that in a few years we'll be there, of course. But right now it is horrid to be stuck with a 17". Of course, had I gone with the 15" option when I picked up my last machine I think that I'd bee well-nigh suicide now...
And of course resolution is a massively important thing as well. No good having lots of inches with big pixels. That's why I stated decent-quality above. Nothing great, nothing wonderful--but soemthing good, which gets the job done and doesn't hurt the eyes.
The unfortunate thing is that almost everyone uses UPS, and that UPS is the worst carrier out there. They damage goods--and never pay the claim! Their delivery system is atrocious--three tries, and then I get to drive two hours from where I live in the heart of Denver, the capital city of Colorado and largest town for about 8 hours in any direction.
But what upsets me most is that they will not deliver easily to my apartment building. The post office can enter, but UPS cannot. So I have to have things delivered care of my landlady, who may not always be home. And then I get the joy and fun of driving two hours out.
I'd take USPS for a buck more a package and another two days delivery time any day of the week. At least my packages make it to my door.
I do, nearly every day. Massive amounts of biological agents are dumped in our water. Fish make love in it, you know...
Nope; they'll each be getting about $165,000. Uncle Sam will be taking $110,000. Of course, RMS lives in Taxachusetts, so he'll be getting even less. I'm not sure what California's taxes are like, so I dunno how Torvalds will be affected. Who th heck is Sakamura? I'm afraid I'm drawing a blank. Possibly my brain has simply skipped a groove.
Thanks to units (a great little prog, even if it does believe that the metre is a fundamental unit), I am happy to report that the 3 lb toy masses all of .0932 slugs.
Surely you've heard the saying that revenge is a dish best served cold? Haven;t you read the Cask of Amontillado? Revenge is a crime of cold passion, of rational hatred.
And that is what we're doing now. Only we're hitting military targets, doing our best to avoid civilian casualties, and dropping food as well as bombs. Al Qaida slew civilians; we feed them.
They're sending over 5,000 kippers, some spotted dick and 400 episodes of The Vicar of Dibley. Surrender is expected any day now...
Tony Blair's an evil republican (note the little r) out to destroy Britain. He's done very well so far, with the disenfranchisement of the Lords, the gun control, the cameras on the streets. Modern Britain is a police state, and much of that is attributable to Blair. The man is a modern day Cromwell.
But see, the aforementioned hippy was protesting against hitting the right people. The `Give Peace a Chance' crowd don't understand the necessity of war anymore than the redneck crowd understand the need for peace. They do not accept the validity of violence, ever. And they're wrong. Which is their right, of course.
You mean, were we not human. We are by our natures a violent species. Observe children--the most natural of men. Observe savages. We are a brutal, bloodthirsty species. I have no doubt that the first tools we fashioned were clubs to kill our fellows. Just look at chimpanzees.
It is religion which civilises us, which encultures us, which teaches us that just maybe slaying our neighbour is not the best of ideas. It is civilisation which codifies and restricts murder to the few.
Financing and arming are no more than eating and fashioning tools. They are what we excel at. War is the great shame of our race--but we can no more avoid it than can the Earth reverse in her course. All we can do is to try to minimise its likelihood, make it unprofitable and otherwise attempt to avoid it. But make no mistake: their will be war as long as there are men upon the earth.
That's why we need a military. That's why we need, sometimes, to fight and to kill. Because if we don't, the other guy will. The pacifist's dream--that if we don't, the other guy won't--is just that: a dream. It's a noble dream, but a dream nonetheless.
By the same token, I may believe them incorrect, even though they hold rather the opposite view.
What's your software company? What sort of development do you do? I'm awfully curious:-)
We've got Texas and the South--no way the Martians are any better armed...
Give me half-a-hundred good ol' boys and I'll deliver you Mars sliced, diced and and packaged in individual bubble-wrapped servings.
I wish it had a Linux port, since that's what I use exclusively these days.
This is where I part ways with the FSF. I agree that it makes sense to have source code. I think that one should have access to the source code for any app on one's computer. I think that one should be able to distribute of the software, or even sell them. I even believe that software copyrights should be shorter than normal ones--perh. 3 years. Look at GhostScript. Those guys make money, and they support Free Software (not just Open Source).
Programmers need to make money. They are highly trained, and their labour is valuable. The methods that the FSF suggests do not seem to cut it for me. We don't need a computer tax to pay the enlightened to program--it would fall prey to all the pitfalls of any other brain-dead socialist programme. Saying `just write for industry' sidesteps the question. I really like the idea of short-term copyright; allow the producers to make money, but then allow for freedom.
The FSF is big on freedom, but short on realism.
I just hope that these Gobe fellows do well; I really do. They look like a nice bunch, and their product looks great. I'd hate to see it and their dreams die.
Now, I'm sure that in the Real World it's more often that the IP would be worth $150 million, and the engineers brought in maybe $5 million, and the VCs only pitched in $50 million, and the engineers end up with a 15% share of something they conributed 75% of.
It takes money to make money. You might have a great idea, but generally great ideas need financing. I might make the world's greatest cheesecake, but without the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to buy a restaraunt, outfit it properly, fill the pantries and larders, hire and train employees, purchase advertising, invite the media &c. my idea is worth very little indeed. Someone needs to finance me--and he's taking a huge risk. That costs me.
The best solution is to finance your activities yourself. If you cannot, sell the rights to your IP to others. You lose the opportunity to become the leader and known name in that market (which one needs to survive after the patents expire), but you turn your idea into cash. You might then use this cash to fund another idea, and this manner become the market leader. When the patent expires, it doesn't matter, because everyone knows and trusts the Smith family of widgets. And then you'll have a profitable corporation.
Remember, though, that it's more lucrative to have a 1% share of a $100 million concern than it is a 10% of a $5 million concern.
There's already a Unix standard for where to install entire packages: /opt. The idea is that one might have an /opt/emacs, /opt/netscape &c.