While there are many things in life that I MUST do, obey the law is not one of them. I think you're a bit confused about the meaning of the word must. Eating is a must, breathing is a must, doing what the state tells me to is not.
I don't think that Bush could have a better cabinet to wage a war on terrorists and the nations that sponsor them. As for going after Iraq, the only real reason we'd have to do that is if we had credible evidence that it and/or Saddam Hussein were behind this attack or sponsoring terrorists in general. After we are finished with the middle east, terrorism will be nothing but a bad dream, as will the conflict between the Israelis and the rest of the region. After we are done the people of that region are no longer going to be forced to live under regimes such as the taliban. Afghanistan is not going to be the targe of a war against the afghani people, rather we are going to do away with the Taliban and then work to help the afghani people with food and other aid. In the end we are going to rescue that country more than conquer it. I for on couldn't be happier about it.
Why are so many people so foolish and short sighted? Banning free communication does nothing to thwart or eliminate evil deeds. I hate what terrorists have done to us as much as the next person, but we can't use that as an excuse to attack the public. So what if someone is asking for voluneers to become terrorists, I would think the fact that this was done in a public forum would provide law enforcement with valuable leads. Adding restrictions on what people can say because a few nuts are out there doesn't do anything to stop or kill the nuts, it just disenfrancishes the rest of us.
I don't know much about TCU, but the name Texas "Christian" University is enough to spook my all by itself. How much you want to bet that part of the reason this was developed was because someone there would like to see the Volstead act reinstated? Lets not forget that it was "christian" busybodies that brought us prohbition in the first place along with all of its resulting problems, organized crime not least among them.
The whole "make money off services" line seems more and more like a lame excuse as time goes by. I'm just about convinced that it is simply the best response someone could come up with when challenged to show how anyone can make money off something they give away.
Imagine something like this....
Gnubert: "Free software is the way to go!"
$uit: "Free? What do you mean by that?"
Gnubert: "I mean free, we give it away and anyone can use it for whatever they want while improving it themselves"
$uit: Mumbles to himself something about Haight Ashbury and LSD. "Uhm.. Well how do you expect anyone to make money doing this? After all, we are running a business here. We'd all like to get paid and ultimately turn a profit, so just how do you suggest we do this?"
Gnubert:"Uhmm.......well....hmmm...um.. I know! We can provide services to our customers that we charge for! We give away the software and then provide support contracts and other services that we can use to make money!"
$uit: "Well if the software is supposed to be so good, why does anyone need support from us? Also, whats to stop other companies from competing with us? Not to mention the fact that providing services costs money, do you really expect us to be able to make enough money from services to offset the loss created by developing the software itself?"
Gnubert: "That's just it, we don't have to pay to develop it. Hackers will work for free because they believe in the Truth of Free Software, amen. Now.. if you'll just invest some money in our new company, FreeRiderProblem.com, we can get busy making new software to give away. We'll make the evil rat bastards at MickeySoft wish they'd stuck to selling basic interpreters! They shall pay!!!!!!!!!"
$uit: "I don't care about that, I just want to make some money here, got it?"
Gnubert: "But you don't understand, MickeySoft is out to steal your soul! At this very instant the company has people working to figure out how to enslave you! They want to own and control everything. Their leader eats the brains of children and bathes in their urine! WE must stop......own us all....monopoly......kill....."
$uit: Quietly slips away as quickly as he can....
........Sound familiar?
Ideologies only work in the minds of those who follow them. In the real world facts and natural laws dictate what goes on. We can seek to discover those laws and use them to our advantage, or we can try to force our ideologies into the picture like someone trying to force the wrong piece into a jigsaw puzzle.
Which are you going to do?
Lee Reynolds
(Go ahead, mod me down because you don't agree with me.)
The problem with the whole business about computers taking over the world / Skynet is watching you is this: Artificial intelligence is not the same thing as an artificial personality. Even if it were, why must we create a human type personality?
Our only understanding of intelligence is human intelligence. We tend to think that for something to have intelligence that it must think as we do and therefore have a similar motivational structure.
These motivational structures exist because they assist human survival more often than not, or assist it in critical situations. The also have unfortunate side effects, which is the reason many are a double edged swords. Greed, jealousy, rage, hatred, love, compassion, friendship, etc, are all human emotions or states of mind. A computerized intelligence would not have to be created with a capacity for any of these things. Therefore the study of its behavior would be an independent subject from human psychology. Claiming that a machine intelligence would eventually enslave mankind is hasty at best. We have no understanding of what the psychology of an intelligent computer would be, and therefore no model by which to predict its behavior.
Lee
Computers for kids, great idea. But now what are all the fearful and anxious adults going to do to control how those computers are used? What are they going to do about the kids who use their computers to trade music, games, and (gasp) porn?
The only thing worse than kids not having access to computers and the information and knowledge they unlock is for that access to be controlled or otherwise abridged, and yes that includes access to things that are sexually explicit. The world would be a much better place if our civilization didn't have this neurotic relationship with sex. Porn is harmless unless it is a person's sole or primary source of information about sex.
Porn is used as the universal excuse for denying access to information. That wouldn't be so bad if it were actually harmful to anyone. The fact that it isn't just makes the lies it is used to defend that much more bitter.
The point that was made is not that religion is truthful in its content. The point is that it is a very powerful tool for socialization and ensuring the future of our civilization by preserving the quality of our citizens.
Religion is a con, plain and simple. Anyone who says that they know and understand the mind and will of God is a fool at best. Especially since the supposed source of this insight, the bible, is hardly what I would call an authoritative source. The mythology of the Jews is no more convincing to me than that of the Greeks and Romans. Even so, that does not mean that the con is without merit. Religion has always been a form of mind control whereby those who are unable to think for themselves and understand right from wrong are kept from causing too much trouble. At least in peace time. In war time religion is used to direct and focus the wrath of a nation towards the destruction of its enemies. In the case of child rearing, religion is used to instill the kind of virtues and qualities that make for a more peaceful and productive society.
This is all very dishonest of course, but just how else do you keep the rabble from making rubble of your nation or society? Lock them up? How do you justify the incarceration of someone based on the trouble they are expected to cause, rather than the trouble they have caused?
So the question of religion in schools has nothing to do with whether one religion is more valid than another, they're all BS. Or with the separation of church and state since that policy simply means that the church and state don't control one another. It has to do with whether or not our society benefits from having its less intelligent members be brainwashed so as to keep them in line.
Having stored proceedures in any language is better than not having them. The advantages of them are that they can be readily used by other programs, and they don't have to be compiled to be run, so they are faster. Since perl is an interpreted language I'd suspect that the latter benefit is lost. So what I'm hoping for is the future inclusion of stored proceedures written in SQL itself like what is offered in other DBMS systems.
Gil Amelio is the one who opened the door for the mac clones, he didn't close it. Steve Jobs did away with the clones. He also killed off the Newton in a fit of juvenile revenge simply because it was the brainchild of John Scully. He did this in spite of the fact that it was a successful product that makes a palm pilot look like a bad joke. It used an arm processor, which is incidentally the same CPU family that palm is being moved over to. Coincidence?
Apple didn't buy Next because NextStep could run existing Mac apps, or even because it would be easier to get it to. They bought it because Gassee wanted more money for Be than they were willing to pay, and Jobs was more than happy to sell. At the time that Next was bought, it was no better suited to running MacOS apps than Be was, it was just cheaper. Apple had dumped a boatload of money into Copland and then discovered that they couldn't make it run existing MacOS apps without running a copy of the old MacOS in a virtual machine ala vmware. Why they ever thought Next or Be could any better I don't know. Even now in OS-X you run an entire instance of MacOS-9 when you run classic apps.
Personally I don't think Apple matters one bit. The reasons are many but they all boil down to the fact that the company has not had its act together for as long as I can remember. The mark of Steve Jobs' personality runs as deep in Apple as the mark of Bill Gate's personality does at Microsoft. Apple is like a intellectually gifted but emotionally immature adolescent that refuses to accept that the world is not as it wants it to be. That does things that it claims are attempts to compete or excel when in fact they are thinly veiled assaults on the way things are, assaults that ammount to nothing more than the company throwing itself on sharp rocks...again. The truth of Apple is that it is a failed monopoly. The position that Microsoft holds through and understanding of how things work is the same exact position that Apple thought it could gain by changing how things work. Steve Jobs summed up Apple best when he said to John Scully, "Do you want to sell sugar water all your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" That kind of mentality, that you have some kind of high purpose behind what you are doing, is exactly the kind of attitude that makes you sacrifice what is practical and pragmatic because it threatens the purity of your vision. In a situation where there is no opposition or competition this doesn't matter, but that isn't exactly how the computer industry works now is it?
I'm personally amazed that the company is still in business. Part of the reason they are is that Microsoft worked to keep the company around as token competition. Now that doing so won't help protect them from anti-trust litigation I don't know that they're going to do anything to keep apple afloat anymore. I mean do you really think that Office was ported to the Mac because it was profitable? It was ported to make the mac a viable competitor to the PC, but a competitor they could control. Of course there is always the fact that by porting Office they pre-empted another company from creating a viable office suite for the Mac, one that could then be ported to the PC. By having mac users use Office, it is easy to move them to a PC once Apple has dropped from the tree so to speak.
Fuck the UN. We've don't owe any allegiance to this would be precursor to a singular world government. We're going to do what is in our best interest and if the UN doesn't like it, they can kiss our ass.
What you're doing is an example of cooperative multitasking. You choose when you do the context switch and which task you pay attention to next.
The problems start when you're forced to do pre-emptive multitasking. This is what happens when you're busy trying to do one thing while the phone is constantly ringing, people are coming and asking you questions, or any number of other distractions are vieing for your attention. It is at this point that productivity plummits because you're spending 75% of your time dealing with bullshit. I once worked as a tech at Fry's Electronics and that is the exact kind of thing I had to deal with. Here I was supposed to be fixing customer's computers but I wasn't able to do that because Fry's wouldn't hire enough people to handle things like customers at the counter, processing returns, etc. etc. I quit that job and I hope I never have another one like it.
Didn't want people tinkering around under the hood? Exsqueeze me? The original II and II+ shipped with shchematics and a complete dump of the roms. The case top popped right off and lets not forget the 8 expansion slots that Woz demanded the machine have.
It wasn't until the Mac came out that Apple took on the attitude that it didn't want you messing around inside the machine. You can thank old Steve Jobs for that nonsense.
You're thinking of the computers that Steve Jobs takes credit for creating, the Macs. You are right, they are overpriced and underpowered. I wouldn't call them junk, because most are well made from an engineering standpoint (hardware that is).
The Apple II series on the other hand, were wonderful computers. I've still got the II+ that I got way back in 1978. It's in my closet, wrapped up in plastic, but it still works. The II's were great because they were an open architecture (unlike the macintoy) and anyone could create accessories and cards for them. I remember back in the late 80's my high school had a IIe with a SCSI hard drive and CDROM, not bad for a design originally created back when Starsky and Hutch was still on the air. It didn't have internet access, but who did in 1987?
In many ways the modern PC is an example of what can happen to a unimpressive platform that has enough money thrown at it. The original PC was no better than the Apple II. The first "five slot" pc shipped with 16 to 64k of memory, no hard drive,a mono text only video card (no bitmapped graphics), and a cassette interface of all things, the floppy drive for it held 160k and was an option. By the time the "eight slot" XT had come out a couple of years later floppies were standard, the motherboard could hold up to 640k, 4/16 color CGA graphics was available, a ten meg hard drive was a common option, and the floppies would do 360k. The platform continued to grow and expand from there because it was popular and IBM kept trying to improve their "branded" PC to keep up with the cloners.
So don't forget that your Athlon/PIII/P4 can trace its roots all the way back to a metal box with an 4.77Mhz 8088 processor and 16k of memory, which itself was influenced in no small way by the open architecture of the Apple II. The PC was a radical departure for IBM, up until then everything had been closed and proprietary and done in house as much as possible. With the PC they used off the shelf parts and created an open and viabrant design that hit the ground running, just like the Apple II did.
The Apple I used a MOS 6502, just like the Apple II/II+/III and early IIe's and IIc's did. Later IIe's and IIc's used the 65c02 and the IIgs used the 65816.
The chip that you're actually thinking of is the Motorola 68000, which was used in many different systems including the early macs, Amigas, Atari ST's, etc. etc. as well as the Sun box you've got.
The 6502 was indirectly derived from the architecture of the Motorola 6800 (note 2 zero's, not three) whereas the 68000 was inspired by DEC's VAX architecture.
I think it is really funny how some suits are complaining that the internet "doesn't follow economic laws." Think about that for a moment, if we discovered something that didn't follow the laws of physics, we'd quickly go back to the drawing board because it would be obvious that our understanding of physics was flawed. Not so with business types I guess.
The greatest strenght of the intenet is its decentralized nature. It reminds me of the form of govenrment the founding fathers tried to create, one where no one person or group had too much control and anything that one group did could be countered by the others.
So now some suits don't like the fact that they can't exploit people online they way they have been able to do traditionally. Well boo fucking hoo. There is plenty of money to be made online, just look at Amazon or Ebay.
The open source model has never been about making money. The only thing it has ever been about is making better code, and making code that others could improve as well. It is a perfect example of true communism (not the enforced socialist oppression we normally call communism). Now I'm not a Marxist, but neither am I strictly a capitalist. Economic ideologies aren't an ideological issue for me. I'm a libertarian by nature and as such believe in freedom. If freedom can exist within the context of true communism then great, I have no problem with that. But that doesn't mean I'm foolish enough to think that the communism that is open source can be a viable capitalist enterprise.
A one point a lot of people of questionable intelligence and even more questionable awareness saw Linux as the next big thing. So they invested a boatload of money into companies without understanding that these companies were trying to make money off something that was not an economic good in the strictest sense.
While it may be possible to make some money off open source, I seriously doubt that more than a handful of people are going to make a lot of money off it. When this fact has been raised, the open source/free software community has generally responded very poorly. Rather than acknowledging this fact we have instead spent our efforts trying to pander to potential investors and generally fool everyone, especially ourselves, into thinking that open source companies can make a lot of money.
It is true that Redhat is in the black now, at least on paper. But imagine if Linux were a traditional product and that it enjoyed the level of popularity that it does right now, Redhat would be like Apple was in the late 70's, a fairy tale success story. There is a question of course of whether Linux would be this popular if it were a commercial product created and marketed by one company, but my example was a hypothetical one.
The truth is that open source companies would fare better in the long run as non profit enterprises. Non profit companies exist to provide a valuable service to the community rather than to make money. Whatever income they receive goes to things like bills, staff salaries, etc. There aren't any investors wailing for profits.
So now tell me, what model does open source fit into better: making money, or providing a service to the community?
Nowadays when I hear of some company or another having an IPO or otherwise doing things to get noticed and attract investors, I get nervous. We've all seen lots of enterprises with great potential going down the tubes like a greek tragedy because the people running the show were either stupid, greedy, lazy, crazy, dishonest, or some strange mixture of all of the above. Nothing will kill off honest effort and hard work faster than easy money. It is also difficult sometimes to keep your perspective and know that long term success means continuing to do the kinds of things that made you successful in the first place. Hate them or dispise them, this is the lesson that Bill Gates and the rest of Microsoft didn't forget. The company is just as aggressive and today as it was years ago when it was but one company among many and there was no clear winner in sight. Open source companies that are successful must have an equal level of discipline. I hope that Mandrakesoft has that, because I've always liked their distribution. It's made for newbies and clueless types, but those are the exact people we need to be making Linux more useful to.
People who are whining about how they don't want open source to gain ground because of something the BSA is doing remind me of people in the military who didn't want the US to have snipers. In both world wars and in Korea we had to throw together a sniper training program when we realized that the enemy had snipers and that they were highly effective. The reason we had to throw a program together each time is that the brass would do away with the sniper schools as soon as the wars were over. It wasn't until Vietnam that our armed forces finally got it through their thick heads that any advantage you can get over the enemy by any means is a good thing. Moral victories don't mean shit. If you see an opening, you go for it. If you have an advantage, you press it. Playing "fair" is fine for sports and other competitive activities. When it comes to combative activities however, you don't play around and you leave your sentimentalism at the door.
Similar to the species of computer user who responds to requests for help with something along the lines of "You stupid #$@$! Can't you figure it out!?" is the user who says something along the lines of "XYZ is better than ABC!! You're an XYZ loser!" In other words, I'm talking about Mac zealots.
Up until 1996 I was completely agnostic about Macs. I'd never really used one since they first came out in 1984. I used PC's because that was what was there to use. I had no notions of one platform being superior to the other, just different. But then I had some run-ins with a few Mac culties and my opinions really changed. The first one I came accross I thought was just a lone nutcase, and not indicative of anything. But then I ran into another, and another, and soon came to realize that there were thousands of religious zealots bent on pissing everyone off who wasn't one of them. That was when I really looked at the mac. I figured that if all these people were so passionate about them, then there must be something to what they are saying. I soon determined that all those people had about as much of a clue as the people living at Jonestown did when they drank the cool-aid.
Today I do everything I can to get macs removed from our organization. I know this isn't wholly rational, but it is a direct result of being repeatedly assaulted by loony Mac types. There are plenty of reasons to hold the company and their platform in utter disdain, but its the actions of these so called "advocates" that inspired the deep hatred I sometimes feel.
Do we want that for Linux? Apple has a pitiful market share, and I believe that it is in no small part due to the behavior of zealous Mac users. I've seen plenty of the same behavior from fellow Linux users, and been on the recieving end of it from FreeBSD and Gnome users.
If we want Linux to become more popular, we can't go around attacking those in whom we would like to create an interest in the plantform. Riding around on a high horse and acting superior doesn't do anything but make people think we are jackasses.
Linux is a grassroots development. But to evolve beyond where it has and move out into the mainstream consciousness, it HAS to have GOOD PR. When people do the kinds of things CmdrTaco described, they might as well be getting a paycheck from Microsoft. I guarantee you that seeing a Linux user act in an abusive juvenile fashion is enough to fill Gate's and Ballmer's hearts with sheer joy.
The only way to win is to play nice. Microsoft plays nice. They don't play fair, but then these are not the same things. Microsoft doesn't go out of its way to piss people off. It kisses ass every chance it gets. If we don't learn to do a little of that ourselves as a community, our community is doomed to forever being an exclusive clique.
The thing to remember is that even if you can't help someone with a technical problem, or persuade a company to support a piece of hardware, leaving them with good feelings about you as a person will translate psychologically into good feelings about Linux itself. Every person we make feel good about Linux is a victory. Every person we piss off is a defeat. In both cases the person in question will pass their opinions on to others. So lets be smart and have lots of good PR ok?
How long till people like me start using our second amendment rights to prevent corporations and the government from exploiting us?
I'd love to have a list of all the lobbyists behind the DMCA, any lawyers they had working for them, and especially the legislators that drew up the bill. Then I'd like to line them all up out in a field in some remote location, give them all shovels, and force them to dig their own graves before blowing all their brains out.
I would not do that of course, because it would be utterly counterproductive and only give license to those who would seek to take away our guns, but that doesn't mean that the idea of it doesn't make me smile.
When lawywers are on the endangered species list, the world will be a better place.
Do your part, shoot or hang a lawyer each day. Better yet, go on a shooting spree at the closest law school! You'll be sure to kill off lots of them, and before they get a chance to create problems like the DMCA or CDA or COPA or you name it.
Acutally come to think of it politicians were in on all that too, so lets be sure and kill them off too.
(If you think I'm serious then you're too crazy to be reading slashdot)
Slashdot Mirror
MUST?????
While there are many things in life that I MUST do, obey the law is not one of them. I think you're a bit confused about the meaning of the word must. Eating is a must, breathing is a must, doing what the state tells me to is not.
Lee
I don't think that Bush could have a better cabinet to wage a war on terrorists and the nations that sponsor them. As for going after Iraq, the only real reason we'd have to do that is if we had credible evidence that it and/or Saddam Hussein were behind this attack or sponsoring terrorists in general. After we are finished with the middle east, terrorism will be nothing but a bad dream, as will the conflict between the Israelis and the rest of the region. After we are done the people of that region are no longer going to be forced to live under regimes such as the taliban. Afghanistan is not going to be the targe of a war against the afghani people, rather we are going to do away with the Taliban and then work to help the afghani people with food and other aid. In the end we are going to rescue that country more than conquer it. I for on couldn't be happier about it.
Lee
Why are so many people so foolish and short sighted? Banning free communication does nothing to thwart or eliminate evil deeds. I hate what terrorists have done to us as much as the next person, but we can't use that as an excuse to attack the public. So what if someone is asking for voluneers to become terrorists, I would think the fact that this was done in a public forum would provide law enforcement with valuable leads. Adding restrictions on what people can say because a few nuts are out there doesn't do anything to stop or kill the nuts, it just disenfrancishes the rest of us.
Lee
I don't know much about TCU, but the name Texas "Christian" University is enough to spook my all by itself. How much you want to bet that part of the reason this was developed was because someone there would like to see the Volstead act reinstated? Lets not forget that it was "christian" busybodies that brought us prohbition in the first place along with all of its resulting problems, organized crime not least among them.
Lee
The whole "make money off services" line seems more and more like a lame excuse as time goes by. I'm just about convinced that it is simply the best response someone could come up with when challenged to show how anyone can make money off something they give away.
Imagine something like this....
Gnubert: "Free software is the way to go!"
$uit: "Free? What do you mean by that?"
Gnubert: "I mean free, we give it away and anyone can use it for whatever they want while improving it themselves"
$uit: Mumbles to himself something about Haight Ashbury and LSD. "Uhm.. Well how do you expect anyone to make money doing this? After all, we are running a business here. We'd all like to get paid and ultimately turn a profit, so just how do you suggest we do this?"
Gnubert:"Uhmm.......well....hmmm...um.. I know! We can provide services to our customers that we charge for! We give away the software and then provide support contracts and other services that we can use to make money!"
$uit: "Well if the software is supposed to be so good, why does anyone need support from us? Also, whats to stop other companies from competing with us? Not to mention the fact that providing services costs money, do you really expect us to be able to make enough money from services to offset the loss created by developing the software itself?"
Gnubert: "That's just it, we don't have to pay to develop it. Hackers will work for free because they believe in the Truth of Free Software, amen. Now.. if you'll just invest some money in our new company, FreeRiderProblem.com, we can get busy making new software to give away. We'll make the evil rat bastards at MickeySoft wish they'd stuck to selling basic interpreters! They shall pay!!!!!!!!!"
$uit: "I don't care about that, I just want to make some money here, got it?"
Gnubert: "But you don't understand, MickeySoft is out to steal your soul! At this very instant the company has people working to figure out how to enslave you! They want to own and control everything. Their leader eats the brains of children and bathes in their urine! WE must stop......own us all....monopoly......kill....."
$uit: Quietly slips away as quickly as he can....
........Sound familiar?
Ideologies only work in the minds of those who follow them. In the real world facts and natural laws dictate what goes on. We can seek to discover those laws and use them to our advantage, or we can try to force our ideologies into the picture like someone trying to force the wrong piece into a jigsaw puzzle.
Which are you going to do?
Lee Reynolds
(Go ahead, mod me down because you don't agree with me.)
The problem with the whole business about computers taking over the world / Skynet is watching you is this: Artificial intelligence is not the same thing as an artificial personality. Even if it were, why must we create a human type personality?
Our only understanding of intelligence is human intelligence. We tend to think that for something to have intelligence that it must think as we do and therefore have a similar motivational structure.
These motivational structures exist because they assist human survival more often than not, or assist it in critical situations. The also have unfortunate side effects, which is the reason many are a double edged swords. Greed, jealousy, rage, hatred, love, compassion, friendship, etc, are all human emotions or states of mind. A computerized intelligence would not have to be created with a capacity for any of these things. Therefore the study of its behavior would be an independent subject from human psychology. Claiming that a machine intelligence would eventually enslave mankind is hasty at best. We have no understanding of what the psychology of an intelligent computer would be, and therefore no model by which to predict its behavior.
Lee
Great post, but I don't think most people understood the spirit in which it was written.
Lee
Computers for kids, great idea. But now what are all the fearful and anxious adults going to do to control how those computers are used? What are they going to do about the kids who use their computers to trade music, games, and (gasp) porn?
The only thing worse than kids not having access to computers and the information and knowledge they unlock is for that access to be controlled or otherwise abridged, and yes that includes access to things that are sexually explicit. The world would be a much better place if our civilization didn't have this neurotic relationship with sex. Porn is harmless unless it is a person's sole or primary source of information about sex.
Porn is used as the universal excuse for denying access to information. That wouldn't be so bad if it were actually harmful to anyone. The fact that it isn't just makes the lies it is used to defend that much more bitter.
I'm 28 years old by the way.
Lee
The point that was made is not that religion is truthful in its content. The point is that it is a very powerful tool for socialization and ensuring the future of our civilization by preserving the quality of our citizens.
Religion is a con, plain and simple. Anyone who says that they know and understand the mind and will of God is a fool at best. Especially since the supposed source of this insight, the bible, is hardly what I would call an authoritative source. The mythology of the Jews is no more convincing to me than that of the Greeks and Romans. Even so, that does not mean that the con is without merit. Religion has always been a form of mind control whereby those who are unable to think for themselves and understand right from wrong are kept from causing too much trouble. At least in peace time. In war time religion is used to direct and focus the wrath of a nation towards the destruction of its enemies. In the case of child rearing, religion is used to instill the kind of virtues and qualities that make for a more peaceful and productive society.
This is all very dishonest of course, but just how else do you keep the rabble from making rubble of your nation or society? Lock them up? How do you justify the incarceration of someone based on the trouble they are expected to cause, rather than the trouble they have caused?
So the question of religion in schools has nothing to do with whether one religion is more valid than another, they're all BS. Or with the separation of church and state since that policy simply means that the church and state don't control one another. It has to do with whether or not our society benefits from having its less intelligent members be brainwashed so as to keep them in line.
Lee
Having stored proceedures in any language is better than not having them. The advantages of them are that they can be readily used by other programs, and they don't have to be compiled to be run, so they are faster. Since perl is an interpreted language I'd suspect that the latter benefit is lost. So what I'm hoping for is the future inclusion of stored proceedures written in SQL itself like what is offered in other DBMS systems.
Lee
Gil Amelio is the one who opened the door for the mac clones, he didn't close it. Steve Jobs did away with the clones. He also killed off the Newton in a fit of juvenile revenge simply because it was the brainchild of John Scully. He did this in spite of the fact that it was a successful product that makes a palm pilot look like a bad joke. It used an arm processor, which is incidentally the same CPU family that palm is being moved over to. Coincidence?
Apple didn't buy Next because NextStep could run existing Mac apps, or even because it would be easier to get it to. They bought it because Gassee wanted more money for Be than they were willing to pay, and Jobs was more than happy to sell. At the time that Next was bought, it was no better suited to running MacOS apps than Be was, it was just cheaper. Apple had dumped a boatload of money into Copland and then discovered that they couldn't make it run existing MacOS apps without running a copy of the old MacOS in a virtual machine ala vmware. Why they ever thought Next or Be could any better I don't know. Even now in OS-X you run an entire instance of MacOS-9 when you run classic apps.
Personally I don't think Apple matters one bit. The reasons are many but they all boil down to the fact that the company has not had its act together for as long as I can remember. The mark of Steve Jobs' personality runs as deep in Apple as the mark of Bill Gate's personality does at Microsoft. Apple is like a intellectually gifted but emotionally immature adolescent that refuses to accept that the world is not as it wants it to be. That does things that it claims are attempts to compete or excel when in fact they are thinly veiled assaults on the way things are, assaults that ammount to nothing more than the company throwing itself on sharp rocks...again. The truth of Apple is that it is a failed monopoly. The position that Microsoft holds through and understanding of how things work is the same exact position that Apple thought it could gain by changing how things work. Steve Jobs summed up Apple best when he said to John Scully, "Do you want to sell sugar water all your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" That kind of mentality, that you have some kind of high purpose behind what you are doing, is exactly the kind of attitude that makes you sacrifice what is practical and pragmatic because it threatens the purity of your vision. In a situation where there is no opposition or competition this doesn't matter, but that isn't exactly how the computer industry works now is it?
I'm personally amazed that the company is still in business. Part of the reason they are is that Microsoft worked to keep the company around as token competition. Now that doing so won't help protect them from anti-trust litigation I don't know that they're going to do anything to keep apple afloat anymore. I mean do you really think that Office was ported to the Mac because it was profitable? It was ported to make the mac a viable competitor to the PC, but a competitor they could control. Of course there is always the fact that by porting Office they pre-empted another company from creating a viable office suite for the Mac, one that could then be ported to the PC. By having mac users use Office, it is easy to move them to a PC once Apple has dropped from the tree so to speak.
Lee
Fuck the UN. We've don't owe any allegiance to this would be precursor to a singular world government. We're going to do what is in our best interest and if the UN doesn't like it, they can kiss our ass.
Lee
What you're doing is an example of cooperative multitasking. You choose when you do the context switch and which task you pay attention to next.
The problems start when you're forced to do pre-emptive multitasking. This is what happens when you're busy trying to do one thing while the phone is constantly ringing, people are coming and asking you questions, or any number of other distractions are vieing for your attention. It is at this point that productivity plummits because you're spending 75% of your time dealing with bullshit. I once worked as a tech at Fry's Electronics and that is the exact kind of thing I had to deal with. Here I was supposed to be fixing customer's computers but I wasn't able to do that because Fry's wouldn't hire enough people to handle things like customers at the counter, processing returns, etc. etc. I quit that job and I hope I never have another one like it.
Lee
Didn't want people tinkering around under the hood? Exsqueeze me? The original II and II+ shipped with shchematics and a complete dump of the roms. The case top popped right off and lets not forget the 8 expansion slots that Woz demanded the machine have.
It wasn't until the Mac came out that Apple took on the attitude that it didn't want you messing around inside the machine. You can thank old Steve Jobs for that nonsense.
Lee
You're thinking of the computers that Steve Jobs takes credit for creating, the Macs. You are right, they are overpriced and underpowered. I wouldn't call them junk, because most are well made from an engineering standpoint (hardware that is).
The Apple II series on the other hand, were wonderful computers. I've still got the II+ that I got way back in 1978. It's in my closet, wrapped up in plastic, but it still works. The II's were great because they were an open architecture (unlike the macintoy) and anyone could create accessories and cards for them. I remember back in the late 80's my high school had a IIe with a SCSI hard drive and CDROM, not bad for a design originally created back when Starsky and Hutch was still on the air. It didn't have internet access, but who did in 1987?
In many ways the modern PC is an example of what can happen to a unimpressive platform that has enough money thrown at it. The original PC was no better than the Apple II. The first "five slot" pc shipped with 16 to 64k of memory, no hard drive,a mono text only video card (no bitmapped graphics), and a cassette interface of all things, the floppy drive for it held 160k and was an option. By the time the "eight slot" XT had come out a couple of years later floppies were standard, the motherboard could hold up to 640k, 4/16 color CGA graphics was available, a ten meg hard drive was a common option, and the floppies would do 360k. The platform continued to grow and expand from there because it was popular and IBM kept trying to improve their "branded" PC to keep up with the cloners.
So don't forget that your Athlon/PIII/P4 can trace its roots all the way back to a metal box with an 4.77Mhz 8088 processor and 16k of memory, which itself was influenced in no small way by the open architecture of the Apple II. The PC was a radical departure for IBM, up until then everything had been closed and proprietary and done in house as much as possible. With the PC they used off the shelf parts and created an open and viabrant design that hit the ground running, just like the Apple II did.
Lee
Apple I processor from Motorola?
The Apple I used a MOS 6502, just like the Apple II/II+/III and early IIe's and IIc's did. Later IIe's and IIc's used the 65c02 and the IIgs used the 65816.
The chip that you're actually thinking of is the Motorola 68000, which was used in many different systems including the early macs, Amigas, Atari ST's, etc. etc. as well as the Sun box you've got.
The 6502 was indirectly derived from the architecture of the Motorola 6800 (note 2 zero's, not three) whereas the 68000 was inspired by DEC's VAX architecture.
The justice department and the courts have not been able to find a solution to the Microsoft problem. Even M$'s competititors have failed miserably.
At this point only group of people can save us....this is a job for Ted Kaczynski and the Trench Coat Mafia!
I think it is really funny how some suits are complaining that the internet "doesn't follow economic laws." Think about that for a moment, if we discovered something that didn't follow the laws of physics, we'd quickly go back to the drawing board because it would be obvious that our understanding of physics was flawed. Not so with business types I guess.
The greatest strenght of the intenet is its decentralized nature. It reminds me of the form of govenrment the founding fathers tried to create, one where no one person or group had too much control and anything that one group did could be countered by the others.
So now some suits don't like the fact that they can't exploit people online they way they have been able to do traditionally. Well boo fucking hoo. There is plenty of money to be made online, just look at Amazon or Ebay.
Lee
The open source model has never been about making money. The only thing it has ever been about is making better code, and making code that others could improve as well. It is a perfect example of true communism (not the enforced socialist oppression we normally call communism). Now I'm not a Marxist, but neither am I strictly a capitalist. Economic ideologies aren't an ideological issue for me. I'm a libertarian by nature and as such believe in freedom. If freedom can exist within the context of true communism then great, I have no problem with that. But that doesn't mean I'm foolish enough to think that the communism that is open source can be a viable capitalist enterprise.
A one point a lot of people of questionable intelligence and even more questionable awareness saw Linux as the next big thing. So they invested a boatload of money into companies without understanding that these companies were trying to make money off something that was not an economic good in the strictest sense.
While it may be possible to make some money off open source, I seriously doubt that more than a handful of people are going to make a lot of money off it. When this fact has been raised, the open source/free software community has generally responded very poorly. Rather than acknowledging this fact we have instead spent our efforts trying to pander to potential investors and generally fool everyone, especially ourselves, into thinking that open source companies can make a lot of money.
It is true that Redhat is in the black now, at least on paper. But imagine if Linux were a traditional product and that it enjoyed the level of popularity that it does right now, Redhat would be like Apple was in the late 70's, a fairy tale success story. There is a question of course of whether Linux would be this popular if it were a commercial product created and marketed by one company, but my example was a hypothetical one.
The truth is that open source companies would fare better in the long run as non profit enterprises. Non profit companies exist to provide a valuable service to the community rather than to make money. Whatever income they receive goes to things like bills, staff salaries, etc. There aren't any investors wailing for profits.
So now tell me, what model does open source fit into better: making money, or providing a service to the community?
Lee
Nowadays when I hear of some company or another having an IPO or otherwise doing things to get noticed and attract investors, I get nervous. We've all seen lots of enterprises with great potential going down the tubes like a greek tragedy because the people running the show were either stupid, greedy, lazy, crazy, dishonest, or some strange mixture of all of the above. Nothing will kill off honest effort and hard work faster than easy money. It is also difficult sometimes to keep your perspective and know that long term success means continuing to do the kinds of things that made you successful in the first place. Hate them or dispise them, this is the lesson that Bill Gates and the rest of Microsoft didn't forget. The company is just as aggressive and today as it was years ago when it was but one company among many and there was no clear winner in sight. Open source companies that are successful must have an equal level of discipline. I hope that Mandrakesoft has that, because I've always liked their distribution. It's made for newbies and clueless types, but those are the exact people we need to be making Linux more useful to.
Lee
People who are whining about how they don't want open source to gain ground because of something the BSA is doing remind me of people in the military who didn't want the US to have snipers. In both world wars and in Korea we had to throw together a sniper training program when we realized that the enemy had snipers and that they were highly effective. The reason we had to throw a program together each time is that the brass would do away with the sniper schools as soon as the wars were over. It wasn't until Vietnam that our armed forces finally got it through their thick heads that any advantage you can get over the enemy by any means is a good thing. Moral victories don't mean shit. If you see an opening, you go for it. If you have an advantage, you press it. Playing "fair" is fine for sports and other competitive activities. When it comes to combative activities however, you don't play around and you leave your sentimentalism at the door.
Since all of the alternative you've mentioned are inferior to your standard PC, why do you feel the need for an alternative?
Similar to the species of computer user who responds to requests for help with something along the lines of "You stupid #$@$! Can't you figure it out!?" is the user who says something along the lines of "XYZ is better than ABC!! You're an XYZ loser!" In other words, I'm talking about Mac zealots.
Up until 1996 I was completely agnostic about Macs. I'd never really used one since they first came out in 1984. I used PC's because that was what was there to use. I had no notions of one platform being superior to the other, just different. But then I had some run-ins with a few Mac culties and my opinions really changed. The first one I came accross I thought was just a lone nutcase, and not indicative of anything. But then I ran into another, and another, and soon came to realize that there were thousands of religious zealots bent on pissing everyone off who wasn't one of them. That was when I really looked at the mac. I figured that if all these people were so passionate about them, then there must be something to what they are saying. I soon determined that all those people had about as much of a clue as the people living at Jonestown did when they drank the cool-aid.
Today I do everything I can to get macs removed from our organization. I know this isn't wholly rational, but it is a direct result of being repeatedly assaulted by loony Mac types. There are plenty of reasons to hold the company and their platform in utter disdain, but its the actions of these so called "advocates" that inspired the deep hatred I sometimes feel.
Do we want that for Linux? Apple has a pitiful market share, and I believe that it is in no small part due to the behavior of zealous Mac users. I've seen plenty of the same behavior from fellow Linux users, and been on the recieving end of it from FreeBSD and Gnome users.
If we want Linux to become more popular, we can't go around attacking those in whom we would like to create an interest in the plantform. Riding around on a high horse and acting superior doesn't do anything but make people think we are jackasses.
Linux is a grassroots development. But to evolve beyond where it has and move out into the mainstream consciousness, it HAS to have GOOD PR. When people do the kinds of things CmdrTaco described, they might as well be getting a paycheck from Microsoft. I guarantee you that seeing a Linux user act in an abusive juvenile fashion is enough to fill Gate's and Ballmer's hearts with sheer joy.
The only way to win is to play nice. Microsoft plays nice. They don't play fair, but then these are not the same things. Microsoft doesn't go out of its way to piss people off. It kisses ass every chance it gets. If we don't learn to do a little of that ourselves as a community, our community is doomed to forever being an exclusive clique.
The thing to remember is that even if you can't help someone with a technical problem, or persuade a company to support a piece of hardware, leaving them with good feelings about you as a person will translate psychologically into good feelings about Linux itself. Every person we make feel good about Linux is a victory. Every person we piss off is a defeat. In both cases the person in question will pass their opinions on to others. So lets be smart and have lots of good PR ok?
Lee
How long till people like me start using our second amendment rights to prevent corporations and the government from exploiting us?
I'd love to have a list of all the lobbyists behind the DMCA, any lawyers they had working for them, and especially the legislators that drew up the bill. Then I'd like to line them all up out in a field in some remote location, give them all shovels, and force them to dig their own graves before blowing all their brains out.
I would not do that of course, because it would be utterly counterproductive and only give license to those who would seek to take away our guns, but that doesn't mean that the idea of it doesn't make me smile.
When lawywers are on the endangered species list, the world will be a better place.
Do your part, shoot or hang a lawyer each day. Better yet, go on a shooting spree at the closest law school! You'll be sure to kill off lots of them, and before they get a chance to create problems like the DMCA or CDA or COPA or you name it.
Acutally come to think of it politicians were in on all that too, so lets be sure and kill them off too.
(If you think I'm serious then you're too crazy to be reading slashdot)
Lee