Are you kidding? I'm afraid of kids going to school and re-enacting the light-saber fights with their sporks.
Jar Jar was not for kids (they won't understand 10% of what he was saying anyhow), he was just for comic relief, just like C3P0 in the original series (about the only useful things 3P0 did was interpret for Jaba and awe a bunch of overgrown teddy bears). He was overdone, I think most people acknowledge that. Oh well, let's hope Lucas learns his leason and tones the comic relief down in the next episodes.
But I wouldn't change Maul a bit. He uttered his one mysterious line (revenge for what?), then proceeded to act as the silent, personal assassin of Sidious, as he was supposed to be. We're not supposed to care about Maul as we were about Vader, just that he's a ruthless fighter full of hatred for the Jedi and intent on their downfall. If we're supposed to think of Maul as a ferocious Sith warrior bent on the annihilation of the Jedi and the servitude of his master Sidious, then how would a dialogue between him and Qui Gon help out any? I like the silent efficiency of Darth Maul. What we don't know about him adds to his character, not detracts from it. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
How many kids do you think are buying up the new TPM toys? I think, right now at least, they are being bought up by speculative collectors who wanna make some money off the franchise. It's like those evil Beanie Babies parents who get the Beanie Babies, not so their kids can play with them (god forbid!) but so they can sell them off at auctions for 100 times their value. In moderation, that's fine, but overall, those people make me sick, and they get all the unenjoyment of the movie they deserve.
As someone who actually played with Star Wars figures back in the 80s (and who owns no Beanie Babies but has purchased them for his little siblings to play with), I must say, I loved TPM, it's annoying nuances (ahem...Jar Jar) aside. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
That's dependant on the ftp server, smartie. I doubt a WinNT ftp server would be able to tar directories for you. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Neither has 3DFX. AFAIK that goes through Glide, which is a binary-only interface to the Voodoo hardware. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I can't find what Rob is referencing about the Anonymous Coward deal. The only two anonymous quotes I see are referred as "Slashdot reader" and "anonymous reader". I don't see the big deal. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
"Not sure why exactly KDE isn't in the shuffle"
on
CDE vs Gnome
·
· Score: 1
How about if the reviewer just didn't have the time or the will to try it? In fact, he gives his personal reasons for not using KDE himself. But from the depth of his analysis into the two desktops he did research it would have been alot more work to also review KDE. And then, of course, people would be shouting "where's GNUStep?"
In other words, you can't win. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Had you read the whole article you'd have seen that "in 1996 [he was awarded] an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden." -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
The GPL protects the property of the developer. The developer owns the code, remember, and it is his or her choice as to whether the code should be freely exchanged or kept proprietary.
Let's say I own a home (completely). It's my right to let people into my house without allowing them to sell my house out from under me. The only difference is that with the internet, I have a house that millions may visit with no discomfort on my part (aside from bandwidth).
You're right, the Stallman model of free software is absolutely socialist. But that in and of itself does not mean that it's evil. Emergency care in America is socialist (care is given according to need, and the cost is shifted to those who able to pay it). Many utilities are socialist in nature, in order to ensure coverage.
I am a libertarian at heart, but I recognize that capitalism has its appropriate uses, and socialism has its own appropriate uses. What is the factor of socialism which makes it fail in an industrial economiy? It is a distribution-centric model, and as a result, production suffers (whereas capitalism is a production-centric model where distribution suffers). Well, information already modifies the typical supply and demand capitalist model, because once created, it can be reproduced at will for almost no cost. The costs associated with distribution, such as shrink-wrapped boxes, storage media, etc. are handled in the capitalist model (this is why Red Hat charges $40 for a RH 5.2 box). Cost of production, aside from initial developer cost, is virtually null. Therefore, following even the supply and demand model, the price will be virtually zero (because supply is infitately greater than demand).
The question then is, how to account for developer cost. Well, using Red Hat as a model, some of that may come from the company charging for distribution. Without production, there can be no distribution, and so it is in their interest to make sure that production continues. This cost will be recouped in the distribution charge. In the more common case, however, there is no direct compensation for the developer. The developer devotes his or her free time and effort to the product. His compensation is often a completed product, which may not be possible without sharing the source code and allowing the product to be developed and tested by other people in a free software model. Sometimes, the compensation is more indirect (for instance, developing a killer app which will get more people to use the OS, which will mean more potential developers and testers as well as more interest from other developers targetting the new users, which means more potential support for the platform you're using). -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Cygnus is probably closer to doing what you're doing, however Cygnus makes significant contributions to free software (they also have proprietary software as well). They not only sell products (both proprietary and free) to end-users, like Linux distributors do, but they offer support contracts, even for free software like egcs. For instance, Corel has just recently hired Cygnus to modify the egcs compiler in ways of particular interest to Corel. Those modifications will be offered (although they may not be accepted) to the egcs team, for incorporation into the standard compiler.
The biggest misconception of free software (as opposed to "open source", which is free software stripped of its moral undertones) is that it is supposed to benefit the developer. It benefits the user (who often is the developer too).
Aside from adopting a Cygnus-like model there probably isn't much room for free software in your company. Free software is about comodity software. It represents what people need to get the basics done, and the successful free software (like Apache, Bind, Sendmail, Linux) represents software that enough people needed that it becomes ubiquitous. When you're doing support for proprietary software, or developing software for proprietary systems that only a select few will need, then chances are not only is free software not going to give you any gain, it won't give much to the community either.
Think of it this way: if someone could own the air we breath, they would have a great business because people need to breath air and therefore they will pay an arm and a leg to get it. As the air owner, you will naturally be opposed to making the air free, and will question the benefits of any model which includes free air. You want to maintain your monopoly on air. But the rest of the people recognize that such a model isn't a good idea, that air should be free, so that people can breathe without having to pay you for the privilege. Similarly, applications need OSes and utility programs; networks need communication and routing protocols; etc. etc. When the need is strong enough, someone will develop a commodity solution for that need, in the form of free software. While some business models can make money from such commodity software, most can't. It simply isn't going to happen.
You cite the GPL, but the GPL is quite a different beast than say, the BSD or FreeBSD licenses. The GPL (and to a lesser extent, the LGPL) has particular provisions which were introduced specifically to make sure that the GPL'd software does not become de-commoditized, as can, and often does, happen with non-copylefted licences like the BSD and FreeBSD licenses. You ask "Why commoditize in the first place?", so choice of free software license is irrelevant. Others, however, once commoditizing their software, ask "What do I do after commoditizing?" and that's where choice of license becomes an issue. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
mirror will be up at fragglerock.linuxpower.org
on
Star Wars Trailer #2
·
· Score: 1
You might wanna check your date on that machine. It says the files were uploaded March 9, 199*8*. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I doubt WINE is going to change their license based on what TWINE does. TWINE is a seperate product which will use code from WINE, correct? -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
WINE is more than a binary emulator, it too is a library to allow porting of Windows sources. That's the intened usage for Corel's future WINE-based projects. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Well if the GPL were found invalid in court, then there would be no license on the code and the person owning the copyright would retain all rights to its distribution. Therefore, MS (or any other entity) still couldn't "steal" GPL'd work. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I've never had it happen to me. Very often I've had panel crash (actually, usually it crashes before it comes up), yet gnome-session is alive and well. gnome-session is the last thing in my.xinitrc (actually, I start gnome-session in the background with & then get its PID and at the end of.xinitrc I have 'wait SESSIONPID'; seems to work better that way). As long as gnome-session doesn't die, you're fine. The panel can actually be killed without affecting gnome-session; but if you choose Logout from the panel, it sends a message to gnome-session to quit, hence your X server quits (assuming that's the last thing in your.xinitrc).
That's been my experience, anyway. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Isn't that the goal of every PC maker too? Sony won't be able to mass produce at that scale at first, because since they lose money on every console system, the costs would just be prohibitive. Mass production can only save you so much; but the systems are still more expensive to produce than they are sold for.
That's why companies fight so hard to force game makers to pay for licenses (through royalties). Remember the big Nintendo/Tengen dispute? Licensing is their primary source of revenue (just as movie theater's primary source of revenue isn't the movies but the food they sell). -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Change it into a corner panel. Then it will exist at one corner of the screen, vertical or horizontal, and only take up as much space as is needed for the buttons, applets, docked apps, etc. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
OpenLook is more than a window manager
on
GNOME 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
It is a widget set too, and simplicity or no, the OpenLook widgets are not only ugly but hard to use. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
The fact is that most programmers don't make any money writing free software. Many have jobs in the commercial world, and they donate some (or all) of their free time to producing free software. A few lucky souls are actually paid to work on free software by companies (for instance, Corel's WINE developers, Red Hat's RHAD labs people, Transmeta's numerous kernel writers).
Any individual who plans on making money soley for free software is nuts. Just as Bob Young implied, Red Hat doesn't make money off of Linux per se, but off their brand name, convenience of shrink-wrapped packaging and their value-added services such as organization and technical support. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet he introduces a virgin birth?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Are you kidding? I'm afraid of kids going to school and re-enacting the light-saber fights with their sporks.
Jar Jar was not for kids (they won't understand 10% of what he was saying anyhow), he was just for comic relief, just like C3P0 in the original series (about the only useful things 3P0 did was interpret for Jaba and awe a bunch of overgrown teddy bears). He was overdone, I think most people acknowledge that. Oh well, let's hope Lucas learns his leason and tones the comic relief down in the next episodes.
But I wouldn't change Maul a bit. He uttered his one mysterious line (revenge for what?), then proceeded to act as the silent, personal assassin of Sidious, as he was supposed to be. We're not supposed to care about Maul as we were about Vader, just that he's a ruthless fighter full of hatred for the Jedi and intent on their downfall. If we're supposed to think of Maul as a ferocious Sith warrior bent on the annihilation of the Jedi and the servitude of his master Sidious, then how would a dialogue between him and Qui Gon help out any? I like the silent efficiency of Darth Maul. What we don't know about him adds to his character, not detracts from it.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
How many kids do you think are buying up the new TPM toys? I think, right now at least, they are being bought up by speculative collectors who wanna make some money off the franchise. It's like those evil Beanie Babies parents who get the Beanie Babies, not so their kids can play with them (god forbid!) but so they can sell them off at auctions for 100 times their value. In moderation, that's fine, but overall, those people make me sick, and they get all the unenjoyment of the movie they deserve.
As someone who actually played with Star Wars figures back in the 80s (and who owns no Beanie Babies but has purchased them for his little siblings to play with), I must say, I loved TPM, it's annoying nuances (ahem...Jar Jar) aside.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Especially considering he built a godamned droid! That ain't like puttin together a workstation folks.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Or the Sahara Desert
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
That's dependant on the ftp server, smartie. I doubt a WinNT ftp server would be able to tar directories for you.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Neither has 3DFX. AFAIK that goes through Glide, which is a binary-only interface to the Voodoo hardware.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I can't find what Rob is referencing about the Anonymous Coward deal. The only two anonymous quotes I see are referred as "Slashdot reader" and "anonymous reader". I don't see the big deal.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
How about if the reviewer just didn't have the time or the will to try it? In fact, he gives his personal reasons for not using KDE himself. But from the depth of his analysis into the two desktops he did research it would have been alot more work to also review KDE. And then, of course, people would be shouting "where's GNUStep?"
In other words, you can't win.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Had you read the whole article you'd have seen that "in 1996 [he was awarded] an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden."
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Apple is the Italy to Microsoft's Germany. They are inconsequential, but just as ambitios.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
The GPL protects the property of the developer. The developer owns the code, remember, and it is his or her choice as to whether the code should be freely exchanged or kept proprietary.
Let's say I own a home (completely). It's my right to let people into my house without allowing them to sell my house out from under me. The only difference is that with the internet, I have a house that millions may visit with no discomfort on my part (aside from bandwidth).
You're right, the Stallman model of free software is absolutely socialist. But that in and of itself does not mean that it's evil. Emergency care in America is socialist (care is given according to need, and the cost is shifted to those who able to pay it). Many utilities are socialist in nature, in order to ensure coverage.
I am a libertarian at heart, but I recognize that capitalism has its appropriate uses, and socialism has its own appropriate uses. What is the factor of socialism which makes it fail in an industrial economiy? It is a distribution-centric model, and as a result, production suffers (whereas capitalism is a production-centric model where distribution suffers). Well, information already modifies the typical supply and demand capitalist model, because once created, it can be reproduced at will for almost no cost. The costs associated with distribution, such as shrink-wrapped boxes, storage media, etc. are handled in the capitalist model (this is why Red Hat charges $40 for a RH 5.2 box). Cost of production, aside from initial developer cost, is virtually null. Therefore, following even the supply and demand model, the price will be virtually zero (because supply is infitately greater than demand).
The question then is, how to account for developer cost. Well, using Red Hat as a model, some of that may come from the company charging for distribution. Without production, there can be no distribution, and so it is in their interest to make sure that production continues. This cost will be recouped in the distribution charge. In the more common case, however, there is no direct compensation for the developer. The developer devotes his or her free time and effort to the product. His compensation is often a completed product, which may not be possible without sharing the source code and allowing the product to be developed and tested by other people in a free software model. Sometimes, the compensation is more indirect (for instance, developing a killer app which will get more people to use the OS, which will mean more potential developers and testers as well as more interest from other developers targetting the new users, which means more potential support for the platform you're using).
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Cygnus is probably closer to doing what you're doing, however Cygnus makes significant contributions to free software (they also have proprietary software as well). They not only sell products (both proprietary and free) to end-users, like Linux distributors do, but they offer support contracts, even for free software like egcs. For instance, Corel has just recently hired Cygnus to modify the egcs compiler in ways of particular interest to Corel. Those modifications will be offered (although they may not be accepted) to the egcs team, for incorporation into the standard compiler.
The biggest misconception of free software (as opposed to "open source", which is free software stripped of its moral undertones) is that it is supposed to benefit the developer. It benefits the user (who often is the developer too).
Aside from adopting a Cygnus-like model there probably isn't much room for free software in your company. Free software is about comodity software. It represents what people need to get the basics done, and the successful free software (like Apache, Bind, Sendmail, Linux) represents software that enough people needed that it becomes ubiquitous. When you're doing support for proprietary software, or developing software for proprietary systems that only a select few will need, then chances are not only is free software not going to give you any gain, it won't give much to the community either.
Think of it this way: if someone could own the air we breath, they would have a great business because people need to breath air and therefore they will pay an arm and a leg to get it. As the air owner, you will naturally be opposed to making the air free, and will question the benefits of any model which includes free air. You want to maintain your monopoly on air. But the rest of the people recognize that such a model isn't a good idea, that air should be free, so that people can breathe without having to pay you for the privilege. Similarly, applications need OSes and utility programs; networks need communication and routing protocols; etc. etc. When the need is strong enough, someone will develop a commodity solution for that need, in the form of free software. While some business models can make money from such commodity software, most can't. It simply isn't going to happen.
You cite the GPL, but the GPL is quite a different beast than say, the BSD or FreeBSD licenses. The GPL (and to a lesser extent, the LGPL) has particular provisions which were introduced specifically to make sure that the GPL'd software does not become de-commoditized, as can, and often does, happen with non-copylefted licences like the BSD and FreeBSD licenses. You ask "Why commoditize in the first place?", so choice of free software license is irrelevant. Others, however, once commoditizing their software, ask "What do I do after commoditizing?" and that's where choice of license becomes an issue.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
You might wanna check your date on that machine. It says the files were uploaded March 9, 199*8*.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I doubt WINE is going to change their license based on what TWINE does. TWINE is a seperate product which will use code from WINE, correct?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
WINE is more than a binary emulator, it too is a library to allow porting of Windows sources. That's the intened usage for Corel's future WINE-based projects.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Well if the GPL were found invalid in court, then there would be no license on the code and the person owning the copyright would retain all rights to its distribution. Therefore, MS (or any other entity) still couldn't "steal" GPL'd work.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I've never had it happen to me. Very often I've had panel crash (actually, usually it crashes before it comes up), yet gnome-session is alive and well. gnome-session is the last thing in my .xinitrc (actually, I start gnome-session in the background with & then get its PID and at the end of .xinitrc I have 'wait SESSIONPID'; seems to work better that way). As long as gnome-session doesn't die, you're fine. The panel can actually be killed without affecting gnome-session; but if you choose Logout from the panel, it sends a message to gnome-session to quit, hence your X server quits (assuming that's the last thing in your .xinitrc).
That's been my experience, anyway.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Isn't that the goal of every PC maker too? Sony won't be able to mass produce at that scale at first, because since they lose money on every console system, the costs would just be prohibitive. Mass production can only save you so much; but the systems are still more expensive to produce than they are sold for.
That's why companies fight so hard to force game makers to pay for licenses (through royalties). Remember the big Nintendo/Tengen dispute? Licensing is their primary source of revenue (just as movie theater's primary source of revenue isn't the movies but the food they sell).
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
gnome-session is a session manager, not a window manager.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Stop whining you jerk.
How's that?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Change it into a corner panel. Then it will exist at one corner of the screen, vertical or horizontal, and only take up as much space as is needed for the buttons, applets, docked apps, etc.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
It is a widget set too, and simplicity or no, the OpenLook widgets are not only ugly but hard to use.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
The fact is that most programmers don't make any money writing free software. Many have jobs in the commercial world, and they donate some (or all) of their free time to producing free software. A few lucky souls are actually paid to work on free software by companies (for instance, Corel's WINE developers, Red Hat's RHAD labs people, Transmeta's numerous kernel writers).
Any individual who plans on making money soley for free software is nuts. Just as Bob Young implied, Red Hat doesn't make money off of Linux per se, but off their brand name, convenience of shrink-wrapped packaging and their value-added services such as organization and technical support.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
...or the efficiency of Excel95...
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.