What you're referring to is known as Fundamentalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Chris tianity). While it is quite profilic opposition to scientific views in the USA, it is by no means the only way of thought for religious people.
Interesting that you'd denigrate one unfair sweeping generalization by making another.
There are quite a few (million) of us here in this country who have no trouble with that concept. We just don't make a lot of headlines because we generally aren't into making fools of ourselves.
The rest of your point is spot on, of course. I sort of expect right-wingers to push their version of Christianity as the only real kind. However its truly sad to see agnostic liberals helping them. This is the battle the "Christian" right is really fighting when they say all this patently silly stuff. They are just using you to facilitate their attempt to take over all the churches in this country.
And yet, experiments showed that this "aether" did not exist. What did scientists do? They changed their minds.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the aether believers slowly died off, until only the "waveicle" believers were left. Not a lot of people actually changed their minds.
There are some differentiators between science and religion. But between scientists and religious people...not so much.
I don't know if this is one of the known "sleeping disorders", but the second monitor of my Vista rig doesn't like to come back from sleep. Both monitors are identical and were even bought at the same time. When the system wakes, the left monitor shows half my desktop just like normal, but the right stays black.
I found I can fix it fairly easily by "testing out" a new desktop resolution. When it switches resolution, the other screen comes back. I then tell it I don't want the new resolution, and everything works fine.
The most unsettling result from these studies is that human head lice and human pubic lice (crabs) vary so greatly that they are in two separate genera.
1) What is "unsettling" about this? Anyone? No prior deeply held beliefs have been overturned.
There was a point where our human/chimp ancestors were covered with hair like modern chimps. On humans, the hair more or less receded to just our heads and nether regions. At this point, the existing hair-parasites should have started their independent evolutionary tracks.
Instead, we apparently got the public lice straight from the hair lice in gorillas long after this split. Given how humans typically get such lice today, yes, I do find that unsettling. Call me a prude if you like.
They were nice enough to present theories that the lice were acquired by sleeping on recently killed gorilla skins or something.
The GPL is a distribution license. If you're doing anything that causes it to apply to you, you're no longer an "average consumer!"
I'm not trying to pick on you, I've seen something like this said in a couple of places. However, it is simply not true. If it were, then no-one would be able to run the software (as the default in the US is "no rights").
However, it is true that the part of the license that applies to running the software is rather short: "The act of running the Program is not restricted".
Your point about the GPL being more understandable is bang on though. Perhaps sheer size isn't the best indicator, but the GPL (sans preamble and other unrelated fluff) is only about 2k words long, with a total of 12 clauses. The Microsoft XP (Home) EULA (sans identification info, foreign language versions, etc.) is nearly 4k words long, with a total of 30 numbered and subnumbered clauses and 6 more paragraphs.
At the risk of going back on-topic, I notice that 2.3 and 2.4 give the software the right to "phone home" without notice to you.
Except that the (single-source) chips won't be soldered into the motherboard.
On the Amiga, this caused perversions like the blitter (fast memory copying) chip eventually becomming slower than the CPU at copying memory. There was no way to pop in a new faster video chip or blitter chip. If you wanted a better rig, your only recourse was to head over to West Chester and join everyone else in begging Commodore to design one.
I like this modular (co)processor idea way better.
I've been using it on my home rig for a couple of weeks. I got it with a new motherboard. Personally I found most of this article about is meaty as a big ball of fluff. The last guy at least had *some* useful points. However, I think one thing should be corrected:
In contrasting Vista's User Account Control (UAC) nag boxes with Linux's Root authorization, I find that I prefer the Linux way more. I can change the time on my Linux system without having to deal with a UAC-style intrusion, and even if I get a pop-up for some reason, I can continue working on other things -- the system isn't frozen until I accept the prompt. Also, I have to know the Root password; it's not enough to just click "OK" and go on my merry way.
He's right about the modal box, but it doesn't really come up *that* much. Its not *always* modal either. I'm not sure yet what situations cause it to be modal or not. The kinds of things that cause it are attempts to install device drivers or attempts to modify system files. With one exception (NCSoft's stupid unified game launcher) I've never had it pop up when I wasn't installing software. In my book, its always been a good thing. I don't want any software getting installed without my say-so.
His complaint about not being prompted for the root password is flat out wrong. I always get prompted for the root password in Vista when I get one of those challenge dialogs. I love this, as it allows my kids to use the system while I'm at work without allowing them to load it up with spyware from nifty stuff they found online (voice of sad experience here).
It sounds to me like he was running under an administrator account. One of the really nice things about Vista is that you don't *need* to do that anymore. Since you don't need to, you really shouldn't. Most people wouldn't dream of running under "root" on Linux all the time, so compare apples with apples. (You gotta wonder about an "IT professional" who would do this...)
Notice I said "root password" above. One of the nice little new things about Vista is that you get to pick the name of the administrator account. I picked "root". Vista has hard and soft links now too. With a few more decades of work on it, Microsoft might finally produce a decent Unix clone.:-)
Am I the only one that thought all the interviewees were idiots?
I don't know about *all* of them, but I certainly winced when the one person started talking about his own personal "bandwidth". I think he was the same genius who was talking about "showstoppers" as if they were *good* things.
Kinda reminds me of character Daemon Wayins used to play on In Living Color who liked to use big words he couldn't pronounce in totally incorrect context. Someone please stop this IT guy, before he runs for President!
For those who don't wanna bother to RTFA, he starts off by complaining about a specific company claiming to use OSS when its software isn't downloadable, only to have to post this correction:
(update: Vyatta source is in git, though in my defense you can't find this out from their downloads page only the wiki. Their entire product is GPL, so they're as open source as they come. I apologize for misfiring)
This is in paragraph one of a 6 paragraph article. Not a good start.
There is one genuine arguing point, where someone named "Tim" tries to claim that certain software is cool because it embraces and extends Postgres to make it Oracle compatible. Its a silly claim though. If you ditch Oracle for someone else's proprietary Oracle look-alike, what exactly are you gaining? Certainly nothing an Open Source or Free Software advocate cares about.
How the hell did that get mod'ed interesting in a day and age when you have powershell on both XP and Vista available for use which is just as robust as bash.
I'm a pretty much exclusive Windows user, so I got all excited about the wonderful tool I'd never heard of that is just as robust as bash, and set out to find it. Here's what I found:
Its latest version is 1.0. I think Bash passed this milestone something like a decade and a half ago (the 1.14 version is dated 1994). Is a 1.0 version product as robust as a 3.2 version product? Its possible that it has as many features I suppose, but I highly doubt it is more stable.
It doesn't support Win2K. I know that's old, but its what I'm using here at work right this minute. Any really large enterprise (which is where scripting is most needed) is going to have some Win2k systems floating around for a few years yet. Bash runs just fine on Win2k.
Microsoft talks about this wonderful "new scripting language" they made. That worries me a bit. Their track record is to hype up some wonderful new way of doing things, only to dump it 3 years later for some new wonderful way of doing things. There are bash scripts out there over 10 years old that still work fine. Will I have that kind of stability with Powershell scripts that I work weeks to develop and debug? Its possible, but given that Microsoft seems to think newness is a selling point, I'm not exactly overflowing with confidence.
This is what you get when you breed monocultures of plants or animals.
Errr...weren't we talking about bees here? Queen bees reproduce with essentially their own offspring. They are "inbred" by nature. The only genetic variation you will ever find between a queen bee and her mother is via mutation.
Also manages to not know about memset and write C code that assumes sizeof(long)==4 and puts non-inline code in header files.
I've seen several people bag on his use of non-inline code in header files. Is that really considered bad practice? I ask because we have a developer here in who loves to do that. Personally, I dislike the practice, but he has a job teaching C++, so I don't feel like I have the cred to gainsay him.
This is what happens when... you are no longer allowed to beat your kids
How do you figure? The kid clearly didn't care about any punishment given, no matter how harsh. How would a beating have differed?
Really, what you want out of this is someone who doesn't beat up handicapped kids because its f'n WRONG, not because he's worried about the repercussions.
Plus, if *I* had a teenager who weighed 210 and was disturbed as this, I don't think I'd be comfortable at all making my confrontations with him physical. You gotta go to sleep sometime...
(by fair-use I mean being able to play content you legally on whatever device, etc. you wish)
So by "fair-use" you mean something that has nothing to do with Fair Use?
The Fair Use clauses are all about allowing partial reproductions for the purpose of research, criticism, review, and/or parody. It has nothing whatsoever to do with your desire to enjoy a song off a CD you bought on your iPod. Not that this is a bad thing. It just has nothing to do with Fair Use.
"Open Source" never had a halo. It wasn't supposed to. The entire purpose of coining the term was to get away from the quasi-religious elements of Free Software.
Instead, "Open Source" was supposed to be a new management fad. Like all management fads, it had its own logic system which promised untold new productivity if followed slavishly. However, half the fun of management fads is the idea that there's some magic system out there which only you and a select few others have been smart enough to find out about. So what has happened to "Open Source" is that it has become mainstream enough that it doesn't make a very good fad anymore.
If you want a "halo", go back to talking about Free Software.
One thing to note though is that this is a 1-player game. I don't think you can really expect phased combat to ever enter the MMORPG arena.
I've done that in WoW. I ran an elite quest with my wife and 2 others one Sunday evening on a full server that was on its last legs. It got so slow, that we were essentially running phased combat, with about a 2 second window for you to enter your command for the next phase. It was actually quite fun. However, it changed the game quite a bit. For one thing, just about every combat ability could be used every phase (as the cool-downs timers were still the same, as was the mana regen rate). Spells with warm-ups essentially took 2 phases (1 to start the warm-up, and the next to complete it). However, this went for the mobs too, so it was kinda even. If you needed to take a health potion to stay up, there were some nerve-wracking moments while you waited to see if the command took before the mob got in his next attack phase.
but he not only voted for it, he was actually the Co-Sponsor of...
But if you look at his Senate record,...He voted to give....Edwards also voted for...
This is one of the primo reasons why senators don't generally get elected president. If you want your party to win the general election, you should really be supporting a governor or former military leader. You want someone who can talk about things accomplished by the large bureaucracy they ran, not someone who's going to be talking about all the funny looking votes and compromises they made over the last x*6 years.
This is not exactly unique for Amazon. It is quite common that companies send goods to people (mostly registered customers) that they have not ordered, and supply an invoice. People either have to just pay, or to call the company, complain and return the goods.
Later you talk about Sweden, so perhaps you aren't posting from the US. Here that would be illegal. If someone mails you something you didn't ask for, its yours free. That's a federal law.
Your example, when extended to programming, would mean programmers shouldn't get paid for coming up with a useful program, but rather for the act of re-typing the code for others' amusement.
That's how I've made my living for the last 18 years. The same goes for most other employed software engineers. Very few of us actually work on shrink-wrapped EULA software.
I don't think there's been anything you could reasonably call a general Internet outage in the last 15 years.
On 9/11 the entire net got congested to the point of unusablity for a while. The sheer number of people trying to get information at once amounted to the world's biggest DDoS attack.
It didn't help much that our connection here happened to go through the basement of tower 2...
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't, by chance attend Midvale School for the Gifted?
The problem there is that the males look like Michelle Phiffer and the females look like Rutger Hauer.
Interesting that you'd denigrate one unfair sweeping generalization by making another.
There are quite a few (million) of us here in this country who have no trouble with that concept. We just don't make a lot of headlines because we generally aren't into making fools of ourselves.
The rest of your point is spot on, of course. I sort of expect right-wingers to push their version of Christianity as the only real kind. However its truly sad to see agnostic liberals helping them. This is the battle the "Christian" right is really fighting when they say all this patently silly stuff. They are just using you to facilitate their attempt to take over all the churches in this country.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the aether believers slowly died off, until only the "waveicle" believers were left. Not a lot of people actually changed their minds.
There are some differentiators between science and religion. But between scientists and religious people...not so much.
er...you do realize that you shouldn't take the term "joystick" literally?
I don't know if this is one of the known "sleeping disorders", but the second monitor of my Vista rig doesn't like to come back from sleep. Both monitors are identical and were even bought at the same time. When the system wakes, the left monitor shows half my desktop just like normal, but the right stays black.
I found I can fix it fairly easily by "testing out" a new desktop resolution. When it switches resolution, the other screen comes back. I then tell it I don't want the new resolution, and everything works fine.
There was a point where our human/chimp ancestors were covered with hair like modern chimps. On humans, the hair more or less receded to just our heads and nether regions. At this point, the existing hair-parasites should have started their independent evolutionary tracks.
Instead, we apparently got the public lice straight from the hair lice in gorillas long after this split. Given how humans typically get such lice today, yes, I do find that unsettling. Call me a prude if you like.
They were nice enough to present theories that the lice were acquired by sleeping on recently killed gorilla skins or something.
I'm not trying to pick on you, I've seen something like this said in a couple of places. However, it is simply not true. If it were, then no-one would be able to run the software (as the default in the US is "no rights").
However, it is true that the part of the license that applies to running the software is rather short:
"The act of running the Program is not restricted".
Your point about the GPL being more understandable is bang on though. Perhaps sheer size isn't the best indicator, but the GPL (sans preamble and other unrelated fluff) is only about 2k words long, with a total of 12 clauses. The Microsoft XP (Home) EULA (sans identification info, foreign language versions, etc.) is nearly 4k words long, with a total of 30 numbered and subnumbered clauses and 6 more paragraphs.
At the risk of going back on-topic, I notice that 2.3 and 2.4 give the software the right to "phone home" without notice to you.
She's not hibernating, she's just napping. 80-year-olds do that.
Except that the (single-source) chips won't be soldered into the motherboard.
On the Amiga, this caused perversions like the blitter (fast memory copying) chip eventually becomming slower than the CPU at copying memory. There was no way to pop in a new faster video chip or blitter chip. If you wanted a better rig, your only recourse was to head over to West Chester and join everyone else in begging Commodore to design one.
I like this modular (co)processor idea way better.
He's right about the modal box, but it doesn't really come up *that* much. Its not *always* modal either. I'm not sure yet what situations cause it to be modal or not. The kinds of things that cause it are attempts to install device drivers or attempts to modify system files. With one exception (NCSoft's stupid unified game launcher) I've never had it pop up when I wasn't installing software. In my book, its always been a good thing. I don't want any software getting installed without my say-so.
His complaint about not being prompted for the root password is flat out wrong. I always get prompted for the root password in Vista when I get one of those challenge dialogs. I love this, as it allows my kids to use the system while I'm at work without allowing them to load it up with spyware from nifty stuff they found online (voice of sad experience here).
It sounds to me like he was running under an administrator account. One of the really nice things about Vista is that you don't *need* to do that anymore. Since you don't need to, you really shouldn't. Most people wouldn't dream of running under "root" on Linux all the time, so compare apples with apples. (You gotta wonder about an "IT professional" who would do this...)
Notice I said "root password" above. One of the nice little new things about Vista is that you get to pick the name of the administrator account. I picked "root". Vista has hard and soft links now too. With a few more decades of work on it, Microsoft might finally produce a decent Unix clone.
I don't know about *all* of them, but I certainly winced when the one person started talking about his own personal "bandwidth". I think he was the same genius who was talking about "showstoppers" as if they were *good* things.
Kinda reminds me of character Daemon Wayins used to play on In Living Color who liked to use big words he couldn't pronounce in totally incorrect context. Someone please stop this IT guy, before he runs for President!
This is in paragraph one of a 6 paragraph article. Not a good start.
There is one genuine arguing point, where someone named "Tim" tries to claim that certain software is cool because it embraces and extends Postgres to make it Oracle compatible. Its a silly claim though. If you ditch Oracle for someone else's proprietary Oracle look-alike, what exactly are you gaining? Certainly nothing an Open Source or Free Software advocate cares about.
I'm a pretty much exclusive Windows user, so I got all excited about the wonderful tool I'd never heard of that is just as robust as bash, and set out to find it. Here's what I found:
Its latest version is 1.0. I think Bash passed this milestone something like a decade and a half ago (the 1.14 version is dated 1994). Is a 1.0 version product as robust as a 3.2 version product? Its possible that it has as many features I suppose, but I highly doubt it is more stable.
It doesn't support Win2K. I know that's old, but its what I'm using here at work right this minute. Any really large enterprise (which is where scripting is most needed) is going to have some Win2k systems floating around for a few years yet. Bash runs just fine on Win2k.
Microsoft talks about this wonderful "new scripting language" they made. That worries me a bit. Their track record is to hype up some wonderful new way of doing things, only to dump it 3 years later for some new wonderful way of doing things. There are bash scripts out there over 10 years old that still work fine. Will I have that kind of stability with Powershell scripts that I work weeks to develop and debug? Its possible, but given that Microsoft seems to think newness is a selling point, I'm not exactly overflowing with confidence.
Errr...weren't we talking about bees here? Queen bees reproduce with essentially their own offspring. They are "inbred" by nature. The only genetic variation you will ever find between a queen bee and her mother is via mutation.
I've seen several people bag on his use of non-inline code in header files. Is that really considered bad practice? I ask because we have a developer here in who loves to do that. Personally, I dislike the practice, but he has a job teaching C++, so I don't feel like I have the cred to gainsay him.
How do you figure? The kid clearly didn't care about any punishment given, no matter how harsh. How would a beating have differed?
Really, what you want out of this is someone who doesn't beat up handicapped kids because its f'n WRONG, not because he's worried about the repercussions.
Plus, if *I* had a teenager who weighed 210 and was disturbed as this, I don't think I'd be comfortable at all making my confrontations with him physical. You gotta go to sleep sometime...
So by "fair-use" you mean something that has nothing to do with Fair Use?
The Fair Use clauses are all about allowing partial reproductions for the purpose of research, criticism, review, and/or parody. It has nothing whatsoever to do with your desire to enjoy a song off a CD you bought on your iPod. Not that this is a bad thing. It just has nothing to do with Fair Use.
"Open Source" never had a halo. It wasn't supposed to. The entire purpose of coining the term was to get away from the quasi-religious elements of Free Software.
Instead, "Open Source" was supposed to be a new management fad. Like all management fads, it had its own logic system which promised untold new productivity if followed slavishly. However, half the fun of management fads is the idea that there's some magic system out there which only you and a select few others have been smart enough to find out about. So what has happened to "Open Source" is that it has become mainstream enough that it doesn't make a very good fad anymore.
If you want a "halo", go back to talking about Free Software.
I've done that in WoW. I ran an elite quest with my wife and 2 others one Sunday evening on a full server that was on its last legs. It got so slow, that we were essentially running phased combat, with about a 2 second window for you to enter your command for the next phase. It was actually quite fun. However, it changed the game quite a bit. For one thing, just about every combat ability could be used every phase (as the cool-downs timers were still the same, as was the mana regen rate). Spells with warm-ups essentially took 2 phases (1 to start the warm-up, and the next to complete it). However, this went for the mobs too, so it was kinda even. If you needed to take a health potion to stay up, there were some nerve-wracking moments while you waited to see if the command took before the mob got in his next attack phase.
This is one of the primo reasons why senators don't generally get elected president. If you want your party to win the general election, you should really be supporting a governor or former military leader. You want someone who can talk about things accomplished by the large bureaucracy they ran, not someone who's going to be talking about all the funny looking votes and compromises they made over the last x*6 years.
Later you talk about Sweden, so perhaps you aren't posting from the US. Here that would be illegal. If someone mails you something you didn't ask for, its yours free. That's a federal law.
Just imagine all the good he'll do once he becomes emperor!
That's how I've made my living for the last 18 years. The same goes for most other employed software engineers. Very few of us actually work on shrink-wrapped EULA software.
It didn't help much that our connection here happened to go through the basement of tower 2...