Next thing you know, we have idiots coding things without the OS built-in GUI and we end up with crappy programs that look out of place and behave completely different to the whole OS and all other programs.
And nobody will care, if the programs do something they want.
Just look at the Windows version of iTunes for an example of a program that looks totally out of place, or at Excel for one that behaves completely differently to every other Microsoft program, even in terms of how it handles fundamental operations like cut-and-paste. And yet, both of those somehow manage to be the most popular programs in their class. Maybe inconsistency isn't such a terrible thing after all.
(It's not just Windows, either; Mac OS X is just as inconsistent. Just look at Garage Band for your proof of that.)
By your reasoning toilet paper is "a requirement for fuck-all".
Yes, that's right. Toilet paper is a requirement for fuck-all. See, your problem is that you are confusing requirements and solutions.
Transportation is a requirement. Gasoline-powered transportation is one solution, but there are other ways of meeting the transportation requirement, such as electrical vehicles powered by solar or nuclear energy.
Hygiene after defecation is a requirement. Toilet paper is one solution, but there are other ways of cleaning your backside, such as the water-jet-plus-electric-drier system installed in some advanced modern lavatories.
Your problem is that you are identifying your preferred solutions and then asserting that there is no alternative to any of them. This is not rational behaviour. The rational man identifies his requirements and then evaluates all solutions impartially, picking the ones that are optimal in his current circumstances. That probably does mean a gasoline-powered vehicle today, but it doesn't mean it's going to stay that way for all time.
Lots of people seem to single out nuclear bombs but I wonder why. Is it because they make war so easy to "win"? Is this so much different to a conventional bomb of corresponding 'size'?
Fallout. Radiation sickness. Conventional bombs can create just as much devastation, but they either kill you outright or they don't. What people don't like about nuclear weapons is the idea that their effects remain as a silent killer for generations to come.
In reality, they clearly aren't as bad as all that; Hiroshima certainly isn't a deadly wasteland today. But I'm talking about popular perception here, not scientific reality.
Good point. Imagine where we'd be if we didn't have home video recordings of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand -- we wouldn't even be able to prove that the First World War happened, and our historical narrative would collapse!
Seriously, it doesn't take video evidence to prove something. Eyewitness statements are also evidence, and in the case of live TV you have potentially millions of eyewitnesses. Good luck trying to convince them all to shut up while you rewrite history.
So you don't think it's a bit odd for any organisation that has Linux desktops as well as Windows desktops to deliberately choose a potentially-Windows-only system for developing corporate tools? Particularly one that's practically indistinguishable from Java, which runs perfectly on both Windows and Linux by design.
SSL costs CPU time (that's part of why it's secure). When you have a busy site like Google, that CPU time costs money. They won't implement encryption until the Spy-SPs hurt their bottom line enough to make it worth their while.
(And even then, there may be cheaper solutions to this particular problem, such as signing pages instead of encrypting the whole lot.)
I can't tell you how many times I've added an "if (0)" around a giant block of code temporarily to test something.
There's your mistake, then. Better by far to comment it out: not only does it mean you don't need to worry about indentation at all (even in Python), but you also get a much more visible indication that the code in question has been disabled.
There was actually a lot of resistance to Unicode in Japan: there were some unfortunate misunderstandings early on that led a lot of Japanese people to believe that Unicode was trying to force them to use Chinese conventions for character shapes. It also doesn't help that all the various UTFs appear to be less efficient at encoding Japanese than their various legacy encoding systems. (Of course, neither of these things is really an issue in practice, but we're talking about popular perception here!)
I don't know if Matz was among those who held those incorrect beliefs, but even if he wasn't, there still won't have been any compelling reason for him to adopt Unicode. Multilingual character sets are only a big win if you're mixing multiple languages. If Matz didn't originally expect Ruby to take off in a big way internationally, then for the sorts of uses he probably envisaged, just Japanese and English would be fine, and you can handle that combination perfectly well using any of the legacy Japanese systems.
one wonders where our technology would be today if we invested more in the space program and less in killing one another
Sadly, we would probably never have developed any sort of rocket (beyond the toy phase) if they weren't such a darned convenient way of delivering explosives...
if anyone is offended by that remark I apologize
Please don't. I for one am fed up of our modern PC climate where everyone is afraid to exercise their right of free speech in case someone isn't mature enough to deal with different views. Save the self-censorship for when you're tempted to shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre, or "Jesus loves gays" in a crowded fundamentalist church, or some other speech act that's actually likely to endanger people's lives.
Fact is, if I run into odd behaviour when testing/using - if the source is available I can read it, I can breakpoint. I cannot do that with a binary.
Nitpick: you most certainly can use breakpoints without the source code. Having source code makes debugging a million times easier, but it's not absolutely essential.
Of course, you're likely to be violating the EULA by running a non-free program in a debugger in the first place. In many ways, the value of free software is as much the freedom to do what you like with it, as the availability of source code...
Big difference: Windows was designed to be a complete OS in its own right, but Linux was specifically intended to be combined with the GNU software to form a complete OS.
I can't deny that I normally call the combination "Linux" myself, but I don't understand why some people are actively hostile to the concept of calling it "GNU/Linux" instead.
I'll bet money that 99% of the people who have access to the code would have no clue what it does. that only leaves those who are familiar with it and those that know the language it is written in but are not familiar with the specific code. the former would easily be silenced
How, and by whom exactly?
You're forgetting that Linux development is distributed across the world. Maybe the NSA might conceivably be able to "silence" developers within the USA. But what hold exactly would the NSA have over developers in Europe and Asia? Even if you suppose that the USA's close allies such as Britain and Canada might be persuaded to join in some conspiracy, what would other countries have to gain? You would have to propose a global conspiracy, with governments the world over uniting to, um, stop themselves from finding out about the backdoors that America was using to spy on them? Sorry, but this is the most half-baked conspiracy theory I've ever heard.
frankly i think it's wise to not trust the nsa even if you can see the code, because frankly it's just plain misplaced faith that a simple philosophy like oss can universally protect you from such malicious intent, Especially considering the history and track record of such a agency.
Leaving aside the clear paranoia that is causing you to characterise the NSA as "malicious", they would have to be not only malicious but downright stupid to put backdoors into open-source code.
For example, the Chinese government uses Linux themselves. It would be foolhardy in the extreme for NSA to assume that they will not have their best security experts scouring the code for backdoors. If they found one, they could use it themselves -- or they could expose it, seriously embarrassing the United States. Not exactly the kind of thing that's likely to result in NSA funding being maintained at its present high level...
Flat panels today almost all suck at color reproduction. It's rare to even approach 24-bit color.
Actually, it's easy to get 24-bit colour: don't use a laptop, and don't use the cheapest type of panel. Everything else has genuine 24-bit colour, and there are plenty of people selling excellent 24-bit flat panels at surprisingly good prices -- even mass-market companies like Dell.
My laptop is, I believe, an 18-bit panel.
Yes, all laptops seem to use TN film displays. I believe the reason is more to do with power consumption than contrast ratios, though. For desktop monitors, it's still as much about price; most people, when they see that a certain manufacturer offers a 24" widescreen for $350 and another 24" widescreen for $700, are just going to say "wow, that $350 one's a bargain!", not "hmm, I wonder whether the cheaper one only has 6 bits per channel?"
If they can get the contrast ratio to something even halfway usable with 30-bit color, we'll see 24-bit color with enough contrast to be used in real-world environments.
24-bit panels already do have enough contrast to be used in real-world environments. Most of the major suppliers of professional monitors (Eizo, NEC, LaCie, etc) barely even bother selling CRTs any more.
The fact is that it's quicker to develop high quality software on the MS platform.
You may believe that this is a fact. Other people strongly disagree with you. Personally I prefer to withhold judgement, because I've never seen any remotely convincing research into the subject -- pretty much everything I've ever read that discussed it was devised and funded by someone with a vested interest in promoting a particular solution.
I agree with much of the rest of what you've written, at least in so far as you acknowledge that it's your personal opinion rather than objective fact. Personally I find Linux has advantages of its own. Windows may well be "more integrated" when you only use Windows, but when you're working in a heterogenous environment, mixing x86 PCs with Solaris servers and other systems older and wilder still, trying to integrate Windows is a right pain, thanks to its sadly limited support for standards such as POSIX. As with most things in IT, it's a question of choosing the right tool for the right job... sometimes that's Microsoft, sometimes it isn't. I wish people on both sides of the divide would stop treating this as a religious issue and start applying braincells...
By the way, to the kneejerky anti-Microsoft zealot who modded the parent "overrated" (the coward's choice): please grow up. If you disagree with someone's opinion, then don't mod them down -- post a reply instead, explaining what they've got wrong.
Yes; "fairly" there implies that you consider it fundamentally faithful and only differing in relatively unimportant ways.
Is that an accurate characterisation? You may think so; many of us disagree. The game is about teleportation research that opens portals to a literal Hell populated by supernatural demons and the tormented souls of the damned. The movie, meanwhile, is about genetic research involving a chromosome that mutates humans into monsters. There really isn't that much similarity there...
Well, yeah, it depends on what you need, doesn't it? What you say is true for many, maybe even most people, but that doesn't mean nobody needs Wine.
If you have to interoperate with Windows users who use specific software, and the Linux equivalents can't read/write files from that software sufficiently well for your purposes, then you may still find yourself looking for a way to run the Windows programs. This used to be the case a lot with MS Office; modern Linux office apps are pretty good at interoperating, so it's not an issue so much, though there are still a few rare cases where the Linux software won't be able to duplicate what MS Office does quite well enough. (Complex VBA macros that automate other Windows applications, for example. Though I don't know offhand whether Wine can handle those either, and frankly anyone who uses them deserves the pain they cause:)
Then there are the cases where the Linux programs are genuinely inferior. Again it's a question of whether that actually matters. For example, GIMP is good enough for most casual users and even many professionals, but still a lot of people are inevitably going to find there are things they need that it doesn't do, and then they're going to want a way to run Photoshop.
And finally we have the fundamental matter of freedom of choice. Some people just prefer various proprietary Windows applications, and it's good that they can have the freedom to choose to retain those, even if the Linux equivalent would work just as well. Linux is all about the freedom to use your computer how you like, after all!
Those of us who find offensive and stupid stuff tedious, and enjoy listening to serious and intellectual discussion, may be tempted to disagree with you.
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
Nice quote. I had no idea RR had such mastery of subtlety.
It isn't true, though. In fact, fully 71% of unborn babies are in favour of abortion. Who wouldn't be? They get to go straight to heaven without having to suffer the horrors of life on Earth, and without any risk of accidentally sinning before they can make it through the pearly gates!
When SCO claimed that the GPL was invalid,/.ers were perfectly content to use the same logic that Blizzard is busting out now.
Either you: (A) agree the EULA is enforceable, and then Glider is a contract violation. (B) claim the EULA is invalid, in which case you have no license to use the software, and then its a copyright violation.
This was the same with SCO, except the license in question was the GPL.
No, there is a very important difference: the GPL covers deliberately making permanent and tangible copies in order to distribute the software, while Blizzard's EULA covers invisibly making temporary and intangible copies in order to use the software, which is a totally different kettle of fish.
The GPL argument is as you say: if you distribute copies of software without permission, you are violating copyright; the GPL gives you permission to do so within certain constraints, and if you don't follow those constraints you violate copyright. It's all about offering you extra rights that you normally wouldn't have.
Blizzard's EULA isn't like that. There's no question of granting you any special rights; far from it, Blizzard forbid you to distribute their software, period. The thing is that Blizzard are claiming that you also need their permission to run the software.
Do you need permission to run software? IANAL, but I can read, and this is what the law says:
it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner
Hmm, looks to me like that's saying you don't need permission to run a program, and not just that, but that (note the word "adaptation") you don't even necessarily need permission to modify it! Doubtless there are subtleties of which I'm not aware, which is why we have lawyers and courts to debate this and tell us whether Blizzard is right or not. But it's pretty clear that it isn't a simple case of "if the EULA is invalid, you can't use the program without violating copyright", and therefore this is not a case of Slashdot having double standards at all.
Re:GPL does pretty much the same thing ...
on
Who Owns Software?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm going to pretend that the quoted characterization is accurate. If so, then this sound very much like the GPL. The are both licenses. If you fail to comply with the terms of the GPL you are violating a copyright since the license is the only thing that grants permission to the copyrighted work, and if you fail to comply with the terms of the EULA you are violating a copyright since the license is the only thing that grants permission to the copyrighted work.
That's like saying that eating a burger is very much like eating a baby, because they're both meat.
GPL advocates all agree, and indeed take great pains to emphasize, that the GPL only applies to distribution. Nobody, not even RMS himself, would dream of asserting that the GPL has any power whatsoever over what you choose to do with GPL'd software in the privacy of your own computer, or even within your own company; it's only if you start making copies to give to other people that the GPL kicks in.
What Blizzard is claiming is completely different. They're claiming that their EULA means you aren't even allowed to run the program unless you comply with all their demands.
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at the Windows version of iTunes for an example of a program that looks totally out of place, or at Excel for one that behaves completely differently to every other Microsoft program, even in terms of how it handles fundamental operations like cut-and-paste. And yet, both of those somehow manage to be the most popular programs in their class. Maybe inconsistency isn't such a terrible thing after all.
(It's not just Windows, either; Mac OS X is just as inconsistent. Just look at Garage Band for your proof of that.)
Transportation is a requirement. Gasoline-powered transportation is one solution, but there are other ways of meeting the transportation requirement, such as electrical vehicles powered by solar or nuclear energy.
Hygiene after defecation is a requirement. Toilet paper is one solution, but there are other ways of cleaning your backside, such as the water-jet-plus-electric-drier system installed in some advanced modern lavatories.
Your problem is that you are identifying your preferred solutions and then asserting that there is no alternative to any of them. This is not rational behaviour. The rational man identifies his requirements and then evaluates all solutions impartially, picking the ones that are optimal in his current circumstances. That probably does mean a gasoline-powered vehicle today, but it doesn't mean it's going to stay that way for all time.
In reality, they clearly aren't as bad as all that; Hiroshima certainly isn't a deadly wasteland today. But I'm talking about popular perception here, not scientific reality.
Good point. Imagine where we'd be if we didn't have home video recordings of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand -- we wouldn't even be able to prove that the First World War happened, and our historical narrative would collapse!
Seriously, it doesn't take video evidence to prove something. Eyewitness statements are also evidence, and in the case of live TV you have potentially millions of eyewitnesses. Good luck trying to convince them all to shut up while you rewrite history.
Which of Brainfuck, Malbolge, and Perl did you have in mind?
If you don't want to be compatible with Win32, use GTK#.
So you don't think it's a bit odd for any organisation that has Linux desktops as well as Windows desktops to deliberately choose a potentially-Windows-only system for developing corporate tools? Particularly one that's practically indistinguishable from Java, which runs perfectly on both Windows and Linux by design.
SSL costs CPU time (that's part of why it's secure). When you have a busy site like Google, that CPU time costs money. They won't implement encryption until the Spy-SPs hurt their bottom line enough to make it worth their while.
(And even then, there may be cheaper solutions to this particular problem, such as signing pages instead of encrypting the whole lot.)
There was actually a lot of resistance to Unicode in Japan: there were some unfortunate misunderstandings early on that led a lot of Japanese people to believe that Unicode was trying to force them to use Chinese conventions for character shapes. It also doesn't help that all the various UTFs appear to be less efficient at encoding Japanese than their various legacy encoding systems. (Of course, neither of these things is really an issue in practice, but we're talking about popular perception here!)
I don't know if Matz was among those who held those incorrect beliefs, but even if he wasn't, there still won't have been any compelling reason for him to adopt Unicode. Multilingual character sets are only a big win if you're mixing multiple languages. If Matz didn't originally expect Ruby to take off in a big way internationally, then for the sorts of uses he probably envisaged, just Japanese and English would be fine, and you can handle that combination perfectly well using any of the legacy Japanese systems.
Of course, you're likely to be violating the EULA by running a non-free program in a debugger in the first place. In many ways, the value of free software is as much the freedom to do what you like with it, as the availability of source code...
Big difference: Windows was designed to be a complete OS in its own right, but Linux was specifically intended to be combined with the GNU software to form a complete OS.
I can't deny that I normally call the combination "Linux" myself, but I don't understand why some people are actively hostile to the concept of calling it "GNU/Linux" instead.
You're forgetting that Linux development is distributed across the world. Maybe the NSA might conceivably be able to "silence" developers within the USA. But what hold exactly would the NSA have over developers in Europe and Asia? Even if you suppose that the USA's close allies such as Britain and Canada might be persuaded to join in some conspiracy, what would other countries have to gain? You would have to propose a global conspiracy, with governments the world over uniting to, um, stop themselves from finding out about the backdoors that America was using to spy on them? Sorry, but this is the most half-baked conspiracy theory I've ever heard.Leaving aside the clear paranoia that is causing you to characterise the NSA as "malicious", they would have to be not only malicious but downright stupid to put backdoors into open-source code.
For example, the Chinese government uses Linux themselves. It would be foolhardy in the extreme for NSA to assume that they will not have their best security experts scouring the code for backdoors. If they found one, they could use it themselves -- or they could expose it, seriously embarrassing the United States. Not exactly the kind of thing that's likely to result in NSA funding being maintained at its present high level...
I agree with much of the rest of what you've written, at least in so far as you acknowledge that it's your personal opinion rather than objective fact. Personally I find Linux has advantages of its own. Windows may well be "more integrated" when you only use Windows, but when you're working in a heterogenous environment, mixing x86 PCs with Solaris servers and other systems older and wilder still, trying to integrate Windows is a right pain, thanks to its sadly limited support for standards such as POSIX. As with most things in IT, it's a question of choosing the right tool for the right job... sometimes that's Microsoft, sometimes it isn't. I wish people on both sides of the divide would stop treating this as a religious issue and start applying braincells...
By the way, to the kneejerky anti-Microsoft zealot who modded the parent "overrated" (the coward's choice): please grow up. If you disagree with someone's opinion, then don't mod them down -- post a reply instead, explaining what they've got wrong.
Is that an accurate characterisation? You may think so; many of us disagree. The game is about teleportation research that opens portals to a literal Hell populated by supernatural demons and the tormented souls of the damned. The movie, meanwhile, is about genetic research involving a chromosome that mutates humans into monsters. There really isn't that much similarity there...
Well, yeah, it depends on what you need, doesn't it? What you say is true for many, maybe even most people, but that doesn't mean nobody needs Wine.
:)
If you have to interoperate with Windows users who use specific software, and the Linux equivalents can't read/write files from that software sufficiently well for your purposes, then you may still find yourself looking for a way to run the Windows programs. This used to be the case a lot with MS Office; modern Linux office apps are pretty good at interoperating, so it's not an issue so much, though there are still a few rare cases where the Linux software won't be able to duplicate what MS Office does quite well enough. (Complex VBA macros that automate other Windows applications, for example. Though I don't know offhand whether Wine can handle those either, and frankly anyone who uses them deserves the pain they cause
Then there are the cases where the Linux programs are genuinely inferior. Again it's a question of whether that actually matters. For example, GIMP is good enough for most casual users and even many professionals, but still a lot of people are inevitably going to find there are things they need that it doesn't do, and then they're going to want a way to run Photoshop.
And finally we have the fundamental matter of freedom of choice. Some people just prefer various proprietary Windows applications, and it's good that they can have the freedom to choose to retain those, even if the Linux equivalent would work just as well. Linux is all about the freedom to use your computer how you like, after all!
Those of us who find offensive and stupid stuff tedious, and enjoy listening to serious and intellectual discussion, may be tempted to disagree with you.
No, there is a very important difference: the GPL covers deliberately making permanent and tangible copies in order to distribute the software, while Blizzard's EULA covers invisibly making temporary and intangible copies in order to use the software, which is a totally different kettle of fish.
The GPL argument is as you say: if you distribute copies of software without permission, you are violating copyright; the GPL gives you permission to do so within certain constraints, and if you don't follow those constraints you violate copyright. It's all about offering you extra rights that you normally wouldn't have.
Blizzard's EULA isn't like that. There's no question of granting you any special rights; far from it, Blizzard forbid you to distribute their software, period. The thing is that Blizzard are claiming that you also need their permission to run the software.
Do you need permission to run software? IANAL, but I can read, and this is what the law says:Hmm, looks to me like that's saying you don't need permission to run a program, and not just that, but that (note the word "adaptation") you don't even necessarily need permission to modify it! Doubtless there are subtleties of which I'm not aware, which is why we have lawyers and courts to debate this and tell us whether Blizzard is right or not. But it's pretty clear that it isn't a simple case of "if the EULA is invalid, you can't use the program without violating copyright", and therefore this is not a case of Slashdot having double standards at all.
GPL advocates all agree, and indeed take great pains to emphasize, that the GPL only applies to distribution. Nobody, not even RMS himself, would dream of asserting that the GPL has any power whatsoever over what you choose to do with GPL'd software in the privacy of your own computer, or even within your own company; it's only if you start making copies to give to other people that the GPL kicks in.
What Blizzard is claiming is completely different. They're claiming that their EULA means you aren't even allowed to run the program unless you comply with all their demands.