Uh, yes. It's called Freedom. It's always been the most compelling reason to use Free Software, although it's usually overlooked.
Maybe for you. Not all of us think that proprietary software is the most important problem facing humanity. If there is a commercial product that does something I need to do that the free equivilant doesn't, then I buy the commercial product, without hesitation. I use free software because (in order of importance):
1. It's free. 2. It fits my way of doing things (open and ready for modification) 3. It's free. 4. (and sometimes) Because it gives me freedom.
True, but did you ever think that if you taught interesting things, then your students would be able to forget their problems for the 45 minutes that you have them?
Did you ever think that maybe teachers don't get to teach what they want? That maybe, just *maybe*, some administrator/school board is deciding what to teach in the classroom?
Just because it isn't cloning, it isn't interesting??? What the hell are you smoking? Nobody has yet been able to bring back any species like this from extinction. Right, it wouldn't be a "real" mammoth. So what? We would be able to observe how a live mammoth looks, to a certain extent. We would be able to observe it's development as it grows. There are a lot of things that can be learned from this. If they were just interested in cloning something, then they could use a live animal that isn't extinct.
This is a naive and over-generalized point of view. Do you think that all businesses are the same? Nope. Every business does a different business. Some sell plywood, some sell consultants, some sell information, some get the government to pay them to do things. How can possibly say what a "basic business" needs? Yes, what you note is certainly required for *any* business, but most businesses have special needs for the special business they do. An enginneering firm is going to need a lot of custom programming for processing their data. An architect is going to need software to keep track of their drawings. Any large business has special ways of doing things and needs and can benefit from special software and IT to help them get their work done.
Sorry, but business isn't just making presentations in powerpoint. There's a lot more to it.
This makes me curious. Can an author of a product on download.com simply erase a ton of bad publicity on it's own by simply releasing minor point releases every couple of days ?
Yes, they can. On the other hand, they're also erasing any good publicity they have.
Ahh, but that is the problem. It would be quite expensive to run a server farm that could provide fast and reliable service to millions of users downloading mp3s at the same time (one reason P2P networks are a better model for file sharing). The overhead would be considerable and they would loose quite a bit of money just running the network that they would want to charge more per download (even if they are making a profit, they want to make a hefty profit!). They charge too much, no one downloads, and results in failure.
Don't you think that they will factor in the costs of all this? As more and more people download more and more music, the price per download actually *goes down* due to economies of scale. I have my doubts that one MP3 download would have a wholesale cost of more that a quarter, which is what the author of the article suggested.
People who are that easily impressed by an operating system aren't the best case studies of the mind-blowing advancements in UI that Linux brings to the world of computing.
Linux is hardly the leader in UI advancements. It's good for a lot of things, but the UI isn't much better than windows or a mac. While I know that MS didn't come up with the ideas themselves, they did get them in their products quickly. Linux is good at copying the innovators in UI, but isn't the leader by any means.
I looked, but was unable to see where the improvements that they have made to certain packages are advertised. I understand that they don't necessarily have to make these easily available, but I would like to at least know if they're contributing to the community in any way.
And here I thought that was a personal note to me. I have spent the last three hours writing my personal reply.
Well, from the looks of the header on my email, your personalized reply would probably be linked directly to the info MS has on you. My reply-to address had a GUID in it.
Sorry, we were unable to service your request. As an option, you may visit any of the pages below for information about Microsoft services and products.
I was about to disagree with you on this one but after reading your post once I again, I must agree in some ways with you.
The truth is that these extremists were generally ignored. Everyone on the panel is an adult and many of them are quite familiar with government debate. They've seen their fair share of extremists and protesters. They usually ignore them, but that doesn't mean that they are so stupid that they ignore their message and "throw the baby out with the bathwater".
In fact, like you said, these protesters helped the less-vocal folks look a lot more reasonable and let them express the views that might not otherwise have been expressed.
I really want to make a sarcastic comment about this....
You should. It was meant to incite some sort of sarcastic reaction.
Having spent a few months in a small town in the midwest a couple months after a Walmart went in, I was able to see the good and the bad of it. Before the Walmart their were more opportunties for small businessmen.
But what about the consumer? I personally don't believe that a small business should take priority over a large one, especially when the prices at the small business are higher and selection less varied.
And yes, I was talking about censorship and Walmart. When they become effectively the only outlet for music for miles around and don't carry something (that would sell) for purely moral reasons, it comes damn close, in practical terms, to gov't censorship. But like I said, they have the right.
Before Walmart, the selection was even smaller and prices higher, at least in rural areas. Before Walmart, you were at the mercy of whatever guy decided to set up shop in town and his sense of morals and what he decided was appropriate. At least now, you can find Britney Spears singles in Podunk, Utah.
But we are off the topic there. If you liked to try an array of different cheeses (after having visited more than my share of stinky cheese shops in France, pulled in against my will by my mom, I find this idea pretty funny. Sorry, I'm just smiling as I write this with those memories) but some mega cheese shop came in and put your favorite cheese shop out of business and now your choice was Cheddar, Swiss or Jack, I think that you'd be a little put out. Not that you'd say the mega cheese shop didn't have the RIGHT to do it, but you'd probably think that it was kinda fucked.
Of course I would be upset if someone put the local cheese shop out of buisness. It would suck for me. But I don't call it censorship, which is what you called it in the first place.
Please try not to put words out of my hands. My parents would not have approved of my music, but they understood that for me to grow up I would need to start making decisions on my own. One of which is what music I listened too. As I said previously, as long as my grades were good and I wasn't getting into trouble, they gave me a great deal of leniency. It was also true that when I screwed up, I had some freedoms taken away. Hardly disinterested parenting.
Sounds like you've got a different idea of what "approve" means. My dad doesn't like Simon and Garfunkel because of many of the political messages (he was born in 1935). But he let me listen to it, which in my mind means that he approved of what I was listening to.
I don't want to insult your parents, but I must disagree with what you seem to think is good parenting. A babysitter can check your grades and make sure you don't get into trouble, but I believe that a parent's responsibility to their child and society goes beyond simple babysitting. The "school of hard knocks" is a good teacher, but it doesn't help our society to progress. If we make each individual learn about the world by himself, then he will learn the same lessons that his parents learned without ever becoming more wise than they. However, if parents teach a child those things that they have learned in life, then that child is prepared to go out into the world with more knowledge than his parents were and will be able to learn more about the world and perhaps make our world a better place.
Of course, not everything that parents teach is right. Racism was taught for centuries from parent to child. However, at the least, a parent should teach their child about such things as morals, ethics, etc.
Now, I'm sure your parents did this, but if they disapproved of your music, then did they talk to you about why they disapproved of it? Did you ever discuss it? Or did they just say to themselves, "I'm a modern parent. I'm not tainting my child with the centuries of wisdom that my parents passed on to me. I don't trust my child to glean the good from the bad and will the world teach them all that they need to know."
I'm not here to insult your parents personally, so please don't take it that way. I don't even know yo' momma!
And its also possible that we're the result of such a colonization project and everyone forgot about it, or were dumped here without knowing to begin with. Or maybe they knew and simply never passed it on. Its not like a lot of folklore has lasted for 30K years.
No, not really possible, unless this colony brought along with it almost every other piece of life that is on this planet. Human beings share genetic data with almost every other species on the planet. Unless you can explain some other way that it got there, we're natives.
But is it a requirement that my "tastes" are the same as the little society that I happen to be stuck in?
No, but is it a requirement of said society to make products and services that fit your tastes convienient? I like French cheese, but I have a hard time finding it. I don't have a *right* to french cheese. I'm not up in arms that someone is censoring my cheese.
I was lucky enough to have parents who understood that as long as I got good grades and the cops weren't knocking on my door, I could use the freedom they gave me in order to make decisions and become an adult instead of being led by my hand 'till released. They didn't listen to a lot of my music. I doubt that they would have approved of it if they had. But this was part of my private life and helped me become who I am.
You're contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you say that your parents where "enlightened" and allowed you to have your own private life (which I agree with, don't get me wrong). But at the same time you imply that if given the choice, they wouldn't allow you to buy the music that you choose. Aren't they giving you approval by allowing you to buy what music you want?
Oh, you mean like the time they locked out the porn satellite with a keypad code when I was 13? I hacked it, and they never knew.
Wow, I stand corrected. Your ability to hack a satellite system certainly trumps your parents years of experience and real-world wisdom. My dad doesn't know how to write emails without being connected to the internet, but he probably knows a lot more about life than I do.
It's not all bad, and I realize that most people who live/shop around Walmarts are happy with them. But when the choice is driving an hour plus for an alternate outlet, for a teen, it is practically equivalent to gov't censorship. I'm sorry, but kids need to have an outlet. Parents always seem to disprove of their kids music. It's practically a right of kids. And Walmart takes it away.
Guess what, unless you're over 18 then your parents have every right and *responsibility* to censor what you watch, listen to, where you go, how late you stay up, what you eat, the color of your hair, and pretty much everything else that isn't abusive in order to turn you into a functioning adult. If they decide that letting you do something is good for you, then great. You are becoming an adult. Freedom of children is great and parents should help children to understand how to take advantage of this wonderful institution, but as a child, you have no right to (almost) ANYTHING. You do have a right to a home without abuse, but beyond that, you're pretty much living under a dictatorship.
If your parents don't like your music, then tough, deal with it. Have you ever thought that they might actually BE SMARTER THAN YOU!?
Business is about profit. If you aren't making a profit, then there really isn't much of a point. When a company brings in $200,000,000 at a time, what is the point of spending time on a project that will only bring in $10? While it may be profitable, it doesn't justify the effort put into it. Yea, so they keep a bunch of people employed for awhile, but why employ them to make a $10 profit, when they could be working to make a $200,000,000 profit?
Running just fine is really personal preference. I actually liked Office 97; 2000 has nothing added that I want. Unfortunately, we were forced to upgrade at work because Office 97 refuses to work properly in a multi-user Win2k environment. I absolutely loathe their forced upgrades!
Forced by who? Your company? Sounds like your company are the idiots, not MS. Yea, MS may have come up with a horrendous licensing scheme, but that doesn't mean that your company should've bought into it.
And why the hell can't you get Office 97 working in Windows 2000? Worked just fine for me and I used it everyday in a multiuser environment (I now use Linux all day).
I'm tired of the "MS software is full of bugs!" rant that I hear on/. all the time. Most of it is FUD. I hate MS and their monopoly as much as the next guy, but some of the their software doesn't actually suck. Except for some security holes, Office 2000 works pretty good.
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Uh, yes. It's called Freedom. It's always been the most compelling reason to use Free Software, although it's usually overlooked.
Maybe for you. Not all of us think that proprietary software is the most important problem facing humanity. If there is a commercial product that does something I need to do that the free equivilant doesn't, then I buy the commercial product, without hesitation. I use free software because (in order of importance):
1. It's free.
2. It fits my way of doing things (open and ready for modification)
3. It's free.
4. (and sometimes) Because it gives me freedom.
True, but did you ever think that if you taught interesting things, then your students would be able to forget their problems for the 45 minutes that you have them?
Did you ever think that maybe teachers don't get to teach what they want? That maybe, just *maybe*, some administrator/school board is deciding what to teach in the classroom?
Just because it isn't cloning, it isn't interesting??? What the hell are you smoking? Nobody has yet been able to bring back any species like this from extinction. Right, it wouldn't be a "real" mammoth. So what? We would be able to observe how a live mammoth looks, to a certain extent. We would be able to observe it's development as it grows. There are a lot of things that can be learned from this. If they were just interested in cloning something, then they could use a live animal that isn't extinct.
This is a naive and over-generalized point of view. Do you think that all businesses are the same? Nope. Every business does a different business. Some sell plywood, some sell consultants, some sell information, some get the government to pay them to do things. How can possibly say what a "basic business" needs? Yes, what you note is certainly required for *any* business, but most businesses have special needs for the special business they do. An enginneering firm is going to need a lot of custom programming for processing their data. An architect is going to need software to keep track of their drawings. Any large business has special ways of doing things and needs and can benefit from special software and IT to help them get their work done.
Sorry, but business isn't just making presentations in powerpoint. There's a lot more to it.
This makes me curious. Can an author of a product on download.com simply erase a ton of bad publicity on it's own by simply releasing minor point releases every couple of days ?
Yes, they can. On the other hand, they're also erasing any good publicity they have.
Ahh, but that is the problem. It would be quite expensive to run a server farm that could provide fast and reliable service to millions of users downloading mp3s at the same time (one reason P2P networks are a better model for file sharing). The overhead would be considerable and they would loose quite a bit of money just running the network that they would want to charge more per download (even if they are making a profit, they want to make a hefty profit!). They charge too much, no one downloads, and results in failure.
Don't you think that they will factor in the costs of all this? As more and more people download more and more music, the price per download actually *goes down* due to economies of scale. I have my doubts that one MP3 download would have a wholesale cost of more that a quarter, which is what the author of the article suggested.
People who are that easily impressed by an operating system aren't the best case studies of the mind-blowing advancements in UI that Linux brings to the world of computing.
Linux is hardly the leader in UI advancements. It's good for a lot of things, but the UI isn't much better than windows or a mac. While I know that MS didn't come up with the ideas themselves, they did get them in their products quickly. Linux is good at copying the innovators in UI, but isn't the leader by any means.
It's a joke son.
I looked, but was unable to see where the improvements that they have made to certain packages are advertised. I understand that they don't necessarily have to make these easily available, but I would like to at least know if they're contributing to the community in any way.
And here I thought that was a personal note to me. I have spent the last three hours writing my personal reply.
Well, from the looks of the header on my email, your personalized reply would probably be linked directly to the info MS has on you. My reply-to address had a GUID in it.
Right now I get:
Sorry, we were unable to service your request. As an option, you may visit any of the pages below for information about Microsoft services and products.
No problems here. Sounds like your setup. I doubt they would be working this long on Ogg if it has audible cracks in standard CD rips.
Fscking slashdot and its U.S.-centric comments. ;)
Please note the winking smiley. That means it's a JOKE.
I was about to disagree with you on this one but after reading your post once I again, I must agree in some ways with you.
The truth is that these extremists were generally ignored. Everyone on the panel is an adult and many of them are quite familiar with government debate. They've seen their fair share of extremists and protesters. They usually ignore them, but that doesn't mean that they are so stupid that they ignore their message and "throw the baby out with the bathwater".
In fact, like you said, these protesters helped the less-vocal folks look a lot more reasonable and let them express the views that might not otherwise have been expressed.
We should have exchanged emails and hashed this out ourselves.
But I wanted to go for the longest running thread in slashdot history.
I really want to make a sarcastic comment about this....
You should. It was meant to incite some sort of sarcastic reaction.
Having spent a few months in a small town in the midwest a couple months after a Walmart went in, I was able to see the good and the bad of it. Before the Walmart their were more opportunties for small businessmen.
But what about the consumer? I personally don't believe that a small business should take priority over a large one, especially when the prices at the small business are higher and selection less varied.
And yes, I was talking about censorship and Walmart. When they become effectively the only outlet for music for miles around and don't carry something (that would sell) for purely moral reasons, it comes damn close, in practical terms, to gov't censorship. But like I said, they have the right.
Before Walmart, the selection was even smaller and prices higher, at least in rural areas. Before Walmart, you were at the mercy of whatever guy decided to set up shop in town and his sense of morals and what he decided was appropriate. At least now, you can find Britney Spears singles in Podunk, Utah.
But we are off the topic there. If you liked to try an array of different cheeses (after having visited more than my share of stinky cheese shops in France, pulled in against my will by my mom, I find this idea pretty funny. Sorry, I'm just smiling as I write this with those memories) but some mega cheese shop came in and put your favorite cheese shop out of business and now your choice was Cheddar, Swiss or Jack, I think that you'd be a little put out. Not that you'd say the mega cheese shop didn't have the RIGHT to do it, but you'd probably think that it was kinda fucked.
Of course I would be upset if someone put the local cheese shop out of buisness. It would suck for me. But I don't call it censorship, which is what you called it in the first place.
Please try not to put words out of my hands. My parents would not have approved of my music, but they understood that for me to grow up I would need to start making decisions on my own. One of which is what music I listened too. As I said previously, as long as my grades were good and I wasn't getting into trouble, they gave me a great deal of leniency. It was also true that when I screwed up, I had some freedoms taken away. Hardly disinterested parenting.
Sounds like you've got a different idea of what "approve" means. My dad doesn't like Simon and Garfunkel because of many of the political messages (he was born in 1935). But he let me listen to it, which in my mind means that he approved of what I was listening to.
I don't want to insult your parents, but I must disagree with what you seem to think is good parenting. A babysitter can check your grades and make sure you don't get into trouble, but I believe that a parent's responsibility to their child and society goes beyond simple babysitting. The "school of hard knocks" is a good teacher, but it doesn't help our society to progress. If we make each individual learn about the world by himself, then he will learn the same lessons that his parents learned without ever becoming more wise than they. However, if parents teach a child those things that they have learned in life, then that child is prepared to go out into the world with more knowledge than his parents were and will be able to learn more about the world and perhaps make our world a better place.
Of course, not everything that parents teach is right. Racism was taught for centuries from parent to child. However, at the least, a parent should teach their child about such things as morals, ethics, etc.
Now, I'm sure your parents did this, but if they disapproved of your music, then did they talk to you about why they disapproved of it? Did you ever discuss it? Or did they just say to themselves, "I'm a modern parent. I'm not tainting my child with the centuries of wisdom that my parents passed on to me. I don't trust my child to glean the good from the bad and will the world teach them all that they need to know."
I'm not here to insult your parents personally, so please don't take it that way. I don't even know yo' momma!
And its also possible that we're the result of such a colonization project and everyone forgot about it, or were dumped here without knowing to begin with. Or maybe they knew and simply never passed it on. Its not like a lot of folklore has lasted for 30K years.
No, not really possible, unless this colony brought along with it almost every other piece of life that is on this planet. Human beings share genetic data with almost every other species on the planet. Unless you can explain some other way that it got there, we're natives.
But is it a requirement that my "tastes" are the same as the little society that I happen to be stuck in?
No, but is it a requirement of said society to make products and services that fit your tastes convienient? I like French cheese, but I have a hard time finding it. I don't have a *right* to french cheese. I'm not up in arms that someone is censoring my cheese.
I was lucky enough to have parents who understood that as long as I got good grades and the cops weren't knocking on my door, I could use the freedom they gave me in order to make decisions and become an adult instead of being led by my hand 'till released. They didn't listen to a lot of my music. I doubt that they would have approved of it if they had. But this was part of my private life and helped me become who I am.
You're contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you say that your parents where "enlightened" and allowed you to have your own private life (which I agree with, don't get me wrong). But at the same time you imply that if given the choice, they wouldn't allow you to buy the music that you choose. Aren't they giving you approval by allowing you to buy what music you want?
Sounds like they just didn't care.
Oh, you mean like the time they locked out the porn satellite with a keypad code when I was 13? I hacked it, and they never knew.
Wow, I stand corrected. Your ability to hack a satellite system certainly trumps your parents years of experience and real-world wisdom. My dad doesn't know how to write emails without being connected to the internet, but he probably knows a lot more about life than I do.
It's not all bad, and I realize that most people who live/shop around Walmarts are happy with them. But when the choice is driving an hour plus for an alternate outlet, for a teen, it is practically equivalent to gov't censorship. I'm sorry, but kids need to have an outlet. Parents always seem to disprove of their kids music. It's practically a right of kids. And Walmart takes it away.
Guess what, unless you're over 18 then your parents have every right and *responsibility* to censor what you watch, listen to, where you go, how late you stay up, what you eat, the color of your hair, and pretty much everything else that isn't abusive in order to turn you into a functioning adult. If they decide that letting you do something is good for you, then great. You are becoming an adult. Freedom of children is great and parents should help children to understand how to take advantage of this wonderful institution, but as a child, you have no right to (almost) ANYTHING. You do have a right to a home without abuse, but beyond that, you're pretty much living under a dictatorship.
If your parents don't like your music, then tough, deal with it. Have you ever thought that they might actually BE SMARTER THAN YOU!?
The partial drop is so you can slip a piece underneath another one. Sometimes just dropping isn't enough.
Business is about profit. If you aren't making a profit, then there really isn't much of a point. When a company brings in $200,000,000 at a time, what is the point of spending time on a project that will only bring in $10? While it may be profitable, it doesn't justify the effort put into it. Yea, so they keep a bunch of people employed for awhile, but why employ them to make a $10 profit, when they could be working to make a $200,000,000 profit?
Running just fine is really personal preference. I actually liked Office 97; 2000 has nothing added that I want. Unfortunately, we were forced to upgrade at work because Office 97 refuses to work properly in a multi-user Win2k environment. I absolutely loathe their forced upgrades!
/. all the time. Most of it is FUD. I hate MS and their monopoly as much as the next guy, but some of the their software doesn't actually suck. Except for some security holes, Office 2000 works pretty good.
Forced by who? Your company? Sounds like your company are the idiots, not MS. Yea, MS may have come up with a horrendous licensing scheme, but that doesn't mean that your company should've bought into it.
And why the hell can't you get Office 97 working in Windows 2000? Worked just fine for me and I used it everyday in a multiuser environment (I now use Linux all day).
I'm tired of the "MS software is full of bugs!" rant that I hear on