Links exist (were designed into the WWW) to allow people to be pointed to documents. Not "web sites", specific documents. That's the big advantage that the web has over protocals like Gopher and FTP that existed before - you can link to something specific rather than pointing in a vague direction and making the user find the specific document themselves.
This works fine for most web sites. Even services like youtube are designed around this model. If you can't handle this, go set up a gopher site.
I consider using the force of government (i.e. threat of violence) to prevent people from sharing cultural content to be the unethical thing here. If someone shares some music on the internet, and then gets sued for tens of thousands of dollars and can't go to college any more or loses their house - there's only one victim, and it's damn well the person who got sued.
Corvette has to compete against other manufacturers of ridiculous looking cars. If you could buy a Corvette for $60,000 and you could get an awesome bat-mobile with a lightning paint job (or whatever naturally competes with a Corvette) for $15,000 - Corvette would sell 0 cars because it wouldn't be worth it in the market.
Music doesn't compete in the market in the same way, because one song isn't a valid replacement for another song. If you want a specific album, and I say "Ahh, but you can buy this other similar album for half the price", you're going to look at me like an idiot - because music isn't functional, so it doesn't have a functional replacement, and therefore doesn't have market forces keeping the price down (aside from the "That's lame, it's too expensive so I can't buy it at all" effect.)
Why would you want Debian to reproduce Ubuntu? Ubuntu already exists!
Debian's really great because it's Debian. It has packages for everything, and it has extensive testing that produces super-stable server releases. Everything fits together well because the developers are willing to patch stuff to make it work the way they want it to.
I'd say that the terrible thing is that you don't understand freedom, and thus don't have any reason to value it.
Let's look at the result of two possible choices for the OLPC project: Opera and Firefox. Both offer a very similar user experience - so similar that if they work properly, an average user won't even notice the difference. There are two significant areas of difference: Opera uses less RAM, Firefox is Free Software.
Choosing Firefox has an immediate disadvantage of requiring more RAM in each OLPC machine, which raises the cost slightly. Having extra RAM isn't strictly a bad thing - it will make the machines more flexible in the future - but without Firefox the extra RAM is clearly not necessary.
Choosing Opera has a much more severe long term disadvantage: It's not Free Software. This has two obvious and practical effects. First, none of the users will contribute to any free web browser, because they don't have one - with a Free Software program, every new user is a fractional new programmer for the development effort. With a proprietary application, that resource is wasted. Second, the application cannot be maintained without the help of Opera Software - useful new features simply can't be added unless the programmers at Opera Software do it themselves. Even if they want to add new user requested features, which many proprietary software vendors won't do, they still have a limited amount of time. With free software, any programmer can do it. Not everyone is a programmer, but they're not rare.
Drivers are innately hardware defendant. Their only purpose is to expose hardware functionality. Proprietary drivers are *really obnoxious*, because they have bugs that you can't fix, but they are - by nature - a short term problem. When that hardware gets replaced, there will be different drivers. Free drivers are much better, but it's not as important as other software, because other software lasts much longer than one hardware generation.
Who cares about "best"? Frequently, Free Software *is* the technically best solution, but even if it isn't it's still the best choice. Freedom is way more important than minor technical differences. Without Free Software, every user is dependent on the software developer for support. Will Opera add a feature to their program for the cost of getting a couple local programmers? Even if they would, is that better than helping the local economy?
A project like OLPC should be helping local economies become self-sufficient. That's not going to happen as a result of making users dependent on foreign software companies, and it's not something to throw away over a couple megs of RAM.
The only general difference I can see between a business user and a home user is that a business user generally won't be playing games. Given that, Linux should be perfect for a corporate environment right now. If there are one or two people who rely on specific legacy Windows apps like Autocad... keep a Windows workstation around for them. If it's just Microsoft Office, the license fees are a waste of money.
...that copyright should be about providing incentive for content creators and any laws should be made with this fact firmly in mind
You do realize that the history and economic reality of copyright don't really support that assertion, right? Take a look at http://www.questioncopyright.org/faq for some actual background on the topic.
Yea, that would have been pretty easy. It wasn't that important though, so they didn't do it. If it were *really* that important you could store short pointer offsets and calculate addresses manually.
DRM technology is theoretically impossible to prevent the copying of non-interactive works.
For interactive works the question is more interesting, but the Starforce people try *damn hard* to prevent people from copying Windows video games, and that doesn't seem to slow RELOADED or DEViANCE down one bit.
There's no reason to expect that entertainment quality would degrade overall if the entertainment industry gave up and copyright law was abolished entirely. We'd lose out on Britney Spears songs, but with Britney's marketing dept out of the way others could produce similar product for the ad revenues from product placement in music videos. I don't think you really fear pop music getting more commercialized.
Basically the only thing that wouldn't have a funding model is really high budget movies and video games. Perhaps that would give people an incentive to resort to such low-budget techniques as having a decent plot.
True. That's why I used the term "almost-custom". If the software you list were any more obscure, it would have to be custom.
An interesting note is that the makers of Autocad would probably be pretty receptive to a Linux port if any of their significant customers requested it. Another product of theirs - Maya - not only has Linux binaries, but is actively supported on two different Linux distros.
Sure, there are specialized applications in any number of obscure fields that only work on legacy platforms. If you absolutely, positively, must run some specific piece of obscure proprietary software then I guess you need a Windows workstation. That's not specific to Windows applications either - there are bunches of people in obscure computer graphics fields who need to run Solaris or (less frequently now) Irix, because that's where the apps they want to use are available.
But just because there's some obscure piece of field-specific software that requires Windows or Solaris or an AIX workstation doesn't mean that everyone in the world needs to run those operating systems on their computer. Most people don't run extremely obscure almost-custom software when they use their computer - they run normal desktop apps like a word processor and a video player - and for those things there's no good reason to favor Windows over the other options.
Are you a time traveller from 1998 who hasn't bothered checking to make sure the world hasn't changed in 8 years or something?
Most computer users use their computer by looking at the screen and clicking on stuff that looks like it will do what they want. The fact that Ubuntu has an "Applications" menu rather than a "Start" menu shouldn't slow that down. The big old Firefox icon, and the "OpenOffice.org Word Processor" item under the "Office" menu shouldn't be that hard either.
The fact of the matter is, as long as a user isn't computer illiterate to the point that they can't operate a mouse, any modern user-oriented desktop operating system will work fine for them - Windows XP, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
Even the old "Applications" issue is basically irrelevant. The only reason you'd need Windows on a computer is to play computer games - Windows is appropriate in the same places that a Playstation 3 is, not for getting work done.
Doubling the number of general purpose registers is nothing to scoff at. Software that takes advantage of that can easily get a noticeable performance jump. Further, the only thing that should reliably be taking up more memory is pointers - x86 & amd64 don't have significant alignment issues like RISC processors, so they can handle short data (i.e. 32 or even 16 bit integers) all day long.
What would be really nice is something like Bittorrent with a multicast system that was synergistic. Every time anyone uploaded a chunk, everyone in the swarm would get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Links exist (were designed into the WWW) to allow people to be pointed to documents. Not "web sites", specific documents. That's the big advantage that the web has over protocals like Gopher and FTP that existed before - you can link to something specific rather than pointing in a vague direction and making the user find the specific document themselves.
This works fine for most web sites. Even services like youtube are designed around this model. If you can't handle this, go set up a gopher site.
I consider using the force of government (i.e. threat of violence) to prevent people from sharing cultural content to be the unethical thing here. If someone shares some music on the internet, and then gets sued for tens of thousands of dollars and can't go to college any more or loses their house - there's only one victim, and it's damn well the person who got sued.
Corvette has to compete against other manufacturers of ridiculous looking cars. If you could buy a Corvette for $60,000 and you could get an awesome bat-mobile with a lightning paint job (or whatever naturally competes with a Corvette) for $15,000 - Corvette would sell 0 cars because it wouldn't be worth it in the market.
Music doesn't compete in the market in the same way, because one song isn't a valid replacement for another song. If you want a specific album, and I say "Ahh, but you can buy this other similar album for half the price", you're going to look at me like an idiot - because music isn't functional, so it doesn't have a functional replacement, and therefore doesn't have market forces keeping the price down (aside from the "That's lame, it's too expensive so I can't buy it at all" effect.)
Why would you want Debian to reproduce Ubuntu? Ubuntu already exists!
Debian's really great because it's Debian. It has packages for everything, and it has extensive testing that produces super-stable server releases. Everything fits together well because the developers are willing to patch stuff to make it work the way they want it to.
I'd say that the terrible thing is that you don't understand freedom, and thus don't have any reason to value it.
Let's look at the result of two possible choices for the OLPC project: Opera and Firefox. Both offer a very similar user experience - so similar that if they work properly, an average user won't even notice the difference. There are two significant areas of difference: Opera uses less RAM, Firefox is Free Software.
Choosing Firefox has an immediate disadvantage of requiring more RAM in each OLPC machine, which raises the cost slightly. Having extra RAM isn't strictly a bad thing - it will make the machines more flexible in the future - but without Firefox the extra RAM is clearly not necessary.
Choosing Opera has a much more severe long term disadvantage: It's not Free Software. This has two obvious and practical effects. First, none of the users will contribute to any free web browser, because they don't have one - with a Free Software program, every new user is a fractional new programmer for the development effort. With a proprietary application, that resource is wasted. Second, the application cannot be maintained without the help of Opera Software - useful new features simply can't be added unless the programmers at Opera Software do it themselves. Even if they want to add new user requested features, which many proprietary software vendors won't do, they still have a limited amount of time. With free software, any programmer can do it. Not everyone is a programmer, but they're not rare.
I guess that's true... unless you have ethics.
Luckily, some people do have ethics - including the people involved in the OLPC program.
Drivers are innately hardware defendant. Their only purpose is to expose hardware functionality. Proprietary drivers are *really obnoxious*, because they have bugs that you can't fix, but they are - by nature - a short term problem. When that hardware gets replaced, there will be different drivers. Free drivers are much better, but it's not as important as other software, because other software lasts much longer than one hardware generation.
Who cares about "best"? Frequently, Free Software *is* the technically best solution, but even if it isn't it's still the best choice. Freedom is way more important than minor technical differences. Without Free Software, every user is dependent on the software developer for support. Will Opera add a feature to their program for the cost of getting a couple local programmers? Even if they would, is that better than helping the local economy?
A project like OLPC should be helping local economies become self-sufficient. That's not going to happen as a result of making users dependent on foreign software companies, and it's not something to throw away over a couple megs of RAM.
The only general difference I can see between a business user and a home user is that a business user generally won't be playing games. Given that, Linux should be perfect for a corporate environment right now. If there are one or two people who rely on specific legacy Windows apps like Autocad... keep a Windows workstation around for them. If it's just Microsoft Office, the license fees are a waste of money.
You do realize that the history and economic reality of copyright don't really support that assertion, right? Take a look at http://www.questioncopyright.org/faq for some actual background on the topic.
Yea, that would have been pretty easy. It wasn't that important though, so they didn't do it. If it were *really* that important you could store short pointer offsets and calculate addresses manually.
DRM technology is theoretically impossible to prevent the copying of non-interactive works.
For interactive works the question is more interesting, but the Starforce people try *damn hard* to prevent people from copying Windows video games, and that doesn't seem to slow RELOADED or DEViANCE down one bit.
There's no reason to expect that entertainment quality would degrade overall if the entertainment industry gave up and copyright law was abolished entirely. We'd lose out on Britney Spears songs, but with Britney's marketing dept out of the way others could produce similar product for the ad revenues from product placement in music videos. I don't think you really fear pop music getting more commercialized.
Basically the only thing that wouldn't have a funding model is really high budget movies and video games. Perhaps that would give people an incentive to resort to such low-budget techniques as having a decent plot.
True. That's why I used the term "almost-custom". If the software you list were any more obscure, it would have to be custom.
An interesting note is that the makers of Autocad would probably be pretty receptive to a Linux port if any of their significant customers requested it. Another product of theirs - Maya - not only has Linux binaries, but is actively supported on two different Linux distros.
I actually was a professional technical support rep for almost a year. Just like small children, users cope if you don't baby them.
Sure, there are specialized applications in any number of obscure fields that only work on legacy platforms. If you absolutely, positively, must run some specific piece of obscure proprietary software then I guess you need a Windows workstation. That's not specific to Windows applications either - there are bunches of people in obscure computer graphics fields who need to run Solaris or (less frequently now) Irix, because that's where the apps they want to use are available.
But just because there's some obscure piece of field-specific software that requires Windows or Solaris or an AIX workstation doesn't mean that everyone in the world needs to run those operating systems on their computer. Most people don't run extremely obscure almost-custom software when they use their computer - they run normal desktop apps like a word processor and a video player - and for those things there's no good reason to favor Windows over the other options.
Why should users jump through ridiculous hoops to get a system that still isn't secure when they can run secure and functional free software instead?
Are you a time traveller from 1998 who hasn't bothered checking to make sure the world hasn't changed in 8 years or something?
Most computer users use their computer by looking at the screen and clicking on stuff that looks like it will do what they want. The fact that Ubuntu has an "Applications" menu rather than a "Start" menu shouldn't slow that down. The big old Firefox icon, and the "OpenOffice.org Word Processor" item under the "Office" menu shouldn't be that hard either.
The fact of the matter is, as long as a user isn't computer illiterate to the point that they can't operate a mouse, any modern user-oriented desktop operating system will work fine for them - Windows XP, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
Even the old "Applications" issue is basically irrelevant. The only reason you'd need Windows on a computer is to play computer games - Windows is appropriate in the same places that a Playstation 3 is, not for getting work done.
That's true for Sparc64. Not so much for amd64.
Doubling the number of general purpose registers is nothing to scoff at. Software that takes advantage of that can easily get a noticeable performance jump. Further, the only thing that should reliably be taking up more memory is pointers - x86 & amd64 don't have significant alignment issues like RISC processors, so they can handle short data (i.e. 32 or even 16 bit integers) all day long.
Why is the perl script so hard? The command line would have a bunch of sed going on, whereas the perl script only requires running perl.
I'm guessing... perl -e 'for(`ls`) { chomp; $n = lc $_; system("mv $_ $n"); }'
What would be really nice is something like Bittorrent with a multicast system that was synergistic. Every time anyone uploaded a chunk, everyone in the swarm would get it.
How much is that worth in tax dollars?
In any case, do you really think that trading 4 types of coin for two types is a bad deal? Would it make your pockets *more* full of coins?
How about we just use the subset of your idea that actually makes sense:
Kill pennies, nickles, and dimes. Replace dollar bills with dollar coins.
What you're missing here is that methane has a much larger global warming effect per carbon atom than carbon dioxide does.
Lots of things are possible. That's one that's possible and not true.
VLC Player is more likely to be the best media player under Windows, where stuff like MPlayer isn't native.