Oh. And this really stopped the US's NATO allies from spying on it during the Cold War for the same reasons, didn't it?
"it" -- what? US? NATO? Allies? job?
Face it, the US is playing by the exact same set of rules as everyone else, and happens to be no better or no worse, and speaks from no higher and no lower a moral standpoint. If the US wasn't doing this, US companies would be torn to pieces by companies from countries that did do this, and vice versa.
Other governments do industrial espionage for "their" companies? That's news to me. Governments constantly do military espionage and extend it to military-meaningful technologies for themselves (say, nuclear technology that is usually controlled by government, not companies), and they do industrial espionage when subjected to embargo for some kinds of non-military technology (this can be justified because they can't just buy products from abroad), but providing this kind of "service" to companies is something where civilized countries draw the line.
(BTW, I wonder why US doesn't just elect companies for Congress and President -- they are "persons" under american laws that have "rights".)
So unless there's an ENFORCABLE end put to this for everyone SIMULTANEOUSLY, I don't see this stopping anytime soon.
Loss of credibility is enough to replace "enforcement" -- and it looks like just that can happen if US won't revise its "we rule the world, and our companies are above everything" policy. Fear, uncertainty and doubt work both ways.
The Russians admitted that the only thing that kept them on par with the Americans (and kept them from being militarily, the Third World country they were in reality) during the Cold War was economic espionage
Who said that? I am Russian, and I didn't.
(second on their 'To-Do' list only to suppressing dissidents -internal and external- Read 'The KGB Papers' for more.)
ISBN? And what is it anyway -- some piece of fiction? An article from tabloid?
If this weren't happening, the taxpayers should complain. How would it look if the director of the CIA had to tell a congressional commitee "Yes, we had the information that would have saved Boeing/General Motors/Lockheed but we couldn't pass it on because it was commercial"?
It's against taxpayers' interest to support Boeing, General Motors or Lockheed -- every case where those companies lost their share in their markts increases the competition there thus making economy more healthy (or, less sick). US is not in war with any of the countries involved, they actually are allies in NATO, so there is no defense-related justification either
YOU aren't purchasing a perpetual right to the music. You're purchasing the right to listen to the music on the media you purchased it on.
Nope. "Purchasing" a copyrighted creative work on the medum (all creative works are copyrighted) is buying a medum plus a license to use the creative work (listen/view/use in derived works within the restriction of fair use... -- for example I have a right to look at the oscilloscope with music on its input even though it was not intended to be used that way -- however I can't use that as a public performance). If the medium is destroyed, license remains -- if you have a copy you can use it instead of the original, and formally you will not be guilty in any crime if you will buy a bootleg of the same.
f your CD shatters or gets stuck in a microwave or somehting, you're not entitled to a new one.
No one has an obligation to replace you your medium (free, for a price of medium, or higher), but your license remains forever. No one but the Congress can revoke it. You may have trouble using that license if you can't find a copy (say, all copies of the work are destroyed), but if you will find another copy, and duplicate it, duplicate will be yours.
Likewise, if you bought MS Word 5.1 for the Mac on floppies, that doesn't mean that you should be entitled to MS Word 2000 on CD due to the G4's lack of a floppy drive.
He is not entitled to physical replacement, but he can borrow a CD with MS Word 5.1 and install it on new Mac, as long as the old one is erased or otherwise destroyed.
How possibly a gas tank (of whatever kind -- it definitely isn't larger than the space station itself, and it is supposed to contain such a simple thing as liquified oxygen or nitrogen) can be this expensive? Doesn't it look like Boeing is being paid much more than what its products can possibly be worth?
(and if I am wrong, I would like to hear the explanation)
Manufacturers are happy to sell wholesale to anyone who buys large enough amount to keep distribution costs low. Now they can't sell it to consumers because they have no shipping infrastructure that will be cheap enough to do that with individual users, so they need retailers. When large enough percentage of consumers will start using search engines to look for products, retailer will become an unnecessary middleman for the whole classes of products -- cheap low-maintenance web site and warehouses would give more profit when selling at prices lower than retail and higher than wholesale.
Because they don't want to undercut the retailers. Retailers act as free adverising. And don't forget that for every item a retailer has in stock, the manufacturer has already received their share.
Retailers are nowhere close to "free" anything -- they take the huge difference between retail and wholesale prices. Advertising is good only for classes of products that no one would buy online anyway, and retailers have their own means of forcing manufacturers to reduce prices or otherwise do favors to them -- manufacturers end up competing for retailers, not consumers.
If Amazon's business doesn't support itself, it should die -- possibly even earlier than when it will become useless by its base idea. There is nothing wrong with that, and if so, society will better without them -- after all it's a business, and if someone else (big company or not) successfully wins over it in fair competition, providing equal or better service, nothing is lost to consumers. No one, including me, you or O'Reilly has any obligation to support Amazon just because it competes with "big businesses" -- if they don't have anything to offer that will be better than B&N, they can kiss our collective asses.
I dislike Microsoft and its likes not because they are big but because they make bad products and cause trouble for people who are trying to make good products. If Microsoft made the best OS possible, sold it at reasonable price and allowed others to easily improve it, no one, even Open Source supporters, would attack it, just like no one would attack Amazon if it managed to keep its position as top online retailer justified. But since we know that Microsoft abused its ability to dictate terms of contracts and turned development of alternative OSes into a struggle with hardware manufacturers at one side, application software file formats at the other, and OEMs that refuse to sell boxes without Windows, we hate Microsoft with a passion and will do everything that is in our power to prevent such abuse in the future.
By the same logic I don't see why Amazon that instead of providing better service abuses USPTO stupidity and courts' technical incompetence, deserves anything better than a place in technology-related ideas junkyard, next to DVIX, STREAMS, DOS and X.25.
The whole point is, Amazon is doomed. I can't know if they will ever turn a profit, but I am absolutely sure, their business model will not be viable after manufacturers themselves will start organizing their "e-commerce" sites, and noncommercial search engines (or semi-commercial -- ones that aren't paid for advertising in their search results) will become smart enough to look for those sites automatically. When that will happen, there will be absolutely no point to have central distributor -- if something is worth ordering by mail, manufacturer/publisher/... will just see users coming through search engines and ordering stuff, so he will send it by himself, probably with some help of low-overhead warehousing/distribution network that will work completely behind the scenes, and no customer will ever know how it looks and how little it charges for storage (no consumer-marketing and accessibility only to carriers => cheap warehousing). Amazon will have no place in such world, just like it had no place in the world before large number of potential customers started using the Internet.
Maybe Jeff Bezos doesn't understand that (he doesn't look smart enough), but he definitely understands that some kind of "dilution" of his business will happen soon, and instead of accepting the fate and trying to be something that competes in quality (what is actually hard to do in this kind of business -- it's just too hard to screw up such a simple process, so everybody except complete crooks will look good), he is trying to pour money into advertising and scare competitors away by bogus patents. Of course, his patents will be sooner or later overturned, and his advertising will be unable to overcome information from search engines, but probably he thinks, it will give him some time, and this is the only thing, this situation is about -- keeping Amazon from its inevitable, and beneficial for the society as a whole, death.
Well, I just copied the above text, and pasted it into the message box just fine, but then I started up kedit and hit paste and nothing happened. So then I typed something in kedit, copied it, went back to netscape, hit paste, and it pasted the above text a second time, not what I had copied in kedit.
Use the middlle button (of course, Motif is evil, but this is a separate issue).
Even if it did work correctly it's still fucked up in that you can't use control-insert to copy and shift-insert to paste in many programs. It will work in Netscape, but only if you remember to use the left control, pressing right-control-insert will lock it up.
Actually use of anything but single mouse button (works everywhere in X) for copy/paste is IMHO screwed up -- the origin of this is single-button Apple mouse, and if there was a way to do mouse-only copy/paste on Apple, key combinations for mouse-based operations wouldn't appear in the first place (and wouldn't find their way into Windows). Your complaint about it only shows, how much idiosyncrasy of Windows interface is the base of "Linux (/Unix) desktops are bad" ideas.
Hrmmm.... I'm currently trying to keep four clients on a home network in sync. Every freaking package scatters its files in a combination of network shared and local filesystems, so instead of just loading the wretched thing into/opt/newgizmo and adding a link to the (shared) global desktop, I have to do the rpm -qlp | egrep -v... dance and then copy the droppings to each system. Then when it comes time to remove the fool thing, I can't just rm -r/opt/gizmo No, I have to track down all of the little buggers and do the whole stupid thing in reverse. Updates are the worst of both. That's a lot of work for four systems in the same area; just imagine the fun that Corporate IT will have with it. This isn't really a Linux problem; it's a hacker (or hacker culture) problem. Too many of the packages are being set up according to rules that make perfect sense to programmer esthetics and depend on users having their own system administration skills.
RPMs are specifically designed to allow installation without copying files -- just copy rpm itself and install (or give the URL to rpm). And if boxes are just exact copies of each other, you can use rsync and just update everything that chaned.
In Windows copying of installed software is absolutely impossible because of registry and conflicts, and installers are too interactive to be useful, so it's definitely the area where Windows isn't ready.
You're right. Why walk into Wal-Mart and buy commercial apps, when you can download wobbly alpha-grade sharewareish apps off random FTP sites all over the place?
Spoken like a true troll, who never actually seen them.
Freshmeat alone provides more fine, robust perl scripts for parsing web logs than the average Wall-Mart customer would ever need!
Average Walmart customer is a moron, who shouldn't have computer in the first place (and most of Walmart customers actually don't). The person who actually needs a desktop computer is another story -- there are a lot of useful for him things listed on freshmeat.
And that isn't even beginning to enumerate the huge choices available in graphical CD-ROM players and clock-skins.
Are you by any chance the famous inventor of Ethernet?
Sometimes I wonder if some of you actually USE Linux. I would like to hear from 1 person who provides technical support to people that thinks Linux is, as of right now, ready for the desktop. The ONLY users I see Linux fit for right now are students doing research and scientists.
I use Linux at my desktop, laptop and server boxes, and I am neither student, nor scientist.
Yes, Linux is great and powerful, but it is lacking alot of interoperability and intuitiveness. I would like to see you explain to the users I used to support why copying and pasting between different programs is different..
It is? You can copy/paste text between everything (except things that can't select it n the first place).
Or how about why since they use Linux they can't click on a PDF and have it open in their browser
They can't? Any desktop environment that has file manager allows it.
, or why they can no longer install printer drivers
If Ghostscript drivers exist for their printer, they can, and if they don't, they can stick their printer up manufacturer's ass because they shouldn't buy unsupported hardware in the first place.
, or how to switch paper trays on LPD printer queues... *breathe*
They can't becauase this is what queues are for -- to separate print jobs that have different filters or output devices. Learn to use lpr or, better, lprng, and stop blaming your own incompetence on software.
Yeah there was a lot of very scary stuff going on and the "Commies" were behind most of it. Vietnam was "clearly" part of that trajectory. Even allowing the possibility that the whole Indo-china problem was not a plot hatched in Moscow, (I know it wasn't) they could hardly be complacent about it. It sure looked like a Commie plot, and certainly if you were an American policy planner, could you possibly doubt that the opposition in Moscow and Peking would make the most out of any opportunity arising from new satellite states in S.E. Asia?
The problem is, it was not a decision of one politician or group of politicians at that time. "Blame Commies for everything" at that time was "the" direction of american international politics, and at that time it was as "natural" for american politician to think in this direction, as thinking that planets make circles and epicycles around the Earth was "natural" for medieval astronomer despite better explanations being easy to come up with.
The Leninist strain of Marxism was something that simply had to be fought off actively. It was contagious, as it offered really bad people a way to get everything they always wanted --with the cooperation of people of good will. I cannot say that the necessity of resisting Leninism justified all means used...
That was Stalinism, not Leninism (and certainly had nothing to do with Marx) -- and it is well known that Communists themselves managed to turn domestic policy away from it as much as the dominant political force was able to soon after Stalin's death, so this was not tied anywhere to their main doctrine. Ideology/philosophy/religion often have very little to do with dictatorship and oppression -- by now ideas of "capitalism" and every major religion (with Islam being most prominent lately) were quite successfully used for the same goals, yet US didn't try to fight all of them at the scale anywhere comparable with communist ideology. It's also very likely that many of those countries would end up more tolerable (similar to USSR in 50's-80's) if US and other western countries didn't demonstrate so much hostility toward them just for the sake of anti-communism.
Beginning with The total destruction of labor as an independent political force within the revolutionary state--by the very same man, Lenin, who elevated the general strike to doomsday weapon status in the struggle against the capitalist system. Communism, not jilted --raped and murdered--at the altar by Lenin's Vanguard theory, and it's rapidly downhill from there...
And how it differs from capitalism's successful subversion of democracy and large companies emerging as the only political force that matters? This process happened with all political systems that survived for long enough to make their subversion/corruption a worthwhile effort.
Stalin, Beria and the Army purges of the 30's. We can't really blame that on Imperialism or Fascism, can we?
Stalin was a nasty and cruel dictator, but capitalism didn't save Germany from even worse things. And more relevant to the topic -- comparison of US and USSR -- US supported (and still supports) extremely oppressive governments all over the world at the extent, USSR allowed itself only with its closest neighbors that actually could be a military threat to it, like Afghanistan (not that I think that it makes things like that right).
The Cultural Revolution in China. Everybody! collect scrap iron and plant rice, the Chairman Mao way! Pyramids to Pharoah.
USSR never supported that policy. -- relationships between USSR and China after WWII for most of time were even worse than relationships between US and China.
Pol Pot's wonderful homage to Mao in Cambodia from 74-78 More pyramids, gleaming white and silent
Again -- had nothing to do with communism or USSR, or support from USSR.
After all that, could any sane man in the rank and file really believe they were fighting for a new and better way? The liberation of anyone? A new age and a "New Man"?
Communists in USSR caused enough trouble by themselves, but adding to them all bullshit that was done by people in other countries under a flag with some part of it red (most of whom neither read Marx, nor were supported by USSR) invalidates youur argument. With what was left, after WWII USSR was mildly oppressive internally and mostly conservative in international politics -- approximately the same as US.
No. It was the oldest way, a pre-historic age--literally, and the Old King. You should be among the most happy of people that it failed.
I am not happy at all. Formerly civilized country where I lived (USSR was civilized, and after living in US for seven years I have not changed my opinion about that) ceased to be civilized (at the extent that I had to leave what left of it to be able to make a living because I am a good programmer but would really suck as a mafia member), and instead of being fixed, political system was just destroyed and replaced with some mix of socialism, feudalism and criminal rule.
If you have some good ideas for subverting the GLobal Capitalist Cabal, I'm all ears.
I don't have any "plan" other than creating a situation where people who want to learn can learn, and people who don't -- starve or at least become socially and economically irrelevant. All the broken stuff in the existing system feeds on ignorance and stupidity.
Shhhh... you can wake up some Evangelion fans (to people who don't know -- it has at least two scenes can be interpreted as references to "naked and petrified"). Or something much worse than Evangelion fans.
It is ridiculous to say there is no difference between USSR and USA. Even if the commoner is slave in both, at least the USA has `bread and circuses.'
As a person, who (as opposed to most of Anonymous Cowards here) lived in both countries, I can testify that in "bread and circuses" both countries were approximately worth each other, yet in both propaganda shown the other side as something between Roman Empire, Hell (christian version) and Moon surface.
hey should simply hand the project to, say, IEEE or IETF or whatever
IETF is dead (since the last sane person there Jon Postel died), IEEE was born dead (never ever issued a sane and open standard) and ITU is an undead monster (a stronghold of proprietary bullshit in telephony industry).
I don't know about the others, but Palm has three different, mutually incompatible, docking stations with which to synchronize different Pilot models with PCs.
What the HECK are you talking about? There are three cases, so holders in cradles for different models are different, but protocols are the same.
Dude, it's a markup language specification. Even more, it's a XML DTD: it's text-based. There is no way they can make it "closed source"!
Hex dump of Word document is a text, too, yet it is still proprietary. XML solves a non-issue with parsing of data, but parsers are dime a dozen with tools like lex. Real problem is that handling the data models that include relationships between objects (including semantics) is still hidden in proprietary as hell code.
But the biggest reason we prevailed in the cold-war is that the inexorable dialectic of corruption undid the ideological trappings of Leninism from around their regimes and revelaed them as modern day Pharoahs.And nobody really likes slaving and dying for Pharoah.
No, people enjoy slaving and dying for President, Congress and Coca Cola-Microsoft-Ford-Monsanto-Walmart. Please, cut on the propaganda language, and talk about the facts.
I never thought of that "The Simpsons" episode...
on
The New Garbage Man
·
· Score: 1
...as a metaphor for software development, however Homer as Java programmer now makes SO MUCH SENSE, I feel bad about my poor perception.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh. And this really stopped the US's NATO allies from spying on it during the Cold War for the same reasons, didn't it?
"it" -- what? US? NATO? Allies? job?
Face it, the US is playing by the exact same set of rules as everyone else, and happens to be no better or no worse, and speaks from no higher and no lower a moral standpoint. If the US wasn't doing this, US companies would be torn to pieces by companies from countries that did do this, and vice versa.
Other governments do industrial espionage for "their" companies? That's news to me. Governments constantly do military espionage and extend it to military-meaningful technologies for themselves (say, nuclear technology that is usually controlled by government, not companies), and they do industrial espionage when subjected to embargo for some kinds of non-military technology (this can be justified because they can't just buy products from abroad), but providing this kind of "service" to companies is something where civilized countries draw the line.
(BTW, I wonder why US doesn't just elect companies for Congress and President -- they are "persons" under american laws that have "rights".)
So unless there's an ENFORCABLE end put to this for everyone SIMULTANEOUSLY, I don't see this stopping anytime soon.
Loss of credibility is enough to replace "enforcement" -- and it looks like just that can happen if US won't revise its "we rule the world, and our companies are above everything" policy. Fear, uncertainty and doubt work both ways.
The Russians admitted that the only thing that kept them on par with the Americans (and kept them from being militarily, the Third World country they were in reality) during the Cold War was economic espionage
Who said that? I am Russian, and I didn't.
(second on their 'To-Do' list only to suppressing dissidents -internal and external- Read 'The KGB Papers' for more.)
ISBN? And what is it anyway -- some piece of fiction? An article from tabloid?
If this weren't happening, the taxpayers should complain. How would it look if the director of the CIA had to tell a congressional commitee "Yes, we had the information that would have saved Boeing/General Motors/Lockheed but we couldn't pass it on because it was commercial"?
It's against taxpayers' interest to support Boeing, General Motors or Lockheed -- every case where those companies lost their share in their markts increases the competition there thus making economy more healthy (or, less sick). US is not in war with any of the countries involved, they actually are allies in NATO, so there is no defense-related justification either
IANAL, but neither you are
YOU aren't purchasing a perpetual right to the music. You're purchasing the right to listen to the music on the media you purchased it on.
Nope. "Purchasing" a copyrighted creative work on the medum (all creative works are copyrighted) is buying a medum plus a license to use the creative work (listen/view/use in derived works within the restriction of fair use... -- for example I have a right to look at the oscilloscope with music on its input even though it was not intended to be used that way -- however I can't use that as a public performance). If the medium is destroyed, license remains -- if you have a copy you can use it instead of the original, and formally you will not be guilty in any crime if you will buy a bootleg of the same.
f your CD shatters or gets stuck in a microwave or somehting, you're not entitled to a new one.
No one has an obligation to replace you your medium (free, for a price of medium, or higher), but your license remains forever. No one but the Congress can revoke it. You may have trouble using that license if you can't find a copy (say, all copies of the work are destroyed), but if you will find another copy, and duplicate it, duplicate will be yours.
Likewise, if you bought MS Word 5.1 for the Mac on floppies, that doesn't mean that you should be entitled to MS Word 2000 on CD due to the G4's lack of a floppy drive.
He is not entitled to physical replacement, but he can borrow a CD with MS Word 5.1 and install it on new Mac, as long as the old one is erased or otherwise destroyed.
Okay, 750 Grand would be more then enough to keep me more then happy for life.
Then you don't live in SF Bay Area -- here it's merely enough to not be homeless (but possibly still hungry) for life :-(
How possibly a gas tank (of whatever kind -- it definitely isn't larger than the space station itself, and it is supposed to contain such a simple thing as liquified oxygen or nitrogen) can be this expensive? Doesn't it look like Boeing is being paid much more than what its products can possibly be worth?
(and if I am wrong, I would like to hear the explanation)
Manufacturers are happy to sell wholesale to anyone who buys large enough amount to keep distribution costs low. Now they can't sell it to consumers because they have no shipping infrastructure that will be cheap enough to do that with individual users, so they need retailers. When large enough percentage of consumers will start using search engines to look for products, retailer will become an unnecessary middleman for the whole classes of products -- cheap low-maintenance web site and warehouses would give more profit when selling at prices lower than retail and higher than wholesale.
Because they don't want to undercut the retailers. Retailers act as free adverising. And don't forget that for every item a retailer has in stock, the manufacturer has already received their share.
Retailers are nowhere close to "free" anything -- they take the huge difference between retail and wholesale prices. Advertising is good only for classes of products that no one would buy online anyway, and retailers have their own means of forcing manufacturers to reduce prices or otherwise do favors to them -- manufacturers end up competing for retailers, not consumers.
Corporations are not people.Why should they have more rights than individuals?
Because they have successfully subverted representstive democracy in US, and are ruling this country.
If Amazon's business doesn't support itself, it should die -- possibly even earlier than when it will become useless by its base idea. There is nothing wrong with that, and if so, society will better without them -- after all it's a business, and if someone else (big company or not) successfully wins over it in fair competition, providing equal or better service, nothing is lost to consumers. No one, including me, you or O'Reilly has any obligation to support Amazon just because it competes with "big businesses" -- if they don't have anything to offer that will be better than B&N, they can kiss our collective asses.
I dislike Microsoft and its likes not because they are big but because they make bad products and cause trouble for people who are trying to make good products. If Microsoft made the best OS possible, sold it at reasonable price and allowed others to easily improve it, no one, even Open Source supporters, would attack it, just like no one would attack Amazon if it managed to keep its position as top online retailer justified. But since we know that Microsoft abused its ability to dictate terms of contracts and turned development of alternative OSes into a struggle with hardware manufacturers at one side, application software file formats at the other, and OEMs that refuse to sell boxes without Windows, we hate Microsoft with a passion and will do everything that is in our power to prevent such abuse in the future.
By the same logic I don't see why Amazon that instead of providing better service abuses USPTO stupidity and courts' technical incompetence, deserves anything better than a place in technology-related ideas junkyard, next to DVIX, STREAMS, DOS and X.25.
The whole point is, Amazon is doomed. I can't know if they will ever turn a profit, but I am absolutely sure, their business model will not be viable after manufacturers themselves will start organizing their "e-commerce" sites, and noncommercial search engines (or semi-commercial -- ones that aren't paid for advertising in their search results) will become smart enough to look for those sites automatically. When that will happen, there will be absolutely no point to have central distributor -- if something is worth ordering by mail, manufacturer/publisher/... will just see users coming through search engines and ordering stuff, so he will send it by himself, probably with some help of low-overhead warehousing/distribution network that will work completely behind the scenes, and no customer will ever know how it looks and how little it charges for storage (no consumer-marketing and accessibility only to carriers => cheap warehousing). Amazon will have no place in such world, just like it had no place in the world before large number of potential customers started using the Internet.
Maybe Jeff Bezos doesn't understand that (he doesn't look smart enough), but he definitely understands that some kind of "dilution" of his business will happen soon, and instead of accepting the fate and trying to be something that competes in quality (what is actually hard to do in this kind of business -- it's just too hard to screw up such a simple process, so everybody except complete crooks will look good), he is trying to pour money into advertising and scare competitors away by bogus patents. Of course, his patents will be sooner or later overturned, and his advertising will be unable to overcome information from search engines, but probably he thinks, it will give him some time, and this is the only thing, this situation is about -- keeping Amazon from its inevitable, and beneficial for the society as a whole, death.
Well, I just copied the above text, and pasted it into the message box just fine, but then I started up kedit and hit paste and nothing happened. So then I typed something in kedit, copied it, went back to netscape, hit paste, and it pasted the above text a second time, not what I had copied in kedit.
Use the middlle button (of course, Motif is evil, but this is a separate issue).
Even if it did work correctly it's still fucked up in that you can't use control-insert to copy and shift-insert to paste in many programs. It will work in Netscape, but only if you remember to use the left control, pressing right-control-insert will lock it up.
Actually use of anything but single mouse button (works everywhere in X) for copy/paste is IMHO screwed up -- the origin of this is single-button Apple mouse, and if there was a way to do mouse-only copy/paste on Apple, key combinations for mouse-based operations wouldn't appear in the first place (and wouldn't find their way into Windows). Your complaint about it only shows, how much idiosyncrasy of Windows interface is the base of "Linux (/Unix) desktops are bad" ideas.
Hrmmm.... I'm currently trying to keep four clients on a home network in sync. Every freaking package scatters its files in a combination of network shared and local filesystems, so instead of just loading the wretched thing into /opt/newgizmo and adding a link to the (shared) global desktop, I have to do the ... /opt/gizmo
rpm -qlp | egrep -v
dance and then copy the droppings to each system. Then when it comes time to remove the fool thing, I can't just
rm -r
No, I have to track down all of the little buggers and do the whole stupid thing in reverse. Updates are the worst of both. That's a lot of work for four systems in the same area; just imagine the fun that Corporate IT will have with it. This isn't really a Linux problem; it's a hacker (or hacker culture) problem. Too many of the packages are being set up according to rules that make perfect sense to programmer esthetics and depend on users having their own system administration skills.
RPMs are specifically designed to allow installation without copying files -- just copy rpm itself and install (or give the URL to rpm). And if boxes are just exact copies of each other, you can use rsync and just update everything that chaned.
In Windows copying of installed software is absolutely impossible because of registry and conflicts, and installers are too interactive to be useful, so it's definitely the area where Windows isn't ready.
You're right. Why walk into Wal-Mart and buy commercial apps, when you can download wobbly alpha-grade sharewareish apps off random FTP sites all over the place?
Spoken like a true troll, who never actually seen them.
Freshmeat alone provides more fine, robust perl scripts for parsing web logs than the average Wall-Mart customer would ever need!
Average Walmart customer is a moron, who shouldn't have computer in the first place (and most of Walmart customers actually don't). The person who actually needs a desktop computer is another story -- there are a lot of useful for him things listed on freshmeat.
And that isn't even beginning to enumerate the huge choices available in graphical CD-ROM players and clock-skins.
Are you by any chance the famous inventor of Ethernet?
Sometimes I wonder if some of you actually USE Linux. I would like to hear from 1 person who provides technical support to people that thinks Linux is, as of right now, ready for the desktop. The ONLY users I see Linux fit for right now are students doing research and scientists.
I use Linux at my desktop, laptop and server boxes, and I am neither student, nor scientist.
Yes, Linux is great and powerful, but it is lacking alot of interoperability and intuitiveness. I would like to see you explain to the users I used to support why copying and pasting between different programs is different..
It is? You can copy/paste text between everything (except things that can't select it n the first place).
Or how about why since they use Linux they can't click on a PDF and have it open in their browser
They can't? Any desktop environment that has file manager allows it.
, or why they can no longer install printer drivers
If Ghostscript drivers exist for their printer, they can, and if they don't, they can stick their printer up manufacturer's ass because they shouldn't buy unsupported hardware in the first place.
, or how to switch paper trays on LPD printer queues... *breathe*
They can't becauase this is what queues are for -- to separate print jobs that have different filters or output devices. Learn to use lpr or, better, lprng, and stop blaming your own incompetence on software.
Yeah there was a lot of very scary stuff going on and the "Commies" were behind most of it. Vietnam was "clearly" part of that trajectory. Even allowing the possibility that the whole Indo-china problem was not a plot hatched in Moscow, (I know it wasn't) they could hardly be complacent about it. It sure looked like a Commie plot, and certainly if you were an American policy planner, could you possibly doubt that the opposition in Moscow and Peking would make the most out of any opportunity arising from new satellite states in S.E. Asia?
The problem is, it was not a decision of one politician or group of politicians at that time. "Blame Commies for everything" at that time was "the" direction of american international politics, and at that time it was as "natural" for american politician to think in this direction, as thinking that planets make circles and epicycles around the Earth was "natural" for medieval astronomer despite better explanations being easy to come up with.
The Leninist strain of Marxism was something that simply had to be fought off actively. It was contagious, as it offered really bad people a way to get everything they always wanted --with the cooperation of people of good will. I cannot say that the necessity of resisting Leninism justified all means used...
That was Stalinism, not Leninism (and certainly had nothing to do with Marx) -- and it is well known that Communists themselves managed to turn domestic policy away from it as much as the dominant political force was able to soon after Stalin's death, so this was not tied anywhere to their main doctrine. Ideology/philosophy/religion often have very little to do with dictatorship and oppression -- by now ideas of "capitalism" and every major religion (with Islam being most prominent lately) were quite successfully used for the same goals, yet US didn't try to fight all of them at the scale anywhere comparable with communist ideology. It's also very likely that many of those countries would end up more tolerable (similar to USSR in 50's-80's) if US and other western countries didn't demonstrate so much hostility toward them just for the sake of anti-communism.
Beginning with The total destruction of labor as an independent political force within the revolutionary state--by the very same man, Lenin, who elevated the general strike to doomsday weapon status in the struggle against the capitalist system. Communism, not jilted --raped and murdered--at the altar by Lenin's Vanguard theory, and it's rapidly downhill from there...
And how it differs from capitalism's successful subversion of democracy and large companies emerging as the only political force that matters? This process happened with all political systems that survived for long enough to make their subversion/corruption a worthwhile effort.
Stalin, Beria and the Army purges of the 30's. We can't really blame that on Imperialism or Fascism, can we?
Stalin was a nasty and cruel dictator, but capitalism didn't save Germany from even worse things. And more relevant to the topic -- comparison of US and USSR -- US supported (and still supports) extremely oppressive governments all over the world at the extent, USSR allowed itself only with its closest neighbors that actually could be a military threat to it, like Afghanistan (not that I think that it makes things like that right).
The Cultural Revolution in China. Everybody! collect scrap iron and plant rice, the Chairman Mao way! Pyramids to Pharoah.
USSR never supported that policy. -- relationships between USSR and China after WWII for most of time were even worse than relationships between US and China.
Pol Pot's wonderful homage to Mao in Cambodia from 74-78 More pyramids, gleaming white and silent
Again -- had nothing to do with communism or USSR, or support from USSR.
After all that, could any sane man in the rank and file really believe they were fighting for a new and better way? The liberation of anyone? A new age and a "New Man"?
Communists in USSR caused enough trouble by themselves, but adding to them all bullshit that was done by people in other countries under a flag with some part of it red (most of whom neither read Marx, nor were supported by USSR) invalidates youur argument. With what was left, after WWII USSR was mildly oppressive internally and mostly conservative in international politics -- approximately the same as US.
No. It was the oldest way, a pre-historic age--literally, and the Old King. You should be among the most happy of people that it failed.
I am not happy at all. Formerly civilized country where I lived (USSR was civilized, and after living in US for seven years I have not changed my opinion about that) ceased to be civilized (at the extent that I had to leave what left of it to be able to make a living because I am a good programmer but would really suck as a mafia member), and instead of being fixed, political system was just destroyed and replaced with some mix of socialism, feudalism and criminal rule.
If you have some good ideas for subverting the GLobal Capitalist Cabal, I'm all ears.
I don't have any "plan" other than creating a situation where people who want to learn can learn, and people who don't -- starve or at least become socially and economically irrelevant. All the broken stuff in the existing system feeds on ignorance and stupidity.
(puts on glasses)
(removes all traces of expresstion from the face)
"I am your father".
Told ya -- Evangelion (Neon Genesis Evangelion) just mentioned one comment below.
Shhhh... you can wake up some Evangelion fans (to people who don't know -- it has at least two scenes can be interpreted as references to "naked and petrified"). Or something much worse than Evangelion fans.
It is ridiculous to say there is no difference between USSR and USA. Even if the commoner is slave in both, at least the USA has `bread and circuses.'
As a person, who (as opposed to most of Anonymous Cowards here) lived in both countries, I can testify that in "bread and circuses" both countries were approximately worth each other, yet in both propaganda shown the other side as something between Roman Empire, Hell (christian version) and Moon surface.
hey should simply hand the project to, say, IEEE or IETF or whatever
IETF is dead (since the last sane person there Jon Postel died), IEEE was born dead (never ever issued a sane and open standard) and ITU is an undead monster (a stronghold of proprietary bullshit in telephony industry).
I don't know about the others, but Palm has three different, mutually incompatible, docking stations with which to synchronize different Pilot models with PCs.
What the HECK are you talking about? There are three cases, so holders in cradles for different models are different, but protocols are the same.
Dude, it's a markup language specification. Even more, it's a XML DTD: it's text-based. There is no way they can make it "closed source"!
Hex dump of Word document is a text, too, yet it is still proprietary. XML solves a non-issue with parsing of data, but parsers are dime a dozen with tools like lex. Real problem is that handling the data models that include relationships between objects (including semantics) is still hidden in proprietary as hell code.
But the biggest reason we prevailed in the cold-war is that the inexorable dialectic of corruption undid the ideological trappings of Leninism from around their regimes and revelaed them as modern day Pharoahs.And nobody really likes slaving and dying for Pharoah.
No, people enjoy slaving and dying for President, Congress and Coca Cola-Microsoft-Ford-Monsanto-Walmart. Please, cut on the propaganda language, and talk about the facts.
...as a metaphor for software development, however Homer as Java programmer now makes SO MUCH SENSE, I feel bad about my poor perception.