Not to mention that if you download a third-party/proprietary app, it is likely to be binary-only and statically compiled, or at least only depend on glibc.
Corporations have no integrity. It doesn't matter if a (big) company does something you agree with on day n, because on day n+1 the board, the CEO and the rest of top management can be fired and replaced; replaced with people that will do something you despise. Likewise they may be bought out, merged, liquidated, etc. Unlike governments, few corporations have any kind of mandatory ethical code, or any way of effectively enforcing such rules.
We see this flip-flop with SCO. Caldera used to be a quite reponsible company, now they are 'evil'. IBM used to be 'evil', now they are 'good'.
This is a specific problem with large companies, because large companies are publically owned and hence involve a fiduciary responsibility of great importance to a lot of people. The management have a duty to the owners to maximise the profit potential of the company. When a company has a lot of capital, the value of 'ethical' practices pales in significance compared to the amount of profit potential.
In the case of small companies, the responsibility to maximise earnings is of secondary importance compared to maintaining valuable customer relationships. Often the owner is also the top manager, and hence he/she may decide to act 'ethically' without risking a breach of their fiduciary duty. Also, they will not be fired arbitrarily! To a certain extent, a small company's integrity resides in that of its (private) owner.
I read a paper once that advocated the following strategy for getting to Proxima Centauri in a span of ~50 years. The plan is this:
1) Construct array of solar panels near Mercury (or whatever) 2) Beam resulting gigawatts of power to the Moon using small lasers/masers 3) Collect the power and use it to feed a very large laser 4) Point laser at a huge fresnel lens orbiting Jupiter (say) 5) Point fresnel lens at a solar sail, accelerating it to ~0.1c quite quickly
The lens allows your laser beam to stay focused at long range (like 4 light years). Of course it would take centuries to build the kit needed, but once it's running you can send lots of payloads for little cost (solar sails are 'cheap' to make). There are also solar sail strategies for interstellar return journeys!
I like solar sails, generally. Sustainable space travel!
can you recommend Mozilla as a stable and well-rendered browser? I mean, does it crash? Would it be a waste of my time to put it on my machine? How much upkeep would I have to do?
How many recommendations do you need? Slashdot is practically a Mozilla advocacy blog. Take it from me: Mozilla is a very stable, secure and usable product on Windows. Its rendering is near-flawless. It costs $0.00. What have you got to lose by trying it out?
BTW, you don't need to work hard to keep 'up to date'. I'm using Mozilla 1.6 from months ago and there are no vulnerabilities in it.
If a bug was discovered in Konqueror's handling of ms-its urls that resulted in a security hole, would there be anyone claiming Konqueror shouldn't be part of KDE?
Konqueror is part of KDE, not part of GNU/Linux. But IE is part of Windows.
It's a flaw of Windows and Linux that applications are tied to an an instance of the OS once installed. It doesn't need to be like that. It hasn't always been like that, it's just the Unix has always followed that philosophy
Sorry, what? How is my software (Gnome, say), 'tied to' my OS (Linux + glibc + GNU bits, say)? I don't get it. Is there some 'Unix/Linux rule' that I have to reinstall Gnome when a new minor rev of the kernel / glibc / GNU bits comes out? 'Cos I seem to be doing fine here. Major revisions of the OS don't count, by the way.
Perhaps if I put it like this: The thing about Linux is that applications live in self-contained RPM packages. (I couldn't give a damn about relocatability).
Nautilus is also moving away from magic numbers. The Gnome 2.6 release uses file extensions. It's a simple question of I/O speed; reading the magic numbers across NFS or SAMBA is just soooo slooow.
Clearly, team play != 'pure altruism' (if altruism is ever pure).
In team play the 'something you expect' is, in the first instance, collective success ( a 'win'). This is still altruism in a broad sense. For instance, dying in CS means you are less likely to be able to afford a good weapon in the next round; your stats will suffer. But as a good player you are prepared to die anyway, because otherwise the team may lose (yes - damaging your stats even more).
The point is that such games are deliberately designed around the concept of team play, and rewarding collective behaviour. You cannot just do what you want in CS and expect to have a good time, let alone win. To win you must serve your team and make 'quasi-altruistic' tradeoffs.
So regardless of whether multiplayer video games allow altruism, it seems that they present non-individualistic aspects. There are a range of possible 'political biases' to find in video games.
-- (Christ-on-a-bike posting under another account)
Do you mean 'harder to play' as in 'harder to use, but effective if used well', or as in 'harder to use, and genuinely crap'? There's a big difference.
The latter is probably more like real life, but the former undoubtedly makes a better game. It's great to be owned by a skilled scout or pyro in team fortress (they've put in the time). But if there's a class no-one uses in normal play, then it seems a waste.
In team play you share a single goal with your team-mates. However, the libertarian/individualistic ethic lets you choose your own goals.
Put another way: the team player is prepared to give up their 'life', altruistically, for their team's success. Does this seem like 'individualism' to you? (Does it seem reasonable to call, say, NFL football 'individualistic'? And if not, what does that say about CAL CS play?)
TFA said that players like to be in control and free. For example, players hate scripted sequences and FMV cut scenes. BUT in e.g. Counter-Strike you 'take one for the team'; your avatar dies and you must watch the remainder of the round non-interactively, like a cut scene. You're prepared to make this sacrifice of control because the team goals are more important than your avatar's survival. (This is how team play goes beyond simply 'playing fair'.)
Socialism is collectivism: giving up some personal privileges and freedoms in order for a greater goal to be achieved. Team play can be interpreted this way, surely.
Notice that I'm not saying that team players are all socialists! Just as TFA doesn't say that people who play GTA are all libertarians. The focus is supposed to be on the 'political meaning' of the games themselves.
--
(Christ-on-a-bike posting under another account)
Corporate lawyers are watching everything every small biz does
Sorry, but that's ridiculous. The patent lawyer armies are marching on the huge revenues of Amazon and MS, not small businesses. They follow the money. Large scale patent litigation is just not feasible, and if it was tried there would be a backlash.
Now on the copyright issue, yes, the RIAA is suing smalltime copyright violators. But that is a lot cheaper than patent litigation, and it doesn't affect small businesses at all (or even most file sharers).
Ogg support alone was what swung me to get an iRiver
Hear Hear. I wish they would call it 'vorbis' support though, since Ogg is just a file format. Xiph are in a bit of a mess with the use of their branding. I wonder if it would be possible to add Speex support too.
I too have several gigs of Ogg Vorbis files. I use Linux and Rhythmbox to play them. Now I have an iRiver player on order from Amazon (UKP250, what a price).
All I want now is rhythmbox/iRiver integration - building on iripdb perhaps.
I think that practically speaking the difference is linguistic. C coders are likely to use GTK and C++ coders Qt. That's just my impression. Of course each toolkit has lots of other bindings as well, though they seem comparatively little used (especially for Qt).
Hopefully that was just a slip because the grandparent had it wrong, but anyway: Qt and GTK aren't window managers, they are toolkits. As you assuredly know, any Qt app or GTK app is equally capable of being used under any X11 window manager.
Neither KDE nor Gnome is a window manager either, although both projects include one. KDE and Gnome are 'environments'.
The open source movement is a pro-programmer movement.
I agree; for example, open source programmers get access to kernel and library sources as well as just APIs. But open source (BSD) applications can be closed and extended in proprietary way. Great for those developers, not so good for the users, who may have to fork out more cash for upgrades.
OTOH Free software is really a pro-user movement. Remember the point of the GPL - to preserve the user's freedom. Part of the effect of the GPL, through Linux, has been to force down prices. Great for users, not so good for developers (except, of course, in that as devs are themselves users).
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that if you download a third-party/proprietary app, it is likely to be binary-only and statically compiled, or at least only depend on glibc.
This is in the works.
IHBT?
We see this flip-flop with SCO. Caldera used to be a quite reponsible company, now they are 'evil'. IBM used to be 'evil', now they are 'good'.
This is a specific problem with large companies, because large companies are publically owned and hence involve a fiduciary responsibility of great importance to a lot of people. The management have a duty to the owners to maximise the profit potential of the company. When a company has a lot of capital, the value of 'ethical' practices pales in significance compared to the amount of profit potential.
In the case of small companies, the responsibility to maximise earnings is of secondary importance compared to maintaining valuable customer relationships. Often the owner is also the top manager, and hence he/she may decide to act 'ethically' without risking a breach of their fiduciary duty. Also, they will not be fired arbitrarily! To a certain extent, a small company's integrity resides in that of its (private) owner.
I read a paper once that advocated the following strategy for getting to Proxima Centauri in a span of ~50 years. The plan is this:
1) Construct array of solar panels near Mercury (or whatever)
2) Beam resulting gigawatts of power to the Moon using small lasers/masers
3) Collect the power and use it to feed a very large laser
4) Point laser at a huge fresnel lens orbiting Jupiter (say)
5) Point fresnel lens at a solar sail, accelerating it to ~0.1c quite quickly
The lens allows your laser beam to stay focused at long range (like 4 light years). Of course it would take centuries to build the kit needed, but once it's running you can send lots of payloads for little cost (solar sails are 'cheap' to make). There are also solar sail strategies for interstellar return journeys!
I like solar sails, generally. Sustainable space travel!
How many recommendations do you need? Slashdot is practically a Mozilla advocacy blog. Take it from me: Mozilla is a very stable, secure and usable product on Windows. Its rendering is near-flawless. It costs $0.00. What have you got to lose by trying it out?
BTW, you don't need to work hard to keep 'up to date'. I'm using Mozilla 1.6 from months ago and there are no vulnerabilities in it.
Konqueror is part of KDE, not part of GNU/Linux. But IE is part of Windows.
Sorry, what? How is my software (Gnome, say), 'tied to' my OS (Linux + glibc + GNU bits, say)? I don't get it. Is there some 'Unix/Linux rule' that I have to reinstall Gnome when a new minor rev of the kernel / glibc / GNU bits comes out? 'Cos I seem to be doing fine here. Major revisions of the OS don't count, by the way.
Perhaps if I put it like this: The thing about Linux is that applications live in self-contained RPM packages. (I couldn't give a damn about relocatability).
Nautilus is also moving away from magic numbers. The Gnome 2.6 release uses file extensions. It's a simple question of I/O speed; reading the magic numbers across NFS or SAMBA is just soooo slooow.
The point is that such games are deliberately designed around the concept of team play, and rewarding collective behaviour. You cannot just do what you want in CS and expect to have a good time, let alone win. To win you must serve your team and make 'quasi-altruistic' tradeoffs.
So regardless of whether multiplayer video games allow altruism, it seems that they present non-individualistic aspects. There are a range of possible 'political biases' to find in video games.
-- (Christ-on-a-bike posting under another account)
The latter is probably more like real life, but the former undoubtedly makes a better game. It's great to be owned by a skilled scout or pyro in team fortress (they've put in the time). But if there's a class no-one uses in normal play, then it seems a waste.
Put another way: the team player is prepared to give up their 'life', altruistically, for their team's success. Does this seem like 'individualism' to you? (Does it seem reasonable to call, say, NFL football 'individualistic'? And if not, what does that say about CAL CS play?)
TFA said that players like to be in control and free. For example, players hate scripted sequences and FMV cut scenes. BUT in e.g. Counter-Strike you 'take one for the team'; your avatar dies and you must watch the remainder of the round non-interactively, like a cut scene. You're prepared to make this sacrifice of control because the team goals are more important than your avatar's survival. (This is how team play goes beyond simply 'playing fair'.)
Socialism is collectivism: giving up some personal privileges and freedoms in order for a greater goal to be achieved. Team play can be interpreted this way, surely.
Notice that I'm not saying that team players are all socialists! Just as TFA doesn't say that people who play GTA are all libertarians. The focus is supposed to be on the 'political meaning' of the games themselves.
-- (Christ-on-a-bike posting under another account)
+1, Insightful!
Sorry, but that's ridiculous. The patent lawyer armies are marching on the huge revenues of Amazon and MS, not small businesses. They follow the money. Large scale patent litigation is just not feasible, and if it was tried there would be a backlash.
Now on the copyright issue, yes, the RIAA is suing smalltime copyright violators. But that is a lot cheaper than patent litigation, and it doesn't affect small businesses at all (or even most file sharers).
You can get apt and urpmi frontends. So duh.
But copyright violation is right!
Oh and there absolutely is interest in users from Gnome devs. What about the usability stuff done by Sun? That had a pretty big effect.
Hear Hear. I wish they would call it 'vorbis' support though, since Ogg is just a file format. Xiph are in a bit of a mess with the use of their branding. I wonder if it would be possible to add Speex support too.
I too have several gigs of Ogg Vorbis files. I use Linux and Rhythmbox to play them. Now I have an iRiver player on order from Amazon (UKP250, what a price).
All I want now is rhythmbox/iRiver integration - building on iripdb perhaps.
Apple engineers squeezed all the best features of iPod into a case weighing just 3.6 ounces and smaller than any cell phone(1)
...
(1) Compared volumetrically to cell phones sold in the U.S.
I can corroborate this. My small Nokia is 98mm x 43mm x 18mm = 75852mm^3.
Mini iPod is 58993mm^3.
I'm impressed they got it that small. They managed to make it 13mm thick. Very nice.
Will cost at least 200 UK pounds inc. tax on release here though. ($360, ouch)
This makes /. sound like a stuck record (duh), but
Do you wanna tell that to IBM? (TCO propaganda at the bottom BTW)
I think that practically speaking the difference is linguistic. C coders are likely to use GTK and C++ coders Qt. That's just my impression. Of course each toolkit has lots of other bindings as well, though they seem comparatively little used (especially for Qt).
Hopefully that was just a slip because the grandparent had it wrong, but anyway: Qt and GTK aren't window managers, they are toolkits. As you assuredly know, any Qt app or GTK app is equally capable of being used under any X11 window manager.
Neither KDE nor Gnome is a window manager either, although both projects include one. KDE and Gnome are 'environments'.
I agree; for example, open source programmers get access to kernel and library sources as well as just APIs. But open source (BSD) applications can be closed and extended in proprietary way. Great for those developers, not so good for the users, who may have to fork out more cash for upgrades.
OTOH Free software is really a pro-user movement. Remember the point of the GPL - to preserve the user's freedom. Part of the effect of the GPL, through Linux, has been to force down prices. Great for users, not so good for developers (except, of course, in that as devs are themselves users).
And it's 'possible' to use relativity to travel backwards too. See wormholes.
Finally someone gives the obvious rebuttal, and he's AC and no-one will get it. Oh well.