What's the advantage of most things they pump at us? I'm waiting till the studios figure out that they could pack boxsets on fewer discs using blueray/HD instead of just upsampling and wasting space. Nothing ruins the fun of watching a series than having to change DVDs every couple episodes (though maybe the getting up and changing the disc bit is how they force us to remain so uber physically active?)
Contrary to popular belief, many of us dont get that warm and fuzzy feeling for helping people with no return expected.
I pity thee.
While not religious myself I do believe in the vague notion of karma (I say vague as not to insult the religious as I only really take the superficial qualities of it).
While I'm all for having money to buy toys and what not, helping people for no other reason than they need the help and I can provide it, is often more than enough reason for me to move to action. And you know what, usually down the road it pays off.
Anyone who thinks social welfare is a complete waste of effort has obviously never had been given a pink slip, or still lives with mommy and daddy. When you got bills to pay and your employer decides to give you the boot it's nice to know that you're not facing the street at the end of the week.
Granted it gets abused, but that's why you enforce policy not cut people who need it off.
Though yea, generally if you don't take reasonable steps to ensure your safety, you're kinda asking for trouble. Not to say phishers aren't criminals, but if you sit there and just hand them your money you don't deserve insurance reimbursement.
No, you don't score points for changing your file format after years of abuse. Also for totally avoiding something like the Open Office format which already exists. Really smooth there.
> using proprietary undocumented file formats, (like everyone else)
Um say what? OpenOffice format is a bunch of XML in zip file. Oh you mean like WordPerfect, Lotus Notes, etc? Except, WordPerfect wasn't tied to one OS, wasn't developed by a platform developer to tie in to the OS. You didn't have to buy CorelLinux [for instance] to run WordPerfect.
As for the POSIX compatibility... why was Windows forever tied to the previous OSes? You're supporting an OS which is in one way or another compatible with a non-standard OS from 1983. It's high time some of the legacy cruft was cut to make way for POSIX compliance. And frankly, why couldn't the win32api libraries be developed over top of a POSIX layer in future OSes? That way there is some backwards compatibility but also some future path to standardization.
You may hate the idea of people not locking their applications/data to a particular OS, but that's what a lot of us users find handy. Which is why we call you guys evil. You abuse your position of market dominance to flail inferior technology upon us and call it an upgrade [re: vista]. You bow to the DRM masters of the studios, interfere with OUR use of the computer all in the name of progress...
As for never wanting to open a Staroffice document... you realize it's pretty much the same format as OpenOffice right? So you're basically saying you don't care what anyone says if it doesn't come in a format that recognizes your ignorance? Well I'm writing this with Firefox, in Gentoo Linux. How about that!!!!
I use GNU/FLOSS/Linux as my platform of choice, but dabble in windows occasionally [mostly to check out that latest flash game posted to fark.com]. I don't see the fonts in the FLOSS world being inferior. What font are you using that is so horrible?
Also in apps where it matters [typesetting] they're professional quality (re: TeX metafonts).
I don't get blanket statements like this. As if there isn't buggy software for MacOS or Windows.
But i daily use Gnome, OpenOffice, tetex, gcc, etc. I can't imagine sitting here to use Windows, Office,... um office and MSVC as being "more" productive. But the point is Linux == Kernel, it's not the distro or desktop. Maybe this guy hates KDE, but that doesn't preclude Gnome or icewm or wm from being suitable, maybe he hates OpenOffice where Abiword would be a better fit...
You said: Just because you do something, doesn't mean people have to talk about it.
I pointed out that my projects are parts of fairly large and ultimately important projects. That if someone chose to talk about them, it wouldn't be without merit. You're just a hater, and with a thinking likes yours, it's all you'll ever be. Frankly, people like you is part of the reason I stopped caring about FLOSS. As much as I try, the hours I spend supporting users, developing new algorithms, documenting, etc, there is always someone around the corner who thinks that tearing a strip off of someone makes them special.
Well fine, think what you want. I never demanded the spotlight, I'm not angry at people. I'm just stating that if people seem to disregard the work that goes into the lesser known FLOSS projects they can ultimately expect them to stop being developed.
I'd suggest you not reply to this posting, as you're not mature enough to hold a civil discussion and frankly I ultimately don't care. I go home at night, relax, read, play piano, etc. FLOSS is not part of my life, and some little kid on/. dissing me makes no never mind to my life other than to fill time between builds at work.
Wow, why bother wasting my time with such sincere folk like you around.
My point isn't that people should give me money, it's that if you're gonna donate money to someone, it might as well be useful. Help defending this kid does nothing but make lawyers rich. Supporting a kid getting through college who writes FLOSS means they can spend more time supporting the public and less time flipping burgers while they try to pay for tuition, books, and rent.
You ignorantly assume this is only about me because you choose to define the parameters of this discussion in a way such that your rant against me shows some illusion of greed. What I said in my opening statements was that there are plenty of other projects out there that need some love and attention, not just mine.
What more do I have to do to prove that it's not selfishness? Or are you just assuming that because you're an opinionless troll who has to make those around you feel worse to elevate your weak sense of self-esteem?
So transit will increase to the point I can get to work? Oh, wait no? Ok.
I don't need a Ph.D. in biology or chemistry to know that taking the bus with 50 other people is more energy efficient than driving my own car by myself the 10km to work.
Here's a tip: FIGURE OUT WHERE FOLK LIVE AND WORK and put routes there. Especially in Canada where we get -30C weather. I don't want to walk 15 minutes to a unsheltered bus stop on the side of a highway to catch a bus [that only comes by three times in the morning and three times at night]. Enough people work on this end of the town that having a bus go here from another major centre (e.g. shopping mall) makes sense.
I am simultaneously aware that pollution is bad and that mass transit is not well developed in many developed areas.
So cry all you want about saving the planet. But if I can't reliably get from home to work, in a city of 700k people... I don't care about driving my own personal car.
If these scienticians want to save the planet promote ecologically sound solutions to known problems. Just bellyaching so you can get more grant money to study how fucked up the world is doesn't solve jack fucking squat.
Oh, don't want to sign with $BIG_LABEL? Well we'll play a competitors song 40 times more than yours, if we play yours at all.
Frankly, payola [and stupid no-brainer advertisements] is why I don't listen to the radio. I can't stand listening to the same craptastic track 100s of times a day, unless it's a track I actually like that is:-)
Posting your own articles to mass media is like making your own vanity page on wikipedia. Sure it's nice and all, but ultimately a meaningless gesture.
The only way I could tell that my work had any meaningful impact on others, is if THEY decide to talk about it amongst themselves. This hasn't been the case. so not being a complete moran I decided to just stop and focus my energies elsewhere. Nobody owes me gratitude or fame or whatever, so it's not like I demand anything from peeps.
Besides, more females at the piano studio. I've been missing out!
You think LibTom is new? Dude, I've been at this since 2001. I HAVE posted benchmarks, comparisons, snippets and all that. I have advanced the OSS world of crypto fairly well. TFM is amongst the fastest OSS math libs in the world, beats OpenSSL on some platforms, matches it on the others. It's also public domain. LTC sports various elliptic curve implementations that give it a very high performance rating, easily beating out all other OSS implementations of ecc (hint: none of them have fixed point or shamir's trick, or importantly both), etc.
My ranting/raving on libtom.org is a recent endeavour since I gave up trying to convince people that there is more to FLOSS than "holy shit this stuff is free." Part of my project was to make software educational so future developers could learn how the algorithms work, are fitted together, and maybe improve the scene. However, as noble [or not] as that goal is, nobody gives two shits. They look at "crypto software" and "public domain" and just throw it in their applications without even looking at the code.
Right now I don't really care one way or the other. If it's not important to others, after 5 years of tireless promotion, development, support, and documentation, then why should it be important to me?
So Tcl, Dropbear and the like are all small unused projects? And I'm hardly alone in this respect. There are many small projects that are both useful and totally obscured by the few larger OSS projects.
i'd throw a few gold coins his way too, as this looks like a pretty good vector to prise open the *iaa shenanigans
Another vector would be to stop giving gold coins to the RIAA in the first place. Of course that requires convincing the mass population of sheep that they should be wiser with their money and stop following payola tunes all around the place.
This is/. dude. Logical discussions need not apply.
Anyways, the kid isn't a hero. At best he's a victim, at worst he's a squirming copyright infringer. Big deal.
Combine that with the fact that many/. readers live outside the USA and you can see how not-upset we are over the RIAA [an american institution] acting like shites.
I may be biased, but the LibTom Projects do have a small [but dedicated] FLOSS following. Yet not a single article, review, or anything exists anywhere on the web to talk about them. That they're used by projects like OLPC, Dropbear, Tcl and the like makes no nevermind appearently./. only reviews the projects that will get ad impressions. If they feature one or two smaller FLOSS projects a week we'd probably be better off and know about dozens if not hundreds of useful projects we wouldn't otherwise hear about.
Fortunately, I don't care anymore as I'm a complete and utter burn out. I went back to studying piano and I leave development to my 9-5 job. My free time is "my time" now and I don't work on my projects anymore.
Consider hunting down smaller [but ultimately still productive] projects and paypal'ing the author some money [more than $5 or whatever, cuz frankly if it's less than $50 or so what's the point, not likely that they'll get hundreds of donations to make it matter].
When I was a young scrapper I was always poor, going from cheque to cheque. I had users for my software ranging from all walks of life, including several billion dollar industries. You think they could donate some rent money or something? HELLS NO. I had to get a regular 9-5 [sw development] job and I'm bitter and pissed off as a result.
But you'd do future generations of FLOSS developers a favour by not just donating to the popular projects...
While I support pissing off the RIAA, I wouldn't give him money. Ultimately, he did break the law by copying music he didn't have a right to [as stupid as that is illegal...].
Why not send your money to FLOSS projects, or sponsor a stipend for a budding developer to give a talk at a conference or something instead.
No. Visual Studio is tied to windows to prop window sales, just like Office and the rest of the apps. If Windows followed ANY open standards w.r.t. operating system calls, gui libraries, etc, porting from Windows to Linux or BSD wouldn't be an impossible task.
As for doing things at the EXPENSE of the customers. How about things like... using proprietary undocumented file formats, exploiting internal API functions, purposefully messing existing apps (back in the day w.r.t lotus), not supporting industry standards, etc.
For example, getting users hooked on Office back in the day, and then vigorously seeking to modify the file format to make it harder to work with.
Similarly, with IE. Why doesn't IE follow the W3C standards? Why must people design for IE and then "the rest of the world". IE came bundled with Windows, got people hooked and then msft used it to depart from the standards, further locking in users.
etc..
As for internal specs being easier... yeah for MSFT, not others. MSFT can develop applications for.doc [for instance] because the format is known internally, it was also designed internally. I'm holding my breath until Office can open StarOffice documents...
Slashdot Mirror
What's the advantage of most things they pump at us? I'm waiting till the studios figure out that they could pack boxsets on fewer discs using blueray/HD instead of just upsampling and wasting space. Nothing ruins the fun of watching a series than having to change DVDs every couple episodes (though maybe the getting up and changing the disc bit is how they force us to remain so uber physically active?)
Tom
Contrary to popular belief, many of us dont get that warm and fuzzy feeling for helping people with no return expected.
I pity thee.
While not religious myself I do believe in the vague notion of karma (I say vague as not to insult the religious as I only really take the superficial qualities of it).
While I'm all for having money to buy toys and what not, helping people for no other reason than they need the help and I can provide it, is often more than enough reason for me to move to action. And you know what, usually down the road it pays off.
... yeah replying to flamebait ...
Anyone who thinks social welfare is a complete waste of effort has obviously never had been given a pink slip, or still lives with mommy and daddy. When you got bills to pay and your employer decides to give you the boot it's nice to know that you're not facing the street at the end of the week.
Granted it gets abused, but that's why you enforce policy not cut people who need it off.
Though yea, generally if you don't take reasonable steps to ensure your safety, you're kinda asking for trouble. Not to say phishers aren't criminals, but if you sit there and just hand them your money you don't deserve insurance reimbursement.
Tom
No, you don't score points for changing your file format after years of abuse. Also for totally avoiding something like the Open Office format which already exists. Really smooth there.
... you realize it's pretty much the same format as OpenOffice right? So you're basically saying you don't care what anyone says if it doesn't come in a format that recognizes your ignorance? Well I'm writing this with Firefox, in Gentoo Linux. How about that!!!!
> using proprietary undocumented file formats,
(like everyone else)
Um say what? OpenOffice format is a bunch of XML in zip file. Oh you mean like WordPerfect, Lotus Notes, etc? Except, WordPerfect wasn't tied to one OS, wasn't developed by a platform developer to tie in to the OS. You didn't have to buy CorelLinux [for instance] to run WordPerfect.
As for the POSIX compatibility... why was Windows forever tied to the previous OSes? You're supporting an OS which is in one way or another compatible with a non-standard OS from 1983. It's high time some of the legacy cruft was cut to make way for POSIX compliance. And frankly, why couldn't the win32api libraries be developed over top of a POSIX layer in future OSes? That way there is some backwards compatibility but also some future path to standardization.
You may hate the idea of people not locking their applications/data to a particular OS, but that's what a lot of us users find handy. Which is why we call you guys evil. You abuse your position of market dominance to flail inferior technology upon us and call it an upgrade [re: vista]. You bow to the DRM masters of the studios, interfere with OUR use of the computer all in the name of progress...
As for never wanting to open a Staroffice document
um? What?
I use GNU/FLOSS/Linux as my platform of choice, but dabble in windows occasionally [mostly to check out that latest flash game posted to fark.com]. I don't see the fonts in the FLOSS world being inferior. What font are you using that is so horrible?
Also in apps where it matters [typesetting] they're professional quality (re: TeX metafonts).
I don't get blanket statements like this. As if there isn't buggy software for MacOS or Windows.
... um office and MSVC as being "more" productive. But the point is Linux == Kernel, it's not the distro or desktop. Maybe this guy hates KDE, but that doesn't preclude Gnome or icewm or wm from being suitable, maybe he hates OpenOffice where Abiword would be a better fit...
But i daily use Gnome, OpenOffice, tetex, gcc, etc. I can't imagine sitting here to use Windows, Office,
Go buy Vista than you hater!
Jealous of what? I'm just stating a fact.
/. dissing me makes no never mind to my life other than to fill time between builds at work.
You said: Just because you do something, doesn't mean people have to talk about it.
I pointed out that my projects are parts of fairly large and ultimately important projects. That if someone chose to talk about them, it wouldn't be without merit. You're just a hater, and with a thinking likes yours, it's all you'll ever be. Frankly, people like you is part of the reason I stopped caring about FLOSS. As much as I try, the hours I spend supporting users, developing new algorithms, documenting, etc, there is always someone around the corner who thinks that tearing a strip off of someone makes them special.
Well fine, think what you want. I never demanded the spotlight, I'm not angry at people. I'm just stating that if people seem to disregard the work that goes into the lesser known FLOSS projects they can ultimately expect them to stop being developed.
I'd suggest you not reply to this posting, as you're not mature enough to hold a civil discussion and frankly I ultimately don't care. I go home at night, relax, read, play piano, etc. FLOSS is not part of my life, and some little kid on
Tom
Wow, why bother wasting my time with such sincere folk like you around.
My point isn't that people should give me money, it's that if you're gonna donate money to someone, it might as well be useful. Help defending this kid does nothing but make lawyers rich. Supporting a kid getting through college who writes FLOSS means they can spend more time supporting the public and less time flipping burgers while they try to pay for tuition, books, and rent.
You ignorantly assume this is only about me because you choose to define the parameters of this discussion in a way such that your rant against me shows some illusion of greed. What I said in my opening statements was that there are plenty of other projects out there that need some love and attention, not just mine.
What more do I have to do to prove that it's not selfishness? Or are you just assuming that because you're an opinionless troll who has to make those around you feel worse to elevate your weak sense of self-esteem?
Tom
Becomes speaking from experience, the OP should donate his money to smaller [equally useful] projects instead of just the big ones.
I was trying to relate how it sucks to both be poor/unrecognized and the author of software that people use [and ultimately demand support for].
maybe the OP will take something from the experience I shared and donate to the smaller projects and encourage diversity in the FLOSS world.
Tom
So transit will increase to the point I can get to work? Oh, wait no? Ok.
I don't need a Ph.D. in biology or chemistry to know that taking the bus with 50 other people is more energy efficient than driving my own car by myself the 10km to work.
Here's a tip: FIGURE OUT WHERE FOLK LIVE AND WORK and put routes there. Especially in Canada where we get -30C weather. I don't want to walk 15 minutes to a unsheltered bus stop on the side of a highway to catch a bus [that only comes by three times in the morning and three times at night]. Enough people work on this end of the town that having a bus go here from another major centre (e.g. shopping mall) makes sense.
oh well, c'est la vie.
Tom
I am simultaneously aware that pollution is bad and that mass transit is not well developed in many developed areas.
... I don't care about driving my own personal car.
So cry all you want about saving the planet. But if I can't reliably get from home to work, in a city of 700k people
If these scienticians want to save the planet promote ecologically sound solutions to known problems. Just bellyaching so you can get more grant money to study how fucked up the world is doesn't solve jack fucking squat.
Tom
MLB players use iPods? OMG NO WAI I MUST own one now!!!!!
Why is this article news?
one word: payola.
:-)
Oh, don't want to sign with $BIG_LABEL? Well we'll play a competitors song 40 times more than yours, if we play yours at all.
Frankly, payola [and stupid no-brainer advertisements] is why I don't listen to the radio. I can't stand listening to the same craptastic track 100s of times a day, unless it's a track I actually like that is
Posting your own articles to mass media is like making your own vanity page on wikipedia. Sure it's nice and all, but ultimately a meaningless gesture.
The only way I could tell that my work had any meaningful impact on others, is if THEY decide to talk about it amongst themselves. This hasn't been the case. so not being a complete moran I decided to just stop and focus my energies elsewhere. Nobody owes me gratitude or fame or whatever, so it's not like I demand anything from peeps.
Besides, more females at the piano studio. I've been missing out!
You think LibTom is new? Dude, I've been at this since 2001. I HAVE posted benchmarks, comparisons, snippets and all that. I have advanced the OSS world of crypto fairly well. TFM is amongst the fastest OSS math libs in the world, beats OpenSSL on some platforms, matches it on the others. It's also public domain. LTC sports various elliptic curve implementations that give it a very high performance rating, easily beating out all other OSS implementations of ecc (hint: none of them have fixed point or shamir's trick, or importantly both), etc.
My ranting/raving on libtom.org is a recent endeavour since I gave up trying to convince people that there is more to FLOSS than "holy shit this stuff is free." Part of my project was to make software educational so future developers could learn how the algorithms work, are fitted together, and maybe improve the scene. However, as noble [or not] as that goal is, nobody gives two shits. They look at "crypto software" and "public domain" and just throw it in their applications without even looking at the code.
Right now I don't really care one way or the other. If it's not important to others, after 5 years of tireless promotion, development, support, and documentation, then why should it be important to me?
Tom
So Tcl, Dropbear and the like are all small unused projects? And I'm hardly alone in this respect. There are many small projects that are both useful and totally obscured by the few larger OSS projects.
i'd throw a few gold coins his way too, as this looks like a pretty good vector to prise open the *iaa shenanigans
Another vector would be to stop giving gold coins to the RIAA in the first place. Of course that requires convincing the mass population of sheep that they should be wiser with their money and stop following payola tunes all around the place.
This is /. dude. Logical discussions need not apply.
/. readers live outside the USA and you can see how not-upset we are over the RIAA [an american institution] acting like shites.
Anyways, the kid isn't a hero. At best he's a victim, at worst he's a squirming copyright infringer. Big deal.
Combine that with the fact that many
I may be biased, but the LibTom Projects do have a small [but dedicated] FLOSS following. Yet not a single article, review, or anything exists anywhere on the web to talk about them. That they're used by projects like OLPC, Dropbear, Tcl and the like makes no nevermind appearently. /. only reviews the projects that will get ad impressions. If they feature one or two smaller FLOSS projects a week we'd probably be better off and know about dozens if not hundreds of useful projects we wouldn't otherwise hear about.
Fortunately, I don't care anymore as I'm a complete and utter burn out. I went back to studying piano and I leave development to my 9-5 job. My free time is "my time" now and I don't work on my projects anymore.
Tom
There is more FLOSS than the major parties.
Consider hunting down smaller [but ultimately still productive] projects and paypal'ing the author some money [more than $5 or whatever, cuz frankly if it's less than $50 or so what's the point, not likely that they'll get hundreds of donations to make it matter].
When I was a young scrapper I was always poor, going from cheque to cheque. I had users for my software ranging from all walks of life, including several billion dollar industries. You think they could donate some rent money or something? HELLS NO. I had to get a regular 9-5 [sw development] job and I'm bitter and pissed off as a result.
But you'd do future generations of FLOSS developers a favour by not just donating to the popular projects...
I never said he's guilty. I merely implicated that he's likely guilty. Or more importantly, even if he's not, what the fuck has the kid done for me?
I hate how everyone rallies behind shit like this. But a starving FLOSS developer goes unnoticed [but properly exploited] and nobody cares.
Whatever. Fine give the kid money. Like I give a rats ass. I was just saying, if you feel charitable there are MUCH BETTER CAUSES to donate to.
While I support pissing off the RIAA, I wouldn't give him money. Ultimately, he did break the law by copying music he didn't have a right to [as stupid as that is illegal...].
Why not send your money to FLOSS projects, or sponsor a stipend for a budding developer to give a talk at a conference or something instead.
Or just keep your money...
They're not competing? NO WAI!!!
Can't wait till studios figure out this isn't the 19th century...
There is a way to make money in music/movies. Selling mass copies of media is not it.
Tom
No. Visual Studio is tied to windows to prop window sales, just like Office and the rest of the apps. If Windows followed ANY open standards w.r.t. operating system calls, gui libraries, etc, porting from Windows to Linux or BSD wouldn't be an impossible task.
... using proprietary undocumented file formats, exploiting internal API functions, purposefully messing existing apps (back in the day w.r.t lotus), not supporting industry standards, etc.
... yeah for MSFT, not others. MSFT can develop applications for .doc [for instance] because the format is known internally, it was also designed internally. I'm holding my breath until Office can open StarOffice documents...
As for doing things at the EXPENSE of the customers. How about things like
For example, getting users hooked on Office back in the day, and then vigorously seeking to modify the file format to make it harder to work with.
Similarly, with IE. Why doesn't IE follow the W3C standards? Why must people design for IE and then "the rest of the world". IE came bundled with Windows, got people hooked and then msft used it to depart from the standards, further locking in users.
etc..
As for internal specs being easier
Tom