I find your lack of inclusiveness distressing. In the future, when referring to the classical extremes, please remember to include my extreme, libertarianism, sometimes known as "classical liberalism." Remember, not all extremists come from the left and the right, and those of us who do not don't appreciate being left out.
(Except I might add that I love talk radio and it is the conservative anti-big-government perspective on liberty that talk radio has given me that makes me agree with your statements that we need to open broadcasting up to everybody freely.)
Actually I've suffered through said migration, and I'm happy to say that the non-technical users were not happy with the change; they much preferred UNIX.
Actually I trust the ones on satellite somewhat more, though I'm sure that kind of thing does happen. My wife's VHS collection of Classic Trek was recorded in a 78-hour marathon off of the sci-fi channel a few years ago, when they first obtained the rights to broadcast and created what they called, "Star Trek: Special Edition." Each episode supposedly has restored scenes in addition to commentary from cast members during commercial breaks. I'm reasonably confident that sci-fi channel is airing complete episodes (possibly more than complete, if they truly are restoring scenes), though I'm not sure if I trust "Spike TV" to be airing complete TNG episodes.
But again, 95% of the episode at 90% quality is probably fine for us. Maybe I'm not a true "die hard" fan after all. I'd make a case that we saved money, but that DVDR Tivo cost $600 more than a regular Tivo. OTOH, we have the ability to do this for as many shows as we want. (And I'm a big TV fan. Currently starting a Smallville DVD collection to complement my VHS collection of the first two seasons.)
My wife and I just bought a Pioneer Tivo/DVD Recorder combo box. We are going to be using this to collect all four of the Trek series and making DVD sets. We'll probably be giving family members season sets of shows they love for Christmas and birthday presents in another year or so.
Actually, when we got married, my wife brought her complete set of TOS on VHS tape; we may simply run that through the recorder to make DVDs instead of waiting to catch them all off of satellite.
True, recordings off of television will probably lack some of the quality we'd have gotten if we bought the boxed set, but we don't mind, and since I was living with broadcast TV only until we got married, I think the satellite quality we're getting is spectactular.
What Linux user doesn't have Acrobat Reader, Flash, a Java runtime, and RealPlayer loaded on their machine?
(Waves hand.) Me!
I'm actually thankful not to have most of that installed. For one thing it keeps me from viewing a lot of junky web content I'd prefer to just avoid. Yes, sometimes I'm hampered, but I have other machines for that stuff if need be.
Just last night I was reading a paper for school where gv on my RedHat 7.2 machine actually displayed better than Adobe Acrobat on my OS X ibook. I was astounded, as Adobe usually gives better performance.
I don't mind if a distribution includes non-free software; I'm still using some myself, just not on Linux. The thing that bothers me is when a distribution includes non-free software but claims to be 100% free. There's a place for hybrid distributions, those containing gratis software and/or shareware but still redistributable as well as, I suppose, Frankenstein distributions with enough proprietary crap to keep you locked in; however, there is also a place for the "100% free" (and/or "100% open source") distribution. I like the way Debian segregates things into three categories of "freeness" so you can easily set your distribution to be just what you want.
The thing that distresses me about this decision (and deception) on RedHat's part is that previously they committed to being 100% free, back when they finally replaced Netscape with Mozilla. I remember specifically seeing a statement that the only piece of software left in the distribution that didn't meet the Open Source definition was Netscape, that they were waiting for Mozilla to catch up, and that the minute it did they would drop Netscape and be 100% free. I remember after a RedHat install I used to specifically go replace the Netscape launcher on the panel with Mozilla, until I upgraded to 7.2.
I understand the economic realities that make them want to distribute this kind of software, but I do not appreciate the change in policy, and I appreciate the duplicity even less.
Actually, can anyone confirm that the product really does have these packages? Or is that just something a troll threw in?
Indeed, having read through this several days later, I am surprised that in all these hundreds of comments, noone mentioned that the Bible does not say the Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, but on the "Mountains of Ararat." In other words, every mountain in the region is a candidate for the search, and the people who keep looking up present day Mount Ararat need to go back to do basic Bible study before they are allowed to continue...
Before 2k/XP most people blammed microsoft when in reality it was buggy drivers. Now with the new driver model these instances of drivers crashing the kernel are rather rare.
I don't understand. You're contradicting yourself. You claim Microsoft was not to blame, but then claim they made changes to their operating system that fixed the problem. If the OS could be robust enough that the drivers could not cause this kind of problem, then the fault was clearly the OS, just as if a program is not robust enough to handle garbage input from a user without crashing, the program needs to be fixed to give reliable error messages instead of exploding.
When he feels like he's got no other choice he fires, killing Greedo in cold blood.
You've highlighted why this has never been an issue to me. If Han had no other choice, then in my opinion, the killing of Greedo was not done in cold blood; it was done to save his own life and was not substantially different from what happened if Greedo shot first.
Wikipedia's NPOV policy, "neutral point of view," is a great way to handle this. If the story comes in, and you aren't sure it's factual but want to get it out real quick, report WHO said WHAT. That way you are only reporting sure facts. "A nameless caller claims that JFK Jr.'s plane has been recovered by the Coast Guard" is a fact if said caller is on the line with you, even if you aren't sure that his statement, "JFK Jr.'s plane has been recovered by the Coast Guard" is factual or not.
This has the benefit that it encourages people to think critically and allows them to make their own appraisal of the trustworthiness of the information and its source.
The neat thing is it's a self-correcting problem. If you're wrong all the time, noone will read you. (Unless you're trying to be wrong to be humorous or something.)
We all assume that the kernel is the kernel that is maintained by kernel.org and that Linux won't fork the way UNIX did..right?
First of all, some of us assume "the kernel" is/kernel/genunix or something else, because we're working on Solaris or something. (There's one assumption on you're part that was unspoken: we're not all Linux users.) Secondly, I don't assume the kernel will never fork. Forking has often been very productive for Free Software programs, and the right to fork is one of the most valuable incentives for development. The kernel has forked all the time (remember the -ac tree from Alan Cox? how about uCLinux?), and that's a good thing.
So your explicit assumptions that "we" "all" have, that the kernel will never fork, are wrong, as well as your implicit assumptions that we all use Linux and that forking is a bad thing. Thus I'm not sure what the big deal is.
Just think of all the awful things you've never done:
"Have you ever ordered, or yourself committed, genocide?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever annihilated a population?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever upset an ecology?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever practiced terrorism?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever bred bodies for degrading purposes?" "That's clean."
"Did you come to Earth for evil purposes?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever made a planet, or nation, radioactive?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever caused a planet to disappear?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever torn out someone's tongue?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever blinded anyone?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever smothered a baby?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever participated in a sexual relationship between a doll body and a human body?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever made love to a dead body?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever tortured another with electrical, or electronic devices?" "That's clean."
"Have you ever been a professional executioner?" "Clean."
Yes, but suddenly those closed-source programs can be freely duplicated and freely reverse-engineered. They will be competing with open-source program which will have a tremendous advantage in acceptance. The massive duplication of the closed-source programs will make it effectively impossible to generate revenue through their sale. The cycle of upgrades and bugfixes for closed-source software will grind to a halt, while the open-source software continues to be maintained.
That would just make everything effectively BSD-licensed, which will still be a great win for Free Software. Copyleft (GPL) is a weapon against misuse of copyright. If copyright no longer exists, the existence of that weapon is no longer an issue.
The reason this is true for you says more about your quantity of experience in Java compared to your experience in Lisp than it does about the quality of either language. An experienced Lisp programmer would probably say exactly the opposite. (In fact, someone in this thread remarked that he does pseudocode for other languages in a Lisp-like syntax, which I found interesting.)
Similarly, I'm a Perl programmer and have never understood why people say the language is "write only" and similar snide remarks. Perl is instantly readable to me. Put me in front of a bunch of C, though, and I have to puzzle for awhile to work out what it does. That doesn't mean Perl is better than C (although every good programmer knows it is:P ); it just means I'm much more fluent in Perl.
The last time I checked, my state government had the power to tax my instate commerce, while the federal government had the power to tax my interstate commerce. When did this change?
I did a paper in high school on a nationwide sales-tax, which I was all gung ho about. Seven years later I realized that it was unconstitutional for the U.S. government to tax intrastate commerce, and changed my mind.
Personally, I'd like to see them constitutionally prohibited from reaching into my wallet, period.
Just because I'm religious and want to self-censor my own movies doesn't mean I want to force my values on you. I believe in your freedom to make your own choices, as long as you offer me the same freedom.
Actually, I can see how you might want XBox Accessories, if that means buying a controller that might one day interface with the emulator. Sure beats keyboard control, at least for emulators I've played.
I haven't bought four movie soundtracks I want to buy because Wal-Mart doesn't seem to have a movie section anymore, and our local Best Buy closed. And I don't listen to much besides movie soundtracks.
Maybe sales are going down because the quality of Wal-Mart's music section is so crummy?
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Radio4All.org has a FAQ on microbroadcasting.
I find your lack of inclusiveness distressing. In the future, when referring to the classical extremes, please remember to include my extreme, libertarianism, sometimes known as "classical liberalism." Remember, not all extremists come from the left and the right, and those of us who do not don't appreciate being left out.
Thank you. :)
Hear, hear! Excellent comments!
(Except I might add that I love talk radio and it is the conservative anti-big-government perspective on liberty that talk radio has given me that makes me agree with your statements that we need to open broadcasting up to everybody freely.)
Actually I've suffered through said migration, and I'm happy to say that the non-technical users were not happy with the change; they much preferred UNIX.
Actually I trust the ones on satellite somewhat more, though I'm sure that kind of thing does happen. My wife's VHS collection of Classic Trek was recorded in a 78-hour marathon off of the sci-fi channel a few years ago, when they first obtained the rights to broadcast and created what they called, "Star Trek: Special Edition." Each episode supposedly has restored scenes in addition to commentary from cast members during commercial breaks. I'm reasonably confident that sci-fi channel is airing complete episodes (possibly more than complete, if they truly are restoring scenes), though I'm not sure if I trust "Spike TV" to be airing complete TNG episodes.
But again, 95% of the episode at 90% quality is probably fine for us. Maybe I'm not a true "die hard" fan after all. I'd make a case that we saved money, but that DVDR Tivo cost $600 more than a regular Tivo. OTOH, we have the ability to do this for as many shows as we want. (And I'm a big TV fan. Currently starting a Smallville DVD collection to complement my VHS collection of the first two seasons.)
Besides, half the fun of researching in the library is the irrelevant but interesting information you stumble across as you browse!
I'm sorry; is that supposed to be an advantage of researching with the library, or with Google?
My wife and I just bought a Pioneer Tivo/DVD Recorder combo box. We are going to be using this to collect all four of the Trek series and making DVD sets. We'll probably be giving family members season sets of shows they love for Christmas and birthday presents in another year or so.
Actually, when we got married, my wife brought her complete set of TOS on VHS tape; we may simply run that through the recorder to make DVDs instead of waiting to catch them all off of satellite.
True, recordings off of television will probably lack some of the quality we'd have gotten if we bought the boxed set, but we don't mind, and since I was living with broadcast TV only until we got married, I think the satellite quality we're getting is spectactular.
What Linux user doesn't have Acrobat Reader, Flash, a Java runtime, and RealPlayer loaded on their machine?
(Waves hand.) Me!
I'm actually thankful not to have most of that installed. For one thing it keeps me from viewing a lot of junky web content I'd prefer to just avoid. Yes, sometimes I'm hampered, but I have other machines for that stuff if need be.
Just last night I was reading a paper for school where gv on my RedHat 7.2 machine actually displayed better than Adobe Acrobat on my OS X ibook. I was astounded, as Adobe usually gives better performance.
I don't mind if a distribution includes non-free software; I'm still using some myself, just not on Linux. The thing that bothers me is when a distribution includes non-free software but claims to be 100% free. There's a place for hybrid distributions, those containing gratis software and/or shareware but still redistributable as well as, I suppose, Frankenstein distributions with enough proprietary crap to keep you locked in; however, there is also a place for the "100% free" (and/or "100% open source") distribution. I like the way Debian segregates things into three categories of "freeness" so you can easily set your distribution to be just what you want.
The thing that distresses me about this decision (and deception) on RedHat's part is that previously they committed to being 100% free, back when they finally replaced Netscape with Mozilla. I remember specifically seeing a statement that the only piece of software left in the distribution that didn't meet the Open Source definition was Netscape, that they were waiting for Mozilla to catch up, and that the minute it did they would drop Netscape and be 100% free. I remember after a RedHat install I used to specifically go replace the Netscape launcher on the panel with Mozilla, until I upgraded to 7.2.
I understand the economic realities that make them want to distribute this kind of software, but I do not appreciate the change in policy, and I appreciate the duplicity even less.
Actually, can anyone confirm that the product really does have these packages? Or is that just something a troll threw in?
Indeed, having read through this several days later, I am surprised that in all these hundreds of comments, noone mentioned that the Bible does not say the Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, but on the "Mountains of Ararat." In other words, every mountain in the region is a candidate for the search, and the people who keep looking up present day Mount Ararat need to go back to do basic Bible study before they are allowed to continue...
Before 2k/XP most people blammed microsoft when in reality it was buggy drivers. Now with the new driver model these instances of drivers crashing the kernel are rather rare.
I don't understand. You're contradicting yourself. You claim Microsoft was not to blame, but then claim they made changes to their operating system that fixed the problem. If the OS could be robust enough that the drivers could not cause this kind of problem, then the fault was clearly the OS, just as if a program is not robust enough to handle garbage input from a user without crashing, the program needs to be fixed to give reliable error messages instead of exploding.
When he feels like he's got no other choice he fires, killing Greedo in cold blood.
You've highlighted why this has never been an issue to me. If Han had no other choice, then in my opinion, the killing of Greedo was not done in cold blood; it was done to save his own life and was not substantially different from what happened if Greedo shot first.
Wikipedia's NPOV policy, "neutral point of view," is a great way to handle this. If the story comes in, and you aren't sure it's factual but want to get it out real quick, report WHO said WHAT. That way you are only reporting sure facts. "A nameless caller claims that JFK Jr.'s plane has been recovered by the Coast Guard" is a fact if said caller is on the line with you, even if you aren't sure that his statement, "JFK Jr.'s plane has been recovered by the Coast Guard" is factual or not.
This has the benefit that it encourages people to think critically and allows them to make their own appraisal of the trustworthiness of the information and its source.
The neat thing is it's a self-correcting problem. If you're wrong all the time, noone will read you. (Unless you're trying to be wrong to be humorous or something.)
Sounds to me like SuSe is upset that they will have to either duplicate this work or use Red Hat's work in order to stay competitive.
Seems like if they were thinking, they'd be glad RedHat has done the work for them free (gratis) under the GPL.
We all assume that the kernel is the kernel that is maintained by kernel.org and that Linux won't fork the way UNIX did..right?
First of all, some of us assume "the kernel" is /kernel/genunix or something else, because we're working on Solaris or something. (There's one assumption on you're part that was unspoken: we're not all Linux users.) Secondly, I don't assume the kernel will never fork. Forking has often been very productive for Free Software programs, and the right to fork is one of the most valuable incentives for development. The kernel has forked all the time (remember the -ac tree from Alan Cox? how about uCLinux?), and that's a good thing.
So your explicit assumptions that "we" "all" have, that the kernel will never fork, are wrong, as well as your implicit assumptions that we all use Linux and that forking is a bad thing. Thus I'm not sure what the big deal is.
Just think of all the awful things you've never done:
"Have you ever ordered, or yourself committed, genocide?" "That's clean." "Have you ever annihilated a population?" "That's clean." "Have you ever upset an ecology?" "That's clean." "Have you ever practiced terrorism?" "That's clean." "Have you ever bred bodies for degrading purposes?" "That's clean." "Did you come to Earth for evil purposes?" "That's clean." "Have you ever made a planet, or nation, radioactive?" "That's clean." "Have you ever caused a planet to disappear?" "That's clean." "Have you ever torn out someone's tongue?" "That's clean." "Have you ever blinded anyone?" "That's clean." "Have you ever smothered a baby?" "That's clean." "Have you ever participated in a sexual relationship between a doll body and a human body?" "That's clean." "Have you ever made love to a dead body?" "That's clean." "Have you ever tortured another with electrical, or electronic devices?" "That's clean." "Have you ever been a professional executioner?" "Clean."
Have you ever enslaved a population?, part of The Road to Xenu, the story of a woman caught up in Scientology.
Yes, but suddenly those closed-source programs can be freely duplicated and freely reverse-engineered. They will be competing with open-source program which will have a tremendous advantage in acceptance. The massive duplication of the closed-source programs will make it effectively impossible to generate revenue through their sale. The cycle of upgrades and bugfixes for closed-source software will grind to a halt, while the open-source software continues to be maintained.
That would just make everything effectively BSD-licensed, which will still be a great win for Free Software. Copyleft (GPL) is a weapon against misuse of copyright. If copyright no longer exists, the existence of that weapon is no longer an issue.
The reason this is true for you says more about your quantity of experience in Java compared to your experience in Lisp than it does about the quality of either language. An experienced Lisp programmer would probably say exactly the opposite. (In fact, someone in this thread remarked that he does pseudocode for other languages in a Lisp-like syntax, which I found interesting.)
Similarly, I'm a Perl programmer and have never understood why people say the language is "write only" and similar snide remarks. Perl is instantly readable to me. Put me in front of a bunch of C, though, and I have to puzzle for awhile to work out what it does. That doesn't mean Perl is better than C (although every good programmer knows it is :P ); it just means I'm much more fluent in Perl.
The last time I checked, my state government had the power to tax my instate commerce, while the federal government had the power to tax my interstate commerce. When did this change?
I did a paper in high school on a nationwide sales-tax, which I was all gung ho about. Seven years later I realized that it was unconstitutional for the U.S. government to tax intrastate commerce, and changed my mind.
Personally, I'd like to see them constitutionally prohibited from reaching into my wallet, period.
How about I teach them such language is not acceptable when they hear it in public?
Just because I'm religious and want to self-censor my own movies doesn't mean I want to force my values on you. I believe in your freedom to make your own choices, as long as you offer me the same freedom.
Don't forget here.
No, I don't keep a code library, because it's easier to just use the work of these guys, who are definitely better programmers than me. :)
Actually, I can see how you might want XBox Accessories, if that means buying a controller that might one day interface with the emulator. Sure beats keyboard control, at least for emulators I've played.
I haven't bought four movie soundtracks I want to buy because Wal-Mart doesn't seem to have a movie section anymore, and our local Best Buy closed. And I don't listen to much besides movie soundtracks.
Maybe sales are going down because the quality of Wal-Mart's music section is so crummy?