I'm a free software guy, myself, but wouldn't be adverse to buying a ReplayTV or Tivo or whatever proprietary system if it had the one killer feature I need. Your goals are a little different than mine; you want 500 hours of recording time; I want a VCD factory. I want to just tell my machine this fall, "Make me a season set of Smallville," and then in May 2004 play disk swap while my system burns the entirety of Smallville season 3 for me.
I don't think proprietary solutions will ever support that, which is why I'm waiting for the free solutions to catch up to the point I can modify them to do what I want.
Private property is established by and enforced by governments. No individual has the 'right' to walk out onto an open, uninhabited plain and say, "I WAS HERE FIRST! THIS IS ALL MINE! NOBODY CAN COME HERE!"
So what gives governments the right to grant property to you? Can they walk out into an open plain and claim it?
In the U.S. Declaration of Independence the belief was that people had inalienable rights. These rights could not be taken away, even by government, and they were not granted by government. Among them was the right to property. You can disagree with that, if you wish, but the fact remains that it is not "intellectual bankruptcy" to think so.
If they really want to compete, they should use an 168 box Linux cluster then, huh?
If the searches were faster and updated quicker, I suppose that might compete with google. But we're pretty much at the point where it's fast enough. I'm with you... all the other "features" these people are dreaming up are just bloat. Google's extra features are nice: cache, indexing of non-HTML content, converting PDF to HTML, etc.
Consult your own sig. The Rand idea is that government is basically a mob.
The idea is that you and I do not have the right to take someone's money and give it to someone else provided the money was legitimately gained. Yet we believe the government does, by virtue of majority rule. You and I don't have the right to take away someone's life, liberty, or property, but we believe the government does. Rand basically equates government with mob rule.
I'm not saying I agree with it, mind you, but it's definitely worth thinking about. Why does the government have the right to do things you and I do not? Just because "we the people" are more people? How many does it take to legitimize democracy? Do six people voting in a dark alley and mugging one of their number constitute a democracy? Is it legitimate?
Thought you might find this line of thought interesting because of your sig.
Usually the best software on the net is Free Software.;)
But for cases where it's not, I usually find it high on the results list from Google. And if I don't, a few simple tries at extra search times like GPL, open source, etc., turns up what I need.
And then there's just no solution for those cases where there isn't a viable free software alternative, short of implementing and releasing it yourself.
Since I don't care about a certain thing, anyone who does is clearly just a troll.
Point taken. The reason I call them a troll is because they are just trying to incite free software zealots by referring to the copyleft concept as "viral" and "less free." But I'll be careful to avoid giving the impression I meant people who disagree with me are automatically a troll, in the future.;)
they bill it as a crossplatform environment but they only offer a GPLed version on certain platforms.
Well, what's stopping someone from porting the GPLed version to Win32? If this becomes valuable to people, it'll happen.
It's 5, last I checked (7.x). Two install CD's, two source, and one documentation. Used to be one source and one power tools.
You only need the two install CD's. In fact, if you want a base install, you only need the first one.
The rest of the stuff on the CD's is extra software for you! Having a huge software library is an advantage, not a liability. I've gotten used to being able to apt-get anything under Debian and instantly upgrade my computer to do whatever I'm interested in doing at the moment. The other night I was back on my little used RedHat box and found that I was installing so much that I copied all the.rpms off of those two install CDs to my hard drive to make it easier. Almost as nice as Debian, except for dependency misery.
All those extra packages are not required for a base install. As I said, in the case of RedHat, you still need just one CD. But after awhile, as you want your computer to do more and more things, I think you will find you would like to have the second, as well. That's not bloat -- that's options.
problem is everyone in linux is on a holy crusade and that their distro and packages are the best
Methinks you are reading the community wrong. I use RedHat and Debian both, where appropriate, and so do most people I know. It's all about having the right tools available for the job. It's all about options.
Incidentally, can you make a point without swearing? I mean, you sound awfully passionate about a platform you don't even like. Is it really that big of a deal?
I never search on sourceforge anymore. I take the position that if the piece of software is worth having, it'll show up as a top Google result.
For that matter, I rarely use site-specific search engines anymore, anyway. Just punch in a few keywords for what kind of program you're looking for and let Google find the best software on the whole net, not just sourceforge.
For instance: someone pointed out that the author is a gnome contributor. No wonder he wants to do away with Qt.
I am a GNOME user and advocate. I like it a lot better than KDE and feel like it's destined to win out. That said, I don't disparage KDE or Qt at all. I want them to continue; I want them to succeed. I actually prefer the pure GPL license they come with and wish GNOME would go that route.
I think it's sad when someone with clout as a KDE or GNOME developer disparages the other project. I'm happy to say I don't think most of the people who are really doing the work on these fine desktops does that.
However, if you want to build proprietary application on top of it, you have to pay TrollTech.
So it sounds like the old troll that the GPL is viral or somehow "less free" because it doesn't allow you to remove freedoms. As I don't care about the success of proprietary software in general or about the success of proprietary software on free platforms in particular, such trollish arguments carry zero weight with me.
They usually remain at a low level of features, as Free Software developers are a limited resource. There are exceptions (GIMP), but they usually have major companies behind them (Open Office, Mozilla) which know what the users want and what to ask from their developers.
Oh, so they usually have companies behind them, huh? You mean like Apache? Or NetBSD? Or the Linux kernel? Or Perl (which constantly seeks community donations)? How about the GNU software suite? Did you know that the lines of source code from GNU exceed the lines of source in the Linux kernel and the X Window System, and that's not counting emacs? How about XFree86; what company is behind that? What company is behind KDE? PostgreSQL has a company behind it now, but didn't for years, and that company still seems to be somewhat on the sidelines. And if you don't think PostgreSQL has features, start comparing its MVCC concurrency control system to Oracle's row-level locking, and ask yourself which supports more language in the database.
Actually, other than the two you mentioned, plus GNOME, most large free software projects seem to be done without a formal company backing them. The ones I listed above have plenty of companies driving them, as community members, just like everyone else, but none of them is identified with a particular company in my mind.
I disagree. We don't go around the internet insisting unused pages disappear. Instead we just insist that those irrelevant features not show up in our search queries -- we use Google.
What sourceforge needs is a better search engine, showing the most relevant results first. Then you'll never get down to the clutter unless you want to.
Thank you. You just completely cleared this up for me. I was sitting, puzzling, thinking, "Life contains huge amounts of information, and should therefore not compress as well as non-life." Then I realized information is less entropy, so it actually will compress better. (What a relief. I was almost on the verge of taking this personally.;)
A useful analogy: an ASCII file, containing information, compresses better than a file of truly random binary data. The truly random (think cryptographic) data has no useful information and has an even probability distribution of bytes, so there is no possible compression. When you add information you start altering the probability distribution of those bytes, and make compression possible. (Or think letter frequency analysis for breaking cyphers.)
There's a group of ex-scientologists who still consider the stuff Hubbard taught to be true, but improperly administered by the church. They practice civil disobedience in distributing their "scriptures," which are under copyright by the Church of Scientology. I believe they are called "freezoners."
Re:Why care about being hated?
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I read some Hebrew, but not enough to answer definitively. The point is that the Latin translation (the Vulgate), and English translations (the KJV) are not the standard. The fact that both chose to translate it "kill" may support a position, but the definitive proof is the original Hebrew.
Now, in context, it is apparent that the same law that said "Do not kill," also commanded the death penalty and certain wars, so it is apparent from context in ANY language that it is not an absolute prohibition on all killing.
Of course, the Old Testament is not the law for Christians today, so all of this is academic. There are no admonitions for the death penalty or war in the New Testament. I'm a pacifist because of my Christian beliefs, but I can certainly see where the other side is coming from. And I'd hate to be associated with much of the anti-war crowd, because their strongest arguments seem to be "I don't like war," and "Bush is stupid."
But the Old Testament most definitely did not prohibit all killing. Whether the word implicitly carries the meaning of "murder" or "kill," the context shows it did not preclude war or the death penalty.
PLEASE CALL ME?!? WTF? This is too technical? Perhaps they should answer more like: "I am far, far too stupid to respond to this in writing. My writing skills suck, and I don't communicate well but can at least manage to pull it off in a verbal conversation. Please call." Or maybe, "We are dishonest and will be lying to you about our product. We don't want you to have our lies documented. Please call." And then there's also: "I look busier to my boss when I talk on the phone. If I just send you an email, I won't look busy. Please call." Yeesh.
My honest opinion is that their reasoning is "With email you can read and respond at your convenience, but I am far more important than the other people you work with for whom that would be appropriate. You must suspend everything you are working on now to talk to me. You must earn the information I possess with an offering to my greatness, a sacrifice of your time, your train of thought, and whatever other thing you might be working on.
Also, I think part of the problem is techies like you and me know how to communicate in email but other people don't. They aren't quite sure what email's for, thus the conclusion that "this is not a job for email."
Sure, there are times when the phone is more appropriate than email. But less times than the average non-technical user thinks.
If I got some kind of disease, I'll happily fork over the cash to get it fixed.
That's the key. Not only will you fork over the cash, so will thousands of other people who are not infected by the disease but want a cure to be found. (If this is not so, a lot of charities have some major explaining to do.)
Even without the protection of a patent, businesses will still research, because there will be a market for it. They just won't be able to take unfair advantage by preventing others from competing on price or service. They can still make a profit. There's a lot to be said for being first to market. Look at how everyone uses BIND. Look at how generic drugs do compared with brand names.
The idea that drug research will not occur without patent protection is an unquestioned axiom. Iconoclast that I am, I am questioning it. Perhaps it will turn out to be true, but I do not think so.
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I'm a free software guy, myself, but wouldn't be adverse to buying a ReplayTV or Tivo or whatever proprietary system if it had the one killer feature I need. Your goals are a little different than mine; you want 500 hours of recording time; I want a VCD factory. I want to just tell my machine this fall, "Make me a season set of Smallville," and then in May 2004 play disk swap while my system burns the entirety of Smallville season 3 for me.
I don't think proprietary solutions will ever support that, which is why I'm waiting for the free solutions to catch up to the point I can modify them to do what I want.
Did you happen to see the "from the department" tagline?
Mac OS X is every bit as usuable as Windows, some may argue more so.
Well, Mac OS X is UNIX, so I would say that's axiomatic.
Private property is established by and enforced by governments. No individual has the 'right' to walk out onto an open, uninhabited plain and say, "I WAS HERE FIRST! THIS IS ALL MINE! NOBODY CAN COME HERE!"
So what gives governments the right to grant property to you? Can they walk out into an open plain and claim it?
In the U.S. Declaration of Independence the belief was that people had inalienable rights. These rights could not be taken away, even by government, and they were not granted by government. Among them was the right to property. You can disagree with that, if you wish, but the fact remains that it is not "intellectual bankruptcy" to think so.
If they really want to compete, they should use an 168 box Linux cluster then, huh?
If the searches were faster and updated quicker, I suppose that might compete with google. But we're pretty much at the point where it's fast enough. I'm with you ... all the other "features" these people are dreaming up are just bloat. Google's extra features are nice: cache, indexing of non-HTML content, converting PDF to HTML, etc.
Consult your own sig. The Rand idea is that government is basically a mob.
The idea is that you and I do not have the right to take someone's money and give it to someone else provided the money was legitimately gained. Yet we believe the government does, by virtue of majority rule. You and I don't have the right to take away someone's life, liberty, or property, but we believe the government does. Rand basically equates government with mob rule.
I'm not saying I agree with it, mind you, but it's definitely worth thinking about. Why does the government have the right to do things you and I do not? Just because "we the people" are more people? How many does it take to legitimize democracy? Do six people voting in a dark alley and mugging one of their number constitute a democracy? Is it legitimate?
Thought you might find this line of thought interesting because of your sig.
No, I haven't. I'm not using their search engine anymore. ;)
Usually the best software on the net is Free Software. ;)
But for cases where it's not, I usually find it high on the results list from Google. And if I don't, a few simple tries at extra search times like GPL, open source, etc., turns up what I need.
And then there's just no solution for those cases where there isn't a viable free software alternative, short of implementing and releasing it yourself.
Since I don't care about a certain thing, anyone who does is clearly just a troll.
Point taken. The reason I call them a troll is because they are just trying to incite free software zealots by referring to the copyleft concept as "viral" and "less free." But I'll be careful to avoid giving the impression I meant people who disagree with me are automatically a troll, in the future. ;)
they bill it as a crossplatform environment but they only offer a GPLed version on certain platforms.
Well, what's stopping someone from porting the GPLed version to Win32? If this becomes valuable to people, it'll happen.
Redhat is up to what 4 CD's??
It's 5, last I checked (7.x). Two install CD's, two source, and one documentation. Used to be one source and one power tools.
You only need the two install CD's. In fact, if you want a base install, you only need the first one.
The rest of the stuff on the CD's is extra software for you! Having a huge software library is an advantage, not a liability. I've gotten used to being able to apt-get anything under Debian and instantly upgrade my computer to do whatever I'm interested in doing at the moment. The other night I was back on my little used RedHat box and found that I was installing so much that I copied all the .rpms off of those two install CDs to my hard drive to make it easier. Almost as nice as Debian, except for dependency misery.
All those extra packages are not required for a base install. As I said, in the case of RedHat, you still need just one CD. But after awhile, as you want your computer to do more and more things, I think you will find you would like to have the second, as well. That's not bloat -- that's options.
problem is everyone in linux is on a holy crusade and that their distro and packages are the best
Methinks you are reading the community wrong. I use RedHat and Debian both, where appropriate, and so do most people I know. It's all about having the right tools available for the job. It's all about options.
Incidentally, can you make a point without swearing? I mean, you sound awfully passionate about a platform you don't even like. Is it really that big of a deal?
I never search on sourceforge anymore. I take the position that if the piece of software is worth having, it'll show up as a top Google result.
For that matter, I rarely use site-specific search engines anymore, anyway. Just punch in a few keywords for what kind of program you're looking for and let Google find the best software on the whole net, not just sourceforge.
For instance: someone pointed out that the author is a gnome contributor. No wonder he wants to do away with Qt.
I am a GNOME user and advocate. I like it a lot better than KDE and feel like it's destined to win out. That said, I don't disparage KDE or Qt at all. I want them to continue; I want them to succeed. I actually prefer the pure GPL license they come with and wish GNOME would go that route.
I think it's sad when someone with clout as a KDE or GNOME developer disparages the other project. I'm happy to say I don't think most of the people who are really doing the work on these fine desktops does that.
However, if you want to build proprietary application on top of it, you have to pay TrollTech.
So it sounds like the old troll that the GPL is viral or somehow "less free" because it doesn't allow you to remove freedoms. As I don't care about the success of proprietary software in general or about the success of proprietary software on free platforms in particular, such trollish arguments carry zero weight with me.
They usually remain at a low level of features, as Free Software developers are a limited resource. There are exceptions (GIMP), but they usually have major companies behind them (Open Office, Mozilla) which know what the users want and what to ask from their developers.
Oh, so they usually have companies behind them, huh? You mean like Apache? Or NetBSD? Or the Linux kernel? Or Perl (which constantly seeks community donations)? How about the GNU software suite? Did you know that the lines of source code from GNU exceed the lines of source in the Linux kernel and the X Window System, and that's not counting emacs? How about XFree86; what company is behind that? What company is behind KDE? PostgreSQL has a company behind it now, but didn't for years, and that company still seems to be somewhat on the sidelines. And if you don't think PostgreSQL has features, start comparing its MVCC concurrency control system to Oracle's row-level locking, and ask yourself which supports more language in the database.
Actually, other than the two you mentioned, plus GNOME, most large free software projects seem to be done without a formal company backing them. The ones I listed above have plenty of companies driving them, as community members, just like everyone else, but none of them is identified with a particular company in my mind.
I disagree. We don't go around the internet insisting unused pages disappear. Instead we just insist that those irrelevant features not show up in our search queries -- we use Google.
What sourceforge needs is a better search engine, showing the most relevant results first. Then you'll never get down to the clutter unless you want to.
Right. And what a shame I wasted all my mod points yesterday.
Thank you. You just completely cleared this up for me. I was sitting, puzzling, thinking, "Life contains huge amounts of information, and should therefore not compress as well as non-life." Then I realized information is less entropy, so it actually will compress better. (What a relief. I was almost on the verge of taking this personally. ;)
A useful analogy: an ASCII file, containing information, compresses better than a file of truly random binary data. The truly random (think cryptographic) data has no useful information and has an even probability distribution of bytes, so there is no possible compression. When you add information you start altering the probability distribution of those bytes, and make compression possible. (Or think letter frequency analysis for breaking cyphers.)
couldn't possibly have been ... must have just been
There's a group of ex-scientologists who still consider the stuff Hubbard taught to be true, but improperly administered by the church. They practice civil disobedience in distributing their "scriptures," which are under copyright by the Church of Scientology. I believe they are called "freezoners."
I read some Hebrew, but not enough to answer definitively. The point is that the Latin translation (the Vulgate), and English translations (the KJV) are not the standard. The fact that both chose to translate it "kill" may support a position, but the definitive proof is the original Hebrew.
Now, in context, it is apparent that the same law that said "Do not kill," also commanded the death penalty and certain wars, so it is apparent from context in ANY language that it is not an absolute prohibition on all killing.
Of course, the Old Testament is not the law for Christians today, so all of this is academic. There are no admonitions for the death penalty or war in the New Testament. I'm a pacifist because of my Christian beliefs, but I can certainly see where the other side is coming from. And I'd hate to be associated with much of the anti-war crowd, because their strongest arguments seem to be "I don't like war," and "Bush is stupid."
But the Old Testament most definitely did not prohibit all killing. Whether the word implicitly carries the meaning of "murder" or "kill," the context shows it did not preclude war or the death penalty.
So, will there be extreme uproar and protest over YDL unifying GNOME and KDE, too, or will everyone have finally realized RedHat had a good idea?
So basically it's like compression. The same amount of information is conveyed with much less data.
Or maybe we just weren't watching commercials at all.
PLEASE CALL ME?!? WTF? This is too technical? Perhaps they should answer more like: "I am far, far too stupid to respond to this in writing. My writing skills suck, and I don't communicate well but can at least manage to pull it off in a verbal conversation. Please call." Or maybe, "We are dishonest and will be lying to you about our product. We don't want you to have our lies documented. Please call." And then there's also: "I look busier to my boss when I talk on the phone. If I just send you an email, I won't look busy. Please call." Yeesh.
My honest opinion is that their reasoning is "With email you can read and respond at your convenience, but I am far more important than the other people you work with for whom that would be appropriate. You must suspend everything you are working on now to talk to me. You must earn the information I possess with an offering to my greatness, a sacrifice of your time, your train of thought, and whatever other thing you might be working on.
Also, I think part of the problem is techies like you and me know how to communicate in email but other people don't. They aren't quite sure what email's for, thus the conclusion that "this is not a job for email."
Sure, there are times when the phone is more appropriate than email. But less times than the average non-technical user thinks.
Also you have to ask if you trust the employee that installed the Open Source product not to modify it.
Well, hopefully R&D doesn't cost as much when you can build on the work of others.
If I got some kind of disease, I'll happily fork over the cash to get it fixed.
That's the key. Not only will you fork over the cash, so will thousands of other people who are not infected by the disease but want a cure to be found. (If this is not so, a lot of charities have some major explaining to do.)
Even without the protection of a patent, businesses will still research, because there will be a market for it. They just won't be able to take unfair advantage by preventing others from competing on price or service. They can still make a profit. There's a lot to be said for being first to market. Look at how everyone uses BIND. Look at how generic drugs do compared with brand names.
The idea that drug research will not occur without patent protection is an unquestioned axiom. Iconoclast that I am, I am questioning it. Perhaps it will turn out to be true, but I do not think so.