I don't disagree that software is overpriced, I think the margins on some software is extortion, I was just making the point that there is cost involved in the manufacturing, and design. The grandparent said there was no cost when there very obviously is cost involved.
Personally, I feel the icon is still valid. Mostly because we still allow patents on things that don't actually cost anything to manufacture, such as software and "business methods". Okay firstly I will point out I don't agree with software patents, they are destructive to innovation, however, how can you possibly say software doesn't cost anything to manufacture?
There is lots of costs involved in software development, nothing in this world is free, even from the view of some geek sat at home hacking away at his favorite opensource application, there is time involved, there is development environments, there is debuggers, there is electricity to run the system. So that is a minor example of very low cost since.
On the other end of the spectrum you have a large company that is developing software, how about their costs? Hiring developers, QA people, office space, standard overheads.
Some of the features of beryl are useful, the cube effect for example and the method of moving windows to different desktops with very intuitive hotkeys. I generally use these features and turn everything else off. It allows me to keep my fingers on the keyboard as opposed to clicking through menus with the mouse. Oh and the jotter is useful as well for presentations.
Other than that I agree with the parent, there is a lot of stuff in beryl which is very cool but really not useful or practical, although that said I have managed to convert 3 windows people to linux on the strength of beryl.
Okay I had to do this, since I am not anti gun or anything, however, you kind of contradict yourself, the thinking behind the right to bear arms comes from two sources the 2nd Amendment:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Abraham Lincon:
"It is your business to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty, for yourselves, and not for me. I desire they shall be constitutionally preserved."
Benjamin Franklin:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Additionally there is many other quotes by founders of the USA and by ex-presidents basically implying it is the right and the responsibility of a US citizen to protect their liberties against an oppressive government, part of the reason for the 2nd Amendment is to ensure the government never becomes complacent or removes civil liberties from the citizens.
So you can pipe on about how you have the right to bear arms, and how the government is not your friend, however, unless you actually take the responsibility to rise up against the government you forfeit your right to bear arms.
With the right to bear arms comes the responsibility to use them for the purpose that right was first granted under. I am not trying to encourage people to rise against the government but the parent post kinda pisses me off and it has become such a common view of the 2nd amendment, all people see if their right to bear arms they never question the reason behind that right, and those same people that keep saying they have the right to their semi automatics are also usually the same people that bitch about their civil rights being taken away.
Additionally although I am not a die hard anti gun person, statistically the US has more gun related crimes that any other western country, I am sure there is a connection between people having the right to bear arms and the number of gun related crimes that are committed. You can talk about how if these kids had all been armed there wouldn't have been so many dead, however, also take into consideration that if no one had a gun in the first place no one would have been shot.
Statistically you have a better chance of being killed by an asteroid than by dying in a plane crash.
It is worked out on the basis that lets say 200 people a year die in a plane crash over a 5,000 year period that is just 1 million deaths.
If we got hit by a world killer or even a regional killer asteroid in the next 5,000 years the number of deaths would be a hell of a lot higher for a regional killer you are looking at millions of deaths for a global killer billions of deaths.
This proves two things firstly you have a better chance of dying from an asteroid than a plane crash, and secondly that statistics can say whatever you want them to say.
Although I generally try to avoid any discussion about belief I can't help but be dragged into this one.
Personally I believe in a god, I just disbelieve in religion. I see the universe around me, I see all things and I see that as evidence of god.
An often used arguement against the existance of a god is that science disproves a god, I believe the opposite to be true, science discovers the rules and the building blocks of the universe and all things, if there is rules in place those rules were created.
I don't believe in the bible, I don't believe in any form of organised religion, I was bought up catholic and rejected that as soon as I was able to. I believe we all have a purpose in life, we are born with an objective that we must carry out in our life, perhaps an experience we must have or an influence we must give to others, regardless there is a reason for our being here. If you believe it is because you are supposed to believe, if you do not believe it is because you are not supposed to believe.
I don't agree with relgion because it doesn't fit with my idea of god and the universe but those that do are supposed to. This can be considered a form of destiny but in the end who cares? Your life and your beliefs are something that are personal to you, you can fight all day with someone about their belief system, but in the end none of us can prove we are correct, you can argue with me all day that there isn't a god and I can't argue right back that there is, chances are no one is going to change their opinions because it is 'hopefully' something you have considered carefully and you have choosen to believe what feels right to you.
Um, I think you're confusing hydrogen batteries with hydrogen bombs... if a hydrogen fuel cell sized to fit in a laptop blew up, the most it would destroy would be a car, or possibly a crowded (and very small) internet cafe, even if they had the hydrogen compressed very densely. I know:o) I was just kidding on that bit.
It is pretty good and Lenovo is being proactive about recalling their batteries, rather than waiting.
Since the two types of exploding batteries we have seen so far are from two different producers (sony and sanyo) I am wondering if this is an inherent flaw in the battery type itself, or if it is just that both manufacturers use similar production methods?
Regardless I think I will wait until we have hydrogen cell batteries before I go buy a laptop, at least that way if one happens to explode you don't need to worry to much about a recall, since a large percentage of your market (read the world) will be destroyed along with the batteries.
I was just suprised that more code seems to come from companies than from individuals. I can understand the reasoning for it, I just didn't realise just quite how seriously some of these companies were working on Linux.
I can see the interest in it for Redhat, Novell, et al. I know than IBM has a very deep interest in linux succeeding, it was some of the other companies on the list that I found interesting such as SGI.
It was pretty interesting reading this article, I was rather shocked to see that there was no mention of code contributed to M$ (joke for you ms fan boys)
Actually in all seriousness, I didn't realise how much of the code was contributed by companies, I was fairly suprised to see broadcom had donated so much code, since I have had quite a few problems with getting their hardware working on linux in the past. I don't know if this is a new thing for them to be contributing code to get their hardware working better, or if this just bad luck on my part that their hardware never seems to work for me on my boxes.
Just because the community at large is too stupid to understand the quite elemental differences between Open Source and Free Software, it doesn't mean I'm abusing the term "Open Source" if I give someone the source code.
A lack of clue on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
There reaches a point when you look at everyone else and think they are stupid you have to ask yourself the question, perhaps it is me that is stupid, or failing that just so arrogant that the idea of considering the point of view of another person or in this case a large community is repulsive to you.
So perhaps you don't agree with my views on open source, but in this instance as I have tried to explain, perhaps not as clearly as you require, the company I was working for was trying to give the impression that they embraced open source and GPL, because they believed by using open source and allowing the client to have the code they paid for made them an opensource company. Once again as I have tried to explain and as you have choosen to ignore, the company was in this instance incorrect, they were a company that provided the source code to their clients with heavy restrictions, they were not an open source company because 99% of the code developed by them was not in any way, shape or form released to anyone.
Congratulations on not understanding the difference between Open Source and Free Software.
Here's a hint: If you give the source to the customer, it's Open Source.
If you're giving the source to everyone, it's probably Free Software. But that depends on the terms under which you distribute it.
If you contract a person to develop a website for you in php how it is possible to give them the site without it being visible sourcecode? When the small print in the clients contract specifically denies them the right to redistribute the code (which I failed to mention originally) you could not be a lot further from open source.
Yes I will concede the point that on a technicality providing the source code (which is unavoidable in their situation) means you are giving them 'open source code', however, you are just highlighting my point that the company is interpreting the term 'open source' to technically be able to get away with it whilst totally sidestepping the spirit of what open source means to the community at large.
I used to work for a web development company that advertised themselves as "the opensource web company".
Their idea of how they were an opensource company was because they used php to develop code, and, because when a site was written they gave the client ownership of the code.
No matter how much we employees tried to explain that didn't make us an opensource company the powers that be refused to listen. It was made worse by the fact that the president of the company was invited to DC to testify on the benefits of opensource.
Our contracts even stated that code developed in our own time was the property of the company, and the company policy was that no code developed could be released to the opensource community at large.
It can be really frustrating to have such a loose term as 'opensource' where a company can choose to interpret it in such a way as to benefit them and no one else, or companies that simply fail to understand the concept.
This sounds a lot like the situation with Bell in the US, they got broken up into a group of smaller companies.
I am not entirely sure how EU law works, but do they have any actually authority, or can they just make recommendations to the government of a nation. I wouldn't have thought they have the ability to take any actual action against Deutsche Telekom?
Okay I am certainly not a microsoft fan, I use Unix and Linux almost exclusively, however, you made a number of reasonable points.
I don't agree that linux of F/OSS is a bad option, I almost entirely disagree with your last paragraph, however, this is one of the best arguements I have seen in a long time on/. in favour of an operating system.
Personally I would like to see opensource used more within military and government facilities, I especially think something like rtlinux would be good for this kind of purpose, but you do put forward a convincing point of view on this, so kudos to you.
I personally use gentoo because I actually like having that much control over my system http://web.archive.org/web/20060513022941/http://w ww.funroll-loops.org/ Nice anonymous post. I love the fact that when you express a personal opinion, there is always someone that wants to knock it, but doesn't have the courage to do so without being anonymous, could it possibly be because they realise what they are saying is going to cause them a major karma hit?
Sorry but I have to step in on this, with gentoo if there is a dependency problem it will notify you as soon as you attempt to emerge a package. In most cases there is no problems with dependencies that portage cannot resolve itself, however, if you unmask a package you may end up having to unmask a bunch of other packages as well.
Yes it is possible for an emerge to break after you have been compiling for a huge amount of time, but this has nothing to do with a dependency, it has to do with either a the codebase on the application you are using being broken or the ebuild itself being broken.
This being said I personally use gentoo because I actually like having that much control over my system, I recently installed Suse 10.1 on my wifes computer and was seriously disappointed since the package updater was broken (I used suse from version 6.0 - 9.0) and I used to have a nightmare with dependencies almost everytime I installed a package. I used fedora at a company I used to work at and got to the point where I would dread having to install anything because of the dependency problems. I used debian and I was fairly impressed, however, I got fed up with having to use out of date packages. I have recently install Ubuntu on my wifes computer and overall I have been very impressed with it, so far I haven't had any dependency problems whatsoever.
Taking a step back, I am not attempting to knock anyone elses preferences, I am just expressing my experience with the various package managers, so far the most impressive for me have been portage on gentoo and apt/dpkg on ubuntu.
This is a fair point, although properly used, the death penalty can provide an additional, (and for obvious reasons very strong) additional incentive not to kill.
However in the US it obviously doesn't provide an incentive not to kill just take a look at the crime stats.
"Hey, you're one of those pro-prison people, right?!? I can't wait to see you wrongly imprisoned for life! With lots of prison rape for good measure!" (As an aside, it would be unlikely to happen to me as my country does not apply capital punishment. Perhaps on a trip abroad though...)
I am not overly pro-prison, I am anti death sentence, in the event you can at a later date be prove innocent at least you have a chance to live your life once you are released from prison, being executed is kinda hard to take back. For the record my country doesn't have capital punishment however the country I live in does. Seriously consider the consequencies with new DNA evidence lots of people can now be proved innocent, but if you executed that person well proving innocence posthumously doesn't help that innocent person much.
Additionally as far as prison rape and victimisation in prison goes, most death row convicts spend years waiting to be executed and as such are subject to rape and other suffering whilst waiting to be executed, so lets reword your statement.
Would you like to sit on deathrow for 20 years being raped and beaten waiting to be executed for a crime you didn't commit, or would you like to sit in prison for 20 years being raped and beaten for a crime you didn't commit, the only difference is that at the end you don't get executed.
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I don't disagree that software is overpriced, I think the margins on some software is extortion, I was just making the point that there is cost involved in the manufacturing, and design. The grandparent said there was no cost when there very obviously is cost involved.
Boxes cost, media costs, replication to media costs, even if you just download, bandwidth costs. Nothing is for free.
There is lots of costs involved in software development, nothing in this world is free, even from the view of some geek sat at home hacking away at his favorite opensource application, there is time involved, there is development environments, there is debuggers, there is electricity to run the system. So that is a minor example of very low cost since.
On the other end of the spectrum you have a large company that is developing software, how about their costs? Hiring developers, QA people, office space, standard overheads.
Software development does cost money.
You can configure Emerald to look however you want. If you like the look of xfwm find a theme that looks like xfwm.
Some of the features of beryl are useful, the cube effect for example and the method of moving windows to different desktops with very intuitive hotkeys. I generally use these features and turn everything else off. It allows me to keep my fingers on the keyboard as opposed to clicking through menus with the mouse. Oh and the jotter is useful as well for presentations.
Other than that I agree with the parent, there is a lot of stuff in beryl which is very cool but really not useful or practical, although that said I have managed to convert 3 windows people to linux on the strength of beryl.
Abraham Lincon:
Benjamin Franklin:
Additionally there is many other quotes by founders of the USA and by ex-presidents basically implying it is the right and the responsibility of a US citizen to protect their liberties against an oppressive government, part of the reason for the 2nd Amendment is to ensure the government never becomes complacent or removes civil liberties from the citizens.
So you can pipe on about how you have the right to bear arms, and how the government is not your friend, however, unless you actually take the responsibility to rise up against the government you forfeit your right to bear arms.
With the right to bear arms comes the responsibility to use them for the purpose that right was first granted under. I am not trying to encourage people to rise against the government but the parent post kinda pisses me off and it has become such a common view of the 2nd amendment, all people see if their right to bear arms they never question the reason behind that right, and those same people that keep saying they have the right to their semi automatics are also usually the same people that bitch about their civil rights being taken away.
Additionally although I am not a die hard anti gun person, statistically the US has more gun related crimes that any other western country, I am sure there is a connection between people having the right to bear arms and the number of gun related crimes that are committed. You can talk about how if these kids had all been armed there wouldn't have been so many dead, however, also take into consideration that if no one had a gun in the first place no one would have been shot.
Okay mod now NRA types feel free to mod me down.
Statistically you have a better chance of being killed by an asteroid than by dying in a plane crash.
It is worked out on the basis that lets say 200 people a year die in a plane crash over a 5,000 year period that is just 1 million deaths.
If we got hit by a world killer or even a regional killer asteroid in the next 5,000 years the number of deaths would be a hell of a lot higher for a regional killer you are looking at millions of deaths for a global killer billions of deaths.
This proves two things firstly you have a better chance of dying from an asteroid than a plane crash, and secondly that statistics can say whatever you want them to say.
Although I generally try to avoid any discussion about belief I can't help but be dragged into this one.
Personally I believe in a god, I just disbelieve in religion. I see the universe around me, I see all things and I see that as evidence of god.
An often used arguement against the existance of a god is that science disproves a god, I believe the opposite to be true, science discovers the rules and the building blocks of the universe and all things, if there is rules in place those rules were created.
I don't believe in the bible, I don't believe in any form of organised religion, I was bought up catholic and rejected that as soon as I was able to. I believe we all have a purpose in life, we are born with an objective that we must carry out in our life, perhaps an experience we must have or an influence we must give to others, regardless there is a reason for our being here. If you believe it is because you are supposed to believe, if you do not believe it is because you are not supposed to believe.
I don't agree with relgion because it doesn't fit with my idea of god and the universe but those that do are supposed to. This can be considered a form of destiny but in the end who cares? Your life and your beliefs are something that are personal to you, you can fight all day with someone about their belief system, but in the end none of us can prove we are correct, you can argue with me all day that there isn't a god and I can't argue right back that there is, chances are no one is going to change their opinions because it is 'hopefully' something you have considered carefully and you have choosen to believe what feels right to you.
Okay yes that makes a lot of sense, I can't believe I didn't think of that.
It is pretty good and Lenovo is being proactive about recalling their batteries, rather than waiting.
Since the two types of exploding batteries we have seen so far are from two different producers (sony and sanyo) I am wondering if this is an inherent flaw in the battery type itself, or if it is just that both manufacturers use similar production methods?
Regardless I think I will wait until we have hydrogen cell batteries before I go buy a laptop, at least that way if one happens to explode you don't need to worry to much about a recall, since a large percentage of your market (read the world) will be destroyed along with the batteries.
:o) The shocking part was just about Microsoft.
I was just suprised that more code seems to come from companies than from individuals. I can understand the reasoning for it, I just didn't realise just quite how seriously some of these companies were working on Linux.
I can see the interest in it for Redhat, Novell, et al. I know than IBM has a very deep interest in linux succeeding, it was some of the other companies on the list that I found interesting such as SGI.
Correction, by M$, must remember to use the preview button.
It was pretty interesting reading this article, I was rather shocked to see that there was no mention of code contributed to M$ (joke for you ms fan boys)
Actually in all seriousness, I didn't realise how much of the code was contributed by companies, I was fairly suprised to see broadcom had donated so much code, since I have had quite a few problems with getting their hardware working on linux in the past. I don't know if this is a new thing for them to be contributing code to get their hardware working better, or if this just bad luck on my part that their hardware never seems to work for me on my boxes.
All in all an interesting read.
Just because the community at large is too stupid to understand the quite elemental differences between Open Source and Free Software, it doesn't mean I'm abusing the term "Open Source" if I give someone the source code.
A lack of clue on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
There reaches a point when you look at everyone else and think they are stupid you have to ask yourself the question, perhaps it is me that is stupid, or failing that just so arrogant that the idea of considering the point of view of another person or in this case a large community is repulsive to you.So perhaps you don't agree with my views on open source, but in this instance as I have tried to explain, perhaps not as clearly as you require, the company I was working for was trying to give the impression that they embraced open source and GPL, because they believed by using open source and allowing the client to have the code they paid for made them an opensource company. Once again as I have tried to explain and as you have choosen to ignore, the company was in this instance incorrect, they were a company that provided the source code to their clients with heavy restrictions, they were not an open source company because 99% of the code developed by them was not in any way, shape or form released to anyone.
Congratulations on not understanding the difference between Open Source and Free Software.
Here's a hint: If you give the source to the customer, it's Open Source.
If you're giving the source to everyone, it's probably Free Software. But that depends on the terms under which you distribute it.
If you contract a person to develop a website for you in php how it is possible to give them the site without it being visible sourcecode? When the small print in the clients contract specifically denies them the right to redistribute the code (which I failed to mention originally) you could not be a lot further from open source.Yes I will concede the point that on a technicality providing the source code (which is unavoidable in their situation) means you are giving them 'open source code', however, you are just highlighting my point that the company is interpreting the term 'open source' to technically be able to get away with it whilst totally sidestepping the spirit of what open source means to the community at large.
I used to work for a web development company that advertised themselves as "the opensource web company".
Their idea of how they were an opensource company was because they used php to develop code, and, because when a site was written they gave the client ownership of the code.
No matter how much we employees tried to explain that didn't make us an opensource company the powers that be refused to listen. It was made worse by the fact that the president of the company was invited to DC to testify on the benefits of opensource.
Our contracts even stated that code developed in our own time was the property of the company, and the company policy was that no code developed could be released to the opensource community at large.
It can be really frustrating to have such a loose term as 'opensource' where a company can choose to interpret it in such a way as to benefit them and no one else, or companies that simply fail to understand the concept.
This sounds a lot like the situation with Bell in the US, they got broken up into a group of smaller companies.
I am not entirely sure how EU law works, but do they have any actually authority, or can they just make recommendations to the government of a nation. I wouldn't have thought they have the ability to take any actual action against Deutsche Telekom?
Okay I am certainly not a microsoft fan, I use Unix and Linux almost exclusively, however, you made a number of reasonable points.
/. in favour of an operating system.
I don't agree that linux of F/OSS is a bad option, I almost entirely disagree with your last paragraph, however, this is one of the best arguements I have seen in a long time on
Personally I would like to see opensource used more within military and government facilities, I especially think something like rtlinux would be good for this kind of purpose, but you do put forward a convincing point of view on this, so kudos to you.
Damn already rated +5 funny, this one deserves at least a +50 funny!
Sorry but I have to step in on this, with gentoo if there is a dependency problem it will notify you as soon as you attempt to emerge a package. In most cases there is no problems with dependencies that portage cannot resolve itself, however, if you unmask a package you may end up having to unmask a bunch of other packages as well.
Yes it is possible for an emerge to break after you have been compiling for a huge amount of time, but this has nothing to do with a dependency, it has to do with either a the codebase on the application you are using being broken or the ebuild itself being broken.
This being said I personally use gentoo because I actually like having that much control over my system, I recently installed Suse 10.1 on my wifes computer and was seriously disappointed since the package updater was broken (I used suse from version 6.0 - 9.0) and I used to have a nightmare with dependencies almost everytime I installed a package. I used fedora at a company I used to work at and got to the point where I would dread having to install anything because of the dependency problems. I used debian and I was fairly impressed, however, I got fed up with having to use out of date packages. I have recently install Ubuntu on my wifes computer and overall I have been very impressed with it, so far I haven't had any dependency problems whatsoever.
Taking a step back, I am not attempting to knock anyone elses preferences, I am just expressing my experience with the various package managers, so far the most impressive for me have been portage on gentoo and apt/dpkg on ubuntu.
Three planes? By my count there was four! One into each world trade center towers, one into the pentagon, and one that crashed in a field.
However in the US it obviously doesn't provide an incentive not to kill just take a look at the crime stats.
I am not overly pro-prison, I am anti death sentence, in the event you can at a later date be prove innocent at least you have a chance to live your life once you are released from prison, being executed is kinda hard to take back. For the record my country doesn't have capital punishment however the country I live in does. Seriously consider the consequencies with new DNA evidence lots of people can now be proved innocent, but if you executed that person well proving innocence posthumously doesn't help that innocent person much.
Additionally as far as prison rape and victimisation in prison goes, most death row convicts spend years waiting to be executed and as such are subject to rape and other suffering whilst waiting to be executed, so lets reword your statement.
Would you like to sit on deathrow for 20 years being raped and beaten waiting to be executed for a crime you didn't commit, or would you like to sit in prison for 20 years being raped and beaten for a crime you didn't commit, the only difference is that at the end you don't get executed.
Did you actually read the parent I was responding to? It isn't my obession with personal witnessing it was the parent.