One is the hoarding of books and knowledge by the church during the middle ages - only a privileged few was allowed access to them. The industrial revolution started when knowledge became freely shared.
It also reminds me of the final scene in the Hitchhiker's Triology, where survivors of the B ark burned down all of the trees so they could use the few remaining leaves as currency. He tries to justify the same thing - trying to create an artificial scarcity on things which are plentiful and easy to reproduce.
I used SuSE/KDE for over 5 years, and for a long time considered it to be a big step ahead of Gnome in terms of stability and usability. Now I am writing this on Ubuntu/Gnome. - Both are now solid and usable and I don't really care one way or another. But if you really have a bee in your bonnet over this you can always give kubuntu a try, or install both desktops and decide which UI you want at login.
Extensive documentary footage of old A-Team episodes show that automatic rifles ( especially M-16s ) are useless at ANY range, except for maybe giving the enemy's jeep a flat tire. It is much more effective to simply drop the rifles and bludgeon the enemy into unconsciousness with your fists.
Not so secretly, I long for a libertarian to lower taxes, and leave me and everybody else the f*ck alone to live their lives as they see fit. Sadly, the very sort of people who are attracted to and ultimately end up in positions of power are those who won't leave you alone, and insist on bending you to their will.
Fine, let them have their red light cameras and photo radars. But there is a caveat: 100% of the fines collected from these MUST go to the united nations, thus removing the incentive for any conflict of interest. Only then will we see how much of this is necessary for public safety versus an excuse for revenue collection. After all, it isn't about the money right? That is what their proponents say. And so long as they do make money off them, there is an obvious conflict of interest, no matter how much you try to excuse it away.
Unfortunately, it becomes a chicken vs. egg problem - critical apps that only run under windows, ergo they need windows. And they need windows because all of their customers are using windows, so.....
Convincing your CEO or CIO to switch to FOSS (even if they would dearly love to) is like convincing a hard core gamer to drop microsoft. They will do it the day WOW or Everquest or runs flawlessly under Linux.
Actually, I bought my first mac because I couldn't afford a Lisa. For the first year of its existence, the Lisa was the primary development platform of mac software, since the 128k "thin" mac didn't have enough RAM or disk space to run a real development environment. (Unlike the first Mac, the Lisa came with an optional small hard drive) From what I remember the biggest problem with the Lisa was the non-square pixels, and funky floppies that never took off.
The mac itself would have died an early death and been on the list as well (it sold very poorly in its first 6 months) if not for the apple laserwriter, which helped spawn the desktop publishing industry. (regrettably couldn't afford one at the time, had to settle for their noisy as hell and slow dot matrix printer)
I am running Ubuntu Feisty beta with a lot of SW installed and have about 100M in patches or updates every day. This doesn't count normal browsing, streaming A/V feeds and whatever the kids are doing.
Besides, isn't this a form of illegal false advertising?
That is not as strange as you think - I heard that in Mogadishu, they were showing pirate screenings of "Black Hawk Down" in a parking lot when it first came out a few years ago, only a block from where the events actually happened. Except the Somalians were cheering every time a US soldier died...
And the eye candy utterly blows Vista or the Mac OSX out of the water! My stepson has a Vista laptop and he was most impressed by the translucent desktop cube with 3D windows. It isn't just pretty, it is quite practical as well, as you can actually see what is happening on the other desktops at a glance. The price was certainly right, and there is DRM or restrictive EULAs to boot!
That troll Orrin Hatch may have initiated the bill, but it was passed under Clinton's watch. I am not an american, but I do know he has something called a VETO which is pretty damned hard to override if he had used it. At very least it would have been a strong symbolic guesture of disapproval. No veto = Clinton approves.
If you go to opensecrets.org and look at where the $$$ for both parties comes from, you will see the #1 contributor to the Democratic party is Hollywood.
What if you post your garage band music that may or may not have a similar title to or cover version of something the RIAA would be after? When they send you a notice, you could then point out that their letter is an admission of unauthorized downloading of YOUR copyrighted works? You were just making them available on a shareware basis, right? And didn't their tech read the legal disclaimer on your web page indicating that by downloading this file they agreed to remit $49.95 to your paypal account?
Finally got it working by assigning the Vista laptop a static IP address. Googling about suggests it may have something to do with stateful packet inspection on my linksys router, but only Vista seems to have any problems with it. I am using a Linksys WRT54GS with firmware version: v4.71.1 (latest as far as I can tell) but Vista somehow doesn't like it as a DHCP server. Maybe there is a fix coming to Vista or the router that will let me use DHCP with it. I am not running my own DNS server. What a freaking headache!
I just did what I swore I would never do. I had to purchase a replacement laptop for my stepson, but it was impossible to find a decent one (decently fast with 1G of RAM or greater) that came without Vista, and all but impossible to find any that didn't come with a microsoft OS. I walked into best buy after trying 5 or 6 stores - only one place would sell me an Ubuntu laptop and theirs was an average of $2K, way out of my budget! I called many places and drove around to a number of stores. Future shop had a big vista banner hung outside their store.
It was a totally ludicrous situation. When I went into best buy, the staff were playing about with the shiny new desktops trying to figure out how stuff worked. Customers were asking what games or legacy would run on the new OS, and the staff sort of shrugged. They obviously had this dropped on them and didn't have a clue either. So I bought the laptop with Vista ( the kid is a windows lover and whines that his favorite game du jour doesn't work under Linux)
So I get the damned thing home, and try to connect through my wireless home LAN. (Linksys WRT54GS running the latest firmware) Guess what? Can't reach beyond my local network - something about TCP scaling problems with the primary DNS server!!! I never had this much trouble with basic networking under SuSE, Ubuntu, or XP. I was even able to get the kids PS2 and PSP networked with less trouble than this!
There has to be some sort of laws put in place to ensure betas (and that is exactly what this is) are not being rammed down everybody's throat like this. The whole situation is utterly insane. I am going to be up half the night trying to get the damned piece of crap connected to the internet.
If you detect the spider, you could quietly redirect them to a honeypot full of bogus personal data and useless links to crap their database and make them waste time sifting through plausible but useless data. The generated "customer" names and addresses can even be real, just combine random first and last names plugged into http://findaperson.canada411.ca/ and add the returned names and addresses to your customer database. Voila!
( I was recently screwed by the taxman despite making rigorous efforts to adhere to their byzantine rules, so I have no longer have any moral qualms about helping others fight them )
Check out GNU octave - I used it for number crunching on my master's thesis. It is basically an open source MATLAB clone with no data set size limitations.
Microsoft is in a "can't lose" situation with VISTA in the developed world - OEM systems will all be shipped with it no questions asked, and most businesses will drink the TCO cool-aid and go with what they think is safe. But the margins are much tighter in the developing world, making proprietary software unaffordable. Their choice is either piracy, (and MS is really putting the squeeze on that) or FOSS.
If FOSS can do the job at all they will use it, even if there are a few warts to deal with. The windows install base will start to erode not in America or Europe as expected, but in the emerging markets. MS themselves knew that when they came out with those international editions of XP at fire sale prices, but they were deliberately crippled in how many applications they could run.
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One is the hoarding of books and knowledge by the church during the middle ages - only a privileged few was allowed access to them. The industrial revolution started when knowledge became freely shared.
It also reminds me of the final scene in the Hitchhiker's Triology, where survivors of the B ark burned down all of the trees so they could use the few remaining leaves as currency. He tries to justify the same thing - trying to create an artificial scarcity on things which are plentiful and easy to reproduce.
I used SuSE/KDE for over 5 years, and for a long time considered it to be a big step ahead of Gnome in terms of stability and usability. Now I am writing this on Ubuntu/Gnome. - Both are now solid and usable and I don't really care one way or another. But if you really have a bee in your bonnet over this you can always give kubuntu a try, or install both desktops and decide which UI you want at login.
#23L What should be changed in future versions of openSUSE? (Multiple answers possible)
Tear up and renounce Novell's deal with Microsoft
(Former SuSE user since version 6.0 came out)
I used GNU octave for my thesis:
www.octave.org
( Open source MATLAB clone )
Extensive documentary footage of old A-Team episodes show that automatic rifles ( especially M-16s ) are useless at ANY range, except for maybe giving the enemy's jeep a flat tire. It is much more effective to simply drop the rifles and bludgeon the enemy into unconsciousness with your fists.
Mr Yarrow's next job will be administering the great firewall of China.
Not so secretly, I long for a libertarian to lower taxes, and leave me and everybody else the f*ck alone to live their lives as they see fit. Sadly, the very sort of people who are attracted to and ultimately end up in positions of power are those who won't leave you alone, and insist on bending you to their will.
An even better idea:
Fine, let them have their red light cameras and photo radars. But there is a caveat: 100% of the fines collected from these MUST go to the united nations, thus removing the incentive for any conflict of interest. Only then will we see how much of this is necessary for public safety versus an excuse for revenue collection. After all, it isn't about the money right? That is what their proponents say. And so long as they do make money off them, there is an obvious conflict of interest, no matter how much you try to excuse it away.
Unfortunately, it becomes a chicken vs. egg problem - critical apps that only run under windows, ergo they need windows. And they need windows because all of their customers are using windows, so.....
Convincing your CEO or CIO to switch to FOSS (even if they would dearly love to) is like convincing a hard core gamer to drop microsoft. They will do it the day WOW or Everquest or runs flawlessly under Linux.
Therefore I claim an exemption under the law to pretext whenever I damned well feel like it.
Actually, I bought my first mac because I couldn't afford a Lisa. For the first year of its existence, the Lisa was the primary development platform of mac software, since the 128k "thin" mac didn't have enough RAM or disk space to run a real development environment. (Unlike the first Mac, the Lisa came with an optional small hard drive) From what I remember the biggest problem with the Lisa was the non-square pixels, and funky floppies that never took off.
The mac itself would have died an early death and been on the list as well (it sold very poorly in its first 6 months) if not for the apple laserwriter, which helped spawn the desktop publishing industry. (regrettably couldn't afford one at the time, had to settle for their noisy as hell and slow dot matrix printer)
I am running Ubuntu Feisty beta with a lot of SW installed and have about 100M in patches or updates every day. This doesn't count normal browsing, streaming A/V feeds and whatever the kids are doing.
Besides, isn't this a form of illegal false advertising?
That is not as strange as you think - I heard that in Mogadishu, they were showing pirate screenings of "Black Hawk Down" in a parking lot when it first came out a few years ago, only a block from where the events actually happened. Except the Somalians were cheering every time a US soldier died...
And the eye candy utterly blows Vista or the Mac OSX out of the water! My stepson has a Vista laptop and he was most impressed by the translucent desktop cube with 3D windows. It isn't just pretty, it is quite practical as well, as you can actually see what is happening on the other desktops at a glance. The price was certainly right, and there is DRM or restrictive EULAs to boot!
That troll Orrin Hatch may have initiated the bill, but it was passed under Clinton's watch. I am not an american, but I do know he has something called a VETO which is pretty damned hard to override if he had used it. At very least it would have been a strong symbolic guesture of disapproval. No veto = Clinton approves.
If you go to opensecrets.org and look at where the $$$ for both parties comes from, you will see the #1 contributor to the Democratic party is Hollywood.
Remember the hunt for Red October and it's super silent caterpillar drive with no moving parts?
All we really need is solid, supported drivers for all peripherals. You can then change distros at will. This is especially a problem with laptops.
What if you post your garage band music that may or may not have a similar title to or cover version of something the RIAA would be after? When they send you a notice, you could then point out that their letter is an admission of unauthorized downloading of YOUR copyrighted works? You were just making them available on a shareware basis, right? And didn't their tech read the legal disclaimer on your web page indicating that by downloading this file they agreed to remit $49.95 to your paypal account?
Will it run Vista's aero interface?
Finally got it working by assigning the Vista laptop a static IP address. Googling about suggests it may have something to do with stateful packet inspection on my linksys router, but only Vista seems to have any problems with it. I am using a Linksys WRT54GS with firmware version: v4.71.1 (latest as far as I can tell) but Vista somehow doesn't like it as a DHCP server. Maybe there is a fix coming to Vista or the router that will let me use DHCP with it. I am not running my own DNS server. What a freaking headache!
I just did what I swore I would never do. I had to purchase a replacement laptop for my stepson, but it was impossible to find a decent one (decently fast with 1G of RAM or greater) that came without Vista, and all but impossible to find any that didn't come with a microsoft OS. I walked into best buy after trying 5 or 6 stores - only one place would sell me an Ubuntu laptop and theirs was an average of $2K, way out of my budget! I called many places and drove around to a number of stores. Future shop had a big vista banner hung outside their store.
It was a totally ludicrous situation. When I went into best buy, the staff were playing about with the shiny new desktops trying to figure out how stuff worked. Customers were asking what games or legacy would run on the new OS, and the staff sort of shrugged. They obviously had this dropped on them and didn't have a clue either. So I bought the laptop with Vista ( the kid is a windows lover and whines that his favorite game du jour doesn't work under Linux)
So I get the damned thing home, and try to connect through my wireless home LAN. (Linksys WRT54GS running the latest firmware) Guess what? Can't reach beyond my local network - something about TCP scaling problems with the primary DNS server!!! I never had this much trouble with basic networking under SuSE, Ubuntu, or XP. I was even able to get the kids PS2 and PSP networked with less trouble than this!
There has to be some sort of laws put in place to ensure betas (and that is exactly what this is) are not being rammed down everybody's throat like this. The whole situation is utterly insane. I am going to be up half the night trying to get the damned piece of crap connected to the internet.
If you detect the spider, you could quietly redirect them to a honeypot full of bogus personal data and useless links to crap their database and make them waste time sifting through plausible but useless data. The generated "customer" names and addresses can even be real, just combine random first and last names plugged into http://findaperson.canada411.ca/ and add the returned names and addresses to your customer database. Voila!
( I was recently screwed by the taxman despite making rigorous efforts to adhere to their byzantine rules, so I have no longer have any moral qualms about helping others fight them )
Oh they get it all right - they get wined and dined by the "vested interests" who make substantial campaign donations.
Wrong tool for the job
Check out GNU octave - I used it for number crunching on my master's thesis. It is basically an open source MATLAB clone with no data set size limitations.
Microsoft is in a "can't lose" situation with VISTA in the developed world - OEM systems will all be shipped with it no questions asked, and most businesses will drink the TCO cool-aid and go with what they think is safe. But the margins are much tighter in the developing world, making proprietary software unaffordable. Their choice is either piracy, (and MS is really putting the squeeze on that) or FOSS.
If FOSS can do the job at all they will use it, even if there are a few warts to deal with. The windows install base will start to erode not in America or Europe as expected, but in the emerging markets. MS themselves knew that when they came out with those international editions of XP at fire sale prices, but they were deliberately crippled in how many applications they could run.