Using a standard keyboard is ONLY important if the people involved are from different keyboard-layout regions. And what is important is that you agree on a standard, not that the standard be English.
About what you mention of the brackets, you should take a look at the Latin-American Spanish keyboard that has {} without modifiers. I find this pretty convenient to code in {} using languages. Another possibility is to switch to Python, so that you only need to know where the : is.
The difference is the timeframe where this has happened.
It is now generally agreed that what went on in the American continent was not right. The massacre of the indigenous inhabitants is not something that many people are proud of today, and each country has their own processes of restoration of SOME of the land to the original peoples.
That such an usurpation would be started in the 20th century by the same people that apologise for their actions in the Americas, with conditions similar to the ones that were so hated about Apartheid in South Africa is something that does not cease to shock me.
So, yes, it's not the first and probably won't be the last unfair usurpation of land, however, the conditions under which it has happened make it specially nasty.
The statement above makes me worried because it suggests that the Open Source Community could not find their way around these patents for two decades! Think about it....20 years!
That is not what the article says. What it says is that the patent was filed 20 years ago, and that the freetype library included the code that infringed on that patent "for some time".
What would "find a way around these patents" be? With software patents, that patent a "method" of doing something, it's quite hard to be able to find a way around them. Say Microsoft decided to enforce their double-click patent, how would you find a way around it? Basically, no other software would be able to use the double click input method without paying Microsoft for a patent license.
The EFF fights against many of the enforced software patents, trying to prove that there was prior art and that the patent was actually invalid when it was granted. If the patent was actually valid, there's not much you could do.
That's how it is, that's why we hate software patents.
Do you have pointers to where your dad submitted these suggestions? Links to bugs, mailing list mails, etc?
It's common for suggestions to rot in the bug tracking system when nobody is interested in implementing them. It's NOT common however, to tell someone that makes a good suggestion to fuck off, so I'm rather not inclined to believe it without proof.
Also, Free Software developers tend to react badly when stuff is demanded from them, instead of just suggested. It could be as subtle a difference as the difference between "I think it would be great if this could be changed" and "This must be changed".
I work as an Assistant Teacher in my local CS University in Argentina (actually it's Informatics Engineering, but it's almost equivalent to CS).
For a while we've been doing a experiment of teaching Python in the first semester and C in the second semester. Even though learning C is still tough, I think this order works quite well. In the first semester the students get to learn the basics of programming, without having to learn the quirks of memory managing and the like, while in the second semester they can focus more on that, having a solid base of programming knowledge. Java/C# are taught after that, in the third semester, when focusing on OOP, design patterns and the like.
I think that this makes an overall better experience for the students that approach programming for the first time. With students that have learned programming at their high-schools we usually spend the whole semester getting them to forget whatever stupidity they were taught.
I don't know which website you are referring to, but at http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer there's a link that says "Download" that allows you to download it. It also allows downloading a pre-compiled Windows version, for the Windows people.
I don't use arch linux, but in Debian and Ubuntu it's available as a package that you can install through whatever package manager you use. It's called (unsurprisingly) gimp-resynthesizer. I expect other distros to have similar packages.
The barrier of entry is just as high as the distro you are using.
If you are trying to profit from the patent system, then you are a con artist. Productive ways of profit mean selling a design for a product for the value of the design, and for the product that it might become.
Selling it so that someone else can sue whoever actually goes about inventing it, means selling lawsuits, not actual products.
Setting a higher price for the ebook might make sense when the ebook was cheaper than the paper edition. If the ebook is more expensive than the paper edition, raising the price is only being greedy.
I understand that producing a book, either digital or physical, costs money. But printing it definitely costs more than copying it, and thus it makes absolutely no sense to charge more for the digital edition.
I know that there are books in both situations (cheaper ebook or cheaper paper book), I guess that most people here are complaining about the case where the paper edition costs less than the digital one.
The only possible explanation I find to charging extra for the digital form is that after buying it, people can copy it without paying. However, that is illegal in most cases and thus charging extra is only a way of pushing people to do something illegal, cause they paid for it anyway.
> Given the choice between Windows for around £50, or OS/2 for around £500, > people went with Windows. OS/2 was better, but it wasn't ten times better.
Now, you don't give any dates or other relevant info. I think you are probably misremembering the facts.
In 1995, when a new computer was around U$S 1000 in Argentina, I was able to buy OS/2 3.0 for U$S 50. Windows 95 was not yet in the market, so this new piece of software was not comparable to any other.
Indeed it does. There was a virus called "HapTime" or something, that infected a lot of machines in a company I work for.
It used simple VBScript, only that it was not an attach as with the "I love you" and all his children, it pasted itself in the content of the messages the person sent (if sent in HTML).
The trick was that the mail was for real, and there was no attach. So, if you wanted to know what the person had to say to you, you would get infected.
Uhm, well, I did have a look. Thanks for the link. But it seems, unfortunately, that they only deliver their stamps to Europe and the USA.
Anyway, as I was commenting elsewhere, even if I could buy the stamps and then sent them with the floppy to the UK, I'd never expect them to come back. My mailing company is anything but reliable.
I'm used to being left out. All the Third World is. And yet, it still makes me sad. It's worse when it's the terms of the GPL that are leaving me out.
It's not just the floppy thing that bothers me, it's the stamps!
I live in Argentina, I have plenty of floppies, but I have no British stamps to send them. And even if they mention the coupons for International post, I have none of those in my post offices.
So, I have no access to the code... Unless I travel to the UK to get those stamps, which is, of course, something I can't afford.
1> Email: Evolution is great. It works just like outlook, it looks even nicer, and you have no virii at all.
2> Pilot: I use JPilot. I can syncronize perfectly, and I can rely on the information that is stored there much more than if it was stored in Windows.
5> Office Apps: It depends on your needs, but I'm sure they can be mostly replaced by OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric. And if you happen to publish important documents, where layout is an issue, Lyx and TeX are just the best.
6> "Multimedia", not much of it goes away, actually, you have XMMS and FreeAmp, both very decent replacements for WinAmp. And DivX thingy, aviplayer and Xine both surpass most of the DivX applications for Windows. I don't know about ripping, since I don't do it, but I know there are apps for doing it.
7> You can use a Jabber client, that suports all the protocols at once. Or you can use Gaim, or you can use "amsn" and "licq", and many more. The great thing here is that you can look for just the client you are looking for.
Don't know about the other points. Really, I think you should give Linux graphical apps a try, nobody is saying you have to use pine or mutt:)
Isn't that a bit late? By then, change may be difficult or impossible once they are indoctrinated into the "Windows way".
Impossible? Do you think? I don't know you, but I switched from Windows to GNU/Linux at the age of 20. And it wasn't impossible at all. I had a dual boot for about a year, then dropped Windows completely.
I think there's no limit age to switch from Windows to GNU/Linux. It's great if you can get your children to use GNU/Linux, and keep a dual boot so that they don't feel imprisoned. But each parent can do it at when they think it's best.
For years I had a 486 DX 50, with Windows 3.1 installed on it that just didn't crash. Everyone around me said how bad Windows was, but I couldn't believe it, since my version worked just so fine.
Afterwards, when I switched to Pentium, Windows became less stable, crashed, blue-screened, etc. I realized that it's not only the software but it's also the hardware where it's running that might make it be more stable.
Nowadays, I have a P4 at work, and it used to run W2K with no crashes (runs GNU/Linux now), but I've seen W2K working not so nicely in computers with less memory or older hardware.
It's true that the newer versions are more stable, but it also requieres you to have newer hardware and lots of memory. And when money is an issue, you probably want an OS that can run with the present hardware for more than just a year.
When the government considers switching from propietary software to open source software, the money is not the only issue.
For instance, the information the government has about the people has to be well protected and persistent. I would say that having it in any MS Office format (.doc,.xls, Access db) is neither secure nor persistent. And as a citizen I demand that my government takes care of this.
Also, it's important that everyone can have access to the code, to ensure that no Big Company is going to access that data and manipulate it for their convenience.
When it comes to companies rather than the government, I'd agree it's a matter of money. But when the civil rights are being questioned, then more important issues are the priority.
Slashdot Mirror
Using a standard keyboard is ONLY important if the people involved are from different keyboard-layout regions. And what is important is that you agree on a standard, not that the standard be English.
About what you mention of the brackets, you should take a look at the Latin-American Spanish keyboard that has {} without modifiers. I find this pretty convenient to code in {} using languages. Another possibility is to switch to Python, so that you only need to know where the : is.
The difference is the timeframe where this has happened.
It is now generally agreed that what went on in the American continent was not right. The massacre of the indigenous inhabitants is not something that many people are proud of today, and each country has their own processes of restoration of SOME of the land to the original peoples.
That such an usurpation would be started in the 20th century by the same people that apologise for their actions in the Americas, with conditions similar to the ones that were so hated about Apartheid in South Africa is something that does not cease to shock me.
So, yes, it's not the first and probably won't be the last unfair usurpation of land, however, the conditions under which it has happened make it specially nasty.
The statement above makes me worried because it suggests that the Open Source Community could not find their way around these patents for two decades! Think about it....20 years!
That is not what the article says. What it says is that the patent was filed 20 years ago, and that the freetype library included the code that infringed on that patent "for some time".
What would "find a way around these patents" be? With software patents, that patent a "method" of doing something, it's quite hard to be able to find a way around them. Say Microsoft decided to enforce their double-click patent, how would you find a way around it? Basically, no other software would be able to use the double click input method without paying Microsoft for a patent license.
The EFF fights against many of the enforced software patents, trying to prove that there was prior art and that the patent was actually invalid when it was granted. If the patent was actually valid, there's not much you could do.
That's how it is, that's why we hate software patents.
And since it's a suggestion mailbox and not bug tracked there's no proof of it?
I still find it very hard to believe.
Do you have pointers to where your dad submitted these suggestions? Links to bugs, mailing list mails, etc?
It's common for suggestions to rot in the bug tracking system when nobody is interested in implementing them. It's NOT common however, to tell someone that makes a good suggestion to fuck off, so I'm rather not inclined to believe it without proof.
Also, Free Software developers tend to react badly when stuff is demanded from them, instead of just suggested. It could be as subtle a difference as the difference between "I think it would be great if this could be changed" and "This must be changed".
I work as an Assistant Teacher in my local CS University in Argentina (actually it's Informatics Engineering, but it's almost equivalent to CS).
For a while we've been doing a experiment of teaching Python in the first semester and C in the second semester. Even though learning C is still tough, I think this order works quite well. In the first semester the students get to learn the basics of programming, without having to learn the quirks of memory managing and the like, while in the second semester they can focus more on that, having a solid base of programming knowledge. Java/C# are taught after that, in the third semester, when focusing on OOP, design patterns and the like.
I think that this makes an overall better experience for the students that approach programming for the first time. With students that have learned programming at their high-schools we usually spend the whole semester getting them to forget whatever stupidity they were taught.
I don't know which website you are referring to, but at http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer there's a link that says "Download" that allows you to download it. It also allows downloading a pre-compiled Windows version, for the Windows people.
I don't use arch linux, but in Debian and Ubuntu it's available as a package that you can install through whatever package manager you use. It's called (unsurprisingly) gimp-resynthesizer. I expect other distros to have similar packages.
The barrier of entry is just as high as the distro you are using.
If you are trying to profit from the patent system, then you are a con artist. Productive ways of profit mean selling a design for a product for the value of the design, and for the product that it might become.
Selling it so that someone else can sue whoever actually goes about inventing it, means selling lawsuits, not actual products.
Setting a higher price for the ebook might make sense when the ebook was cheaper than the paper edition. If the ebook is more expensive than the paper edition, raising the price is only being greedy.
I understand that producing a book, either digital or physical, costs money. But printing it definitely costs more than copying it, and thus it makes absolutely no sense to charge more for the digital edition.
I know that there are books in both situations (cheaper ebook or cheaper paper book), I guess that most people here are complaining about the case where the paper edition costs less than the digital one.
The only possible explanation I find to charging extra for the digital form is that after buying it, people can copy it without paying. However, that is illegal in most cases and thus charging extra is only a way of pushing people to do something illegal, cause they paid for it anyway.
> Given the choice between Windows for around £50, or OS/2 for around £500,
> people went with Windows. OS/2 was better, but it wasn't ten times better.
Now, you don't give any dates or other relevant info. I think you are probably misremembering the facts.
In 1995, when a new computer was around U$S 1000 in Argentina, I was able to buy OS/2 3.0 for U$S 50. Windows 95 was not yet in the market, so this new piece of software was not comparable to any other.
So, how come you are not distributing it?
Come on! It sounds really nice!
Indeed it does. There was a virus called "HapTime" or something, that infected a lot of machines in a company I work for.
It used simple VBScript, only that it was not an attach as with the "I love you" and all his children, it pasted itself in the content of the messages the person sent (if sent in HTML).
The trick was that the mail was for real, and there was no attach. So, if you wanted to know what the person had to say to you, you would get infected.
I thank God I use Evolution.
Uhm, well, I did have a look. Thanks for the link. But it seems, unfortunately, that they only deliver their stamps to Europe and the USA.
Anyway, as I was commenting elsewhere, even if I could buy the stamps and then sent them with the floppy to the UK, I'd never expect them to come back. My mailing company is anything but reliable.
I'm used to being left out. All the Third World is. And yet, it still makes me sad. It's worse when it's the terms of the GPL that are leaving me out.
It's not just the floppy thing that bothers me, it's the stamps!
I live in Argentina, I have plenty of floppies, but I have no British stamps to send them. And even if they mention the coupons for International post, I have none of those in my post offices.
So, I have no access to the code... Unless I travel to the UK to get those stamps, which is, of course, something I can't afford.
My site is hosted in Argentina.
I pay U$S 5 per month, and I get 700 mb, PHP, MySQL, unlimited pop mail, and lots of stuff that I never used (like a chatroom or the statistics).
God! How did you do that?!
I'm impressed.
--
Margarita.
And I though I was having a seriuos case of Deja Vu. First the Phoenix naming story now this one.
I fear my co-workers may start duplicating as well soon.
--
Margarita.
1> Email: Evolution is great. It works just like outlook, it looks even nicer, and you have no virii at all.
:)
2> Pilot: I use JPilot. I can syncronize perfectly, and I can rely on the information that is stored there much more than if it was stored in Windows.
5> Office Apps: It depends on your needs, but I'm sure they can be mostly replaced by OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric. And if you happen to publish important documents, where layout is an issue, Lyx and TeX are just the best.
6> "Multimedia", not much of it goes away, actually, you have XMMS and FreeAmp, both very decent replacements for WinAmp. And DivX thingy, aviplayer and Xine both surpass most of the DivX applications for Windows. I don't know about ripping, since I don't do it, but I know there are apps for doing it.
7> You can use a Jabber client, that suports all the protocols at once. Or you can use Gaim, or you can use "amsn" and "licq", and many more. The great thing here is that you can look for just the client you are looking for.
Don't know about the other points. Really, I think you should give Linux graphical apps a try, nobody is saying you have to use pine or mutt
All the children in my family enjoy using those Flash sites, but since Mozilla is set up properly, they don't even realize they are using GNU/Linux.
I don't think Flash sites are in issue nowadays, you can allow your children to play as much as they want.
Really, I haven't encountered a single version problem up to now.
Isn't that a bit late? By then, change may be difficult or impossible once they are indoctrinated into the "Windows way".
Impossible? Do you think? I don't know you, but I switched from Windows to GNU/Linux at the age of 20. And it wasn't impossible at all. I had a dual boot for about a year, then dropped Windows completely.
I think there's no limit age to switch from Windows to GNU/Linux. It's great if you can get your children to use GNU/Linux, and keep a dual boot so that they don't feel imprisoned. But each parent can do it at when they think it's best.
For years I had a 486 DX 50, with Windows 3.1 installed on it that just didn't crash. Everyone around me said how bad Windows was, but I couldn't believe it, since my version worked just so fine.
Afterwards, when I switched to Pentium, Windows became less stable, crashed, blue-screened, etc. I realized that it's not only the software but it's also the hardware where it's running that might make it be more stable.
Nowadays, I have a P4 at work, and it used to run W2K with no crashes (runs GNU/Linux now), but I've seen W2K working not so nicely in computers with less memory or older hardware.
It's true that the newer versions are more stable, but it also requieres you to have newer hardware and lots of memory. And when money is an issue, you probably want an OS that can run with the present hardware for more than just a year.
When the government considers switching from propietary software to open source software, the money is not the only issue.
.xls, Access db) is neither secure nor persistent. And as a citizen I demand that my government takes care of this.
For instance, the information the government has about the people has to be well protected and persistent. I would say that having it in any MS Office format (.doc,
Also, it's important that everyone can have access to the code, to ensure that no Big Company is going to access that data and manipulate it for their convenience.
When it comes to companies rather than the government, I'd agree it's a matter of money. But when the civil rights are being questioned, then more important issues are the priority.