I work for a small government agency in Canada. We are almost 100% Open Source. We do give donations to open source projects to have them implement features we would like.
You could use Linux and give up your games, and 90% of your other apps... ... gaining access to a multitude of equivalent or better apps available on *nix systems. I suggest you checkout a gentoo portage tree sometime.
we've been through these discussions over and over again. linux is NOT a suitable desktop operating system for the majority of users. most users do NOT want to spend a whole lot of time reading documentation on how to setup/configure their system, and most find it fustrating.
Most users also do not know how to setup/configure things for Windows. Where I work, everyone uses Linux. As usual, the administrators setup the system for the users. The users have no more problems using Linux than they have using windows. The administrators benefit by not having to do so much work fighting fires.
The major Linux distributions that I've tried don't include a media player for fear they might get sued.
The ones that I have tried include several media players including xmms, Xine and mplayer.
don't include a NTFS driver for fear they might get sued...
Umm, no. There is NTFS support in the kernel, but write mode is not recommended because it is not stable and can cause data loss.
Mind you, I am the top 1% of users. If you can't convert me you are going to have a very difficult time converting others.
First off, being in the top 1% of users is nothing to brag about. Second, it is eaier to convert non-technical users because they don't care or worry about they technical details either.
And it's dumbasses like you who are going to get Bush re-elected,...
In a democracy, you should be able to vote for whomever you want. The fact that he is not voting for Bush means that he IS NOT responsible for bush getting re-elected.
If anything, blame the people who don;t show up to vote.
It is mentalities like this that keep getting the lesser of two evils voted in.
I can't believe that post has a score of +3. I'd expect deeper thought from a +3.
most people don't understand the biology of transgenic food, and ignorance breeds fear and suspicion.
Agreed. People are focusing on the wrong suspect. Really they should be focussing on the big biotech firms, not some artist. That's the irony here. He was trying to point out the issues with biotechnology, but instead, people thought he was the bad guy. People seem to trust large corporations too much.
Secondly, a basic government is needed to protect property rights.
I think most people would agree with that. The problem is when protect is granted too excessively or when obvious methods get patented.
Your assumption is that everybody wants to code for free, which is utter bullshit. How do you propose protecting the rights of people who develop software and want to sell it?
You can to develop software and distribute it with a restricted license if you wish. The fact that others develop software for free doesn't change that. Keep in mind that even if others weren't developing free software that competes with yours, a monopoly might be developing software that competes with yours, making it hard to make money off your software.
The government is there to protect basic rights that make capitalism possible.
Yes, but they do not protect you against competition (Monopolies and IP rights aside). If somebody can produce a product for cheaper than you can, then you are SOL. That's how the market works.
Those people who DO create and want to be rewarded for it will have nothing to do with this country any more.
You seem to think that OSS is about destroying the the entire market place. It is not. In fact, having solid infrastructure that is open to those who whish to enhance it strengthens the economy.
Free software makes no logical sense, because people do it out of altruism and stupidity.
To many people it is a hobby, and if you can share the fruits of your hobby at almost no cost with the rest of the world, that's great. Software is not limited by scarcity, so the old economic model does not apply to it.
To some people, OSS is a reaction to companies trying to unfairly apply the old economic model to software.
No, it wasn't RCS, it was nothing. He just used diff and patch manually.
Well in that case, using ANY tool would have increased his productivity. So the increase in productivity is not neccessarily because Bitkeeper is better than CVS or RCS.
If it is true that bitkeeper makes him ten times more productive, then he must have spent more 90% of his time in the tool he used previously (was it RCS?).
We have beneficial E. coli bacteria living in our stomachs (we are born this way!),
To further that point, we have bacteria in out digestive tracts that help us break down our food. In fact we need those bacteria to maintain proper health.
This one of those rare situations where I see proprietary software in a good light. Adobe has been investing in research into graphics and color for decades. These are not trivial subjects. There is alot to know about how to get color to look right on paper or on a monitor. Researchers made it their livelyhood to understand all there is to know about images are percieved and how to get the best results.
Hats off to them. I would glady give them some money to use their excelent software. Anyone who has taken a University level Computer Science Graphics course has got to appriciate what they do.
That all being said, I am not big into photo editting or graphic design, so I use gimp because thats what there is available on my BSD box. It's alright. But it's no photoshop. I've tried some of other free image/graphic editors that were in my ports directory. They weren't very good at all.
If any application allows for scripting and furthermore, there is a lot of resource/information sharing among programs, it opens the door for application scripts to obtain information which they should not have. Lots of sharing means lots of security needed to make sure the access should be allowed, and lots of opportunity for mistakes.
Agreed, we should always be carefull in design to make sure that a system is secure. I was not proposing a full fledged design, but rather an idea. These details would obviously have to be worked out.
the main problem with programs sharing information & resources is that it makes it trivial to write malicious scripts.
Sharing information is not the same as allowing arbitrary execution. Nowhere did I mention the ability to execute programs from remote locations.
Example: The internet has wealth of data that is publicly available. That alone does not make it trivial to write malicious scripts. Scripting and Active X in outlook and IE were what made malicious script writing trivial.
Also, to be clear, I don't consider reverse engineering to be "a right" as the poster does. Just because something is not illegal doesn't make it a right. Free speech is a right. Free press is a right. Reverse engineering (within certain constraints) is simply legal.
Using your brain to figure out how something works should not be subject to the penalty of law.
Absolutely 100% agreed with parent. I was thinking about this earlier today. Imagine if there was standard API that desktop applications implementated that allowed other applications to get data from them.
Example: Gnome could ask evolution for it's contact information. In fact, Gnome could ask for any piece of information, group of information, or all of evolutions information. The information would be returned in an XML format. Gnome could also ask for meta data from evolution.
If desktop applicatons started implementing this standard, It would be very easy to write interoperable applications. In fact, it would be very easy to implement entire new applications based on the information existing applications have.
The lines between applications would become blurred, and we would have a very rich environment. In fact, an idea such as this just might be the killer concept the blows the door wide open for Unix/Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
TCP/IP sucks for satellite links. The need for ACK packets means that each packet takes 550 milliseconds to arrive.
In this situation, increase the window size, and TCP/IP will be alright.
I work for a small government agency in Canada. We are almost 100% Open Source. We do give donations to open source projects to have them implement features we would like.
If it weren't for open source, I would be unemployed right now.
You could use Linux and give up your games, and 90% of your other apps... ... gaining access to a multitude of equivalent or better apps available on *nix systems. I suggest you checkout a gentoo portage tree sometime.
What would he do if I took his start menu away?
You can use icewm for those people.
we've been through these discussions over and over again. linux is NOT a suitable desktop operating system for the majority of users. most users do NOT want to spend a whole lot of time reading documentation on how to setup/configure their system, and most find it fustrating.
Most users also do not know how to setup/configure things for Windows. Where I work, everyone uses Linux. As usual, the administrators setup the system for the users. The users have no more problems using Linux than they have using windows. The administrators benefit by not having to do so much work fighting fires.
me@here.com
The major Linux distributions that I've tried don't include a media player for fear they might get sued.
The ones that I have tried include several media players including xmms, Xine and mplayer.
don't include a NTFS driver for fear they might get sued...
Umm, no. There is NTFS support in the kernel, but write mode is not recommended because it is not stable and can cause data loss.
Mind you, I am the top 1% of users. If you can't convert me you are going to have a very difficult time converting others.
First off, being in the top 1% of users is nothing to brag about. Second, it is eaier to convert non-technical users because they don't care or worry about they technical details either.
And it's dumbasses like you who are going to get Bush re-elected, ...
In a democracy, you should be able to vote for whomever you want. The fact that he is not voting for Bush means that he IS NOT responsible for bush getting re-elected.
If anything, blame the people who don;t show up to vote.
It is mentalities like this that keep getting the lesser of two evils voted in.
I can't believe that post has a score of +3. I'd expect deeper thought from a +3.
most people don't understand the biology of transgenic food, and ignorance breeds fear and suspicion.
Agreed. People are focusing on the wrong suspect. Really they should be focussing on the big biotech firms, not some artist. That's the irony here. He was trying to point out the issues with biotechnology, but instead, people thought he was the bad guy. People seem to trust large corporations too much.
And how long before someone writes a program that spits out nonsense essays that generate high grades?
Leaving your keys in your ignition and the doors unlocked is a good way to get away with insurance fraud.....
Secondly, a basic government is needed to protect property rights.
I think most people would agree with that. The problem is when protect is granted too excessively or when obvious methods get patented.
Your assumption is that everybody wants to code for free, which is utter bullshit. How do you propose protecting the rights of people who develop software and want to sell it?
You can to develop software and distribute it with a restricted license if you wish. The fact that others develop software for free doesn't change that. Keep in mind that even if others weren't developing free software that competes with yours, a monopoly might be developing software that competes with yours, making it hard to make money off your software.
The government is there to protect basic rights that make capitalism possible.
Yes, but they do not protect you against competition (Monopolies and IP rights aside). If somebody can produce a product for cheaper than you can, then you are SOL. That's how the market works.
Those people who DO create and want to be rewarded for it will have nothing to do with this country any more.
You seem to think that OSS is about destroying the the entire market place. It is not. In fact, having solid infrastructure that is open to those who whish to enhance it strengthens the economy.
Free software makes no logical sense, because people do it out of altruism and stupidity.
To many people it is a hobby, and if you can share the fruits of your hobby at almost no cost with the rest of the world, that's great. Software is not limited by scarcity, so the old economic model does not apply to it.
To some people, OSS is a reaction to companies trying to unfairly apply the old economic model to software.
No, it wasn't RCS, it was nothing. He just used diff and patch manually.
Well in that case, using ANY tool would have increased his productivity. So the increase in productivity is not neccessarily because Bitkeeper is better than CVS or RCS.
If it is true that bitkeeper makes him ten times more productive, then he must have spent more 90% of his time in the tool he used previously (was it RCS?).
nerd politics.
To minimize nerd politics, go with BSD. In general there isn't as much zealotry going on in BSD movement.
Plus it's a solid operating system that provides you with over 10,000 ports that just work. 'make install clean' and *BANG* your done.
We have beneficial E. coli bacteria living in our stomachs (we are born this way!),
To further that point, we have bacteria in out digestive tracts that help us break down our food. In fact we need those bacteria to maintain proper health.
Or you can cron wget to run every hour.
This one of those rare situations where I see proprietary software in a good light. Adobe has been investing in research into graphics and color for decades. These are not trivial subjects. There is alot to know about how to get color to look right on paper or on a monitor. Researchers made it their livelyhood to understand all there is to know about images are percieved and how to get the best results.
Hats off to them. I would glady give them some money to use their excelent software. Anyone who has taken a University level Computer Science Graphics course has got to appriciate what they do.
That all being said, I am not big into photo editting or graphic design, so I use gimp because thats what there is available on my BSD box. It's alright. But it's no photoshop. I've tried some of other free image/graphic editors that were in my ports directory. They weren't very good at all.
Good, I can keep smoking forever.
If any application allows for scripting and furthermore, there is a lot of resource/information sharing among programs, it opens the door for application scripts to obtain information which they should not have. Lots of sharing means lots of security needed to make sure the access should be allowed, and lots of opportunity for mistakes.
Agreed, we should always be carefull in design to make sure that a system is secure. I was not proposing a full fledged design, but rather an idea. These details would obviously have to be worked out.
You're right - that would be a good idea.
Well I'll be damned. I am not surprised that someone else has thought of this. And yes, it is a good idea.
I was refering to something more abstract though, like a standard way of sharing information that all programs would understand.
Hopefully this gets the ball rolling to inovation on the Gnome desktop.
the main problem with programs sharing information & resources is that it makes it trivial to write malicious scripts.
Sharing information is not the same as allowing arbitrary execution. Nowhere did I mention the ability to execute programs from remote locations.
Example:
The internet has wealth of data that is publicly available. That alone does not make it trivial to write malicious scripts. Scripting and Active X in outlook and IE were what made malicious script writing trivial.
Also, to be clear, I don't consider reverse engineering to be "a right" as the poster does. Just because something is not illegal doesn't make it a right. Free speech is a right. Free press is a right. Reverse engineering (within certain constraints) is simply legal.
Using your brain to figure out how something works should not be subject to the penalty of law.
Absolutely 100% agreed with parent. I was thinking about this earlier today. Imagine if there was standard API that desktop applications implementated that allowed other applications to get data from them.
Example: Gnome could ask evolution for it's contact information. In fact, Gnome could ask for any piece of information, group of information, or all of evolutions information. The information would be returned in an XML format. Gnome could also ask for meta data from evolution.
If desktop applicatons started implementing this standard, It would be very easy to write interoperable applications. In fact, it would be very easy to implement entire new applications based on the information existing applications have.
The lines between applications would become blurred, and we would have a very rich environment. In fact, an idea such as this just might be the killer concept the blows the door wide open for Unix/Linux.