Many times they seem very surprised when a local merchant does not want to accept dollars, and does not speak American English.
My saddest moment in this respect was watching a young waiter at a Cairo restaurant being loundly and, um, colorfully berated (in English, of course) by an American for not being able to bring him A-1 steak sauce. It was 4 July, and they had festooned the place with red-white-and-blue streamers and American flags, and attempted a U.S.-style barbecue, to make the expats feel welcome.
No, actually it was when a Jeep full of drunken Americans pulled into an oasis in the Sahara (eight hour drive to get there, and they'd been drinking the whole way), and proceeded to try to buy people's patio furniture from them. In English. With U.S. dollars. (If you're an American, imagine a drunken Arab stumbling into your house and waving around wads of Saudi rials, urgently demanding something in Arabic.) Unfortunately for me, I not only came from the same country, I knew the guys.
Well, thank God! We need more conservatives. I've had enough of these whiney, ``I have rights'' republicans. I mean, come on! Elections indeed. Typical Freemason nonsense. Give me a good, Catholic king, and for God's sake get the education system out of the hands of those state employees. I hear some of them aren't even baptised.
Linux is more free market than Microsoft is, because MS relies on an artificial construct called "intellectual property" that Linux doesn't.
I'm not sure I agree with the statement that Linux doesn't rely on IP law... Without copyright law, the GPL is meaningless.
Imagine that there's no such thing as copyright. Now, Linus gives me a kernel image, as well as a source tarball. There's nothing to stop me from giving copies of either to all my friends; the same would be true of any Windows 2000 CDs I came across. However, since I am an evil but very talented [1] bastard, I completely rewrite the scheduler to improve performance in every situation. I keep the source code locked in a safe guarded by my flying monkeys, and only distribute binaries, which are further hacked so that each requires a unique dongle, and for each of which I charge ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
(This is a bit OT, but national identity is a subject of professional interest for me...)
I find this statement fascinating because it implies that you do not identify as Indian, although both your parents do. Yet you date ``in-group'' or endogamously. How do you identify yourself? As a hyphenate or as a ``simple'' Canadian/USian/Australian/whatever? Or does a working geek have no nation?;)
So I guess unfortunately, it seems as if Mr. Gates' Bribe err 'heartfelt visit' may have worked after all."
His visit may have been unnecessary.
I'm curious to hear from Indian IT folks on this, but I have some ideas about Free Software and India, based on my experience with IT in the Middle East.
First, in an economy where there is no real fear of legal action for illegal copying, and where a Microsoft licence costs a month's wages or more, you can expect illegally copied MS products to be everywhere. In such an environment, there is little incentive to use free (as in beer) products, because all products cost nothing to procure.
Second, in an economy where corruption is endemic down to the lowest clerical levels, decisions are often made on a, um, non-technical basis. (Bofors, anyone?) Free software may be at a disadvantage here, because there is not always a for-profit entity to ``encourage'' a product's adoption. I can't really see the Apache team buying anyone a villa.
Given both of these, I would not expect Free software to be a major player in Indian IT. Indeed, in contrast with (for example) East and Central Europe, Latin America, or East Asia, South Asia doesn't seem to be making any major contributions to Free software, despite having large numbers of trained programmers.
Yes but the beauty of the open source nature of the browser is that you could write the code do that yourself, and have it added to the browser!
Or you could just use Galeon, which is Free and already has a resume-session-after-crash feature. I find it mostly useful when I kill the browser by CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACEing X or something, as Galeon very rarely crashes...
Therefore, I claim that the only people who claim that the GPL is necessary (rather than the BSD license) are those who (a) feel that open source software is inferior to closed source software, (b) feel that open source is so marginally better than closed source software that a simple influx of marketing will forever bar open source software from the market, or (c) are irrational.
The main problem with your argument here, if I may be so bold, is that you're ignoring the workings of the market. Of course, the vast majority of the population has a fundamentally flawed understanding of the market, because they uncritically believed what they heard in high school econ classes, viz. that consumers are rational actors. People are not rational actors, and the real market is not even slightly transparent, but is characterized by serious assymetries of information. Therefore, a superior product can very often lose to an inferior one, because of many irrational factors -- which could be marketing (we prefer what we're told to prefer), regionalism (we prefer a locally-made product), aesthetics (we prefer a green computer), or whatever.
In short, GPL ensures that free software will remain free, even if the imperfectly functioning market chooses inferior and more costly proprietary software.
So, I see 1 Nixon, 1 Ford, 3 Reagans, 2 Bushes, and 2 Clintons.
Which would be just more than three quarters appointed by right-wing presidents. A simple majority, one might note, were appointed when GHWB was either president or vice-president. One more was appointed by the man who made GHWB CIA director. Hmm.
in liquidation, the company is protected 'temporarily' from bankrupt for some time in order to find cash to keep its head above the water.
I know bugger-all about French corporate law, but as the terms are used in the Anglo world, it's rather the opposite. Bankruptcy is a protected status that can help a firm avoid liquidation. If you liquidate, the company doesn't exist any more.
We have the GNOME control panel, KDE control panel, Red Hat utilites, Mandrake utilities, etc... (include almost every major distribution out there) for everything! Everything is different and everything has a slightly different interface for the same tasks.
Just use Debian, it's the universal OS!;)
Seriously, though, the commercial distros have to have something that distinguishes their offering from the rest if they're going to get noticed. I don't care for that, myself, but I'm not sure you can convince them to give up what it is that they've cooked up to make themselves stand out.
Is there a really user-friendly CDR program for Linux?
You mean to say mkisofs + cdrecord isn't user-friendly?!
Truth be told, I've found I'm more comfortable with them than GUI stuff, but you might want to check out gcombust...
Come to think of it, the best thing for you to do might be to whip up a bash script for them, which would take the contents of $HOME/burn or whatever and make a CD (using the CLI tools). Give it an icon and they can use their GUI file-manager of choice to move the files there, then double-click your icon and presto!
If he prevents the prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq and prevents the U.S. from planting damning evidence in the event that there are no chemical weapons, then I'm glad he went in.
That's an interesting perspective, but I fail to see how we'd know, at least for another fifty years... It's not like BBC will run a story: ``Paras Prevent Yanks Planting Evidence.''
That being said, he's (for this moment anyways) a weenie.
Current experimental tidal power plants are extremely expensive, environmentally disastrous (they kill all the species that feed/lay eggs on the shoreline), and produce pathetically small amounts of energy.
I haven't really kept up on tidal power, but I recall an old Traveller module set on a Turkish-colonized water world in the Solomani Rim which had ocean arcologies powered by tidal generators in the arcologies' bases. It always struck me as feasible in principle.
Now, assuming that power in the middle of the ocean is actually useful to you (e.g., because you've got an arcology right there or whatever) wouldn't a tidal generator far from shore avoid the ecological problems?
On a serious note, if beer was cheaper than water, I would probably drink more beer, less water. And be drunk all the time.[...]
I don't think there's anywhere that beer is cheaper than tap water.. However, if the only source of safe drinking water is horribly overpriced little bottles of mineral water, it is conceivable that beer could be cheaper. Add the possiblility that in a given market, the local workers may drink not-quite-safe tap water, but also lots of beer, so that only tourists drink the bottled water, and it's a perfectly understandable phenomenon.
Slashdot Mirror
scripsit mindstrm:
My saddest moment in this respect was watching a young waiter at a Cairo restaurant being loundly and, um, colorfully berated (in English, of course) by an American for not being able to bring him A-1 steak sauce. It was 4 July, and they had festooned the place with red-white-and-blue streamers and American flags, and attempted a U.S.-style barbecue, to make the expats feel welcome.
No, actually it was when a Jeep full of drunken Americans pulled into an oasis in the Sahara (eight hour drive to get there, and they'd been drinking the whole way), and proceeded to try to buy people's patio furniture from them. In English. With U.S. dollars. (If you're an American, imagine a drunken Arab stumbling into your house and waving around wads of Saudi rials, urgently demanding something in Arabic.) Unfortunately for me, I not only came from the same country, I knew the guys.
scripsit p51d007:
Well, thank God! We need more conservatives. I've had enough of these whiney, ``I have rights'' republicans. I mean, come on! Elections indeed. Typical Freemason nonsense. Give me a good, Catholic king, and for God's sake get the education system out of the hands of those state employees. I hear some of them aren't even baptised.
scripsit argoff:
I'm not sure I agree with the statement that Linux doesn't rely on IP law... Without copyright law, the GPL is meaningless.
Imagine that there's no such thing as copyright. Now, Linus gives me a kernel image, as well as a source tarball. There's nothing to stop me from giving copies of either to all my friends; the same would be true of any Windows 2000 CDs I came across. However, since I am an evil but very talented [1] bastard, I completely rewrite the scheduler to improve performance in every situation. I keep the source code locked in a safe guarded by my flying monkeys, and only distribute binaries, which are further hacked so that each requires a unique dongle, and for each of which I charge ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
Linux relies on my not being able to do that.
[1] Remember, this is just a thought exercise.
scripsit Trejus:
(This is a bit OT, but national identity is a subject of professional interest for me...)
I find this statement fascinating because it implies that you do not identify as Indian, although both your parents do. Yet you date ``in-group'' or endogamously. How do you identify yourself? As a hyphenate or as a ``simple'' Canadian/USian/Australian/whatever? Or does a working geek have no nation? ;)
His visit may have been unnecessary.
I'm curious to hear from Indian IT folks on this, but I have some ideas about Free Software and India, based on my experience with IT in the Middle East.
First, in an economy where there is no real fear of legal action for illegal copying, and where a Microsoft licence costs a month's wages or more, you can expect illegally copied MS products to be everywhere. In such an environment, there is little incentive to use free (as in beer) products, because all products cost nothing to procure.
Second, in an economy where corruption is endemic down to the lowest clerical levels, decisions are often made on a, um, non-technical basis. (Bofors, anyone?) Free software may be at a disadvantage here, because there is not always a for-profit entity to ``encourage'' a product's adoption. I can't really see the Apache team buying anyone a villa.
Given both of these, I would not expect Free software to be a major player in Indian IT. Indeed, in contrast with (for example) East and Central Europe, Latin America, or East Asia, South Asia doesn't seem to be making any major contributions to Free software, despite having large numbers of trained programmers.
Am I on the right track here?
scripsit commodoresloat:
There's a reason the coward posted anonymously...
scripsit Alizarin Erythrosin:
Or you could just use Galeon, which is Free and already has a resume-session-after-crash feature. I find it mostly useful when I kill the browser by CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACEing X or something, as Galeon very rarely crashes...
scripsit gspira:
:wq
scripsit mgblst:
No kidding... I'd hate to lose my geek credentials over one (three now?!) of the worst movies ever made.
Hang on... I've always preferred `geek' to `nerd' -- maybe that's the difference.
OK, stand tall, Geeks! We don't need Austin Powers; that's for Nerds!
scripsit mr. methane:
Comprimar ergo sum?
scripsit craesh:
Huh? Right-wing dictatorship in Spain? Impossible. Could never happen. You must be thinking of San Marino.
scripsit 0x0d0a:
The main problem with your argument here, if I may be so bold, is that you're ignoring the workings of the market. Of course, the vast majority of the population has a fundamentally flawed understanding of the market, because they uncritically believed what they heard in high school econ classes, viz. that consumers are rational actors. People are not rational actors, and the real market is not even slightly transparent, but is characterized by serious assymetries of information. Therefore, a superior product can very often lose to an inferior one, because of many irrational factors -- which could be marketing (we prefer what we're told to prefer), regionalism (we prefer a locally-made product), aesthetics (we prefer a green computer), or whatever.
In short, GPL ensures that free software will remain free, even if the imperfectly functioning market chooses inferior and more costly proprietary software.
scripsit sirshannon:
Erm, it's infinitely inflated over the zero-dollar cost of keeping your old OS, were that possible...
scripsit override11:
Why?
Not trolling, it's an honest question...
scripsit mjpaci:
Which would be just more than three quarters appointed by right-wing presidents. A simple majority, one might note, were appointed when GHWB was either president or vice-president. One more was appointed by the man who made GHWB CIA director. Hmm.
scripsit an AC:
(1) I believe it was a 7.62mm, and (2) the Republic of Texas
scripsit unitron:
Only for nobles...
scripsit borgdows:
I know bugger-all about French corporate law, but as the terms are used in the Anglo world, it's rather the opposite. Bankruptcy is a protected status that can help a firm avoid liquidation. If you liquidate, the company doesn't exist any more.
scripsit tyrann98:
Just use Debian, it's the universal OS! ;)
Seriously, though, the commercial distros have to have something that distinguishes their offering from the rest if they're going to get noticed. I don't care for that, myself, but I'm not sure you can convince them to give up what it is that they've cooked up to make themselves stand out.
scripsit FuzzyBad-Mofo:
You mean to say mkisofs + cdrecord isn't user-friendly?!
Truth be told, I've found I'm more comfortable with them than GUI stuff, but you might want to check out gcombust...
Come to think of it, the best thing for you to do might be to whip up a bash script for them, which would take the contents of $HOME/burn or whatever and make a CD (using the CLI tools). Give it an icon and they can use their GUI file-manager of choice to move the files there, then double-click your icon and presto!
scripsit Angry White Guy:
That's an interesting perspective, but I fail to see how we'd know, at least for another fifty years... It's not like BBC will run a story: ``Paras Prevent Yanks Planting Evidence.''
Not a weenie, just a Tory with a red shirt ;)
scripsit Angry White Guy:
Yeah, it's worked so well this far.
scripsit sssmashy:
I haven't really kept up on tidal power, but I recall an old Traveller module set on a Turkish-colonized water world in the Solomani Rim which had ocean arcologies powered by tidal generators in the arcologies' bases. It always struck me as feasible in principle.
Now, assuming that power in the middle of the ocean is actually useful to you (e.g., because you've got an arcology right there or whatever) wouldn't a tidal generator far from shore avoid the ecological problems?
scripsit EvilTwinSkippy:
Budwasser
scripsit mrtroy:
I don't think there's anywhere that beer is cheaper than tap water.. However, if the only source of safe drinking water is horribly overpriced little bottles of mineral water, it is conceivable that beer could be cheaper. Add the possiblility that in a given market, the local workers may drink not-quite-safe tap water, but also lots of beer, so that only tourists drink the bottled water, and it's a perfectly understandable phenomenon.