Re:Ironically, that story isn't true
on
New Standard Keyboard
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Much of the arguments about dvorak versus qwerty have to do with typing speed--as a dvorak user, I must contend that the greatest advantage is that my fingers don't hurt after 30 minutes of solid typing.
No my point is that if we combine our data, the top 20% aren't actually making any more money; their raises are only keeping their net income even. If they didn't give themselves raises, they'd start losing money because of higher taxes.
No my point is that if we combine our data, the top 20% aren't actually making any more money; their raises are only keeping their net income even. If they didn't give themselves raises, they'd start losing money because of higher taxes.
I'm naturally inclined to agree, but that's because I think most religious people are at least a little insane.
Don't get me wrong, some religious people are really nice. But nutty.
You should make a distinction as to which religion(s) you're talking about. There are a great many religions, and many of them share more in common with Atheism than they do with eachother.
Lumping all "religions" into one category draws a lot of conclusions about the value structures of the participants.
Even within a religion, you get varying degress of sanity. I don't have to remind you that there have been insane Atheists as well as perfectly sane, say, Mormons.
I suspect your definition of sanity involves the disbelief in the "supernatural." It's no wonder that you think most religious people are a bit nutty.
Even your definition of "religious persons" might have problems. Someone might fit the description to me if he believes in the existence of a single, omniscient entity, but not to you if his idea does not resemble some established norm.
Someone who disbelieves in God simply because he doesn't "feel" like it's true might be said to be religious because his cause for disbelief is not mere logical positivism. Someone who embraces evolution dogmatically because his teacher taught him that way could be said to religious in a rather loose sense (the alternative is to have studied other scientists' research on the matter).
I can't help but to think your opinion of religous people has more to do with your feelings on whatever religion is most prevalent in your area. To me, "religious" is a term used to describe someone who's outward appearance would lead me to believe that they're concerned with "blending in" with the other followers in his partictular "religious group."
Anyway, I probably sound like I'm totally nitpicking now. If so, I apologize. I simply found your post a bit presumtuous.
Seriously, could someone please explain to me one more time how it is that this man was even re-elected? Just how stupid is America?
I'm no Republican, but I really think that if the Dems would have focused more both on what they wanted to do with this country and what grievances they had with the previous administration, instead of calling Bush and Republicans alike silly names, they may have had a chance.
I'll be the first to admit that many Republicans sunk to name-calling as well, but I'll bet quite a few swing voters got really sick of liberal elitism and Bush-bashing.
Although I definately think that the high-ups in a corporation should be the first to accept a salary reduction, the numbers don't add up to any signifcance. Meaning, if I drop salaries $5,000 a year for 2,000 workers, and give myself and my 10 colleagues a $50,000 raise, I've saved the company $10 million and taken away $500 thousand.
In other words, it can't be said that I'm lowering people's salaries to give myself a raise.
Could you give me some real life data to corroberate your claims? Or is this an example of real life speculation designed to support an inherently emotional world view?
And Tux, who's come off of a left paddle injury with tremendous intensity here in the quarterfinals, takes the ball down the field. Score is still tied 0-0 with just twelve seconds on the clock to do it for the second half....He gets past Beastie with an impressive stutter step....HE GETS IN RANGE....THE GOALIE GETS DOWN....DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?
Let's check our official Netcraft judges panel--and they're going to count it! *BSD is dead!
Jeez...you didn't have to come down on him so hard.
Anyways, I second this post. I'd also like to mention that you might try booting your OS off of the network and loading it into RAM and skip the whole hard drive altogether. That way you can keep the number of moving parts as low as possible (and save some cash).
But contracts and licenses are not illegal per-se. Now if you point is regarding abusive situations in contracts and licenses then I completely agree with you. But I can't really see the concept of close sourced products as abusive at all. And certainly not like the concept of slavery (no sarcasm intended).
Of course not--let me be the first to say I'm sick of people comparing what is somewhat wrong with another thing that is universally deplorable. The pertinent portion of the example is specifically the question of whether or not we have the right to take away the freedoms of others with or without the other person's consent.
Now as a developer who makes a living out of coding small programs I can't see at all the advantages of open source for me right now.
Well, the only problem I can see with releasing your source code in your business model according to the terms of the GPL would be that others could take your binaries (or build new ones from the source code) and redistribute them for free and your hands would be tied behind your back if you wanted to get them to stop. This would shatter your profit model.
Open source development only benefits software intended to be used by a lot of people. If you make a living writing software for the masses, and your service is truly needed, I think that other folks out there, if they haven't already, will start working on some kind of open source alternative. If you write software on a contract basis, then not only does the FOSS movement not threaten your business model, but it actually isn't applicable, because no redistribution is involved.
My brother recently paid for Trillian pro on Windows. I actually prefer Gaim running on my Gnome 2.8 box here at home. Coding small programs is exactly what the FOSS world does best (which is why combining the FOSS model with Unix has produced a few pretty respectable operating systems).
Obviously, if I feel like it will be of great advantage to humanity I may eventually decide to share it with the world... but isn't the decision mine to take?
Of course. But if I decide to reimplement your program and share it with the world, that's my decision as well. And of course if I did, and the widespread interest were there, I would end up with a small army of developers helping me out, and my userbase wouldn't have it's freedom to use the software restricted.
The only freedom that I think the GPL specifically doesn't protect is my freedom to decide what to do with my own work (= time and effort)
Well, to be completely nitpicky (I apologize in advance), as the sole proprietor and copyright holder, you release the source under the terms of the GPL and release binaries under any other proprietary license you. Trolltech does this with QT. Of course, that model works great for libraries that you build other applications on, but terrible for end user software.
My point is that the GPL doesn't really concern itself with the author's freedoms because his are guaranteed. What it doesn't do is protect the author's business model, if the model is based on distributing binaries for a price. There are lots of ways to make money writing software that don't involve this business model.
Anyways, reading a recent blog entry from Nat Frieman (of Novell/Ximian and Gnome fame) really piqued my curiosity in a sort of communal bounty program for free software development. It would work in a pretty simple fashion--if I want a feature added to a program, or I want some new application or library, I offer a certain amount of money as bounty to whoever completes the task. Other people pile on to the bounty over time, and eventually highly requested features could potentially yield some pretty decent prizes.
I'm a bit skeptical about it's viability, and it's certainly a long way from even coming to fruition, let alone being a stable means of income, but I'm definately going to keep an eye on it.
No. I mean that real freedom can only be achieved by letting the developer choose how to develop and the customer choose what to buy.
This is a rephrasing of what I said. The only case where our ideas clash is when developers decide to restrict the user's freedom. The freedom that you're talking about is the ability for the developer to take away this freedom from the end user.
And that's why the customer has the right to choose what to buy. Exactly like in any other industry.
If you get me to sign a contract that states that I shall hereby be your slave, the contract is not legally binding. In a sense, you don't have the freedom to enslave me with a contract, and I don't even have the freedom to give up my liberties like that in a contract.
I'm not advocating making proprietary software illegal. All I'm pointing out is that the only freedoms you're protecting here are ones that come at the expense of the freedoms of others.
If people don't value that freedom, however, it seems like a fair trade. Unfortunately, if enough people get together and collectively ignore this freedom, all sorts of nasty things start happening to everyone. If every user valued his freedom, and refused to support shackled software, we would never have to worry about things like trusted computing. They are a function of people accepting that, unlike any other product you can buy, locking down software and hiding what's in side is acceptible.
Quite the contrary. The smaller the business, however, the less extra capital I have lying around to invest in writing/improving software. There are still plenty of businesses in the small-mid sized support sector that will either roll out vanilla Windows XP installs or roll out Linux.
They're going to be less able to handle some of the more demanding needs of certain clients, but I think the solution is to pick out a sector, say small real estate firms, and work on tailoring their deployments for that group.
Advocates of FOSS software believe that the entire business model of the proprietary software shop hinges upon selling software that restricts people's freedoms.
In the future, as the FOSS movement grows and gains momentum, I believe that hardware and support shops will wipe software shops clean by simply bundling FOSS software as part of the support contract.
I'm not suggesting you quit your job (what idiot would listen to me?)--this won't happen for a while. What I do want to impart you with is how much FOSS advocates hate businesses like yours, because they cannot make a dime without peddling software that inhibits the freedoms of users.
It's no small wonder why it's hard for you to use GPL'ed software in your product--it is businesses like yours the GPL is designed to fight!
Say I'm IBM and I sign on 10 support contracts in 2005. They all want Linux on the desktop, but they need some sort of alternative to some proprietary, Windows only software, let's call it TurboFoo. IBM does a quick freshmeat search and finds a GPL'ed alternative called FreeFoo which runs on Linux. Better yet, IBM is planning on deploying Gnome 2.8, and FreeFoo is built on top of Gnome. The only problem with FreeFoo is that it's currently in Beta, and, from correspondence with future clients, IBM realizes that FreeFoo needs some bug fixing and an enlarged featureset.
The work required to get FreeFoo up to snuff would take 6 programmers 2 months. If IBM paid each one 10,000 dollars a month (after benefits), then hiring the in-house development team would cost IBM 240,000 dollars. Of course, IBM would probably keep most of them on full time to keep up the support of FreeFoo as many more clients will use it, but going on with this hypothetical, if IBM is getting, on average, 90,000 dollars a month in support from each of the 10 clients, then both IBM and the clients who would have to spend hundreds of thousands on software apiece will see an ROI in just the first month!
This is why I think FOSS is the way of the future.
Real freedom in software can be achieved by only letting both the developer and the end-users choose what's best for them.
You mean, real freedom can only be achieved by letting either the developers or the end-users give up freedom to the other party?
It is the developers who are tempted to restrict the freedom of the end-users, not the other way around. They're the ones that generate the product and decide how to proliferate it.
I have no problem with other people choosing a piece of software or operating system that restricts their freedom until enough people choose a proprietary platform that suddenly I'm out of luck when I can't get drivers for my new camera, I can't read that document file you just e-mailed me, I can't help develop a port for my favorite piece of software, etc.
The problems with proprietary software in a world where FOSS users and the proprietary users roughly equal eachother are few. When you guys get 95% of the market, then we have a problem.
The Germans only got owned because Italy tried invading Greece. The invasion was...less than successful...and Germany had to delay Operation Barbarossa two weeks.
I don't think you read my post the way I intended it.
Gentoo is a good example of taking a difficult task and making it dead simple, and then having a userbase that thinks it knows how to perform the task but really only knows how to invoke a simple script. In the case of Gentoo, the task is building a system from the ground up. A lot of Gentoo users happen to know how to roll custom Linux systems, but then again a lot of them don't.
I'm not saying that people should get rid of the scripts (like I'm not saying ease of use is a bad thing), I'm just saying that they should know more or less what the scripts do and how to do it on their own, because without that knowledge you really don't know how to build a system from scratch.
In the case of server configuration, I don't really care how the configuration is presented (be it in the form of a long text document or clunky dialog). I just think that one unfortunate side effect of making configuration really easy is users that know so little about the software that they shouldn't be using it in the first place end up getting things working. Barely.
Most professional Windows administrators I know are pretty clueless about how any of their software actually works. Some have a clue. As much as I love Linux, I'd put the Windows systems built by the really good Windows admins on par with anything I could roll out and maintain with Linux.
There are enourmous advantages to making software easier, and disadvantages to making it more complex. Windows being so easy to set up as a server has many advantages, I'm just lamenting over one solitary disadvantage.
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Much of the arguments about dvorak versus qwerty have to do with typing speed--as a dvorak user, I must contend that the greatest advantage is that my fingers don't hurt after 30 minutes of solid typing.
Well, such a machine could run the games of today, but next year's games might require much more.
Switch to dvorak!
Being a programmer, you probably want one of the layouts tweaked for programming (that put braces and stuff in easy locations).
No my point is that if we combine our data, the top 20% aren't actually making any more money; their raises are only keeping their net income even. If they didn't give themselves raises, they'd start losing money because of higher taxes.
I don't understand why this isn't relevant.
No my point is that if we combine our data, the top 20% aren't actually making any more money; their raises are only keeping their net income even. If they didn't give themselves raises, they'd start losing money because of higher taxes.
I only hope more of us join in.
I'm naturally inclined to agree, but that's because I think most religious people are at least a little insane.
Don't get me wrong, some religious people are really nice. But nutty.
You should make a distinction as to which religion(s) you're talking about. There are a great many religions, and many of them share more in common with Atheism than they do with eachother.
Lumping all "religions" into one category draws a lot of conclusions about the value structures of the participants.
Even within a religion, you get varying degress of sanity. I don't have to remind you that there have been insane Atheists as well as perfectly sane, say, Mormons.
I suspect your definition of sanity involves the disbelief in the "supernatural." It's no wonder that you think most religious people are a bit nutty.
Even your definition of "religious persons" might have problems. Someone might fit the description to me if he believes in the existence of a single, omniscient entity, but not to you if his idea does not resemble some established norm.
Someone who disbelieves in God simply because he doesn't "feel" like it's true might be said to be religious because his cause for disbelief is not mere logical positivism. Someone who embraces evolution dogmatically because his teacher taught him that way could be said to religious in a rather loose sense (the alternative is to have studied other scientists' research on the matter).
I can't help but to think your opinion of religous people has more to do with your feelings on whatever religion is most prevalent in your area. To me, "religious" is a term used to describe someone who's outward appearance would lead me to believe that they're concerned with "blending in" with the other followers in his partictular "religious group."
Anyway, I probably sound like I'm totally nitpicking now. If so, I apologize. I simply found your post a bit presumtuous.
Seriously, could someone please explain to me one more time how it is that this man was even re-elected? Just how stupid is America?
I'm no Republican, but I really think that if the Dems would have focused more both on what they wanted to do with this country and what grievances they had with the previous administration, instead of calling Bush and Republicans alike silly names, they may have had a chance.
I'll be the first to admit that many Republicans sunk to name-calling as well, but I'll bet quite a few swing voters got really sick of liberal elitism and Bush-bashing.
Combine that graph with this one (the one under "Who Pays Income Taxes?") and you'll see why I'm still not convinced.
Although I definately think that the high-ups in a corporation should be the first to accept a salary reduction, the numbers don't add up to any signifcance. Meaning, if I drop salaries $5,000 a year for 2,000 workers, and give myself and my 10 colleagues a $50,000 raise, I've saved the company $10 million and taken away $500 thousand.
In other words, it can't be said that I'm lowering people's salaries to give myself a raise.
Could you give me some real life data to corroberate your claims? Or is this an example of real life speculation designed to support an inherently emotional world view?
Umm....the original parent was talking about frames per second...that's a video card issue.
I'm not running any sort of heavy duty server, so fucking forget dealing with Linux.
Umm, these days Linux runs on watches, PVRs, routers, desktops, toasters, and, yes, servers too.
It's also pretty easy to use, if you use the right distro.
That would be "providing for the common welfare" in my book.
Announcer:
And Tux, who's come off of a left paddle injury with tremendous intensity here in the quarterfinals, takes the ball down the field. Score is still tied 0-0 with just twelve seconds on the clock to do it for the second half....He gets past Beastie with an impressive stutter step....HE GETS IN RANGE....THE GOALIE GETS DOWN....DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?
Let's check our official Netcraft judges panel--and they're going to count it! *BSD is dead!
Is it more efficient memory sharing amongst the different cores?
Anyways, I second this post. I'd also like to mention that you might try booting your OS off of the network and loading it into RAM and skip the whole hard drive altogether. That way you can keep the number of moving parts as low as possible (and save some cash).
But contracts and licenses are not illegal per-se. Now if you point is regarding abusive situations in contracts and licenses then I completely agree with you. But I can't really see the concept of close sourced products as abusive at all. And certainly not like the concept of slavery (no sarcasm intended).
Of course not--let me be the first to say I'm sick of people comparing what is somewhat wrong with another thing that is universally deplorable. The pertinent portion of the example is specifically the question of whether or not we have the right to take away the freedoms of others with or without the other person's consent.
Now as a developer who makes a living out of coding small programs I can't see at all the advantages of open source for me right now.
Well, the only problem I can see with releasing your source code in your business model according to the terms of the GPL would be that others could take your binaries (or build new ones from the source code) and redistribute them for free and your hands would be tied behind your back if you wanted to get them to stop. This would shatter your profit model.
Open source development only benefits software intended to be used by a lot of people. If you make a living writing software for the masses, and your service is truly needed, I think that other folks out there, if they haven't already, will start working on some kind of open source alternative. If you write software on a contract basis, then not only does the FOSS movement not threaten your business model, but it actually isn't applicable, because no redistribution is involved.
My brother recently paid for Trillian pro on Windows. I actually prefer Gaim running on my Gnome 2.8 box here at home. Coding small programs is exactly what the FOSS world does best (which is why combining the FOSS model with Unix has produced a few pretty respectable operating systems).
Obviously, if I feel like it will be of great advantage to humanity I may eventually decide to share it with the world... but isn't the decision mine to take?
Of course. But if I decide to reimplement your program and share it with the world, that's my decision as well. And of course if I did, and the widespread interest were there, I would end up with a small army of developers helping me out, and my userbase wouldn't have it's freedom to use the software restricted.
The only freedom that I think the GPL specifically doesn't protect is my freedom to decide what to do with my own work (= time and effort)
Well, to be completely nitpicky (I apologize in advance), as the sole proprietor and copyright holder, you release the source under the terms of the GPL and release binaries under any other proprietary license you. Trolltech does this with QT. Of course, that model works great for libraries that you build other applications on, but terrible for end user software.
My point is that the GPL doesn't really concern itself with the author's freedoms because his are guaranteed. What it doesn't do is protect the author's business model, if the model is based on distributing binaries for a price. There are lots of ways to make money writing software that don't involve this business model.
Anyways, reading a recent blog entry from Nat Frieman (of Novell/Ximian and Gnome fame) really piqued my curiosity in a sort of communal bounty program for free software development. It would work in a pretty simple fashion--if I want a feature added to a program, or I want some new application or library, I offer a certain amount of money as bounty to whoever completes the task. Other people pile on to the bounty over time, and eventually highly requested features could potentially yield some pretty decent prizes.
I'm a bit skeptical about it's viability, and it's certainly a long way from even coming to fruition, let alone being a stable means of income, but I'm definately going to keep an eye on it.
There's always contract
No. I mean that real freedom can only be achieved by letting the developer choose how to develop and the customer choose what to buy.
This is a rephrasing of what I said. The only case where our ideas clash is when developers decide to restrict the user's freedom. The freedom that you're talking about is the ability for the developer to take away this freedom from the end user.
And that's why the customer has the right to choose what to buy. Exactly like in any other industry.
If you get me to sign a contract that states that I shall hereby be your slave, the contract is not legally binding. In a sense, you don't have the freedom to enslave me with a contract, and I don't even have the freedom to give up my liberties like that in a contract.
I'm not advocating making proprietary software illegal. All I'm pointing out is that the only freedoms you're protecting here are ones that come at the expense of the freedoms of others.
If people don't value that freedom, however, it seems like a fair trade. Unfortunately, if enough people get together and collectively ignore this freedom, all sorts of nasty things start happening to everyone. If every user valued his freedom, and refused to support shackled software, we would never have to worry about things like trusted computing. They are a function of people accepting that, unlike any other product you can buy, locking down software and hiding what's in side is acceptible.
They're going to be less able to handle some of the more demanding needs of certain clients, but I think the solution is to pick out a sector, say small real estate firms, and work on tailoring their deployments for that group.
Advocates of FOSS software believe that the entire business model of the proprietary software shop hinges upon selling software that restricts people's freedoms.
In the future, as the FOSS movement grows and gains momentum, I believe that hardware and support shops will wipe software shops clean by simply bundling FOSS software as part of the support contract.
I'm not suggesting you quit your job (what idiot would listen to me?)--this won't happen for a while. What I do want to impart you with is how much FOSS advocates hate businesses like yours, because they cannot make a dime without peddling software that inhibits the freedoms of users.
It's no small wonder why it's hard for you to use GPL'ed software in your product--it is businesses like yours the GPL is designed to fight!
Say I'm IBM and I sign on 10 support contracts in 2005. They all want Linux on the desktop, but they need some sort of alternative to some proprietary, Windows only software, let's call it TurboFoo. IBM does a quick freshmeat search and finds a GPL'ed alternative called FreeFoo which runs on Linux. Better yet, IBM is planning on deploying Gnome 2.8, and FreeFoo is built on top of Gnome. The only problem with FreeFoo is that it's currently in Beta, and, from correspondence with future clients, IBM realizes that FreeFoo needs some bug fixing and an enlarged featureset.
The work required to get FreeFoo up to snuff would take 6 programmers 2 months. If IBM paid each one 10,000 dollars a month (after benefits), then hiring the in-house development team would cost IBM 240,000 dollars. Of course, IBM would probably keep most of them on full time to keep up the support of FreeFoo as many more clients will use it, but going on with this hypothetical, if IBM is getting, on average, 90,000 dollars a month in support from each of the 10 clients, then both IBM and the clients who would have to spend hundreds of thousands on software apiece will see an ROI in just the first month!
This is why I think FOSS is the way of the future.
Real freedom in software can be achieved by only letting both the developer and the end-users choose what's best for them.
You mean, real freedom can only be achieved by letting either the developers or the end-users give up freedom to the other party?
It is the developers who are tempted to restrict the freedom of the end-users, not the other way around. They're the ones that generate the product and decide how to proliferate it.
I have no problem with other people choosing a piece of software or operating system that restricts their freedom until enough people choose a proprietary platform that suddenly I'm out of luck when I can't get drivers for my new camera, I can't read that document file you just e-mailed me, I can't help develop a port for my favorite piece of software, etc.
The problems with proprietary software in a world where FOSS users and the proprietary users roughly equal eachother are few. When you guys get 95% of the market, then we have a problem.
Unless my context-insensitive eyes misread joviality for harsh criticism. In which case I apologize profusely.
The Germans only got owned because Italy tried invading Greece. The invasion was...less than successful...and Germany had to delay Operation Barbarossa two weeks.
Gentoo is a good example of taking a difficult task and making it dead simple, and then having a userbase that thinks it knows how to perform the task but really only knows how to invoke a simple script. In the case of Gentoo, the task is building a system from the ground up. A lot of Gentoo users happen to know how to roll custom Linux systems, but then again a lot of them don't.
I'm not saying that people should get rid of the scripts (like I'm not saying ease of use is a bad thing), I'm just saying that they should know more or less what the scripts do and how to do it on their own, because without that knowledge you really don't know how to build a system from scratch.
In the case of server configuration, I don't really care how the configuration is presented (be it in the form of a long text document or clunky dialog). I just think that one unfortunate side effect of making configuration really easy is users that know so little about the software that they shouldn't be using it in the first place end up getting things working. Barely.
Most professional Windows administrators I know are pretty clueless about how any of their software actually works. Some have a clue. As much as I love Linux, I'd put the Windows systems built by the really good Windows admins on par with anything I could roll out and maintain with Linux.
There are enourmous advantages to making software easier, and disadvantages to making it more complex. Windows being so easy to set up as a server has many advantages, I'm just lamenting over one solitary disadvantage.