They want to abolish wealth redistribution and escape the shackles of the french-speaking socialists aka walloons.
They want to have a referendum on the European constitution - very unusual for any european party, for the most part the anti-democratic eurosocialists prefer to avoid all that democracy stuff and just impose more and more of the european behemoth on their subjects without asking them for their opinion on the matter, so good for you VB!
And the VB are the largest party in Flanders, whcih means they are nto by any means an extremist party at the edge of society, but a alrge party representing the interests of the people, a people who are ignored and abused by the central Belgian state, a people who are ignored by Brussels and who the walloons, on their socialist drip feed of money from the Flemings, prefer to villify.
I think the VB are an example of a resurgance of representative democracy and a new agitation for freedom in the face of opposition by the old, corrupt european establishment. Only a few countries are goign to escape the evil of Europe - those countries with the longest traditions of freedom and democracy, such as Britain. Can Flanders join them?
This is why wealthier areas always have more expensive goods and services. Its a lot more expensive to live in a wealthy crucible of commerce, such as New York City or London, than it is to live in rural Indonesia.
Broadband pricing is no exception. I should expect Afghanistan and Ethiopia to top the charts. When i lived in Finland, a rather poor country, I found broadband to be impressively cheap compared to my native France.
Capitalism ensures that the wealthy people of the West pay through the nose for commodities. that wealth filtering down, via a sort of global reaganomics, to the people of Delhi and Addis Ababa.
The problem is that global trade raises prices in the third world, because it levels prices. Sure, it makes things cheaper in the west, but it makes things more expensive in the third world. This is why it is our duty to allow the free exchange of ideas, but not of goods and cash.
I expect, in any such map, that the third world will come first and the first world will come last, in terms of prices. But the more free trade linked third world countries will be more expensive than the more protectionist ones, like Singapore.
Modern opinion pollsters show the way. it is eminently possible to quanticise happiness, all that matters is people's subjective feelings, that's all unhappiness and happiness is, so all you need to do is ask them! A goovernment department tracking happiness units for all sorts of crimes using opinion pollster techniques would track both changing social attitudes and be flexible and just. There's nothing particularly difficult about it.
Utilitarianism is concerned not with "good" so much as "happiness". Happiness is considered to be the same as good. The total happiness of a society and how certain actions and people affect it can be readily measured by the sophisticated polling techniques of the modern age - just ask Mori.
And you are quite right, the WTC thing is a completely joke, the War on Terror is a sham, and we should indeed be concentrating on auto accidents.
You don't exist in a vacuum, and the notion of "rights" oes not exist out there, in the physical world. The notions of rights is merely of a social contract that allow us to live in society with certain assurances. Under Utilitarianism, these rights would be slightly different, obviously.
However, the subtle application of inverse Utilitarianism shows that arbitrarily locking pople up will in fact cause greater unhappiness due to general insecurities, so I imagine rights would be much the same.
Nonetheless, I think my point about spammers stands. They are a great evil, far worse than murderers etc purely in terms of unhappiness caused.
Don't you understand? Who causes the greatest unhappiness, a spammer, or a rapist?
Answer: the spammer. He causes small amounts of unhappiness to VAST numbers of people.
If the Spammer causes 100 rapists worth of total unhappiness, who should recieve the greater punishment? Why the spammer should, of course.
It is people with attitudes like yours, holding to some spurious "moral standard" that depends on belief that allow a culture of unhappiness to prevail. let us attack those who cause unhappiness and society will improve and become a better place to live. Who knows, by applying these zero tolerance policies on spammers the greatly increased happiness in society in general may reduce the numbers of desperate rapists. Everything is connected. and we should act on what works best, you know?
I can't be the only fellow to wonder at the mere slap on the wrist spammers currently recieve.
I think society should be run on purely utilitarian grounds. In other words, we should run the state, and by extension our society, by the principle of what gives the greatest good to the greatest number. This allows us to throw out Judaeo-Christian notions of morality entirely, to be replaced by an inherently scientific notion of justice. We simply give the highest punishments for those crimes that cause the greatest unhappiness.
Under this simple and fair scheme the death penalty would be used less on murderers, rapists etc (who, really, only cause harm to one or two people at a time) but would be used a lot on spammers (who cause a small amount of unhappiness to many millions of people). By simply adding the small amounts of happiness caused to these millions up, we see that the *total* amount of unhappiness caused by spammers is far greater than that caused by the typical murder, rapist or arsonist.
This would allow us to institute the death penalty for spammers and put an end to this terrible scourge. Next time I see an email urging me to visit animalporn.com, I want the full recourse of the law to hunt down these terrible spreaders of unhappiness, the biggest scourge of our times, and electrocute them to death in a chair in Nebraska.
It is just and it is right, Utilitarianism points the way forward.
Am I the only one who has noticed that the remit of consoles increases year on year? At first they were simple gaming machines, now they focus on email, broadband, DVD playing, web browsing, etc etc.
With MS's.NET initiative, one can't help but wonder if the concept of a 'home computer' will become entirely redundant. After all, the fact is that.NET will enable traditional tasks performed by applications such as MS Word, Excel etc to be done entirely over the web. With the rise of consoles, this will render the home computer redundant in time.
Another advantage is that consoles are so easy.
I mean, I find Windows and Mac OS X very complicated and difficult to use - I am from a pre-computer generation, and have watched with a little bemusement as these glorified typewriters conquer all.
They are dividing society into two classes, the Digirati, who can understand Computers running super complicated, unintuitive OS's like OS X and Windows, and the disposessed, who just don't understand and never will.
Consoles, by extending their grasp, may remove this knowledge gap by providing a wonderfully simple, hermetically sealed system that can be easily used by everyone, including your granny, and me!
I will welcome the day, I think, I don't like the idea of supercomplex computers running increasingly difficult OS's taking over all simple tasks and dispossessing those with better things to do than understand the impossible complexities of Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word.
I look to Sony, MS and Nintendo to provide a democratic and egalitarean new computing future for all, in which everyone can share.
I'm sorry, but this seems rather one-sided. Commercialisation of the internet is not all bad, at all. In fact, commercialisation of the internet democratises commerce.
For example, Amazon as a retailer has to compete with every other bookshop on the onternet - this competition is good, and keeps prices down. Low proces allow poorer people to buy. The digital nature of amazon means that anyone can work for it anywhere in the world (excluding the manual work in the warehouses). This is a democratic, meritocratic process.
As for the effect on the internet itself, well, look at all the services available - hotmail, msn, aol, yahoo, cnn, bbc, these are the bread and butter of the internet.
But most importantly, the Internet prior to commercialisation was an ivory tower. It was exclusive and exclusing. It has been the commercial companies that have pushed it out into the mainstream and made it a resource accessible by everyone - much to the chagrin of the Internet 'old timers', who still contemptiously sneer at AOLers and such 'low life'.
Moaning about commercialisation of the internet is just a front for elitist snobbery, for wanting the old, university and academic dominated internet back, for people who want to exclude the majority.
This hypocrisy must not be tolerated.
You may be annoyed that the sort of internet *you* like is no longer mainstream, and is relegated to dusty old newsgroups and places like slashdot, but that's just tough; don't try and exclude the majority under the pretense of 'stopping commercialism', the only great force of equality known to man, Capitalism.
I have been in the Digirati for 15 years, but as an artiste, not a programmer or sysadmin, and it has always dismayed me how the mainstream 'hacker' opinion is so exclusionary, and hypocritical.
Now that this culture is finally a tiny majority on the internet, it seems to view itself as persecuted by commercialism, which (in a small sense), it is, as it has been sidelined.
But creating this anticommercial, anticapitalist, antiequality and antiegalitarean agenda will only lead to tears.
Kilobytes and Megabytes may have seemed like a decent measure back in the 70's, when it was important to quantize easily down to the byte level and all the users were computer scientists anyway, but these days it is rather archaic.
Most users don't know how many bytes are in a megabyte or a kilobyte, or think (naturally) 1000 rather than 1024.
However, hard drive manufacturers already use Megabyte to specifically mean 1,000,000 bytes, Before long computer OS's and RAM manufacturers will use the same definition.
Why come up with a new 'Mebibyte' system? What does 'kilo-' and 'mega-' actually mean? Answer: 1000 and 1,000,000, not the perversion of the computer scientists.
Now that computers are becoming more popular, the meaning of the terms megabyte and kilobyte are shifting back to compatibility with normal English usage.
Time blah blah money blah blah I'm so smart blah blah IQ blah blah I deserve cash
Honestly, don't you understand what hacking is about? Only through playing, playing can we reach total understanding of a complex system, and learn to maximise out own personal growth potential.
Certainly, it is wonderful the way you sacrifice yourself for corporate ideals, but don't forget moeny is only the means of survival, and not the substance.
Get out of your Ayn Rand hellhole and join us, us in the older generation with true socialist, egalitarian ideals.
No, it isn't. Learn to recognise the difference between satire and truth, though it can be close, I grant you.
I suppose if all you do is view email and browse the web, then that isn't the case, but more advanced computer usage yields many cases where command line tools (not just a command line, it's actually the tools that one has access to that's important, like a base linux system) are many times faster.
YES! I absolutely agree, it is nice to see some people have sense and cling on to the old ways.
(I don't mean that in an offensive way, if I had I'd have called you a cunt)
People perceive that using the commandline is faster since it gives their mind more of a workout, whereas mousing is easier and more "boring".
Umm, even if that is true, I don't see how it matters. Are you a corporate slave? Do you think 'Oh, this may seem boring and repetitive, but hey, there are integers and studies out there that prove this way is faster.' If so, you admit that base fact of economic superiority outweighs subjective experience.
Implicit in the TOGS study is the FACT that CLI is aesthetically superior, else why would TOGs respondants describe the GUI as boring?
The simple fact is that CLI Users have higher IQ's and demand more intellectual challenge and stimulus, stimulus the GUI does not provide.
So, I leave you to your corporate dreaming, your 'productivity', and I'll go off and have a damned good time with the superior, and TOGs-admitted more enterataining CLI.
I'm fed up of all the nonsense about the BSD OS X flavour. It may seem that OS X is flavour of the month, after all it is a Unix with MS Office and IE and photoshop and even high street games.
But normal people don't need these things. Who the hell needs MS Office except business zealots? Nobody needs anything more than vi or emacs and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the command line. With a bit of effort, I can do simple things like post emails, browse newsnet and rip mp3's too, and as nobody but closed minded GUI maniacs need some brain dead pointy-clicky interface, I don't see how retrogressing into the early 90's fraudulent GUI paradigm can do anybody any good.
GUI's are a productivity waste for dummies. Think how long it takes to move the mouse around and select some obscure option in preferences, as compared to editing rc files with sed. Any decent user worth his salt can make his PC sing with eternal, messianic, orgasmic glory as he./configures, makes and make installs his way to ecstatic, orgasmic destiny.
Fuck this GUI shit. Look at my uid, I've been around since 1969 and used Unix since 1972, after graduating from Multics, and I still curse the day that the closed sourse idiots in Xerox started getting lofty ideas.
Sorry, but I just had to rant. This stuff makes me see red:-)
Nice, you ignore my points by labelling me a troll.
It doesn't matter to you that it is a FACT that freeBSD does perform better, or that, yes, Linux will have to behave in a more proprietry fashion (ie, make stuff geared at idiots and not intelligent people) to succeed, does it?
The latter they have been attempting (Konq over Lynx, Eudora ovwer mutt), but they have a long way to go.
This is another case like the Macintosh. With pressures coming from all sides in the department of Justice case, it can be easily seen that it helps MS greatly if they have a competitor.
Enter Linux.
Linux is not remotely a threat on the desktop - as long as it has multiple different GUI's and window managers and toolkits and all the rest, and a lack of a decent browser or office solution, it always will not be a threat.
On the server end, Linux is more of a threat, but Microsoft has never had a big slice of this market anyway. If anything FreeBSD is a greater threat than Linux in this arena, as it is better performing.
However, MS will always have a big place of the server market for as long as they produce a system that is easy to use. Not everyone can afford £60,000 a year for a Unix export, especially small businesses, to keep a server running. MS ensure that a boss can do such things part time - this has really driven the internet revolution, by opening access to the internet to many who would have been cut out by a skills shortage before.
All in all, I can see that MS are wary of Linux, but in truth they have nothing to worry about, as the two OS'es operate in different spheres, and don't really compete at all except in the minds of unthinking Linux apologists and Windows Advocates.
Windows will always have 95% of te market, MS need have no fear of that. The only way Linux will threaten this is if they start behaving in a more proprietry fashion by gearing things at the consumer and not at the Linux Geek.
Cryptography/Countercryptography, it is all a neodarwinian game, an arms race, a cold war, call it what you will the key fact is that the decryptors are never very far behind the encryptors, the nature of technology is that the ability to encrypt blesses one with an equivalent ability to decrypt, the knowledge and techniques that improve encryption also improve decryption.
The problem is the competitive nature of modern business. Despite what the hackers and libertarians may say, the home user has no real need of encryption - encryption is the technology of big government and big business. The home user does not need it for his emails to Aunt Beth and porn downloading, but Big Government and Megacorp(TM) most certainly do, for their official secrets and industrial espionage.
The development of encryption is rather like the development of weapons - it is at it's fastest in a cuthroat society of vicious competition.
If we really want secure communication, we must not treat the symptoms by encrypting, but rather effect a radical cure - we must render all motivations for evesdropping redundant.
How?
Simple. Just attack the basis of competitive society by encouraging greater global cooperation (some sort of 5th International?), smashing big business, nationalise the worst, most competitive industries leaving only the big, lumbering and safe monopolies to do their thing. This way, we reduce the competitive nature of modern society and consequently the technological encryption/decryption competitive paradigm.
It would be tough, but is eminently possible. We just need the will to power!
I am glad that Alan Cox has left off developing the 2.4 series kernel, for it seems he was using his position for a political agenda. The previous article reveals how he used his position as kernel maintainer to make his political position on the DMCA clear.
I am not comfortable with someone in such a powerful and important position in the linux community using his position for his own personal agenda. I think he should have resigned back then, and am glad he has stepped down now.
Although I must make clear I do not like the DMCA, it is still clear to me that such a conflict of interest and abuse of a supposedly monarchal position above such political realities is very wrong indeed.
This is the difference between book learning and experience. Sure, you can 'test' a network under idealised simulated conditions, as one might 'test' a plane in a wind tunnel, but till the network is reality, and the secretary spills a cup of coffee on the router or the chief engineer urinates drunkenly on the packet switcher, you can't tell how your network will perform.
What is it with the modern generation who think that simulations will improve their likely performance? It is all idiocy, when I was young we did things with a spanner and looked at das blinkenlights under real world conditions. This is so much nonsense, really, the sort of thing I'd expect to come out of our modern CS courses.
Computing is just an offshoot of down-and-dirty engineering, and none of us should forget it. The day we forget the feel of the netowrk cards in our hands, the smell of the overheating cat5, is the day we lose control over the netowkrks of America, the day that our economy starts going backwards.
There is a problem with Linux development in the UK: it is dominated by the Welsh. Viz.
Alan Cox - Welsh
Keith Owens - Welsh
Davedd Williams - Welsh
Rhiannon Wemys - Welsh
These are the big names of Linux development in the UK, there are very few Englishmen or Scotsmen who are big name Linux developers.
The reasons for this are manifold. Firstly, Wales is a country long since colonised and dominated by England, the first acts of genocide were committed there. The Welsh have a strong and tribal identity, and are usually fairly open to new paradigms (hence their role in the Industrial Revolution, and OSS is at least as significant as the Industrial Revolution).
This means that they have seized on Linux as a revolutionary operating system that may free them from domination by Microsoft and England. The welsh terrorist organisation, Plyde Cymru, uses Linux, it can be seen that they favour the decentralised nature of linux just like they favoured Owain Gln Dour's guerrilla tactics, which were similarly decentralised.
Keith Owens is very much a Welsh nationalist and has criticised England many times, not least when I met him in a pub in Cardiff once, he broadsided against the oppressors (Sorry Keith:-).
I think Linux does have a role to play in revolutionary freedom movements, and the Welsh Situation may make a good testing ground for this, especially around Trethomas.
I like PIM's, but myself I stick to a file-o-fax. It doesn't crash or lose data, and is easy to read, never runs out of batteries and is portable. I don't see what advantage a computer would bring, it would tie me down and lose data.
But my main gripe is the interactivity of the new PIM's, like Outlook Express in Office XP. They allow one's data to be inspected by one's superior, and make for an invasion of personal space by the hierarchy at work.
One of my girlfriends Joselle had to cancel a date with me because her boss inserted a work appointment at the same time, without notice, and she had to obey.
The only way to be truly provate and control your schedule is to have it written down privately. Computers allow for the domination of one's calendar by the digital elite.
Slashdot Mirror
We're a band of brothers.
OOGA OOGA
They want to abolish wealth redistribution and escape the shackles of the french-speaking socialists aka walloons.
They want to have a referendum on the European constitution - very unusual for any european party, for the most part the anti-democratic eurosocialists prefer to avoid all that democracy stuff and just impose more and more of the european behemoth on their subjects without asking them for their opinion on the matter, so good for you VB!
And the VB are the largest party in Flanders, whcih means they are nto by any means an extremist party at the edge of society, but a alrge party representing the interests of the people, a people who are ignored and abused by the central Belgian state, a people who are ignored by Brussels and who the walloons, on their socialist drip feed of money from the Flemings, prefer to villify.
I think the VB are an example of a resurgance of representative democracy and a new agitation for freedom in the face of opposition by the old, corrupt european establishment. Only a few countries are goign to escape the evil of Europe - those countries with the longest traditions of freedom and democracy, such as Britain. Can Flanders join them?
I say they can, thanks to the VB.
Broadband pricing is no exception. I should expect Afghanistan and Ethiopia to top the charts. When i lived in Finland, a rather poor country, I found broadband to be impressively cheap compared to my native France.
Capitalism ensures that the wealthy people of the West pay through the nose for commodities. that wealth filtering down, via a sort of global reaganomics, to the people of Delhi and Addis Ababa.
The problem is that global trade raises prices in the third world, because it levels prices. Sure, it makes things cheaper in the west, but it makes things more expensive in the third world. This is why it is our duty to allow the free exchange of ideas, but not of goods and cash.
I expect, in any such map, that the third world will come first and the first world will come last, in terms of prices. But the more free trade linked third world countries will be more expensive than the more protectionist ones, like Singapore.
10x worse than me. You must've regged 10 minutes later >:(
Modern opinion pollsters show the way. it is eminently possible to quanticise happiness, all that matters is people's subjective feelings, that's all unhappiness and happiness is, so all you need to do is ask them! A goovernment department tracking happiness units for all sorts of crimes using opinion pollster techniques would track both changing social attitudes and be flexible and just. There's nothing particularly difficult about it.
And you are quite right, the WTC thing is a completely joke, the War on Terror is a sham, and we should indeed be concentrating on auto accidents.
However, the subtle application of inverse Utilitarianism shows that arbitrarily locking pople up will in fact cause greater unhappiness due to general insecurities, so I imagine rights would be much the same.
Nonetheless, I think my point about spammers stands. They are a great evil, far worse than murderers etc purely in terms of unhappiness caused.
Answer: the spammer. He causes small amounts of unhappiness to VAST numbers of people.
If the Spammer causes 100 rapists worth of total unhappiness, who should recieve the greater punishment? Why the spammer should, of course.
It is people with attitudes like yours, holding to some spurious "moral standard" that depends on belief that allow a culture of unhappiness to prevail. let us attack those who cause unhappiness and society will improve and become a better place to live. Who knows, by applying these zero tolerance policies on spammers the greatly increased happiness in society in general may reduce the numbers of desperate rapists. Everything is connected. and we should act on what works best, you know?
I think society should be run on purely utilitarian grounds. In other words, we should run the state, and by extension our society, by the principle of what gives the greatest good to the greatest number. This allows us to throw out Judaeo-Christian notions of morality entirely, to be replaced by an inherently scientific notion of justice. We simply give the highest punishments for those crimes that cause the greatest unhappiness.
Under this simple and fair scheme the death penalty would be used less on murderers, rapists etc (who, really, only cause harm to one or two people at a time) but would be used a lot on spammers (who cause a small amount of unhappiness to many millions of people). By simply adding the small amounts of happiness caused to these millions up, we see that the *total* amount of unhappiness caused by spammers is far greater than that caused by the typical murder, rapist or arsonist.
This would allow us to institute the death penalty for spammers and put an end to this terrible scourge. Next time I see an email urging me to visit animalporn.com, I want the full recourse of the law to hunt down these terrible spreaders of unhappiness, the biggest scourge of our times, and electrocute them to death in a chair in Nebraska.
It is just and it is right, Utilitarianism points the way forward.
With MS's .NET initiative, one can't help but wonder if the concept of a 'home computer' will become entirely redundant. After all, the fact is that .NET will enable traditional tasks performed by applications such as MS Word, Excel etc to be done entirely over the web. With the rise of consoles, this will render the home computer redundant in time.
Another advantage is that consoles are so easy.
I mean, I find Windows and Mac OS X very complicated and difficult to use - I am from a pre-computer generation, and have watched with a little bemusement as these glorified typewriters conquer all.
They are dividing society into two classes, the Digirati, who can understand Computers running super complicated, unintuitive OS's like OS X and Windows, and the disposessed, who just don't understand and never will.
Consoles, by extending their grasp, may remove this knowledge gap by providing a wonderfully simple, hermetically sealed system that can be easily used by everyone, including your granny, and me!
I will welcome the day, I think, I don't like the idea of supercomplex computers running increasingly difficult OS's taking over all simple tasks and dispossessing those with better things to do than understand the impossible complexities of Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word.
I look to Sony, MS and Nintendo to provide a democratic and egalitarean new computing future for all, in which everyone can share.
For example, Amazon as a retailer has to compete with every other bookshop on the onternet - this competition is good, and keeps prices down. Low proces allow poorer people to buy. The digital nature of amazon means that anyone can work for it anywhere in the world (excluding the manual work in the warehouses). This is a democratic, meritocratic process.
As for the effect on the internet itself, well, look at all the services available - hotmail, msn, aol, yahoo, cnn, bbc, these are the bread and butter of the internet.
But most importantly, the Internet prior to commercialisation was an ivory tower. It was exclusive and exclusing. It has been the commercial companies that have pushed it out into the mainstream and made it a resource accessible by everyone - much to the chagrin of the Internet 'old timers', who still contemptiously sneer at AOLers and such 'low life'.
Moaning about commercialisation of the internet is just a front for elitist snobbery, for wanting the old, university and academic dominated internet back, for people who want to exclude the majority.
This hypocrisy must not be tolerated.
You may be annoyed that the sort of internet *you* like is no longer mainstream, and is relegated to dusty old newsgroups and places like slashdot, but that's just tough; don't try and exclude the majority under the pretense of 'stopping commercialism', the only great force of equality known to man, Capitalism.
I have been in the Digirati for 15 years, but as an artiste, not a programmer or sysadmin, and it has always dismayed me how the mainstream 'hacker' opinion is so exclusionary, and hypocritical.
Now that this culture is finally a tiny majority on the internet, it seems to view itself as persecuted by commercialism, which (in a small sense), it is, as it has been sidelined.
But creating this anticommercial, anticapitalist, antiequality and antiegalitarean agenda will only lead to tears.
Wake up!
Most users don't know how many bytes are in a megabyte or a kilobyte, or think (naturally) 1000 rather than 1024.
However, hard drive manufacturers already use Megabyte to specifically mean 1,000,000 bytes, Before long computer OS's and RAM manufacturers will use the same definition.
Why come up with a new 'Mebibyte' system? What does 'kilo-' and 'mega-' actually mean? Answer: 1000 and 1,000,000, not the perversion of the computer scientists.
Now that computers are becoming more popular, the meaning of the terms megabyte and kilobyte are shifting back to compatibility with normal English usage.
There is no need for new terms at all, IMHO.
Time blah blah money blah blah I'm so smart blah blah IQ blah blah I deserve cash
Honestly, don't you understand what hacking is about? Only through playing, playing can we reach total understanding of a complex system, and learn to maximise out own personal growth potential.
Certainly, it is wonderful the way you sacrifice yourself for corporate ideals, but don't forget moeny is only the means of survival, and not the substance.
Get out of your Ayn Rand hellhole and join us, us in the older generation with true socialist, egalitarian ideals.
No, it isn't. Learn to recognise the difference between satire and truth, though it can be close, I grant you.
I suppose if all you do is view email and browse the web, then that isn't the case, but more advanced computer usage yields many cases where command line tools (not just a command line, it's actually the tools that one has access to that's important, like a base linux system) are many times faster.
YES! I absolutely agree, it is nice to see some people have sense and cling on to the old ways.
People perceive that using the commandline is faster since it gives their mind more of a workout, whereas mousing is easier and more "boring".
Umm, even if that is true, I don't see how it matters. Are you a corporate slave? Do you think 'Oh, this may seem boring and repetitive, but hey, there are integers and studies out there that prove this way is faster.' If so, you admit that base fact of economic superiority outweighs subjective experience.
Implicit in the TOGS study is the FACT that CLI is aesthetically superior, else why would TOGs respondants describe the GUI as boring?
The simple fact is that CLI Users have higher IQ's and demand more intellectual challenge and stimulus, stimulus the GUI does not provide.
So, I leave you to your corporate dreaming, your 'productivity', and I'll go off and have a damned good time with the superior, and TOGs-admitted more enterataining CLI.
Thank you.
But normal people don't need these things. Who the hell needs MS Office except business zealots? Nobody needs anything more than vi or emacs and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the command line. With a bit of effort, I can do simple things like post emails, browse newsnet and rip mp3's too, and as nobody but closed minded GUI maniacs need some brain dead pointy-clicky interface, I don't see how retrogressing into the early 90's fraudulent GUI paradigm can do anybody any good.
GUI's are a productivity waste for dummies. Think how long it takes to move the mouse around and select some obscure option in preferences, as compared to editing rc files with sed. Any decent user worth his salt can make his PC sing with eternal, messianic, orgasmic glory as he ./configures, makes and make installs his way to ecstatic, orgasmic destiny.
Fuck this GUI shit. Look at my uid, I've been around since 1969 and used Unix since 1972, after graduating from Multics, and I still curse the day that the closed sourse idiots in Xerox started getting lofty ideas.
Sorry, but I just had to rant. This stuff makes me see red :-)
Show me some easy to use software that is not proprietary.
It doesn't matter to you that it is a FACT that freeBSD does perform better, or that, yes, Linux will have to behave in a more proprietry fashion (ie, make stuff geared at idiots and not intelligent people) to succeed, does it?
The latter they have been attempting (Konq over Lynx, Eudora ovwer mutt), but they have a long way to go.
Enter Linux.
Linux is not remotely a threat on the desktop - as long as it has multiple different GUI's and window managers and toolkits and all the rest, and a lack of a decent browser or office solution, it always will not be a threat.
On the server end, Linux is more of a threat, but Microsoft has never had a big slice of this market anyway. If anything FreeBSD is a greater threat than Linux in this arena, as it is better performing.
However, MS will always have a big place of the server market for as long as they produce a system that is easy to use. Not everyone can afford £60,000 a year for a Unix export, especially small businesses, to keep a server running. MS ensure that a boss can do such things part time - this has really driven the internet revolution, by opening access to the internet to many who would have been cut out by a skills shortage before.
All in all, I can see that MS are wary of Linux, but in truth they have nothing to worry about, as the two OS'es operate in different spheres, and don't really compete at all except in the minds of unthinking Linux apologists and Windows Advocates.
Windows will always have 95% of te market, MS need have no fear of that. The only way Linux will threaten this is if they start behaving in a more proprietry fashion by gearing things at the consumer and not at the Linux Geek.
The problem is the competitive nature of modern business. Despite what the hackers and libertarians may say, the home user has no real need of encryption - encryption is the technology of big government and big business. The home user does not need it for his emails to Aunt Beth and porn downloading, but Big Government and Megacorp(TM) most certainly do, for their official secrets and industrial espionage.
The development of encryption is rather like the development of weapons - it is at it's fastest in a cuthroat society of vicious competition.
If we really want secure communication, we must not treat the symptoms by encrypting, but rather effect a radical cure - we must render all motivations for evesdropping redundant.
How?
Simple. Just attack the basis of competitive society by encouraging greater global cooperation (some sort of 5th International?), smashing big business, nationalise the worst, most competitive industries leaving only the big, lumbering and safe monopolies to do their thing. This way, we reduce the competitive nature of modern society and consequently the technological encryption/decryption competitive paradigm.
It would be tough, but is eminently possible. We just need the will to power!
I am not comfortable with someone in such a powerful and important position in the linux community using his position for his own personal agenda. I think he should have resigned back then, and am glad he has stepped down now.
Although I must make clear I do not like the DMCA, it is still clear to me that such a conflict of interest and abuse of a supposedly monarchal position above such political realities is very wrong indeed.
What is it with the modern generation who think that simulations will improve their likely performance? It is all idiocy, when I was young we did things with a spanner and looked at das blinkenlights under real world conditions. This is so much nonsense, really, the sort of thing I'd expect to come out of our modern CS courses.
Computing is just an offshoot of down-and-dirty engineering, and none of us should forget it. The day we forget the feel of the netowrk cards in our hands, the smell of the overheating cat5, is the day we lose control over the netowkrks of America, the day that our economy starts going backwards.
Alan Cox - Welsh
Keith Owens - Welsh
Davedd Williams - Welsh
Rhiannon Wemys - Welsh
These are the big names of Linux development in the UK, there are very few Englishmen or Scotsmen who are big name Linux developers.
The reasons for this are manifold. Firstly, Wales is a country long since colonised and dominated by England, the first acts of genocide were committed there. The Welsh have a strong and tribal identity, and are usually fairly open to new paradigms (hence their role in the Industrial Revolution, and OSS is at least as significant as the Industrial Revolution).
This means that they have seized on Linux as a revolutionary operating system that may free them from domination by Microsoft and England. The welsh terrorist organisation, Plyde Cymru, uses Linux, it can be seen that they favour the decentralised nature of linux just like they favoured Owain Gln Dour's guerrilla tactics, which were similarly decentralised.
Keith Owens is very much a Welsh nationalist and has criticised England many times, not least when I met him in a pub in Cardiff once, he broadsided against the oppressors (Sorry Keith
I think Linux does have a role to play in revolutionary freedom movements, and the Welsh Situation may make a good testing ground for this, especially around Trethomas.
But my main gripe is the interactivity of the new PIM's, like Outlook Express in Office XP. They allow one's data to be inspected by one's superior, and make for an invasion of personal space by the hierarchy at work.
One of my girlfriends Joselle had to cancel a date with me because her boss inserted a work appointment at the same time, without notice, and she had to obey.
The only way to be truly provate and control your schedule is to have it written down privately. Computers allow for the domination of one's calendar by the digital elite.