I use KDE and vi, and think Gnome was a lot better back in the days when Enlightenment was the usual window manager (never liked Sawfish), but why was this modded Flamebait?
Now, I don't much care for Gnome and if I thought it was important to change his mind (it's not; I think it's important that he use whatever works best for him) I could rattle off a bunch of reasons why (IMO) KDE is better. However, the fact that I disagree with him doesn't make his opinion flamebait.
Oh, wait, sorry. I forgot where I was. "Flamebait" and "troll" both mean "Something I personally disagree with."
Possibly. However, the mere threat of that happening would be enough to keep most, if not all, countries with nuclear weapons or the ability to make them, from supplying terrorists with nuclear material. If we can determine with a high degree of accuracy where the makings of a device originated and widely publicize this fact along with the fact that we will retaliate in kind against the supplier, would *you* want to risk being the supplier?
Most likely, you wouldn't. If we make the threat real and believeable, we'll most likely never have to act on it. I do, however, believe that we would act on it if someone wasn't scared enough and did supply terrorists with nuclear material which was then used against us.
That action may or may not be mass murder. For example, some of our nukes are pretty small. They aren't all the kind you deliver by ICBM, B-52, or B-1. An F-16 can deliver a nuke, and there are also nuclear torpedoes (I don't know if we still have those, but they were carried during the Cold War, at least). Let's say the retaliation takes the form of destroying a relatively remote military base. That's mass killing, but is it mass murder? I'm not saying it isn't, but I'm also not saying it is. It bears discussion.
I grew up in the cold war and remember nuclear fallout shelters in school basements in the midwest. My closest grade school friend's mom was a little girl in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Obviously, she was far enough from the hypocenter that she survived, but the stigma attached to being a hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) would have made her practically unmarriageable in Japan. As a young woman, she met her future husband, my friend's dad, who was an American and didn't care about such things. Because of this, my view on nuclear weapons isn't just that of a person who grew up in the sixties and seventies, but of a person who knows someone who was there in one of the only two uses of nukes against a live target.
Coming from this background, I probably hope more than those who are young enough to have never lived knowing there were Soviet ICBMs aimed at their city 24 x 7 that nuclear weapons are never used again and will eventually be removed from every nation's arsenals. In the meantime, the paradox of nuclear weapons is that we have to maintain a credible nuclear threat until such time as every nation is totally committed to the elimination of nuclear arms and we can all begin eliminating our arsenals together. China, Russia, and the United States will obviously be the last ones holding (I'm not saying this is right or fair, but it's a fact on the ground and won't go away) and will have to destroy our last nukes about the same time.
The world really will be a better place then, but in the meantime, anyone who thinks first use of nukes is a good idea will have to be made to live in fear of the terrible and immediate consequences of doing so.
Another upside of forks that doesn't seem to get mentioned often is they tend to produce quality through competition and natural selection.
Free/Net/Open BSD are a pretty good example of this. They each have their area of focus, but at the same time there is a certain amount of competition between them, I think, and competition leads to innovation. Because they are free, the best code produced by each BSD camp can, and often does, get used by the others as well.
If we wind up with a situation where we have two or three forks of XFree86, we will probably see code-sharing and competition between them, and the one that seems the best to the various Linux and BSD distros and anyone else who uses a Free X server will get used the most.
Multiple forks does not necessarily mean fragmentation. It will most often mean the emergency of a best-of-breed fork that is used by most.
Your argument that forking is not a problem for end-users is spot-on. Many of them might not even know whether they are using XFree86 or an alternative implemenation, and if it's XFree86, whether it's 4.4 or 4.3 (but odds are pretty good it will be 4.3, since most everyone seems to be backing away from 4.4).
I used to work in mainframe operations at a bank in the 1980s and my opinion of the Diebold ATMs of the day were that they were the skankiest, poorest-designed, and just general pieces of crap. If you want to see decent ATM, you have to go to Japan. Their ATMs from 10 years ago are worlds better than the ones we have now. For years, Japanese ATMs have accepted loose coin and loose bills. Just put the coins and bills into the bill and coin hoppers, and they will be accurately counted and deposited to your account. I never saw a Japanese ATM make a mistake, but if it does, you can make it count the money again. And, from an ATM at just about any bank or post office, you can do a wire transfer to any other bank account in the country for a small fee. Of course, they ATMs all speak and have Braille keypads as well.
Knowing that the same company that produced those abominable Diebold ATMs is now making our voting machines is pretty scary.
I can honestly say I still don't really like vi or vim or emacs as much as i do plain old notepad
Well, then don't use any of those things. My dad has been using Linux for about four years now and has no idea how to use emacs or any flavor of vi, despite my constant, umm, "encouragement" that he learn at least the basics of vi, because his tendency to experiment often gets him in trouble, but to no avail. Where choice and usability come together in Linux is that if you don't like your distro's default editor, you can always pick another one. Total beginners can get some more experienced person to help them find one that suits their needs. Windows boosters always troll us about choice as if it's a bad thing, and try to claim users don't want it, but I think most do. The desire for choice and control is why most people dislike thin clients. A thin client net-booted over a fast network is usable, efficient, cheaper than a PC, and guarantees getting your home environment wherever you go on your network, but people don't like them because they want the choice and control of being able to install software on a PC and set it up to work the way they want it to work.
You like Notepad b/c you're used to it, and I agree that everybody needs a simple, clean text editor that they are used to, for quick-n-dirty editing jobs. For me, vi fills the bill. For others, it's Kedit, or Gedit, or if they are on Windows, notepad. Not sure what Mac editor fits that description. You can choose whatever editor works for you (even run Notepad under Wine if you really want to), and that choice is part of what makes Free Software great.
Oh, MS has gotten as least one thing right since Notepad: the photo printing wizard in XP is actually really good, it's one of the best pieces of software Microsoft has ever produced. I wish we had something half that good in Linux. I like it so much that I'm learning to program in the hope that one day I can clone it if somebody doesn't do it before me:-)
Yes, Konqueror 3.2.1 (which I'm using right now:-) is nice. It's even faster than it was before, and the security controls, which were already the most fine-grained of any browser I've used on any platform, have become even more fine-grained but without requiring a user to delve into that if s/he doesn't want to.
KDE 3.2 isn't the great leap forward that 3.0 was over 2.2 (of course, being a point release) but there are some really good refinements in it for the end-user experience. The Kgpg wizard and Kwallet wizard come to mind offhand, in addition to the aforementioned improvements in Konqueror. Kmail is also much improved, including the quality of its IMAP support.
Anyone who is not yet using KDE 3.2 and who has usability complaints has something to look forward to.
You're probably just trolling, but on the off chance that your're not:
KDE and GNOME? Yeah. But there are two of them. Why? End users do not care about choice.
If they do not care about choice (and I don't think that's true of all of them, or even most, or things like skins wouldn't exist in the first place), that's not a problem: in a business environment, the choice of UI is made by the IT department, not the end users. They will choose either Gnome or KDE, as they see fit. The end user, if unfamiliar with FOSS, may be unaware that there even *was* a choice. Nor will the end users ever have to recompile a kernel, or even install one. Do you know long it's been since I've had to build a custom kernel? Never. That is, I've never *had* to build one. Sometimes I do, but it's not necessary, I just do it for fun. Mostly, I use whatever is current in Debian Sid.
Can you tell me anything in, say, Star Office/OpenOffice.org that takes "a Ph.D in Rocket Science (or two hours of trial-and-failure)" to do? I rarely use MS Office (my usual work environment is a text editor) or OpenOffice.org, but when I use either, I find the behavior of both similar, and the ease (or lack thereof) to do things similar as well. Put another way, if your claim is true of FOSS office suites, it is just as true of the most popular proprietary ones.
What about browsers? Hmmm. Mozilla, Firefox, and Konqueror are just as easy to use as IE, and easiser to configure, especially from a security standpoint.
Email? Outlook and Outlook Express have nothing on Evolution and Kmail (or Sylpheed or Balsa) for usability.
Text editors? Same story.
I fully agree that usability is important, but if you can point to an actual usability problem in some FOSS software likely to be used in an office environment, please do. You have not made your case at all.
On the other side of the coin, let me relate my experiences with being hit by geniuses who don't get simple concepts like "Stop sign" + "Line of card" = "Pressing break pedal good idea." That was the first one. The second one was a genius who thought backing his truck at a stoplight on Broadway in downtown San Diego was a good idea. He didn't get the simple concept that there is pretty much guaranteed to be a vehicle behind you. He didn't get the concept of a horn blowing behind you means you'd better stop, either.
The second of those, which was a relatively minor accident, happened less than a month after I'd finished a one-year course of treatment for injuries sustained in the first accident, which as a 30 - 40 MPH no-brakes rear impact.
In both cases, I had to retain a lawyer and sue. Why? Well, in the first case, the guy's insurance company simply didn't want to pay. The claim was open and shut, their client rear-ended my car at a stop sign without even touching his breaks (he was driving a lifted mini-truck that was so high the bottom of his bumper guards cut through the spoiler on the hatchback of my Mustang GT as the rear of the car was rolled up all the way to the backs of the doors). You couldn't ask for anything more clear-cut. The guy even admitted, right there on the spot, that it was his fault, and I had a witness who heard him say it.
Still, his insurance company was going to try and stiff for both medical bills and car repair. I wasn't even asking for anything beyond that. However, their refusal to even meet their obligation forced me to retain a lawyer and sue. When it was just about to go to court, they settled. They knew they didn't have a leg to stand on at trial. I got my car fixed. I got my body fixed, mostly. I still have lingering neck problem that will never completely go away. I have Advil for that. The lawyer got his cut above and beyond the cost of fixing me and my car. My attorney was, among other things, a personal injury lawyer, and he struck me as being an upstanding guy. He wasn't trying to cheat anyone, and all I was after was for the guy's insurance company to meet its legal obligation. If they had just done so at the outset, they would have saved themselves thousands of dollars in legal fees. That cost gets passed straight on to their policy holders, so if your insurance is too expensive, insurance company actions like that are one of the reasons why.
The second time I had to sue was because after the bright spark backed his truck up into my car and I went to file a claim with the trucking company's insurance company for the damage to my vehicle (medical wasn't too bad, but it did aggravate my neck condition a bit), they turned out to be an offshore insurance company in the Caribbean and they quite simply weren't going to pay. In fact, they had apparently never paid a claim to anyone, ever. It was basically a scam. So I had to sue the trucking company itself. What I eventually wound up doing, on my lawyer's advice, was to use my own collision coverage and uninsured motorist coverage to pay for my vehicle damage and medical expenses, and let my insurance company go after the trucking company for recovery.
So, while there are certainly sleazy ambulance-chaser PI lawyers out there, personal injury nevertheless remains an important area of law. Without a PI lawyer, I would have wound up paying at least the medical out of my own pocked in the first of those incidents, and it would have been very difficult to afford.
You are right about Frodo at the ford; Glorfindel put him on the horse and ordered the horse to carry him across, as Frodo's will was frozen by the Nazgul when they appeared. Glorfindel remained behind to stand against the Nazgul. I stand corrected.
WRT Osgiliath, I stand by my claim of gratuitous change. There is no first-hand account of the fighting at Osgiliath in the books, only reports of how it has gone. Nothing of significance to the story happened there. If he was going to raise the skirmishes of Osgiliath to such importance, why not also send Frodo on a jaunt to Cair Andros to witness the minor fighting there, too? The three battles of real importance are the breaking of Isengard by the ents (which is not a battle per se; Saruman's entire army had marched on Rohan), Helm's Deep, and Minas Tirith, which is why protagonists in the story are present at all three. Other battles were minor occurrences that did not influence the course of the War of the Ring.
I do not begrudge Jackson his cuts. Making a movie from a book always requires it. What I begrudge him, rather, are his additions. As you say, he did an overall good job of it. That is precisely why the things he did wrong are so bothersome. He changed the story, and in doing so reduced substantially the integrity and character of Faramir. Faramir acted as Galadriel acted, passing the temptation of the ring. Jackson, however, turned him into a person who would hijack the ring and Frodo's mission, as Boromir and Denethor would have done.
I, too, would have cut Bombadil if push came to shove. While I would have liked to see that entire section in the movie, as I said, I do not begrudge Jackson his cuts, but his additions.
No where in the book does it state or imply that Legolas is the only archer at Helm's Deep, nor does it state or imply that he is the only competent one. Indeed, it is preposterous to think that the Rohirrim would not have used the bow as both a weapon of hunting and a weapon of war. The bow, in our history, filled the place that the firearm does today. It's use was ubiquitous. It is unimaginable that the Rohirrim would not have used it as well. If the battle of Helm's Deep had not included elvish archers, and had correctly shown Erkenbrand's regrouped army arriving at dawn with Gandalf, it would have been just as plausible. The defenders of Helm's Deep were not outnumbered as badly as it was made to appear in the movie. Still, things were not going well. They were saved by the combination of the arrival of Erkenbrand and Gandalf, together with the arrival of the huorns, to which the fleeing orcs of Saruman's army fell prey.
I'm not saying the movies were not a triumph of storytelling, but rather why, in the midst of something so overall well done, did Jackson have to gratuitously fiddle? The things he changed would have stood on their own if he had not.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. Liv Tyler?? Puh-lease!:-p They could have done far better on that. Arwen is regal and of stunning beauty, something that Liv Tyler is, well, not.
Expanding the love interest line, which was not of great significance as written by Tolkien is not, IMO, a good reason to change the story.
WRT Saruman and the Uruk-Hai, you are in error. If you read the books closely, you will find that Uruk-Hai are also in the service of Mordor (specifically mentioned in The Two Towers), and there is no implication that Sauron got them from Saruman. The other way around, in fact, seems to me morelikely. There is speculation that Saruman has cross-bred Orcs and humans, however, the result was not Uruk-Hai. If you read carefully, ou will find that orcish humans such as the southerner at Bree who was associating with Bill Ferny, are believed to possibly have resulted from Saruman breeding humans and orcs. Perhaps Jackson simply made the same mistake you have, but in light of his wholesale changes in the story at other points, I doubt it.
Nor did Sauron create the orcs. They were created, or more accurately warped from elves, by Morgoth, of whom Sauron was merely a servant. It is not made clear how the Uruk-Hai came into being. They may have been made from regular Orcs by Sauron, or they may have evolved on their own. Certainly, if it was beyond Sauron's ability to create the Uruk-Hai from regular orcs, it would have been even farther beyond Saruman's. None of the Istari, including Gandalf and Saruman, who were the mightiest, had the power or depth of lore possessed by Sauron.
wouldn't it slow down the child's abilility [sic] with their first language
Not at all. My daughter will be 16 months old this month and speaks both English and Vietnamese, and does both better than most kids monolingual kids who are between 18 and 24 months old. She already forms grammatical sentences up to five or six words in length and has been doing that for a couple months already. She is highly vocal and tends to learn most words in both English and Vietnamese about the same time.
Additionally, a couple of my closest friends are Singaporean; one speaks four languages, and the other speaks five (four natively). I speak only English (native), Japanese (business level) and a little Vietnamese, and going to Singapore makes me feel linguistically undereducated. A Singaporean who is only bilingual is way behindthe curve; even a trilingual Singaporean is no better than average.
It is well-attested in the literature that bilingualism or multilingualism from infancy or early childhood increases the ease of language acquisition, both of childhood languages and languages acquired later. In effect, a child who is bilingual (or more) from the start does not have a first language; rather, she has several first languages.
Incidentally, most of the Vietnamese that I understand came not from formal teaching (although I've taken a few classes), but just from being surrounded by a lot of (mostly monolingual) native speakers as a part of daily family life. Words related to babies figure particularly prominently in the mix, of course. The fact that I already spoke two languages before acquiring any Vietnamese has made learning Vietnamese much easier, especially with trying to get my mouth around the pronunciation. Both as a tone language and as a language with a vowel system significantly different than that of English or the far simpler Japanese vowel system, pronunciation has been the hardest thing about learning Vietnamese.
Agreed. Of course, as a fan of Tolkien's works since I first met them in 1974, I was also appalled at some of the gratuitous changes changes that Jackson made to the story, most particularly Arwen being injected into the role of Glorfindel to rescue the party on the road to Rivendell and carry Frodo across the ford into Rivendell (what kind of agenda was behind that, I wonder?) and the attempt of Faramir to force Frodo to bring the ring to Minas Tirith, taking him as far as Osgiliath (nothing of the sort ever happened; Faramir gave Sam and Frodo provisions and sent them on their way from Ithilien). The only elf at the battle of Helm's Deep was Legolas. Eomer was not in Theoden's best graces, but he was never banished from Rohan, nor was it Eomer who arrived with Gandalf at daybreak, it was Erkenbrand and the remainder of his men from Westfold, who had been scattered by the attack of Saruman's army. They regrouped with Gandalf's help and went on a forced march to Helm's Deep. Eomer and his men were already inside. Since the banishment of Wormtongue and the death of Theodred (he was never brought back wounded to Edoras, he died in the field), Eomer had been made the chief of the armies of Rohan.
Saruman did not create the Uruk-Hai, either (they already existed, he just recruited them and apparently bred them), but that's a minor point.
Of course, you can't fit everything from a book into a movie due to time and budget constraints, but to willfully change a classic story, distorting events and inserting others that never happened at all, is too much. It's especially distressing in Peter Jackson's case, because there is so very much that he got so very right. All of the things he got right make it the things he willfully screwed up even more painful to watch.
Rather than give him an Oscar, I would have whacked him over the head with it and tell him to not screw up The Hobbit like that, but follow the story.
I was so disappointed by The Two Towers that I have not yet seen The Return of the King. I don't know if I'll even bother.
My advice to those who have not read Tolkien (is there anybody like that on/.?) and want to get maximum enjoyment out of the movies is to not read the books before seeing the movies. Only read the books after you've seen all the movies, if at all. You will then see all of the things Jackson bolluxed up, but will not have harmed your initial enjoyment of his work.
That is a different matter altogether. Unless the pizza restaurant actually dumped those boxes in the landfill itself and said dumping was a violation of the law (I'm not familiar with that case and not interested in buying the book from the Amazon link to find out, but might look in the library the next time I'm there), they should not have been held accountable for that. The person(s) or company responsible for dumping them there should have been. However, what the heck makes a pizza box a superfund item? Superfund was supposed to be for toxic waste cleanup. Now, I've had some pretty bad pizza in my day, but none of it quite qualified as toxic waste (some was close, though).
In the case of a person who throws a gum wrapper in the water from a canoe, the legal and moral liability is clear. Throwing a gum wrapper in the water is littering, and it is illegal (at least in most places). It carries a fine as a means of compelling those who won't refrain from littering because littering is wrong. I have no problem with that, except that perhaps the fines are generally too low to be an effective compulsion, and/or the enforcement is insufficient to make violators believe they will be caught.
For example, here in southern California, one of the leading causes of brush fires every year is cigarettes tossed from moving vehicles. Despite education programs, despite coverage in the media of cigarette-caused fires, despite the fact that littering a highway carries a $1000 fine in California and despite the fact that you could possibly be tried for arson and/or billed for the cost of fighting the fire, people keep on throwing lit cigarette butts out of car windows. I live in LA and I see it constantly, even during the height of fire season (late summer/early - mid fall). I don't know what it would take to get near-100% compliance with the law in those cases, but I'd be willing to try the $100,000 fine approach, and a good Singapore-style caning as extra disincentive.
For example, let's that about the time SCO announced this whole fiasco, I had gone out and bought some SCO stock (I didn't, ain't go no money, but let's say for the sake of argument that I had).
First, I have not invested in SCO per se. I have invested in stock, but SCO didn't get my money, the person I bought the stock from got it. Whatever money SCO got from that stock came the first time they sold it. They got nothing from any sale after that. Now, if my buy was part of a general pattern of buying, then that pushes the price up and Darl can sell some of his stock and make money, or SCO could issue some new stock (AFAIK the didn't), although that would tend to push the share price down (supply and demand).
So, here I sit with some SCO stock that I bought, but I have not really invested any money in SCO. The money is invested in the stock, but SCO doesn't get any of that money.
Now, am I crooked? Or do I just think that whatever SCO's chances, some fool is going to come a long later and be willing to pay a lot more per share for this stock than I did, allowing me to sell it at a profit before the trial is over and walk away. SCO later goes down in flames and the stock is worthless. I made my profit, and SCO benefited not at all from my ownership of their stock.
Is anything about that crooked, or even supportive of SCO? No, not at all. Is it a gamble? Yes. Perhaps less of one than sitting down at a table in Las Vegas, but a gamble nevertheless. I suspect that most of the holders of SCO stock are not particularly supporters of SCO, except to the extent that their hope of having the stock go up makes them hope that SCO prevails; most of them are probably simply people who believe (or at least hope) that the stock will go up and they will therefore profit.
Oh, and in the meanwhile, my owning stock would give me voting power in shareholders' meetings; a hostile takeover of SCO could have stopped this suit dead in its tracks. Imagine if Linux supporters had bought all available SCO shares:-) Of course, that's what an IBM buyout of SCO would have achieved, and what they may well have been privately hoping would happen.
Now, of course, it would be a bad time to buy. However, anyone who could and did buy SCO stock back when this first started to brew up made a shrewd move, and if they have since sold, a tidy profit. There's nothing wrong with that, and certainly no support of SCO in it. It's just buying a thing and later selling it for more than the purchase price. SCO gets nothing of either.
In a world where software has no monetary cost, how much are developers software worth?
First of all, is there such a thing as software with no monetary cost? I don't think so. It may have a substantially reduced monetary cost, but even something that is totally free and Free, such as Debian, costs at least some allocated share of the broadband connection I maintain and the electricity that powers it.
At my company, we sell a service based almost entirely on open source software (the chunk that ties it all together and creates our service is proprietary. The mail and web servers on which we base this, our trouble-ticketing system, and the internal system we use to manage the service are all all open source. We employ programmers who spend a great deal of time either directly working on the open source things (we have a lot of customization) or our own in-house software.
Paying those programmers is the monetary cost to us of open source. Is it cheaper than the monetary cost of proprietary software? Oh, yes. The cost of licensing and paying for support on proprietary software for our hundreds of servers would be prohibitive. I'm not certain we could even have a going concern based on proprietary software. However, our use of Free Software does nevertheless have a monetary cost.
Finally, if you look at the authors of Free/Open Source software, many (perhaps most) of them are making their livings as programmers. Some of them are even being paid to work on their Free projects. Most of the others are probably doing what our programmers do: work on in-house proprietary software which is not released to anyone but is used to run our business and provide our services.
As others have said elsewhere in this thread, there are many combinations of closed and open software that stand between the extremes of all-closed and all-open. I believe it will eventually come down the great majority of "infrastructure software" - operating systems, applications, a lot of embedded systems, services such as HTTP, SMTP, etc., being almost completely Free/Open Source. Proprietary stuff will be found in uses like what my company does, in niches where there either is no FOSS product or none that is any good, and inside of hardware products like routers and load balancers. As Linux distributions become better and better at end-user desktop use and at the same time enterprise-level server use, vendors of proprietary operating systems will find themselves squeezed harder and harder. The last two proprietary OSes standing will probably be Windows and Solaris, but even Microsoft and Sun will eventually have to make their revenue streams from something other than operating systems. Sun, as a hardware vendor, already largely does this. Microsoft will have to follow suit. They may wind up becoming a content company rather than an OS and office suite company, because those revenue streams are going to shrink drastically and maybe dry up entirely. They might even have to become an open source company themselves, but that won't put an end to Microsoft, just to their current business model.
I think calling anything cyberterrorism makes most people in the tech community take it less seriously
Exactly. Nothing about what he did constitutes terrorism. Making crank calls to 911 is already a crime and he could and should be prosecuted for that, but not "cyberterrorism." That's ridiculous.
Now, if they wanted to put him in jail for using WebTV, de facto evidence of criminal stupidity, I'd be all for it. On the other hand, he rendered some WebTV units at least temporarily inoperable, which was a public service:-)
Nowhere did I say "Can't afford." Rather, my opinion is that the price is unjustifiably high for what you get. You could certainly argue that about the ipod itself, as you mention, and the high price of it is pretty much why I don't have one. I could afford one, but I don't see the ipod as offering sufficient extra bang for the large amount of extra bucks. A much cheaper player will meet all my needs, so I have no interest in an ipod, and won't until the price is much lower than it is now. And they get the battery situation worked out:-)
Actually, though, I really prefer players with no moving parts. I don't need 4 gig of storage on a player; a large CF more than meets my needs, and doesn't have the one fatal problem of anything that goes around: someday it will stop going around.
Supply and demand may allow for a $70 price (or not; time will tell if Belkin is at the wrong price point or not), but even that doesn't mean it's not steep. Anytime demand outstrips supply, that allows suppliers to reap windfall profits. Belkin might currently be the only people offering one of these. If six months from now ten other companies are making such a product, you'll see them selling for half what Belkin is currently asking, and still making a profit.
Therefore, yes I do think that 70 bucks is really steep for one of those and would either wait or try building my own rather than spend that much.
While he obviously didn't RTFA, on the other hand, the existence of an external ipod battery pack with LEDs to indicate the charge, a secure (by which they seem to mean locking) on/off switch and a suction-cup mount is something I did not know about before, so I'd call him informative and misinformed, simultaneously.
However, 70 bucks seems kind of steep for that thing. I'm sure you could make one with all or most of its functions and that looked as good for a lot less.
Or if you just want to go on the cheap yet have something sturdier than a playing card box, got a snap-together travel soap carrier and make an ipod battery pack out of that instead. It will take a little more effort and skill to mount the firewire plug in it, but it will last a long time.
Most of our community service comes from drunk drivers, though. Suprisingly, most of them do what they're supposed to.
I'm actually not surprised by that. Why?
Well, just because somebody was under the influence and got behind the wheel, that doesn't mean they aren't by and large responsible and hardworking. I know people who like to go out and drink. Sometimes they get drunk. I would too, before I had kids (parenthood changes that; you need to be able to respond coherently to anything that happens at any time, and that means always being cold sober). However, those people are/were all hardworking people who did their jobs well. Just because you like to party on occassion doesnt make you lazy or stupid. Sometimes, some otherwise responsible people screw up, misjudge how intoxicated they are, and drive. Some of them get caught. In the most tragic cases, they get caught only after they've hurt or killed someone.
That being the case, I'm not surprised that if someone who is otherwise hardworking and of at least average intelligence, but who screwed up and got behind the wheel after having too much to drink and got caught, would then do a good job at community service. I would. I wouldn't see it as having paid my debt for what I did if I just showed up and stood around all day. Plus, putting in an honest effort makes the time pass faster at any job, paid or unpaid.
I'm also not surprised that most people sentenced to community service for other crimes (which probably include things like petty theft and other crimes with a targeted victim, rather than with a potential accidental victim, such as DWI) don't work hard or do a good job, because:
They don't directly benefit from their labor. Whether they work hard or not doesn't matter; only the hours matter, so they see no particular reason to work hard
People who either make or supplement their living by crime are mostly below average in both intelligence and motivation already (the smart ones are rarely caught and will rarely wind up in prison or on community service, but they are a minority of criminals), so they aren't likely to work hard at community service. They don't work hard at anything else, not even at being criminals, or they wouldn't have been caught in the first place. The police naturally catch the low-hanging fruit (stupid, lazy criminals) first because it's easy.
Please, try to get some idea of what you're talking about. Federal non-violent offenders (like him) go to minimum-security prisons. They do not put people who kill, maim (not mame, that's an emulator), rob, or rape in those places. For those, they have maximum-security prisons.
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I use KDE and vi, and think Gnome was a lot better back in the days when Enlightenment was the usual window manager (never liked Sawfish), but why was this modded Flamebait?
:-)
Now, I don't much care for Gnome and if I thought it was important to change his mind (it's not; I think it's important that he use whatever works best for him) I could rattle off a bunch of reasons why (IMO) KDE is better. However, the fact that I disagree with him doesn't make his opinion flamebait.
Oh, wait, sorry. I forgot where I was. "Flamebait" and "troll" both mean "Something I personally disagree with."
Never mind
Possibly. However, the mere threat of that happening would be enough to keep most, if not all, countries with nuclear weapons or the ability to make them, from supplying terrorists with nuclear material. If we can determine with a high degree of accuracy where the makings of a device originated and widely publicize this fact along with the fact that we will retaliate in kind against the supplier, would *you* want to risk being the supplier?
Most likely, you wouldn't. If we make the threat real and believeable, we'll most likely never have to act on it. I do, however, believe that we would act on it if someone wasn't scared enough and did supply terrorists with nuclear material which was then used against us.
That action may or may not be mass murder. For example, some of our nukes are pretty small. They aren't all the kind you deliver by ICBM, B-52, or B-1. An F-16 can deliver a nuke, and there are also nuclear torpedoes (I don't know if we still have those, but they were carried during the Cold War, at least). Let's say the retaliation takes the form of destroying a relatively remote military base. That's mass killing, but is it mass murder? I'm not saying it isn't, but I'm also not saying it is. It bears discussion.
I grew up in the cold war and remember nuclear fallout shelters in school basements in the midwest. My closest grade school friend's mom was a little girl in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Obviously, she was far enough from the hypocenter that she survived, but the stigma attached to being a hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) would have made her practically unmarriageable in Japan. As a young woman, she met her future husband, my friend's dad, who was an American and didn't care about such things. Because of this, my view on nuclear weapons isn't just that of a person who grew up in the sixties and seventies, but of a person who knows someone who was there in one of the only two uses of nukes against a live target.
Coming from this background, I probably hope more than those who are young enough to have never lived knowing there were Soviet ICBMs aimed at their city 24 x 7 that nuclear weapons are never used again and will eventually be removed from every nation's arsenals. In the meantime, the paradox of nuclear weapons is that we have to maintain a credible nuclear threat until such time as every nation is totally committed to the elimination of nuclear arms and we can all begin eliminating our arsenals together. China, Russia, and the United States will obviously be the last ones holding (I'm not saying this is right or fair, but it's a fact on the ground and won't go away) and will have to destroy our last nukes about the same time.
The world really will be a better place then, but in the meantime, anyone who thinks first use of nukes is a good idea will have to be made to live in fear of the terrible and immediate consequences of doing so.
Ummm, Ft. Detrick is mentioned clearly in the article, no need to list it again. Oh, you didn't read it? Never mind :-)
Why do we need more TLDs? Are the spammers already coming close to having run through all mathematically possible domain names in .info and .biz?
Are you trying to imply that having a longer dick is not pragmatic?
Another upside of forks that doesn't seem to get mentioned often is they tend to produce quality through competition and natural selection.
Free/Net/Open BSD are a pretty good example of this. They each have their area of focus, but at the same time there is a certain amount of competition between them, I think, and competition leads to innovation. Because they are free, the best code produced by each BSD camp can, and often does, get used by the others as well.
If we wind up with a situation where we have two or three forks of XFree86, we will probably see code-sharing and competition between them, and the one that seems the best to the various Linux and BSD distros and anyone else who uses a Free X server will get used the most.
Multiple forks does not necessarily mean fragmentation. It will most often mean the emergency of a best-of-breed fork that is used by most.
Your argument that forking is not a problem for end-users is spot-on. Many of them might not even know whether they are using XFree86 or an alternative implemenation, and if it's XFree86, whether it's 4.4 or 4.3 (but odds are pretty good it will be 4.3, since most everyone seems to be
backing away from 4.4).
No, no, it's a cabal you're thinking of. There is no cabal.
I used to work in mainframe operations at a bank in the 1980s and my opinion of the Diebold ATMs of the day were that they were the skankiest, poorest-designed, and just general pieces of crap. If you want to see decent ATM, you have to go to Japan. Their ATMs from 10 years ago are worlds better than the ones we have now. For years, Japanese ATMs have accepted loose coin and loose bills. Just put the coins and bills into the bill and coin hoppers, and they will be accurately counted and deposited to your account. I never saw a Japanese ATM make a mistake, but if it does, you can make it count the money again. And, from an ATM at just about any bank or post office, you can do a wire transfer to any other bank account in the country for a small fee. Of course, they ATMs all speak and have Braille keypads as well.
Knowing that the same company that produced those abominable Diebold ATMs is now making our voting machines is pretty scary.
Well, then don't use any of those things. My dad has been using Linux for about four years now and has no idea how to use emacs or any flavor of vi, despite my constant, umm, "encouragement" that he learn at least the basics of vi, because his tendency to experiment often gets him in trouble, but to no avail. Where choice and usability come together in Linux is that if you don't like your distro's default editor, you can always pick another one. Total beginners can get some more experienced person to help them find one that suits their needs. Windows boosters always troll us about choice as if it's a bad thing, and try to claim users don't want it, but I think most do. The desire for choice and control is why most people dislike thin clients. A thin client net-booted over a fast network is usable, efficient, cheaper than a PC, and guarantees getting your home environment wherever you go on your network, but people don't like them because they want the choice and control of being able to install software on a PC and set it up to work the way they want it to work.
You like Notepad b/c you're used to it, and I agree that everybody needs a simple, clean text editor that they are used to, for quick-n-dirty editing jobs. For me, vi fills the bill. For others, it's Kedit, or Gedit, or if they are on Windows, notepad. Not sure what Mac editor fits that description. You can choose whatever editor works for you (even run Notepad under Wine if you really want to), and that choice is part of what makes Free Software great.
Oh, MS has gotten as least one thing right since Notepad: the photo printing wizard in XP is actually really good, it's one of the best pieces of software Microsoft has ever produced. I wish we had something half that good in Linux. I like it so much that I'm learning to program in the hope that one day I can clone it if somebody doesn't do it before me
Yes, Konqueror 3.2.1 (which I'm using right now :-) is nice. It's even faster than it was before, and the security controls, which were already the most fine-grained of any browser I've used on any platform, have become even more fine-grained but without requiring a user to delve into that if s/he doesn't want to.
KDE 3.2 isn't the great leap forward that 3.0 was over 2.2 (of course, being a point release) but there are some really good refinements in it for the end-user experience. The Kgpg wizard and Kwallet wizard come to mind offhand, in addition to the aforementioned improvements in Konqueror. Kmail is also much improved, including the quality of its IMAP support.
Anyone who is not yet using KDE 3.2 and who has usability complaints has something to look forward to.
KDE and GNOME? Yeah. But there are two of them. Why? End users do not care about choice.
If they do not care about choice (and I don't think that's true of all of them, or even most, or things like skins wouldn't exist in the first place), that's not a problem: in a business environment, the choice of UI is made by the IT department, not the end users. They will choose either Gnome or KDE, as they see fit. The end user, if unfamiliar with FOSS, may be unaware that there even *was* a choice. Nor will the end users ever have to recompile a kernel, or even install one. Do you know long it's been since I've had to build a custom kernel? Never. That is, I've never *had* to build one. Sometimes I do, but it's not necessary, I just do it for fun. Mostly, I use whatever is current in Debian Sid.
Can you tell me anything in, say, Star Office/OpenOffice.org that takes "a Ph.D in Rocket Science (or two hours of trial-and-failure)" to do? I rarely use MS Office (my usual work environment is a text editor) or OpenOffice.org, but when I use either, I find the behavior of both similar, and the ease (or lack thereof) to do things similar as well. Put another way, if your claim is true of FOSS office suites, it is just as true of the most popular proprietary ones.
What about browsers? Hmmm. Mozilla, Firefox, and Konqueror are just as easy to use as IE, and easiser to configure, especially from a security standpoint.
Email? Outlook and Outlook Express have nothing on Evolution and Kmail (or Sylpheed or Balsa) for usability.
Text editors? Same story.
I fully agree that usability is important, but if you can point to an actual usability problem in some FOSS software likely to be used in an office environment, please do. You have not made your case at all.
On the other side of the coin, let me relate my experiences with being hit by geniuses who don't get simple concepts like "Stop sign" + "Line of card" = "Pressing break pedal good idea." That was the first one. The second one was a genius who thought backing his truck at a stoplight on Broadway in downtown San Diego was a good idea. He didn't get the simple concept that there is pretty much guaranteed to be a vehicle behind you. He didn't get the concept of a horn blowing behind you means you'd better stop, either.
The second of those, which was a relatively minor accident, happened less than a month after I'd finished a one-year course of treatment for injuries sustained in the first accident, which as a 30 - 40 MPH no-brakes rear impact.
In both cases, I had to retain a lawyer and sue. Why? Well, in the first case, the guy's insurance company simply didn't want to pay. The claim was open and shut, their client rear-ended my car at a stop sign without even touching his breaks (he was driving a lifted mini-truck that was so high the bottom of his bumper guards cut through the spoiler on the hatchback of my Mustang GT as the rear of the car was rolled up all the way to the backs of the doors). You couldn't ask for anything more clear-cut. The guy even admitted, right there on the spot, that it was his fault, and I had a witness who heard him say it.
Still, his insurance company was going to try and stiff for both medical bills and car repair. I wasn't even asking for anything beyond that. However, their refusal to even meet their obligation forced me to retain a lawyer and sue. When it was just about to go to court, they settled. They knew they didn't have a leg to stand on at trial. I got my car fixed. I got my body fixed, mostly. I still have lingering neck problem that will never completely go away. I have Advil for that. The lawyer got his cut above and beyond the cost of fixing me and my car. My attorney was, among other things, a personal injury lawyer, and he struck me as being an upstanding guy. He wasn't trying to cheat anyone, and all I was after was for the guy's insurance company to meet its legal obligation. If they had just done so at the outset, they would have saved themselves thousands of dollars in legal fees. That cost gets passed straight on to their policy holders, so if your insurance is too expensive, insurance company actions like that are one of the reasons why.
The second time I had to sue was because after the bright spark backed his truck up into my car and I went to file a claim with the trucking company's insurance company for the damage to my vehicle (medical wasn't too bad, but it did aggravate my neck condition a bit), they turned out to be an offshore insurance company in the Caribbean and they quite simply weren't going to pay. In fact, they had apparently never paid a claim to anyone, ever. It was basically a scam. So I had to sue the trucking company itself. What I eventually wound up doing, on my lawyer's advice, was to use my own collision coverage and uninsured motorist coverage to pay for my vehicle damage and medical expenses, and let my insurance company go after the trucking company for recovery.
So, while there are certainly sleazy ambulance-chaser PI lawyers out there, personal injury nevertheless remains an important area of law. Without a PI lawyer, I would have wound up paying at least the medical out of my own pocked in the first of those incidents, and it would have been very difficult to afford.
You are right about Frodo at the ford; Glorfindel put him on the horse and ordered the horse to carry him across, as Frodo's will was frozen by the Nazgul when they appeared. Glorfindel remained behind to stand against the Nazgul. I stand corrected.
:-p They could have done far better on that. Arwen is regal and of stunning beauty, something that Liv Tyler is, well, not.
WRT Osgiliath, I stand by my claim of gratuitous change. There is no first-hand account of the fighting at Osgiliath in the books, only reports of how it has gone. Nothing of significance to the story happened there. If he was going to raise the skirmishes of Osgiliath to such importance, why not also send Frodo on a jaunt to Cair Andros to witness the minor fighting there, too? The three battles of real importance are the breaking of Isengard by the ents (which is not a battle per se; Saruman's entire army had marched on Rohan), Helm's Deep, and Minas Tirith, which is why protagonists in the story are present at all three. Other battles were minor occurrences that did not influence the course of the War of the Ring.
I do not begrudge Jackson his cuts. Making a movie from a book always requires it. What I begrudge him, rather, are his additions. As you say, he did an overall good job of it. That is precisely why the things he did wrong are so bothersome. He changed the story, and in doing so reduced substantially the integrity and character of Faramir. Faramir acted as Galadriel acted, passing the temptation of the ring. Jackson, however, turned him into a person who would hijack the ring and Frodo's mission, as Boromir and Denethor would have done.
I, too, would have cut Bombadil if push came to shove. While I would have liked to see that entire section in the movie, as I said, I do not begrudge Jackson his cuts, but his additions.
No where in the book does it state or imply that Legolas is the only archer at Helm's Deep, nor does it state or imply that he is the only competent one. Indeed, it is preposterous to think that the Rohirrim would not have used the bow as both a weapon of hunting and a weapon of war. The bow, in our history, filled the place that the firearm does today. It's use was ubiquitous. It is unimaginable that the Rohirrim would not have used it as well. If the battle of Helm's Deep had not included elvish archers, and had correctly shown Erkenbrand's regrouped army arriving at dawn with Gandalf, it would have been just as plausible. The defenders of Helm's Deep were not outnumbered as badly as it was made to appear in the movie. Still, things were not going well. They were saved by the combination of the arrival of Erkenbrand and Gandalf, together with the arrival of the huorns, to which the fleeing orcs of Saruman's army fell prey.
I'm not saying the movies were not a triumph of storytelling, but rather why, in the midst of something so overall well done, did Jackson have to gratuitously fiddle? The things he changed would have stood on their own if he had not.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. Liv Tyler?? Puh-lease!
WRT Saruman and the Uruk-Hai, you are in error. If you read the books closely, you will find that Uruk-Hai are also in the service of Mordor (specifically mentioned in The Two Towers), and there is no implication that Sauron got them from Saruman. The other way around, in fact, seems to me morelikely. There is speculation that Saruman has cross-bred Orcs and humans, however, the result was not Uruk-Hai. If you read carefully, ou will find that orcish humans such as the southerner at Bree who was associating with Bill Ferny, are believed to possibly have resulted from Saruman breeding humans and orcs. Perhaps Jackson simply made the same mistake you have, but in light of his wholesale changes in the story at other points, I doubt it.
Nor did Sauron create the orcs. They were created, or more accurately warped from elves, by Morgoth, of whom Sauron was merely a servant.
It is not made clear how the Uruk-Hai came into being. They may have been made from regular Orcs by Sauron, or they may have evolved on their own. Certainly, if it was beyond Sauron's ability to create the Uruk-Hai from regular orcs, it would have been even farther beyond Saruman's. None of the Istari, including Gandalf and Saruman, who were the mightiest, had the power or depth of lore possessed by Sauron.
Not at all. My daughter will be 16 months old this month and speaks both English and Vietnamese, and does both better than most kids monolingual kids who are between 18 and 24 months old. She already forms grammatical sentences up to five or six words in length and has been doing that for a couple months already. She is highly vocal and tends to learn most words in both English and Vietnamese about the same time.
Additionally, a couple of my closest friends are Singaporean; one speaks four languages, and the other speaks five (four natively). I speak only English (native), Japanese (business level) and a little Vietnamese, and going to Singapore makes me feel linguistically undereducated. A Singaporean who is only bilingual is way behindthe curve; even a trilingual Singaporean is no better than average.
It is well-attested in the literature that bilingualism or multilingualism from infancy or early childhood increases the ease of language acquisition, both of childhood languages and languages acquired later. In effect, a child who is bilingual (or more) from the start does not have a first language; rather, she has several first languages.
Incidentally, most of the Vietnamese that I understand came not from formal teaching (although I've taken a few classes), but just from being surrounded by a lot of (mostly monolingual) native speakers as a part of daily family life. Words related to babies figure particularly prominently in the mix, of course. The fact that I already spoke two languages before acquiring any Vietnamese has made learning Vietnamese much easier, especially with trying to get my mouth around the pronunciation. Both as a tone language and as a language with a vowel system significantly different than that of English or the far simpler Japanese vowel system, pronunciation has been the hardest thing about learning Vietnamese.
Agreed. Of course, as a fan of Tolkien's works since I first met them in 1974, I was also appalled at some of the gratuitous changes changes that Jackson made to the story, most particularly Arwen being injected into the role of Glorfindel to rescue the party on the road to Rivendell and carry Frodo across the ford into Rivendell (what kind of agenda was behind that, I wonder?) and the attempt of Faramir to force Frodo to bring the ring to Minas Tirith, taking him as far as Osgiliath (nothing of the sort ever happened; Faramir gave Sam and Frodo provisions and sent them on their way from Ithilien). The only elf at the battle of Helm's Deep was Legolas. Eomer was not in Theoden's best graces, but he was never banished from Rohan, nor was it Eomer who arrived with Gandalf at daybreak, it was Erkenbrand and the remainder of his men from Westfold, who had been scattered by the attack of Saruman's army. They regrouped with Gandalf's help and went on a forced march to Helm's Deep. Eomer and his men were already inside. Since the banishment of Wormtongue and the death of Theodred (he was never brought back wounded to Edoras, he died in the field), Eomer had been made the chief of the armies of Rohan.
/.?) and want to get maximum enjoyment out of the movies is to not read the books before seeing the movies. Only read the books after you've seen all the movies, if at all. You will then see all of the things Jackson bolluxed up, but will not have harmed your initial enjoyment of his work.
Saruman did not create the Uruk-Hai, either (they already existed, he just recruited them and apparently bred them), but that's a minor point.
Of course, you can't fit everything from a book into a movie due to time and budget constraints, but to willfully change a classic story, distorting events and inserting others that never happened at all, is too much. It's especially distressing in Peter Jackson's case, because there is so very much that he got so very right. All of the things he got right make it the things he willfully screwed up even more painful to watch.
Rather than give him an Oscar, I would have whacked him over the head with it and tell him to not screw up The Hobbit like that, but follow the story.
I was so disappointed by The Two Towers that I have not yet seen The Return of the King. I don't know if I'll even bother.
My advice to those who have not read Tolkien (is there anybody like that on
That is a different matter altogether. Unless the pizza restaurant actually dumped those boxes in the landfill itself and said dumping was a violation of the law (I'm not familiar with that case and not interested in buying the book from the Amazon link to find out, but might look in the library the next time I'm there), they should not have been held accountable for that. The person(s) or company responsible for dumping them there should have been. However, what the heck makes a pizza box a superfund item? Superfund was supposed to be for toxic waste cleanup. Now, I've had some pretty bad pizza in my day, but none of it quite qualified as toxic waste (some was close, though).
In the case of a person who throws a gum wrapper in the water from a canoe, the legal and moral liability is clear. Throwing a gum wrapper in the water is littering, and it is illegal (at least in most places). It carries a fine as a means of compelling those who won't refrain from littering because littering is wrong. I have no problem with that, except that perhaps the fines are generally too low to be an effective compulsion, and/or the enforcement is insufficient to make violators believe they will be caught.
For example, here in southern California, one of the leading causes of brush fires every year is cigarettes tossed from moving vehicles. Despite education programs, despite coverage in the media of cigarette-caused fires, despite the fact that littering a highway carries a $1000 fine in California and despite the fact that you could possibly be tried for arson and/or billed for the cost of fighting the fire, people keep on throwing lit cigarette butts out of car windows. I live in LA and I see it constantly, even during the height of fire season (late summer/early - mid fall). I don't know what it would take to get near-100% compliance with the law in those cases, but I'd be willing to try the $100,000 fine approach, and a good Singapore-style caning as extra disincentive.
Not necessarily.
:-) Of course, that's what an IBM buyout of SCO would have achieved, and what they may well have been privately hoping would happen.
For example, let's that about the time SCO announced this whole fiasco, I had gone out and bought some SCO stock (I didn't, ain't go no money, but let's say for the sake of argument that I had).
First, I have not invested in SCO per se. I have invested in stock, but SCO didn't get my money, the person I bought the stock from got it. Whatever money SCO got from that stock came the first time they sold it. They got nothing from any sale after that. Now, if my buy was part of a general pattern of buying, then that pushes the price up and Darl can sell some of his stock and make money, or SCO could issue some new stock (AFAIK the didn't), although that would tend to push the share price down (supply and demand).
So, here I sit with some SCO stock that I bought, but I have not really invested any money in SCO. The money is invested in the stock, but SCO doesn't get any of that money.
Now, am I crooked? Or do I just think that whatever SCO's chances, some fool is going to come a long later and be willing to pay a lot more per share for this stock than I did, allowing me to sell it at a profit before the trial is over and walk away. SCO later goes down in flames and the stock is worthless. I made my profit, and SCO benefited not at all from my ownership of their stock.
Is anything about that crooked, or even supportive of SCO? No, not at all. Is it a gamble? Yes. Perhaps less of one than sitting down at a table in Las Vegas, but a gamble nevertheless. I suspect that most of the holders of SCO stock are not particularly supporters of SCO, except to the extent that their hope of having the stock go up makes them hope that SCO prevails; most of them are probably simply people who believe (or at least hope) that the stock will go up and they will therefore profit.
Oh, and in the meanwhile, my owning stock would give me voting power in shareholders' meetings; a hostile takeover of SCO could have stopped this suit dead in its tracks. Imagine if Linux supporters had bought all available SCO shares
Now, of course, it would be a bad time to buy. However, anyone who could and did buy SCO stock back when this first started to brew up made a shrewd move, and if they have since sold, a tidy profit. There's nothing wrong with that, and certainly no support of SCO in it. It's just buying a thing and later selling it for more than the purchase price. SCO gets nothing of either.
First of all, is there such a thing as software with no monetary cost? I don't think so. It may have a substantially reduced monetary cost, but even something that is totally free and Free, such as Debian, costs at least some allocated share of the broadband connection I maintain and the electricity that powers it.
At my company, we sell a service based almost entirely on open source software (the chunk that ties it all together and creates our service is proprietary. The mail and web servers on which we base this, our trouble-ticketing system, and the internal system we use to manage the service are all all open source. We employ programmers who spend a great deal of time either directly working on the open source things (we have a lot of customization) or our own in-house software.
Paying those programmers is the monetary cost to us of open source. Is it cheaper than the monetary cost of proprietary software? Oh, yes. The cost of licensing and paying for support on proprietary software for our hundreds of servers would be prohibitive. I'm not certain we could even have a going concern based on proprietary software. However, our use of Free Software does nevertheless have a monetary cost.
Finally, if you look at the authors of Free/Open Source software, many (perhaps most) of them are making their livings as programmers. Some of them are even being paid to work on their Free projects. Most of the others are probably doing what our programmers do: work on in-house proprietary software which is not released to anyone but is used to run our business and provide our services.
As others have said elsewhere in this thread, there are many combinations of closed and open software that stand between the extremes of all-closed and all-open. I believe it will eventually come down the great majority of "infrastructure software" - operating systems, applications, a lot of embedded systems, services such as HTTP, SMTP, etc., being almost completely Free/Open Source. Proprietary stuff will be found in uses like what my company does, in niches where there either is no FOSS product or none that is any good, and inside of hardware products like routers and load balancers. As Linux distributions become better and better at end-user desktop use and at the same time enterprise-level server use, vendors of proprietary operating systems will find themselves squeezed harder and harder. The last two proprietary OSes standing will probably be Windows and Solaris, but even Microsoft and Sun will eventually have to make their revenue streams from something other than operating systems. Sun, as a hardware vendor, already largely does this. Microsoft will have to follow suit. They may wind up becoming a content company rather than an OS and office suite company, because those revenue streams are going to shrink drastically and maybe dry up entirely. They might even have to become an open source company themselves, but that won't put an end to Microsoft, just to their current business model.
Exactly. Nothing about what he did constitutes terrorism. Making crank calls to 911 is already a crime and he could and should be prosecuted for that, but not "cyberterrorism." That's ridiculous.
Now, if they wanted to put him in jail for using WebTV, de facto evidence of criminal stupidity, I'd be all for it. On the other hand, he rendered some WebTV units at least temporarily inoperable, which was a public service :-)
Nowhere did I say "Can't afford." Rather, my opinion is that the price is unjustifiably high for what you get. You could certainly argue that about the ipod itself, as you mention, and the high price of it is pretty much why I don't have one. I could afford one, but I don't see the ipod as offering sufficient extra bang for the large amount of extra bucks. A much cheaper player will meet all my needs, so I have no interest in an ipod, and won't until the price is much lower than it is now. And they get the battery situation worked out :-)
Actually, though, I really prefer players with no moving parts. I don't need 4 gig of storage on a player; a large CF more than meets my needs, and doesn't have the one fatal problem of anything that goes around: someday it will stop going around.
Supply and demand may allow for a $70 price (or not; time will tell if Belkin is at the wrong price point or not), but even that doesn't mean it's not steep. Anytime demand outstrips supply, that allows suppliers to reap windfall profits. Belkin might currently be the only people offering one of these. If six months from now ten other companies are making such a product, you'll see them selling for half what Belkin is currently asking, and still making a profit.
Therefore, yes I do think that 70 bucks is really steep for one of those and would either wait or try building my own rather than spend that much.
While he obviously didn't RTFA, on the other hand, the existence of an external ipod battery pack with LEDs to indicate the charge, a secure (by which they seem to mean locking) on/off switch and a suction-cup mount is something I did not know about before, so I'd call him informative and misinformed, simultaneously.
However, 70 bucks seems kind of steep for that thing. I'm sure you could make one with all or most of its functions and that looked as good for a lot less.
Or if you just want to go on the cheap yet have something sturdier than a playing card box, got a snap-together travel soap carrier and make an ipod battery pack out of that instead. It will take a little more effort and skill to mount the firewire plug in it, but it will last a long time.
Yeah, I've been on trains that slow a few times, too.
I'm actually not surprised by that. Why?
Well, just because somebody was under the influence and got behind the wheel, that doesn't mean they aren't by and large responsible and hardworking. I know people who like to go out and drink. Sometimes they get drunk. I would too, before I had kids (parenthood changes that; you need to be able to respond coherently to anything that happens at any time, and that means always being cold sober). However, those people are/were all hardworking people who did their jobs well. Just because you like to party on occassion doesnt make you lazy or stupid. Sometimes, some otherwise responsible people screw up, misjudge how intoxicated they are, and drive. Some of them get caught. In the most tragic cases, they get caught only after they've hurt or killed someone.
That being the case, I'm not surprised that if someone who is otherwise hardworking and of at least average intelligence, but who screwed up and got behind the wheel after having too much to drink and got caught, would then do a good job at community service. I would. I wouldn't see it as having paid my debt for what I did if I just showed up and stood around all day. Plus, putting in an honest effort makes the time pass faster at any job, paid or unpaid.
I'm also not surprised that most people sentenced to community service for other crimes (which probably include things like petty theft and other crimes with a targeted victim, rather than with a potential accidental victim, such as DWI) don't work hard or do a good job, because:
Please, try to get some idea of what you're talking about. Federal non-violent offenders (like him) go to minimum-security prisons. They do not put people who kill, maim (not mame, that's an emulator), rob, or rape in those places. For those, they have maximum-security prisons.