Heh... Back in the good ol' days (1960s and 1970s), the governments in most Soviet Bloc countries specifically prohibited listening and distribution of popular Western music, as it was seen as a "conductor of imperialist capitalist influence," so you could very well be arrested for listening to the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.
Not only that, there existed certain citizens who took upon themselves the responsibility of spying for anti-government activities, and in fact did report people for such capital offenses as listening to Western music.
Naturally, this situation created an enormous, thriving samizdat production of bootlegs of popular albums of the time, and in 1966 - 1968, during the social phenomenon known as the "new wave," which was initiatied by the Czech intellectuals, the regime relaxed enough to allow even state radio stations to play the evil Western music.
Which lasted until that fateful August 20 of 1968, may it forever remain in out memories, when Soviet tanks rolling in the beautiful city of Prague announced yet another blow to the free human spirit.
But I am sure the RIAA (and the MPAA for that matter) will be pleasantly surprised to learn that the methods they use to maintain their monopoly are so similar to the Soviet ones. Corporations have already demonstrated thay won't hesitate to use force in order to protect their "intellectual property," so how long before they employ their own army (or armies)?
On a good note, the first guy was so boring (talking about why XP is cool because it's on a 32bit kernel, not a 16bit one on top of DOS like Win98/ME)
Curiously enough, Microsoft Chicago (circa 1993), which later became Windows 95, was supposed to be true 32-bit (ha!). And there are still people who buy Microsoft propaganda today. I suppose George Orwell was right -- ignorance is power.
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win."
-Mohandas Gandhi (I'm not sure whether
he was referring to the open source movement 8-)
Since when does Excel constitute a "small, reusable" component? I remember that Excel in the Office 4.0 (circa 1994) suite was about 20 MB barebone installation, and the entire product was
over 200 MB.
At the same time, my TeTeX distribution, version 1.0.6 from December 1999 is exactly 50144057 bytes, or a little less than 50 MB. If we make a very generous estimate for temporary files created by TeX, such as fonts, etc., the entire space occupied is maybe 80 MB -- let's double that and make it 160 MB for the purposes of our demonstration.
The difference here is that I can remove every single package from the distribution and still end up with a perfectly functional typesetting engine, provided that it has access to at least one font file. And I can add packages just as easily, or I can write my own ones.
And you know what? The complete documentation on how to write extensions in TeX has been available for more than 15 years now. No constantly changing, undocumented APIs. No ridiculous platform dependencies. Tech support provided for free by Usenet, which far surpasses most commercial tech support facilities. Software which is dependable, modular, and free as in free speech and as in free beer.
Consider the following: in just a few dozen lines of code, I can write a script that dynamically generates TeX (or derivative) markup, and automate tasks like mail address lookup and merging, or anything that involves sophisticated text processing with multiple input sources; I'm doing this with tools like Awk and M4, which have not been specifically designed to interoperate with each other, but they are exteremely flexible, and, combined with the power of TeX, are suitable for the most challenging document production tasks. At the same time, all of these tools operate just as well in various other combinations.
At the same time, none of the monolithware has the flexibility to process textual input in an automated fashion; for repetitious operations over multiple entries that are identical, I have to either click with the mouse thousands of times, or deal with the cumbersome, unportable Visual Basic or whatever it's called. I don't think so.
I think markup languages are the way to go, aided by small text processing tools, which fit like LEGO building blocks to create a masterpiece of semantic processing.
Monolithware simply doesn't cut it, because it's extremely difficuly to maintain, usually suffers from multiple design flaws, due to the feature bloat in it, and it's not user friendly, in the sense that it provides mouse-clickable features that cannot be invoked in an automated manner, other than directly calling the underlying APIs. Which can be outright impossible with software produced by the Great Evil of the Northwest.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh... Back in the good ol' days (1960s and 1970s), the governments in most Soviet Bloc countries specifically prohibited listening and distribution of popular Western music, as it was seen as a "conductor of imperialist capitalist influence," so you could very well be arrested for listening to the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.
Not only that, there existed certain citizens who took upon themselves the responsibility of spying for anti-government activities, and in fact did report people for such capital offenses as listening to Western music.
Naturally, this situation created an enormous, thriving samizdat production of bootlegs of popular albums of the time, and in 1966 - 1968, during the social phenomenon known as the "new wave," which was initiatied by the Czech intellectuals, the regime relaxed enough to allow even state radio stations to play the evil Western music.
Which lasted until that fateful August 20 of 1968, may it forever remain in out memories, when Soviet tanks rolling in the beautiful city of Prague announced yet another blow to the free human spirit.
But I am sure the RIAA (and the MPAA for that matter) will be pleasantly surprised to learn that the methods they use to maintain their monopoly are so similar to the Soviet ones. Corporations have already demonstrated thay won't hesitate to use force in order to protect their "intellectual property," so how long before they employ their own army (or armies)?
On a good note, the first guy was so boring (talking about why XP is cool because it's on a 32bit kernel, not a 16bit one on top of DOS like Win98/ME)
Curiously enough, Microsoft Chicago (circa 1993), which later became Windows 95, was supposed to be true 32-bit (ha!). And there are still people who buy Microsoft propaganda today. I suppose George Orwell was right -- ignorance is power.
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win."
-Mohandas Gandhi (I'm not sure whether he was referring to the open source movement 8-)
Since when does Excel constitute a "small, reusable" component? I remember that Excel in the Office 4.0 (circa 1994) suite was about 20 MB barebone installation, and the entire product was over 200 MB.
At the same time, my TeTeX distribution, version 1.0.6 from December 1999 is exactly 50144057 bytes, or a little less than 50 MB. If we make a very generous estimate for temporary files created by TeX, such as fonts, etc., the entire space occupied is maybe 80 MB -- let's double that and make it 160 MB for the purposes of our demonstration.
The difference here is that I can remove every single package from the distribution and still end up with a perfectly functional typesetting engine, provided that it has access to at least one font file. And I can add packages just as easily, or I can write my own ones.
And you know what? The complete documentation on how to write extensions in TeX has been available for more than 15 years now. No constantly changing, undocumented APIs. No ridiculous platform dependencies. Tech support provided for free by Usenet, which far surpasses most commercial tech support facilities. Software which is dependable, modular, and free as in free speech and as in free beer.
Consider the following: in just a few dozen lines of code, I can write a script that dynamically generates TeX (or derivative) markup, and automate tasks like mail address lookup and merging, or anything that involves sophisticated text processing with multiple input sources; I'm doing this with tools like Awk and M4, which have not been specifically designed to interoperate with each other, but they are exteremely flexible, and, combined with the power of TeX, are suitable for the most challenging document production tasks. At the same time, all of these tools operate just as well in various other combinations.At the same time, none of the monolithware has the flexibility to process textual input in an automated fashion; for repetitious operations over multiple entries that are identical, I have to either click with the mouse thousands of times, or deal with the cumbersome, unportable Visual Basic or whatever it's called. I don't think so.
I think markup languages are the way to go, aided by small text processing tools, which fit like LEGO building blocks to create a masterpiece of semantic processing.
Monolithware simply doesn't cut it, because it's extremely difficuly to maintain, usually suffers from multiple design flaws, due to the feature bloat in it, and it's not user friendly, in the sense that it provides mouse-clickable features that cannot be invoked in an automated manner, other than directly calling the underlying APIs. Which can be outright impossible with software produced by the Great Evil of the Northwest.
The minute I read this, I knew someone would be crazy enough...
How about Brix (sorry, couldn't help it)?