I should begin with that I am a confirmed Debian booster. I run Debian at home and love it. Anyhow, at work an old server was decommissioned and I was told I could have it, so I burned the latest unstable CD and tried to install Debian. No go. I have heard a lot about Gentoo but have never really played with it so I decided to try that. No - didn't work. So then I had some Red Hat CDs lying around so I tried that. No go again.
In years past I have always noticed that FreeBSD always makes it easy to install. Makes it easy meaning it recognizes hard drives, network cards, even 56K modems, without a problem. I installed FreeBSD with two 3.5" standard FreeBSD install disks a few years ago over a 56K modem with no problem. Like the Apple commercials say - "it just works".
I prefer Debian and Linux to FreeBSD, but Linux distros have a lot to learn from FreeBSD in terms of ease of installation. FreeBSD makes it really easy to install itself on a PC without barfing on network cards, hard drives and so forth. It was the same situation ten years ago when I was installing Slackware on multiple floppies versus my FreeBSD network installs. And from my experience last week, I see it still holds true.
I can connect to Google France, Google Japan, Google Germany and so forth. I used to be able to connect to Google China - you can even see it in google.com's search for Google China and the cache for it. But nowadays, it just redirects to Google.com. They don't want Westerners able to see what people can and can't search for in China. So what else is new, the corporate stooges are saying BS to the press, while in the back they are continuing to do what they do and are attempting to hide what they are doing.
If you have listened to Linus and his lieutenants (Andrew Morton etc.), they say they are not focused on the desktop. They are focused on the high-end. Which makes sense to me - Microsoft dominates the desktop, the high-end is up for grabs right now. Linux has improved a lot for the high-end, but still needs work done. I just was speaking with someone from Oracle recently who told me how in an environment with a lot of Linuxes connected to a lot of SANs, the 2.4 kernel was complete junk. He did say things were getting better with the 2.6.
Hey here's another example - what if I want a fricking kernel dump when my system crashes? What, I can't dump it to disk like Solaris and every other enterprise UNIX does? I have to send it over the network (which comes to a host of problems which I won't go into here)? Yes, yes, I know about the problems of doing this for a variety of hardware, but this is the sort of thing I'm talking about
Linux is not there yet for high-end enterprise, although it is getting there. Linux should concentrate on that, which it has been doing, which is good. Trying to crack Microsoft's desktop monopoly while the high-end is up for grabs is dumb. Take the high-end and then go for the low end. Of course, people are free to work on the Linux desktop if they wish. But I'm glad the core team is concentrating on making Linux a real enterprise UNIX system.
For all the talk from Republicans about "states rights", this is something they seem to have no belief in when it comes to cable television. Of course, with the DLC contingent of the Democrats coming to power, who knows if the Democrats will be any different. I'm quite sure we wouldn't have some of the public access television shows we have locally if those bills made much headway. Government then just hands over the rights to wire public streets with cable lines to some giant multinational monopoly. You can read about what has been going on this year here - here.
As far as broadcasts over the Internet done in a technically sensible way, old-timers may remember the MBONE initiative. This would have distributed broadcast video via IP Multicast. All of the "Tier One" ISPs I knew of, as well as many Tier Two ISPs had the capability to do this, the equipment in place - all they had to do was turn IP multicasting on on their Cisco routers. But management did not want to do this, because they thought it would fill their bandwidth up with video, which they didn't want. At the time, traffic shaping and billing technology was not really up to speed, people were still used to how NSFnet did things to some extent. So instead of multicasting, people did p2p, which is less efficient. After Napster began coming under legal assault, Gnutella was released with technology to specifically evade attempts to block it.
Aside from technical issues, I think decentralization, peer-to-peer and so forth is the way to go. I don't want to be the little receiver of content from the Giant Corporation with DRM, monopoly price increases and whatnot. To me it makes sense (like Mbone did) and gives me more freedom. It allows me to publish content, which Youtube and whatnot can not censor if they wish. Which is precisely why it won't happen - we don't live in some federated decentralized anarchist council structure, we live in an imperialist, capitalist society where capital is centralized in a few hands, along with the media, political power for the most part, and so on. Which is why peer to peer decentralization has been under attack since day one.
The Hippocratic oath that doctors take includes the statement "First, do no harm". What country has the corporations that are creating the architecture to allow the Chinese government to censor material? The answer is the US - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Cisco and other corporations have been who have implemented this censorship for the Chinese government. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to say you are setting up "free zones" in "free countries" to help evade censorship, when the people who control the capital in the US are the ones who have implemented the censorship in China. If this were a free country, the obvious answer would be to just have these corporations stop implementing the censorship in China. Instead, that, which is the only solution that makes any sense, is not even thought of, and instead these PR "free zones" are set up, so that Chinese people can attempt to evade (at their own personal risk) the censorship which is set up by US corporations, including the US corporations like Yahoo who helped China hunt down dissidents like Shi Tao. This stuff is a joke, if you want to stop censorship in China, stop implementing it in the US.
I dropped out of college in 1992, began working in IT in 1996, and began going to school at night or on the weekend this year. I got a 4.0 for my class in the spring semester, and so far I have very good grades for the two classes I'm taking now.
It used to frustrate me that I didn't know how to program C decently but I rectified that starting in 2002. I was going to start by reading The Art of Computer Programming and realized how much MATH there was, and how it would be in assembly, so I did a "shortcut" and read K&R and Code Complete and did things that way. Of course, there are no real shortcuts, and the right way to do it is learning the math and the assembly language and going like that.
This is just something I want to do. I want to stand around all those code gods and be like them (in the sense of coding and skill, not necessarily everything else). There's the old cypherpunk slogan "Cypherpunks code" and one way of learning to code is to just write code, but I want to have a track where I'm doing it the right way while I'm on the second track of actually writing stuff now.
I also find biology interesting and may take a minor (or double major) in that. I don't think I'll worry about job security much with a bachelors in Computer Science and Biology. Or even a Masters. Or Phd. I think one step at a time though.
One thing though is I want to do this. I would do this even if there was no material reward. I think that is something to think about. It would be nice if I could make more money, or get a job doing less braindead stuff, but if all that happened would be that I would know enough to contribute to the Linux kernel, or some free software projects which I like, that would be enough for me. After doing mindless BS wage slave stuff all day, it's nice to go home and do my own work where I can actually do what I want, even if I make no money at it. If I could make a living doing that stuff, so much the better, but I would go crazy if all I did was cog-in-the-machine mindless nonsense all day.
Until I installed Debian I didn't even know there was no good free Java. I think this is great.
For those who have already started complaining about the license in this thread - why don't you spend a few years writing your own Java clone, and giving it away under BSD or whatever?
It seems that everyone believes in capitalism, supply and demand and so forth except when it comes to paying people. The current economic theory taught in the US is that if you are willing to pay enough, the supply will appear. Yet this idea goes out the windows when companies are looking for people. Another alternative to this is to have decent work hours which would include any weekend work, on-call time and so forth, nice vacation time and sick days and personal days.
I have 10 years in IT. From 1996 to 2001 I worked almost non-stop. In 2001 I had a decent paying job but the market was tight so we started to get treated like crap and no one else was hiring. So I just quit and moved back in with my parents. Aside from a six month contract somewhere in the middle of that, I didn't start working again until earlier this year.
Regarding the economics stuff I mentioned earlier, that is the predominant theory but I don't believe it. I look, as many heterodox economic watchers look, at the business cycle as a back and forth primarily over the division of profit and wages. Inflation, recessions, booms, and unemployment are all byproducts of this, in our view. So the business cycle is like this: things are going along and growing, so people start demanding more wages, which cuts into profits. So the companies start laying people off, so that people will be happy to have a job and won't ask for a raise. A threat to the profit rate results in greater unemployment. After a time the pressure on profit is reduced and the economy gets going again, and the cycle repeats.
Some people have families, are not from my area or even the US and have to work. I don't, so I didn't, when I feel I'm not getting what I deserve. I felt my time was better spent when I wasn't working. However, people like me actually prolong recessions because the companies just increase unemployment even more since I'm not playing their game.
In the old days, even in skilled/professional jobs like ours, groups like associations for professionals (lawyers - ABA, doctors - AMA, dentists - ADA) or unions for skilled workers (telecommunications - CWA, electricians - IBEW etc.) would handle a lot of this, since it works less well on an individual level. You're not really fighting the system when you're off on your own. But if you just look at what's happening in Oaxaca, Mexico now, you can see that a real class war against them (with the addition of their own internal problems - corruption, bureaucracy, lack of solidarity) has knocked all those things down to where they're pretty much powerless and non-existent in the US.
Back to the original point - with all this belief in supply and demand and capitalism, how come the answer is never "pay more"?
The Forbes piece is written by Daniel Lyons. Lyons bashes Stallman, GPL, Linux, free software, open source etc. every chance he gets. He has been writing FUD for years. Just do a Google search for Daniel Lyons and you can read people's thoughts on this. He came to the article with an axe to grind.
"I am an individual", yet one third of my salary is going to the US federal government, which is giving it to Halliburton so they can kill people in Iraq. So what do you do when they come to your door looking for tax money, you the individual are going to singlehandedly take on the police, the national guard, and the US army? That might play in Hollywood movies but it is not reality. The government doesn't even have to come to you for money, they go to the company boss who takes it out of wages anyhow. Which also leads one to wonder why a worker who is creating the wealth he lives on has a boss working for company owners who control his money anyhow. The idea you're "free" now is a joke - unless you really are well-to-do, which means you have little in common with the average Slashdot reader who is, at best, a professional.
We live in a capitalist society, which means it is run by capitalists. Federal reserve surveys show that over 40% of the corporate stock in the country is owned by 1% of the population, while the bottom 90% of the population has to split up the less than 20% of the pie left for them. The numbers are similar for private business as well (and bonds etc.) If you look at these types, say on the Forbes 400, you see that half of them inherited all of their money. And the cutoff between the inheritance half and "self-made" billionaires is at the $300 million line, meaning someone inheriting $280 million and parlaying it into a few billion is "self-made". In fact the top people on the list all came from wealth - Bill Gates's father and grandfather were well-to-do lawyers (Preston Gates was huge before Microsoft), Warren Buffett's father was a congressman whose family owned many stores etc. I won't even go into how much of capitalism is based on imperialist theft - say the English robbery of Ireland, India or English settlers robbery of American Indians (in the US and Canada). Or US theft of oil in Iraq.
Ayn Rand takes the reality of capitalism, hides it, and creates a fantasy land. The workers movements, the left, has always been about giving control of the workers work to the worker. This is what the capitalists don't want, or people nominally on the left who try to betray this tradition - US trade union bureaucrats who don't care about workers, or USSR communist bureaucrats who ultimately became straight-out capitalists, showing what they really were all along. Of course, people who have had workers movements and the like know this, which is why Ayn Rand is a joke anywhere outside of the US. Ayn Rand is the equivalent of the fundamentalist Jesus bullshit in the US, except for professionals and managers too smart to buy into those myths. But not smart enough to know about the world outside the US, or even inside the US going back a century or two.
You beat me to saying it. All this guy does is write articles down on Linux, free software etc. Has been doing it for years.
Oracle needs to be good on Linux
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Oracle Linux?
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I used to work at a Fortune 100 company, I now work at a Fortune 1000 company. At the Fortune 100 company no production Linux was deployed when I worked there, just Windows and Solaris (they did have a Linux lab though). Currently we are Windows, Red Hat and Solaris. We only run databases on Solaris. A year ago we tried migrating Oracle from Solaris to Red Hat and it was a disaster. We had to cancel the move and go back to Solaris.
Oracle did not work well on Red Hat Linux for us, in fact, it worked very badly. I know that raises cackles here and people say it has worked fine for them and give anecdotes about their successful experiences. But this company is in the business of making profits for its stockholders, not promoting free software. Perhaps if we have an expert Oracle/Linux DBAs and a genius sysadmin dedicated to just this and so forth, perhaps it would work, but these types of resources are just not available for us. It has been my experience over the past decade that at most companies, Oracle runs on Solaris. I'd be curious to hear the names of major companies that are running Oracle on Linux in production. Oracle has a long history with Sun and Solaris and has worked most of the kinks out, in my opinion, it is not just their yet for Linux. Perhaps working on their own Linux will help that. Because the only thing those Oracle/Linux developers are going to give a damn about is getting Oracle RDBMS running well on Linux. It might even help Red Hat in the long term.
"According to Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, who undertook the task of processing the Mitrokhin Archive, another competing group, the FSLN, was formally organised in 1961 by Tomás Borge Martínez and Silvio Mayorga and recent KGB recruit Carlos Fonseca Amador. According to Andrew, this was one part of Aleksandr Shelepin's 'grand strategy' of using national liberation movements as a spearhead of the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the Third World, in 1960 the KGB organized funding and training for twelve individuals that Fonseca handpicked."
This is just completely bonkers and off the wall, and you find this sort of thing all over Wikipedia. I have many more examples as well. And the old canard "well, just change it" is BS. Wikipedia has been showing it's true colors as it's gotten more popular, and even progressives who got to be admins (172, Secretlondon) have begun getting persecuted, sometimes by Jimbo himself. Meanwhile, Jimbo tries to scuttle elections to ArbCom (which had so much opposition, he backed off), but after JayJG ran into too much opposition, he appointed him anyway. JayJG is anything but neutral, writing totally in a Zionist point of view, and the only reason to appoint him is to enforce that even more. As I said, Jimbo used to run the Ayn Rand mailing list, and has said that conservative icon Friedrich "Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project", which is probably the most self-damning things I've seen him say to date.
Perhaps I am somewhat partisan to the workers movement, or left of center or whatever you might call it, but when I read the political and historical articles on Wikipedia, I feel they are just a regurgitation of the same nonsense I get from the corporate media. I hear about how the press is free in the US, but when I go to my local bookstore I am hard-pressed to find, say, a book about Russia which isn't written from a perspective that denounces the Russian revolution (the one exception is Five Days that shook the world - so we're allowed to hear that the Russian revolution was OK for the first five days, but that's it). There have been thousands of books about the Russian revolution, how come I can't walk into a library or bookstore and read alternative views on it? Is that freedom of the press? Is that any different than our accusations about the USSR only allowing a party line? Why can't I make up my own mind? When I point out that there is no freedom in the US with regards to this, people sometimes denounce me for desiring to read alternative viewpoints on the USSR, as if that was some horrible thing to do.
Wikipedia just continues this tradition, and being run by someone who ran the Ayn Rand mailing list (Jimbo Wales) that's not a surprise. It's just the same crap everywhere else, except in GFDL format.
There are alternatives out there like Anarchopedia,
Red Tellus and Red Wiki, as well as liberal/soc-dem ones like Dkosopedia and Demopedia. An alternative to Wikipedia is emerging, albeit slowly, that is not just a regurgitation of the corporate bullshit we hear all the time, which is what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia has decent articles on quantum mechanics and things like that, but for history and the like it is the usual. I'm interested in the Internet as a tool to create an encyclopedia by and for working people. If you want the US imperialist corporate party line brought to you by dorky white American male professionals, then Wikipedia is the place for you.
I think the main thing that made what Pat Kroupa once called the "modem world" special is unlike most communication medium, it was homegrown, sociable, and a little anarchic. I was never much of a ham radio person, but it serves as a comparison - I am not an expert, but in the rules I read you must register with the FCC before you are able to make a communication, you must identify yourself before any broadcast, you must speak in English, you must not use any code words etc. Then compare that to the freedom of logging onto the BBS of some 16 year old kid with a Commodore 64 and 5.25" floppy disk drive on his room's phone line, and being able to say whatever you wanted. It was organic, it was homegrown, it was a community.
The GPL has always had a clause that you can update code to a new version of the GPL. These changes are to protect against DRM, not to make big money for Stallman. I find this talk of a violation of trust a little disingenuous. If you're going to slap a license on your code, you should read it first.
As far as community splintering and a fall-off of corporate support, those are possible. These are the core Linux people, and if they want to stay at version 2, that's their choice. I contribute to free software packages, and I would tend to prefer 3 to 2, but to each their own. As far as splintering, we already have GPL, BSD and a number of other licenses, I don't see much of a problem.
As far as corporate support, it is sort of a double-edged sword, I fear for a free software movement where people ask themselves every time they are about to do something, "What will the corporations think?"
Sorry, but you are giving us a number from January 2005 (look at the date on his link) estimating the 2006 budget. In March of 2006, $72 billion was tacked onto that ( http://www.house.gov/budget/emrgsuppau031506.htm ). I can guarantee you that after the federal elections in November that several more billion will be tacked on on top of that.
Perhaps more important than you leaving out the $72 billion supplementary budget that was tacked on, is the $438 billion (plus $72 billion, plus whatever more is added on in December) does not cover what the true costs of military spending is.
And your own link shows how you are deceptively lowering the amount spent. There is a chart that says "Nondefense Discretionary Funding, by Budget Function", the slices of which you do not include in your $438 billion. A 7% slice of that for the 2005 budget ($31 billion) is Veterans' Benefits and Services. So from your numbers, a VA hospital treating wounded veterans who had their legs blown off by an IED in Iraq have nothing to do with military spending. The over $30 billion of that is "social welfare" as you call it.
The two ways I mentioned are fairly obvious ways that over $100 billion can be hidden, so that a $438 billion lowball military budget can be claimed. But the true number is higher than that, and much of the money is hidden in even more clever ways, if you take the trouble to investigate it, or read analysis of what the real military budget is.
On Wikipedia, pages relating to quantum mechanics are sometimes vandalized, but 99% of people are on the same side in terms of keeping it accurate. So there are various ways this can be improved.
On the other hand, the pages regarding the fight between Hamas and IDF are as much a battleground as is the area around the Israeli/Lebanese border. I have been involved in Wikipedia for years and have just seen things deteriorate around these types of flame-wars. Wikipedia's leadership is not dealing with it well. Imagine Slashdot setting up a wiki where we had to determine which was better - Debian or Gentoo (or Ubuntu etc.), BSD or Linux, vi or emacs etc.
We are technical people, and there's the old thing about when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. But I don't think a technical solution will help much in regards to this. I'm not even sure you really can have a neutral view about wars in the Middle East. And even if you could, Wikipedia's "cabal" is nowhere near able to deal with it, and I doubt they ever will be. Personally, I think most of the people in high positions at Wikipedia are jerks, all the flamewars and such seem to have driven most of the nice people off.
Things like Wikipediareview.com convince me that what will ultimately happen is alternatives to Wikipedia will pop up. Wikipedia is a new phenomenom, and it makes sense everyone edits on the same wiki, but why should that be? Why should pro-Hamas and pro-Israel people edit and battle on the same wiki? It makes little sense, and I'm sure in time, just as IRC went from one network to EFnet and Anet, and then split even more, I'm sure we'll see splits with Wikipedia. In the old days, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had one view of history and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia had another, why should the future be any different?
"First of all, let us make a caveat regarding our approach. Our methodology is formal economic modelling. What this means is that we construct a stylized mathematical model of the relationship."
I consider the economic nonsense they teach in universities today so far out of touch with reality, they may as well have created a theological model.
Beyond that, one of the major problems of this is it only sees one competition between Linux and Windows. But this is not the case, there is a competition between Linux on the low-end and high-end, as a desktop and server. Which is where some of their arguments fall apart. Clearly Microsoft dominated the desktop. But how about for servers? I recall back in 1996 when I had a fvwm desktop and the Mac-like Windows 95 had not been out long. We were running Linux servers and also had a Window NT 3.51 server. As a techie, I like fvwm and Linux, but I could understand how the average person would prefer Windows 95. But to me, the Linux 1.2 kernel was far superior to Windows NT 3.51. With NT 3.51, you could only have 8 or so IP addresses without editing the registry! It blue screened all the time. It did not clearly dominate the server market at all.
Fast-forward to today. It is still competitive between Linux and Windows in the server market. Linus, Andrew Morton and so forth repeatedly say that most of their concentration is on Linux as a server as opposed to Linux as a desktop. This makes sense to me, as this is where Linux has been in the game for a long time, and is still in the game. Windows Server blue screens less now, and has things like Remote Desktop which are definite improvements. They also use their monopoly advantage so that Outlook and Calendar and so forth hook into an Exchange server well, a free Outlook Express with the OS, they use the desktop as leverage against the server market. I now work at a company that uses Exchange servers for mail, the first time I've ever seen this at a company (by the way, considering how often it is down, I'd say it is not quite there yet).
For the desktop, Windows clearly dominates, and if Linux is lucky it will chisel a percent away every few months or years. The real competition between Linux and Windows is in the server market, and it has been like this for a while. Windows *has* been improving, as well as has been doing the old monopoly hooks thing. Linux not only has to be able to support high-end equipment on the kernel end, it has to make sure applications like Oracle run well on Red Hat (which it doesn't, although some don't like to hear this), or that Red Hat's patch system is better than or equal to Microsoft's (It is acceptable, but could be improved, especially in terms of ease-of-use). Of course not all Linux is Red Hat, although for the Fortune 1000 that don't roll their own it may as well be, and Linux isn't a corporation and doesn't have to be in a competition. But this is what Linux needs to do to continue being a player on the server market. This report ignoring the desktop/server distinction shows how little they know of their subject.
I would love to use a free (speech and beer) OCR engine that works as well as a commercial one, or even nearby as good as a commercial one.
I just checked out tesseract. One thing I have to look at more is the license. It appears to be the Apache license, which seems like a decent free license. But it also includes MITRE's aspirin. I'm not sure how dependent it is on aspirin and what the license restrictions of aspirin are.
The two best free OCR engines out right now are clara and gocr. While they are the best, they are not that great yet. I just ran the same tiff I had run with those two (I also have the document in pbm and other formats). Tesseract did not read it, it bailed with "IMAGE::check_legal_access:Error:Can't seek backwards in a buffered image!"
Clara and GOCR are written in C, Tesseract is written in C++, a language I don't know. Tesseract did well in the UNLV challenge so it probably has some good features. It does say it has no page layout analysis though.
Hopefully this can be improved, or good parts of it can be borrowed and incorporated into gocr or clara. It couldn't handle my test that both clara and gocr could, but it probably has strengths the other two doesn't. One day hopefully we'll have a free OCR that handles things as automagically as the commercial ones do. I will see what I can contribute to that as well. Although this is C++ and I don't know that language.
I have a problem in WoW, but fixing it may cast light on WoW problems. When I start the game, I am in very high resolution and things are slow. So I lower the resolution (which kicks me back into a look at my Windows desktop background for a second). I would like to permanently set a lower resolution, but have no idea how to do so. There is no button that I can see to save my video settings, and it does not save them automatically. The configuration directory gets locked when the game is on in Windows. I posted a message to the WoW forum and was told to post in another WoW forum. I read through the forums more and saw someone with the same problem, it said to edit the configuration file (which is not straightforward text) but it is a binary-like configuration file. I don't see anything in the FAQs about this. From what I can see, there are high-end UI modules that you can hook into WoW, but for a level 24 player like me, I have to go on a mission to learn this. I still don't know. I guess if I spent some more hours on this I could find out, but it is a lot of time for that. I have been around long enough to know this is more Blizzard's fault than mine.
Aside from that, I have a level 25 mage, and two much lower level characters due to the realm downtimes (another problem). Also, some things are getting to be a little repetitive like the "talk to a guy who gives you a quest to kill 5 whatevers, 4 whatnots and 6 whatsies". Also repetitive to me is the standard caves (although not the designed caves like Deadmines).
I also get a little tired of running around, having it take 5-10 minutes to run somewhere. I have a Hearthstone but I usually save that for when I have to leave for real life reasons. I also can teleport to Stormwind and Ironforge, but that costs 10 silver for my reagent. I can fly on an eagle, but that costs a few silver as well. At level 40 and then 60 I guess I can get a ride which will speed things up. When I used to play on the Arctic Mud, there was a road which was kind of a circuit around most of the world. I could probably do the entire circuit in less than 10 minutes, and with macros as well.
I can think of some other things. On the Arctic Mud, there was a guy you could bring things to, and he would tell you what the hell it was. I had a ton of stuff cluttering up my bank deposit box for a while. I finally got tired of it and consulted the WoW wiki and sold or tossed out a lot of it. It would be better to be able to do this in game as well.
Then of course there is the old multi-player thing of you being in a group, you fight another group, everything slows down to a crawl and when things go back to normal speed you're dead. Not such a problem on the MUDs I've played. WoW developers should play MUDs more, there's a lot they can learn from them.
A look at who is not eligible to participate shows that it includes "citizens of Iran, Cuba..." etc. I have been reading the Advogato blog of roozbeh for a while, an Iranian who is pissed off he can't participate. Here is a middle class Iranian who wants to participate in something like this and he is shown the door. Of course maybe there's some legal reasons for Google to do this, one can look at their kow-towing to the Chinese government to see it wouldn't be for any ethical reason.
Roozbeh is the one who got me thinking about this, about how this fun worldwide code contest is marred by a no thank you to those countries on their hands and knees to the US elite. On the news you'd think all Iranians are screaming bloodythirsty people in the dark ages, these restrictions help people forget that there are normal hackers like anyone like Roozbeh, I guess they want to dehumanize and alienate us from Iranians so it will be easier to go to war with them. I guess with policies like this, the US government is trying to keep Iranians in the dark ages. Then there's Cuba, the only country in Latin America not on its hands and knees to the US (although Venezuela has not been so over the last few years either). I'm not religious but it reminds me of Daniel 3:4-6 "To you it is commanded, O people, nations, and languages, that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music, ye fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king hath set up: and whoso falleth not down and worshippeth shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace."
In fact, it could be argued that the Cold War was in reality an economic war that Communism lost (is still losing) because they cannot maintain the technology and information lead. Their infrastructure simply could not compete.
It could be argued but it doesn't make much sense. You say "they cannot maintain the technology and information lead". When did countries with governments run by the Communist party ever have the technology and information lead? Russia was the backward of Europe - in 1917 it was still a feudal country run by a king. China was a feudal country until 1912, and was under foreign domination for centuries, the Japanese were kicked out just 4 years before the Communist Party took over.
In the US, the Cold War is presented as a game of chess, where both sides start out equally, and one side one. When one looks at what the conditions were from 1917-1945, you see that the US was a capitalist republic from 1865 to that time period, had two oceans protecting it from military attack, was by 1917 the most industrialized country in the world and so forth. On the other hand, in 1917 Russia was a feudal country, which started out not only with a civil war between its classes, but was invaded by 21 foreign armies, including the US which had over 10,000 troops in Russia. Less than 24 years later, it was invaded by Nazi Germany and suffered enormous losses. Then the Cold War started.
Right now there is a communist uprising in Nepal, probably one of the most backwards countries in the world. Your conclusions may put the cart before the horse - it's not that countries where communist parties take over can't keep up, it's that countries that can't keep up have leaderships which are weak enough to be displaced by a communist party.
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In years past I have always noticed that FreeBSD always makes it easy to install. Makes it easy meaning it recognizes hard drives, network cards, even 56K modems, without a problem. I installed FreeBSD with two 3.5" standard FreeBSD install disks a few years ago over a 56K modem with no problem. Like the Apple commercials say - "it just works".
I prefer Debian and Linux to FreeBSD, but Linux distros have a lot to learn from FreeBSD in terms of ease of installation. FreeBSD makes it really easy to install itself on a PC without barfing on network cards, hard drives and so forth. It was the same situation ten years ago when I was installing Slackware on multiple floppies versus my FreeBSD network installs. And from my experience last week, I see it still holds true.
I can connect to Google France, Google Japan, Google Germany and so forth. I used to be able to connect to Google China - you can even see it in google.com's search for Google China and the cache for it. But nowadays, it just redirects to Google.com. They don't want Westerners able to see what people can and can't search for in China. So what else is new, the corporate stooges are saying BS to the press, while in the back they are continuing to do what they do and are attempting to hide what they are doing.
Hey here's another example - what if I want a fricking kernel dump when my system crashes? What, I can't dump it to disk like Solaris and every other enterprise UNIX does? I have to send it over the network (which comes to a host of problems which I won't go into here)? Yes, yes, I know about the problems of doing this for a variety of hardware, but this is the sort of thing I'm talking about
Linux is not there yet for high-end enterprise, although it is getting there. Linux should concentrate on that, which it has been doing, which is good. Trying to crack Microsoft's desktop monopoly while the high-end is up for grabs is dumb. Take the high-end and then go for the low end. Of course, people are free to work on the Linux desktop if they wish. But I'm glad the core team is concentrating on making Linux a real enterprise UNIX system.
For all the talk from Republicans about "states rights", this is something they seem to have no belief in when it comes to cable television. Of course, with the DLC contingent of the Democrats coming to power, who knows if the Democrats will be any different. I'm quite sure we wouldn't have some of the public access television shows we have locally if those bills made much headway. Government then just hands over the rights to wire public streets with cable lines to some giant multinational monopoly. You can read about what has been going on this year here - here.
Aside from technical issues, I think decentralization, peer-to-peer and so forth is the way to go. I don't want to be the little receiver of content from the Giant Corporation with DRM, monopoly price increases and whatnot. To me it makes sense (like Mbone did) and gives me more freedom. It allows me to publish content, which Youtube and whatnot can not censor if they wish. Which is precisely why it won't happen - we don't live in some federated decentralized anarchist council structure, we live in an imperialist, capitalist society where capital is centralized in a few hands, along with the media, political power for the most part, and so on. Which is why peer to peer decentralization has been under attack since day one.
The Hippocratic oath that doctors take includes the statement "First, do no harm". What country has the corporations that are creating the architecture to allow the Chinese government to censor material? The answer is the US - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Cisco and other corporations have been who have implemented this censorship for the Chinese government. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to say you are setting up "free zones" in "free countries" to help evade censorship, when the people who control the capital in the US are the ones who have implemented the censorship in China. If this were a free country, the obvious answer would be to just have these corporations stop implementing the censorship in China. Instead, that, which is the only solution that makes any sense, is not even thought of, and instead these PR "free zones" are set up, so that Chinese people can attempt to evade (at their own personal risk) the censorship which is set up by US corporations, including the US corporations like Yahoo who helped China hunt down dissidents like Shi Tao. This stuff is a joke, if you want to stop censorship in China, stop implementing it in the US.
It used to frustrate me that I didn't know how to program C decently but I rectified that starting in 2002. I was going to start by reading The Art of Computer Programming and realized how much MATH there was, and how it would be in assembly, so I did a "shortcut" and read K&R and Code Complete and did things that way. Of course, there are no real shortcuts, and the right way to do it is learning the math and the assembly language and going like that.
This is just something I want to do. I want to stand around all those code gods and be like them (in the sense of coding and skill, not necessarily everything else). There's the old cypherpunk slogan "Cypherpunks code" and one way of learning to code is to just write code, but I want to have a track where I'm doing it the right way while I'm on the second track of actually writing stuff now.
I also find biology interesting and may take a minor (or double major) in that. I don't think I'll worry about job security much with a bachelors in Computer Science and Biology. Or even a Masters. Or Phd. I think one step at a time though.
One thing though is I want to do this. I would do this even if there was no material reward. I think that is something to think about. It would be nice if I could make more money, or get a job doing less braindead stuff, but if all that happened would be that I would know enough to contribute to the Linux kernel, or some free software projects which I like, that would be enough for me. After doing mindless BS wage slave stuff all day, it's nice to go home and do my own work where I can actually do what I want, even if I make no money at it. If I could make a living doing that stuff, so much the better, but I would go crazy if all I did was cog-in-the-machine mindless nonsense all day.
For those who have already started complaining about the license in this thread - why don't you spend a few years writing your own Java clone, and giving it away under BSD or whatever?
I have 10 years in IT. From 1996 to 2001 I worked almost non-stop. In 2001 I had a decent paying job but the market was tight so we started to get treated like crap and no one else was hiring. So I just quit and moved back in with my parents. Aside from a six month contract somewhere in the middle of that, I didn't start working again until earlier this year.
Regarding the economics stuff I mentioned earlier, that is the predominant theory but I don't believe it. I look, as many heterodox economic watchers look, at the business cycle as a back and forth primarily over the division of profit and wages. Inflation, recessions, booms, and unemployment are all byproducts of this, in our view. So the business cycle is like this: things are going along and growing, so people start demanding more wages, which cuts into profits. So the companies start laying people off, so that people will be happy to have a job and won't ask for a raise. A threat to the profit rate results in greater unemployment. After a time the pressure on profit is reduced and the economy gets going again, and the cycle repeats.
Some people have families, are not from my area or even the US and have to work. I don't, so I didn't, when I feel I'm not getting what I deserve. I felt my time was better spent when I wasn't working. However, people like me actually prolong recessions because the companies just increase unemployment even more since I'm not playing their game.
In the old days, even in skilled/professional jobs like ours, groups like associations for professionals (lawyers - ABA, doctors - AMA, dentists - ADA) or unions for skilled workers (telecommunications - CWA, electricians - IBEW etc.) would handle a lot of this, since it works less well on an individual level. You're not really fighting the system when you're off on your own. But if you just look at what's happening in Oaxaca, Mexico now, you can see that a real class war against them (with the addition of their own internal problems - corruption, bureaucracy, lack of solidarity) has knocked all those things down to where they're pretty much powerless and non-existent in the US.
Back to the original point - with all this belief in supply and demand and capitalism, how come the answer is never "pay more"?
Whether you're serious or not, there is a VI within EMACS called VIPER (Viper Is a Package for Emacs Rebels). Scary.
The Forbes piece is written by Daniel Lyons. Lyons bashes Stallman, GPL, Linux, free software, open source etc. every chance he gets. He has been writing FUD for years. Just do a Google search for Daniel Lyons and you can read people's thoughts on this. He came to the article with an axe to grind.
We live in a capitalist society, which means it is run by capitalists. Federal reserve surveys show that over 40% of the corporate stock in the country is owned by 1% of the population, while the bottom 90% of the population has to split up the less than 20% of the pie left for them. The numbers are similar for private business as well (and bonds etc.) If you look at these types, say on the Forbes 400, you see that half of them inherited all of their money. And the cutoff between the inheritance half and "self-made" billionaires is at the $300 million line, meaning someone inheriting $280 million and parlaying it into a few billion is "self-made". In fact the top people on the list all came from wealth - Bill Gates's father and grandfather were well-to-do lawyers (Preston Gates was huge before Microsoft), Warren Buffett's father was a congressman whose family owned many stores etc. I won't even go into how much of capitalism is based on imperialist theft - say the English robbery of Ireland, India or English settlers robbery of American Indians (in the US and Canada). Or US theft of oil in Iraq.
Ayn Rand takes the reality of capitalism, hides it, and creates a fantasy land. The workers movements, the left, has always been about giving control of the workers work to the worker. This is what the capitalists don't want, or people nominally on the left who try to betray this tradition - US trade union bureaucrats who don't care about workers, or USSR communist bureaucrats who ultimately became straight-out capitalists, showing what they really were all along. Of course, people who have had workers movements and the like know this, which is why Ayn Rand is a joke anywhere outside of the US. Ayn Rand is the equivalent of the fundamentalist Jesus bullshit in the US, except for professionals and managers too smart to buy into those myths. But not smart enough to know about the world outside the US, or even inside the US going back a century or two.
You beat me to saying it. All this guy does is write articles down on Linux, free software etc. Has been doing it for years.
Oracle did not work well on Red Hat Linux for us, in fact, it worked very badly. I know that raises cackles here and people say it has worked fine for them and give anecdotes about their successful experiences. But this company is in the business of making profits for its stockholders, not promoting free software. Perhaps if we have an expert Oracle/Linux DBAs and a genius sysadmin dedicated to just this and so forth, perhaps it would work, but these types of resources are just not available for us. It has been my experience over the past decade that at most companies, Oracle runs on Solaris. I'd be curious to hear the names of major companies that are running Oracle on Linux in production. Oracle has a long history with Sun and Solaris and has worked most of the kinks out, in my opinion, it is not just their yet for Linux. Perhaps working on their own Linux will help that. Because the only thing those Oracle/Linux developers are going to give a damn about is getting Oracle RDBMS running well on Linux. It might even help Red Hat in the long term.
"According to Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, who undertook the task of processing the Mitrokhin Archive, another competing group, the FSLN, was formally organised in 1961 by Tomás Borge Martínez and Silvio Mayorga and recent KGB recruit Carlos Fonseca Amador. According to Andrew, this was one part of Aleksandr Shelepin's 'grand strategy' of using national liberation movements as a spearhead of the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the Third World, in 1960 the KGB organized funding and training for twelve individuals that Fonseca handpicked."
This is just completely bonkers and off the wall, and you find this sort of thing all over Wikipedia. I have many more examples as well. And the old canard "well, just change it" is BS. Wikipedia has been showing it's true colors as it's gotten more popular, and even progressives who got to be admins (172, Secretlondon) have begun getting persecuted, sometimes by Jimbo himself. Meanwhile, Jimbo tries to scuttle elections to ArbCom (which had so much opposition, he backed off), but after JayJG ran into too much opposition, he appointed him anyway. JayJG is anything but neutral, writing totally in a Zionist point of view, and the only reason to appoint him is to enforce that even more. As I said, Jimbo used to run the Ayn Rand mailing list, and has said that conservative icon Friedrich "Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project", which is probably the most self-damning things I've seen him say to date.
Wikipedia just continues this tradition, and being run by someone who ran the Ayn Rand mailing list (Jimbo Wales) that's not a surprise. It's just the same crap everywhere else, except in GFDL format.
There are alternatives out there like Anarchopedia, Red Tellus and Red Wiki, as well as liberal/soc-dem ones like Dkosopedia and Demopedia. An alternative to Wikipedia is emerging, albeit slowly, that is not just a regurgitation of the corporate bullshit we hear all the time, which is what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia has decent articles on quantum mechanics and things like that, but for history and the like it is the usual. I'm interested in the Internet as a tool to create an encyclopedia by and for working people. If you want the US imperialist corporate party line brought to you by dorky white American male professionals, then Wikipedia is the place for you.
I think the main thing that made what Pat Kroupa once called the "modem world" special is unlike most communication medium, it was homegrown, sociable, and a little anarchic. I was never much of a ham radio person, but it serves as a comparison - I am not an expert, but in the rules I read you must register with the FCC before you are able to make a communication, you must identify yourself before any broadcast, you must speak in English, you must not use any code words etc. Then compare that to the freedom of logging onto the BBS of some 16 year old kid with a Commodore 64 and 5.25" floppy disk drive on his room's phone line, and being able to say whatever you wanted. It was organic, it was homegrown, it was a community.
As far as community splintering and a fall-off of corporate support, those are possible. These are the core Linux people, and if they want to stay at version 2, that's their choice. I contribute to free software packages, and I would tend to prefer 3 to 2, but to each their own. As far as splintering, we already have GPL, BSD and a number of other licenses, I don't see much of a problem.
As far as corporate support, it is sort of a double-edged sword, I fear for a free software movement where people ask themselves every time they are about to do something, "What will the corporations think?"
Perhaps more important than you leaving out the $72 billion supplementary budget that was tacked on, is the $438 billion (plus $72 billion, plus whatever more is added on in December) does not cover what the true costs of military spending is.
And your own link shows how you are deceptively lowering the amount spent. There is a chart that says "Nondefense Discretionary Funding, by Budget Function", the slices of which you do not include in your $438 billion. A 7% slice of that for the 2005 budget ($31 billion) is Veterans' Benefits and Services. So from your numbers, a VA hospital treating wounded veterans who had their legs blown off by an IED in Iraq have nothing to do with military spending. The over $30 billion of that is "social welfare" as you call it.
The two ways I mentioned are fairly obvious ways that over $100 billion can be hidden, so that a $438 billion lowball military budget can be claimed. But the true number is higher than that, and much of the money is hidden in even more clever ways, if you take the trouble to investigate it, or read analysis of what the real military budget is.
On the other hand, the pages regarding the fight between Hamas and IDF are as much a battleground as is the area around the Israeli/Lebanese border. I have been involved in Wikipedia for years and have just seen things deteriorate around these types of flame-wars. Wikipedia's leadership is not dealing with it well. Imagine Slashdot setting up a wiki where we had to determine which was better - Debian or Gentoo (or Ubuntu etc.), BSD or Linux, vi or emacs etc.
We are technical people, and there's the old thing about when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. But I don't think a technical solution will help much in regards to this. I'm not even sure you really can have a neutral view about wars in the Middle East. And even if you could, Wikipedia's "cabal" is nowhere near able to deal with it, and I doubt they ever will be. Personally, I think most of the people in high positions at Wikipedia are jerks, all the flamewars and such seem to have driven most of the nice people off.
Things like Wikipediareview.com convince me that what will ultimately happen is alternatives to Wikipedia will pop up. Wikipedia is a new phenomenom, and it makes sense everyone edits on the same wiki, but why should that be? Why should pro-Hamas and pro-Israel people edit and battle on the same wiki? It makes little sense, and I'm sure in time, just as IRC went from one network to EFnet and Anet, and then split even more, I'm sure we'll see splits with Wikipedia. In the old days, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had one view of history and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia had another, why should the future be any different?
I consider the economic nonsense they teach in universities today so far out of touch with reality, they may as well have created a theological model.
Beyond that, one of the major problems of this is it only sees one competition between Linux and Windows. But this is not the case, there is a competition between Linux on the low-end and high-end, as a desktop and server. Which is where some of their arguments fall apart. Clearly Microsoft dominated the desktop. But how about for servers? I recall back in 1996 when I had a fvwm desktop and the Mac-like Windows 95 had not been out long. We were running Linux servers and also had a Window NT 3.51 server. As a techie, I like fvwm and Linux, but I could understand how the average person would prefer Windows 95. But to me, the Linux 1.2 kernel was far superior to Windows NT 3.51. With NT 3.51, you could only have 8 or so IP addresses without editing the registry! It blue screened all the time. It did not clearly dominate the server market at all.
Fast-forward to today. It is still competitive between Linux and Windows in the server market. Linus, Andrew Morton and so forth repeatedly say that most of their concentration is on Linux as a server as opposed to Linux as a desktop. This makes sense to me, as this is where Linux has been in the game for a long time, and is still in the game. Windows Server blue screens less now, and has things like Remote Desktop which are definite improvements. They also use their monopoly advantage so that Outlook and Calendar and so forth hook into an Exchange server well, a free Outlook Express with the OS, they use the desktop as leverage against the server market. I now work at a company that uses Exchange servers for mail, the first time I've ever seen this at a company (by the way, considering how often it is down, I'd say it is not quite there yet).
For the desktop, Windows clearly dominates, and if Linux is lucky it will chisel a percent away every few months or years. The real competition between Linux and Windows is in the server market, and it has been like this for a while. Windows *has* been improving, as well as has been doing the old monopoly hooks thing. Linux not only has to be able to support high-end equipment on the kernel end, it has to make sure applications like Oracle run well on Red Hat (which it doesn't, although some don't like to hear this), or that Red Hat's patch system is better than or equal to Microsoft's (It is acceptable, but could be improved, especially in terms of ease-of-use). Of course not all Linux is Red Hat, although for the Fortune 1000 that don't roll their own it may as well be, and Linux isn't a corporation and doesn't have to be in a competition. But this is what Linux needs to do to continue being a player on the server market. This report ignoring the desktop/server distinction shows how little they know of their subject.
I just checked out tesseract. One thing I have to look at more is the license. It appears to be the Apache license, which seems like a decent free license. But it also includes MITRE's aspirin. I'm not sure how dependent it is on aspirin and what the license restrictions of aspirin are.
The two best free OCR engines out right now are clara and gocr. While they are the best, they are not that great yet. I just ran the same tiff I had run with those two (I also have the document in pbm and other formats). Tesseract did not read it, it bailed with "IMAGE::check_legal_access:Error:Can't seek backwards in a buffered image!"
Clara and GOCR are written in C, Tesseract is written in C++, a language I don't know. Tesseract did well in the UNLV challenge so it probably has some good features. It does say it has no page layout analysis though.
Hopefully this can be improved, or good parts of it can be borrowed and incorporated into gocr or clara. It couldn't handle my test that both clara and gocr could, but it probably has strengths the other two doesn't. One day hopefully we'll have a free OCR that handles things as automagically as the commercial ones do. I will see what I can contribute to that as well. Although this is C++ and I don't know that language.
Aside from that, I have a level 25 mage, and two much lower level characters due to the realm downtimes (another problem). Also, some things are getting to be a little repetitive like the "talk to a guy who gives you a quest to kill 5 whatevers, 4 whatnots and 6 whatsies". Also repetitive to me is the standard caves (although not the designed caves like Deadmines).
I also get a little tired of running around, having it take 5-10 minutes to run somewhere. I have a Hearthstone but I usually save that for when I have to leave for real life reasons. I also can teleport to Stormwind and Ironforge, but that costs 10 silver for my reagent. I can fly on an eagle, but that costs a few silver as well. At level 40 and then 60 I guess I can get a ride which will speed things up. When I used to play on the Arctic Mud, there was a road which was kind of a circuit around most of the world. I could probably do the entire circuit in less than 10 minutes, and with macros as well.
I can think of some other things. On the Arctic Mud, there was a guy you could bring things to, and he would tell you what the hell it was. I had a ton of stuff cluttering up my bank deposit box for a while. I finally got tired of it and consulted the WoW wiki and sold or tossed out a lot of it. It would be better to be able to do this in game as well.
Then of course there is the old multi-player thing of you being in a group, you fight another group, everything slows down to a crawl and when things go back to normal speed you're dead. Not such a problem on the MUDs I've played. WoW developers should play MUDs more, there's a lot they can learn from them.
Roozbeh is the one who got me thinking about this, about how this fun worldwide code contest is marred by a no thank you to those countries on their hands and knees to the US elite. On the news you'd think all Iranians are screaming bloodythirsty people in the dark ages, these restrictions help people forget that there are normal hackers like anyone like Roozbeh, I guess they want to dehumanize and alienate us from Iranians so it will be easier to go to war with them. I guess with policies like this, the US government is trying to keep Iranians in the dark ages. Then there's Cuba, the only country in Latin America not on its hands and knees to the US (although Venezuela has not been so over the last few years either). I'm not religious but it reminds me of Daniel 3:4-6 "To you it is commanded, O people, nations, and languages, that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music, ye fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king hath set up: and whoso falleth not down and worshippeth shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace."
It could be argued but it doesn't make much sense. You say "they cannot maintain the technology and information lead". When did countries with governments run by the Communist party ever have the technology and information lead? Russia was the backward of Europe - in 1917 it was still a feudal country run by a king. China was a feudal country until 1912, and was under foreign domination for centuries, the Japanese were kicked out just 4 years before the Communist Party took over.
In the US, the Cold War is presented as a game of chess, where both sides start out equally, and one side one. When one looks at what the conditions were from 1917-1945, you see that the US was a capitalist republic from 1865 to that time period, had two oceans protecting it from military attack, was by 1917 the most industrialized country in the world and so forth. On the other hand, in 1917 Russia was a feudal country, which started out not only with a civil war between its classes, but was invaded by 21 foreign armies, including the US which had over 10,000 troops in Russia. Less than 24 years later, it was invaded by Nazi Germany and suffered enormous losses. Then the Cold War started.
Right now there is a communist uprising in Nepal, probably one of the most backwards countries in the world. Your conclusions may put the cart before the horse - it's not that countries where communist parties take over can't keep up, it's that countries that can't keep up have leaderships which are weak enough to be displaced by a communist party.