Instead of spending all this money to rebuild New Orleans, let's just put the buildings and houses on stilts, replace the cars with bass fishing boats (gondolas are just too inappropriately European), and change the name to New Venice.
GUI? How quaint. Wake me up when we get to the Renaissance or Industrial Age and computers can understand and correctly respond to human language, and there's no more futzing about with these clunky GUI things. Better yet, wake me when we can bybass that clunky language thingy altogether with brain caps or something similar.
I see a lot of threads assume that this will force patent holders to choose GPL or their patents, and that they will naturally choose their patents, but there may be another alternative. What if such companies, like IBM, who are supportive of OSS and the GPL, open-source their patents or something to the same effect. I'm no lawyer so I can't speak to the details, but could IBM choose to "give" their software patents to OSS, making them freely available under the new GPL? IBM's patents would then still be protected from use by competitors like MS who choose their patents over the GPL, while becoming freely available to other companies who open-sourced their own patents. It seems like it could be a big win-win-win for any company involved, plus innovation in general, especially if enough companies agreed to this. If Stallman can get such support from a critical mass of corporations, he will have single-handedly reformed the US patent system, making an end-run around Congress.
Frankly, I'd rather put up with arrogance and have access to amazing code, rather than dealing with a nice person who can't write code worthy of a cockfool.
Fortunately, decency and skill/talent are not mutually exclusive, and there are plenty of examples of that, so it's not too much to ask even of brilliant people that they also comport as decent human beings.
Wanting to crush the competition is not sane since the goal is to make money, not kill everybody else... Capitalism is about healthy competition that follows rules.
No, capitalism is about recognizing and harnessing the natural human desire (at least in a subset of the population) to control the most wealth by whatever means are possible. Period. One way of doing that is to kill off all your competitors. Another way is by creating wealth by applying intelligence, capital, and labor to create things worth more than the sum of their parts. Capitalism itself is a social system designed to harness both of those forces while encouraging the latter and constraining the former. Those constraints primarily take the form of anti-trust law and various commercial regulations.
The problem (that we're seeing now) occurs when those laws are laxly enforced, and some people's baser instinct to win by completely destroying all competition overbalances other people's attempts to win by pure excellence of achievement.
Some people, like the Bush administration, believe that free markets inevitably rebalance themselves, hence govt regulation is uneccessary and even counterproductive. Some evidence of that can even be seen with the rise of Linux and the Open Source movement, but the question is, at what cost? What innovations has MS quashed to maintain its dominance, what financial losses has the world experienced from security breaches and other failures in M$ products, what has the Microsoft monopoly tax cost people and businesses who had no other choice of products? What well-deserved financial remuneration have all the skilled Open Source developers forgone to rebalance the free-market? Etc. etc.
Anyway, the goal of capitalism is to harness the natural drive and energy of humanity, while encouraging the creative and discouraging the destructive. Microsoft may be an example of a failing in the latter.
I maintain the website for a non-profit scholarship foundation that runs a lean operation. One of their money-raising initiatives is to collect depleted printer cartridges and exchange them with Greenfund for cash. I guess Greenfund will be out of business now (except for the cell-phone part of their endeavors), and my scholarship organization will have to find another source of $$. Bake sales and car washes, here we come. Not to mention the fact that preventing the recycling of cartridges and other recyclelables means bigger landfills and more wasted resources.
I suggest the communist apologists read/listen to this (also available on iTunes podcast). Unlike most of the revisionist fools on this thread, it is compiled and written by Chinese nationals who were fortunate enough to escape the Communist system, and actually know first-hand what they are talking about.
Looking at the history of China's last 160 years, nearly one hundred million people have died unnatural deaths and almost all of the traditional Chinese culture and civilization have been destroyed.
Today the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s violence and abuses are even more severe than those of the tyrannical Qin Dynasty.
Why is Falun Gong, which upholds the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance and has been promulgated in over 60 countries worldwide, being persecuted only in China, not anywhere else in the world?
The CCP has devoted the nation's resources to destroying China's rich traditional culture. The CCP's destruction of Chinese culture has been planned, well organized, and systematic, made possible by the state's use of violence.
Under the rule of the CCP, 60 to 80 million innocent Chinese people have been killed, leaving their broken families behind.
Perhaps Marx's communism can work on a small scale where everyone opts in, and those who don't can freely leave the commune, but there's no way to implement it on a large scale other than by force, which of course accounts for the horrific loss of human life under communist systems in the 1900s.
One of the core components of Marx's communism is completely unworkable - the remuneration scheme: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". All that means is that those with ability are enslaved to those without. The consequences are that those with ability begin to hide and not use their ability, and economic advancement retrogrades. (It is a vexing fact that some people have no ability and others have great ability, and many others are somewhere in between on that scale. Perhaps one day we will genetically modify the human race to create a species of pure geniuses, changing human nature in a way that makes possible social organization systems that previously weren't, but till that happens, communism a system that doesn't work on a large-scale, be it Marx's or Lenin's or Mao's.)
Concurrently, how do you decide what everyone's "need" is? At the fundamental level, every human being has the same material needs - food, water, clothing, shelter. No one actually needs anything else, but that won't stop people from trying to work the system, and of course there will be points of corruption and failure, where "pull" and favor-trading serve to skew the distribution of wealth.
For this reason, large-scale communist systems are even more vulnerable to corruption than their capitalist counterparts. Capitalism may see some unfairness in wealth distribtion, and yes we have a problem with the growing power of corporations, but that book is still being written and it's too early yet to judge capitalism by it. But a rectifying factor of capitalism is that those with ability are rewarded for using it to create vast wealth that naturally disseminates throughout society. Capitalism tends to reward those who create wealth more so than those who consume it, while communism is the diametric opposite, and that is one of the primary reasons for communism's failure.
You're thinking like a geek. $10 bucks says most people's mothers who use MSN already
Actually, what you've described is the amount of effort MS must make to sell their product nowadays. Skype and Vonage won't go away until/unless MS makes this effort, and maybe not even then since they've had time to build up significant mindshare, similar to how Real is still around. Gone are the days when a MS press release could single-handedly sink a competitor and scare away any and all newcomers to a particular market.
Unless someone in the ID camp is willing to admit that God is falsifiable, their theory will not be considered science.
Ah, but they don't actually need to admit such a thing, because the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves God exists, so therefore, by ID/Creationists' own arguements, God doesn't. QED.
...why are there diehard fans of the opera browser?...and what's still drawing in new users into the Opera club?
In a nutshell b/c migrating from any browser to Opera is like migrating from any OS to OS X. Yes, Firefox's extensions and tabbed browsing are nice, but relatively clunkily implemented. Once you've learned Opera, there's just no comparison, and no going back. It's the OS X of web browsers.
"Customers have asked me for an analysis on Linux," Taylor said in the statement.
Those customers are obviously PHB's simply needing justification for going w/ Microsoft. They've already made up their minds, and may have already made the purchase and now have to justify it to a boss who got wind of "free" OSS. It's like, "hey GM, can you get me a comparison of your cars vs Ford's so I can make a more informed buying decision?" Translation: "Please tell me what I should want to hear, and then tell me what you've told me I want to hear, so I can justify to my boss and keep my secretary and corner office."
... then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Looks like MS is fighting now, but they're only able to fight on the PR front. With Vista appearing to be a minor upgrade of XP, it seems they're not able to fight on the innovation front, where a host of competitors - Linux, OSS, OSX, Google, etc - are attacking. What's that I see written on the wall?
I'm far from an expert here, but does it matter that Google's service probably doesn't do much writing, only reading, from disk? Sounds like mainframes do at least as much writing as reading.
Yes indeed, back in the days when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri...
Maybe that will finally convince Apple to make iPods with user-removeable batteries. Cell phones, walkmans, and others have been doing it for decades, get with the program, Apple! I'm sure their industrial designers and engineers can devise such a solution without compromising aesthetics too much. Their excuses for not doing so are just red herrings.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of spending all this money to rebuild New Orleans, let's just put the buildings and houses on stilts, replace the cars with bass fishing boats (gondolas are just too inappropriately European), and change the name to New Venice.
[Dons flame-retardant suite and ducks...]
GUI? How quaint. Wake me up when we get to the Renaissance or Industrial Age and computers can understand and correctly respond to human language, and there's no more futzing about with these clunky GUI things. Better yet, wake me when we can bybass that clunky language thingy altogether with brain caps or something similar.
We want AJAX, RIA, and Web 2.0, you insensitive clods!
I see a lot of threads assume that this will force patent holders to choose GPL or their patents, and that they will naturally choose their patents, but there may be another alternative. What if such companies, like IBM, who are supportive of OSS and the GPL, open-source their patents or something to the same effect. I'm no lawyer so I can't speak to the details, but could IBM choose to "give" their software patents to OSS, making them freely available under the new GPL? IBM's patents would then still be protected from use by competitors like MS who choose their patents over the GPL, while becoming freely available to other companies who open-sourced their own patents. It seems like it could be a big win-win-win for any company involved, plus innovation in general, especially if enough companies agreed to this. If Stallman can get such support from a critical mass of corporations, he will have single-handedly reformed the US patent system, making an end-run around Congress.
Frankly, I'd rather put up with arrogance and have access to amazing code, rather than dealing with a nice person who can't write code worthy of a cockfool.
Fortunately, decency and skill/talent are not mutually exclusive, and there are plenty of examples of that, so it's not too much to ask even of brilliant people that they also comport as decent human beings.
for dominance of the HD media format, especially when you've got a M$-supported HD0-DVD consortium breathing down your throat...
Wanting to crush the competition is not sane since the goal is to make money, not kill everybody else... Capitalism is about healthy competition that follows rules.
No, capitalism is about recognizing and harnessing the natural human desire (at least in a subset of the population) to control the most wealth by whatever means are possible. Period. One way of doing that is to kill off all your competitors. Another way is by creating wealth by applying intelligence, capital, and labor to create things worth more than the sum of their parts. Capitalism itself is a social system designed to harness both of those forces while encouraging the latter and constraining the former. Those constraints primarily take the form of anti-trust law and various commercial regulations.
The problem (that we're seeing now) occurs when those laws are laxly enforced, and some people's baser instinct to win by completely destroying all competition overbalances other people's attempts to win by pure excellence of achievement.
Some people, like the Bush administration, believe that free markets inevitably rebalance themselves, hence govt regulation is uneccessary and even counterproductive. Some evidence of that can even be seen with the rise of Linux and the Open Source movement, but the question is, at what cost? What innovations has MS quashed to maintain its dominance, what financial losses has the world experienced from security breaches and other failures in M$ products, what has the Microsoft monopoly tax cost people and businesses who had no other choice of products? What well-deserved financial remuneration have all the skilled Open Source developers forgone to rebalance the free-market? Etc. etc.
Anyway, the goal of capitalism is to harness the natural drive and energy of humanity, while encouraging the creative and discouraging the destructive. Microsoft may be an example of a failing in the latter.
0 rows returned.
Knock yourself out...
I maintain the website for a non-profit scholarship foundation that runs a lean operation. One of their money-raising initiatives is to collect depleted printer cartridges and exchange them with Greenfund for cash. I guess Greenfund will be out of business now (except for the cell-phone part of their endeavors), and my scholarship organization will have to find another source of $$. Bake sales and car washes, here we come. Not to mention the fact that preventing the recycling of cartridges and other recyclelables means bigger landfills and more wasted resources.
I suggest the communist apologists read/listen to this (also available on iTunes podcast). Unlike most of the revisionist fools on this thread, it is compiled and written by Chinese nationals who were fortunate enough to escape the Communist system, and actually know first-hand what they are talking about.
Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party
Some choice quotes:
Looking at the history of China's last 160 years, nearly one hundred million people have died unnatural deaths and almost all of the traditional Chinese culture and civilization have been destroyed.
Today the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s violence and abuses are even more severe than those of the tyrannical Qin Dynasty.
Why is Falun Gong, which upholds the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance and has been promulgated in over 60 countries worldwide, being persecuted only in China, not anywhere else in the world?
The CCP has devoted the nation's resources to destroying China's rich traditional culture. The CCP's destruction of Chinese culture has been planned, well organized, and systematic, made possible by the state's use of violence.
Under the rule of the CCP, 60 to 80 million innocent Chinese people have been killed, leaving their broken families behind.
Perhaps Marx's communism can work on a small scale where everyone opts in, and those who don't can freely leave the commune, but there's no way to implement it on a large scale other than by force, which of course accounts for the horrific loss of human life under communist systems in the 1900s.
One of the core components of Marx's communism is completely unworkable - the remuneration scheme: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". All that means is that those with ability are enslaved to those without. The consequences are that those with ability begin to hide and not use their ability, and economic advancement retrogrades. (It is a vexing fact that some people have no ability and others have great ability, and many others are somewhere in between on that scale. Perhaps one day we will genetically modify the human race to create a species of pure geniuses, changing human nature in a way that makes possible social organization systems that previously weren't, but till that happens, communism a system that doesn't work on a large-scale, be it Marx's or Lenin's or Mao's.)
Concurrently, how do you decide what everyone's "need" is? At the fundamental level, every human being has the same material needs - food, water, clothing, shelter. No one actually needs anything else, but that won't stop people from trying to work the system, and of course there will be points of corruption and failure, where "pull" and favor-trading serve to skew the distribution of wealth.
For this reason, large-scale communist systems are even more vulnerable to corruption than their capitalist counterparts. Capitalism may see some unfairness in wealth distribtion, and yes we have a problem with the growing power of corporations, but that book is still being written and it's too early yet to judge capitalism by it. But a rectifying factor of capitalism is that those with ability are rewarded for using it to create vast wealth that naturally disseminates throughout society. Capitalism tends to reward those who create wealth more so than those who consume it, while communism is the diametric opposite, and that is one of the primary reasons for communism's failure.
Add Tigris.org to your list of Sourceforge alternatives for collaborative software.
Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to 'organize the world's information,'
Oh, that Google. Thanks for the elaboration, yes I've heard of them before.
This is a great thing for Apple, and their Intel-based machines are going to impress and wow people.
Ah, I knew they had a strategy for obsfucating the fact that their shiny new Intel architecture will also include TPM...
Now, jamming chewed bubble-gum into your hated enemy's car keyhole takes on a new and devious meaning...
But he swears that next time he'll start with a rewrite and leave the fancy stuff as a last option.
heh, let me guess who "he" really is...
You're thinking like a geek. $10 bucks says most people's mothers who use MSN already
Actually, what you've described is the amount of effort MS must make to sell their product nowadays. Skype and Vonage won't go away until/unless MS makes this effort, and maybe not even then since they've had time to build up significant mindshare, similar to how Real is still around. Gone are the days when a MS press release could single-handedly sink a competitor and scare away any and all newcomers to a particular market.
Hope this guy didn't burn any bridges when he left Caltech...
Unless someone in the ID camp is willing to admit that God is falsifiable, their theory will not be considered science.
Ah, but they don't actually need to admit such a thing, because the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves God exists, so therefore, by ID/Creationists' own arguements, God doesn't. QED.
...why are there diehard fans of the opera browser? ...and what's still drawing in new users into the Opera club?
In a nutshell b/c migrating from any browser to Opera is like migrating from any OS to OS X. Yes, Firefox's extensions and tabbed browsing are nice, but relatively clunkily implemented. Once you've learned Opera, there's just no comparison, and no going back. It's the OS X of web browsers.
"Customers have asked me for an analysis on Linux," Taylor said in the statement.
Those customers are obviously PHB's simply needing justification for going w/ Microsoft. They've already made up their minds, and may have already made the purchase and now have to justify it to a boss who got wind of "free" OSS. It's like, "hey GM, can you get me a comparison of your cars vs Ford's so I can make a more informed buying decision?" Translation: "Please tell me what I should want to hear, and then tell me what you've told me I want to hear, so I can justify to my boss and keep my secretary and corner office."
... then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Looks like MS is fighting now, but they're only able to fight on the PR front. With Vista appearing to be a minor upgrade of XP, it seems they're not able to fight on the innovation front, where a host of competitors - Linux, OSS, OSX, Google, etc - are attacking. What's that I see written on the wall?
Tell that to Google.
I'm far from an expert here, but does it matter that Google's service probably doesn't do much writing, only reading, from disk? Sounds like mainframes do at least as much writing as reading.
Sigh... Good times... good times...
Yes indeed, back in the days when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri...
Maybe that will finally convince Apple to make iPods with user-removeable batteries. Cell phones, walkmans, and others have been doing it for decades, get with the program, Apple! I'm sure their industrial designers and engineers can devise such a solution without compromising aesthetics too much. Their excuses for not doing so are just red herrings.