Sigh. No. In a communist/socialist system the state owns everything and just claims to do it in the name of the people.
Sigh. In the Communist system according to Marx the people own everything. There is no State.
Fascism has to do with totalitarianism and suppression of rights, not with property. The canonical fascist country (Nazi Germany) was capitalist.
There was massive state ownership of industry, and although, it could be argued, this was just for the war effort it was also true under Italian Fascism even during the relatively peaceful 20s.
The fact there there are still vulnerabilities should come as a surprise to no one.
Indeed, however the hope is that the security problems will be fixed quickly, and that the developers wont ignore them, pretending they don't exist.
The really important thing as far as I'm concerned is the length of time needed to fix newly discovered bugs, not the number, and this is where the open source development model works so much better.
Erm, right, this doesn't even consider the costs or benefits of such an action; just that we should attempt even the near impossible just because the probability of success isn't quite 0.
if we don't find a way off this rock before we turn it into a smoldering pile of nuclear waste our species isn't going to leave behind much of a legacy.
Striping the emotive language: We should colonise somewhere else soon because we are about to destroy this planet, and it is a lot cheaper to send a handful of people to Mars than to try and save the billions on Earth.
The recording has hidden water markings in the audio, which list your friend as the legal licensee of the music. By pulling the track off the P2P network it's easy to find who's copy it is, and hence who has been copying it illegally.
I don't think your friend will lend you his stereo.
The other thing I was thinking about is: If the rovers are on opposite sides of the planet, then one is in the northern hemisphere and one is in the south.
As a result only one rover is about to go into the martian winter. For the other, rock on Summer!
Anyway, I think something is wrong in the article. Any ideas?
a)it looks like the only reason development started again was because of all the Xfree86 licensing hubbub(which isn't going to be around much longer, because Xfree86 will most likely cave). If the project did not have the merits to succeed before, I do not see how things have changed in such a way that it will be successful long-term, and this was a blatant "look at me" attempt. Y was dead, FreeDesktop was humming along quietly.
Did you read the bit at the top? "I was on holiday in Japan when the story broke" means he was in Japan on holiday, and so couldn't start dev then. Also, he wrote it for a "final year project for his masters degree", which doesn't sound like a look-at-me-attempt, but more of a I'd-like-to-pass-my-course attempt.
c)We already have an interesting, viable alternative(FreeDesktop)...and it's got heavy involvement with the major developers of Gnome and KDE, the two most popular desktop systems. Everyone is playing Chicken with Xfree86, while hedging their bet(and strengthening their position with Xfree86) by starting work with FreeDesktop. Y is nowhere to be seen in all of this, especially if it's only got one guy- versus a whole group of some of the best Linux programmers around.
How can you play chicken with an OS project??
Anyway, Y is nowhere to be seen since there was no centre for dev until yesterday. The mailing list has only just become active, and now it is there are lots of people interested in helping develop this. It's worth mentioning that the closed nature of development for X means lots of people are looking for something where they can have more of an impact and really get involved, which is exactly what Y can provide them.
Okay, it's not an X killer yet by a long shot, although Linux never started as a Unix killer, and look where it is now!
Just because you don't like it, don't call it otherwise.
Capitalism is the best system, if it is allowed to function properly. Please open a standard economics textbook and look up "free market" and you'll find that in a free market, as no one seller has any market power they must sell at the market price. If you don't sell at marginal cost, someone else will, undercutting you and putting you out of business. Hence the market price is the marginal cost.
Microsoft, once it discovered it was being undercut by a more efficient producer, deliberately dumped goods below marginal cost into a market. This creates inefficiency in the free market system meaning it can't operate. Microsoft is slightly better off, everyone else is far worse off.
Capitalism isn't just Competition-Competition-Competition... it's a lot more complicated than that. The best bits for capitalism aren't when one firm has defeated all others, but when lots of firms are competiting against each other at all times. Microsoft "competing" here is an attempt to remove competition (as a principle, not as in a firm) from the market. It's not good for capitalism.
The attempt by Microsoft to cut prices for one customer (preditory pricing against a competitor) is definitely anti-capitalist, since in a free-market situation you have to sell each product for the same price to all customers. Otherwise the system doesn't work efficiently and you end up with market failures such as monopoly.
In basic economics this is Microsoft attempting to eat into the consumer-surplus. It is anti-competitive and hence anti-capitalist.
You are right in that Linux is now competiting with Microsoft enough that they are having to lower their prices, which is a good thing. However, Microsofts response simply negates any competition Linux may pose, since they can lower prices for the few individuals who do threaten to swap until they promise not to and buy into the current lock-in situation. We'd have to wait until 10% of Microsoft's customers threaten to swap simultaniously for it to effect Microsofts bottom line.
Preditory pricing like this is a lot more worrying than with Internet Explorer. Okay, Microsoft bundled one piece of software into the cost of something a lot bigger, giving people the impression the smaller piece of software is free, hence Netscape lost. This is bad, but not nearly as specific an attack as they tried in Munich.
If Microsoft is able to sell the same software to different parties at different prices (ie the maximum price that party is willing to pay without swapping) then there is no hope for OSS use anywhere on a commercial basis. Microsoft can always afford to give discounts to the small few who think of switching.
...the moment they showed an interest in an OSS alternative that Microsoft turns up and offers them a huge discount on using Windows. It's quite lucky that they decided to pay $37.7 million for the OS option instead of the amazingly reduced dirt cheap $23.7 million for the Microsoft option.
If Microsoft is able to get away with this kind of preditory pricing, this will result in a much slower take up of the cheaper OS alternatives. So much for capitalism.
Slashdot is feeding the troll. Just because the original article claims to be a balanced warning into OSS, a little research shows all his points to be wrong.
Just another journalist trying to make a story people - move along.
What can you say or do in a forty minute long meeting? Why on earth would such a thing be news worthy, and get a reportage in any "Times", or on Slashdot? What astonishingly desperate personality culting is Slashdot pursuing today?
And how many minutes have you had with the Indian president? Considering how busy the man is (as any president will be) I think it is an important sign of how well OSS is doing now. This is important news for a site which claims "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters".
The fact that he even downloaded Stallmans biography ("Free as in Freedom" - which sounds more like a political manifesto to me) means that he devoted even more time to his guest. This is a sign of how serious the Indian President takes OSS.
I'm glad. This kind of product simply shows a lack of respect for the consumer. Large corporations should all be putting the money into gaining consumer trust, rather than limiting consumer freedom.
I don't understand how making DVDs which deliberately fail is "limiting their freedom" any more than normal. Under the normal rental system you borrow a DVD for a day or two, and can watch it as many times as you want. At the end of this time you have to return it to the store. Surely this places a greater limit on a persons freedom? They have no choice but to return the video, or risk a fine etc
If you want to keep it longer than that, then shell out the extra cash to buy the permanent version. The reason this system has failed is not any notion about "freedom", but simply because it was incredibly over priced for the rentals market. It's not complicated.
The more the 2.6 kernel is accepted by companies the faster it'll get to that "critical point" where distributions will have to start using it not to feel left behind. And for those trying to sell Linux (with services etc) the 2.6 kernel will be an excellent bonus.
I also hope they'll be more stable than the 2.4 + 2.6patch was... I know a fair few people for whom lack of stable videocard support was the factor stopping them upgrade to 2.6.
I'm just pointing out the difference between the article and the post linking to it. Although true that it is possible for the processor to run one instruction per cycle, it doesn't claim that in the article, and assuming it is the case just because it can be is a little careless.
The machines aren't as slow as the top post says... they don't run at 20MHz, they are "capable of carrying out about 20 million instructions per second". Depending on the complexity of the instructions, the processor actually runs several times faster than 20MHz.
"Especially the support for Microsoft Word 95 and Microsoft Word 97 documents has become much better."
I'm no expert, but considering OpenOffice can already open these file formats quite well (they are old), why does KOffice lag behind? I can understand difficulty in writing these files, but for reading them it shouldn't be nearly as difficult. They wouldn't have to reverse engineer the formats from scratch; they can simply read using the method from the GPLed OpenOffice code. Why the difference exactly?
I'd like to think that IBM won't enforce this patent to disrupt paid open source development because they now realise how important Linux, GNU, X, Gnome and KDE are to their business model. However, I suspect I'm just being naieve.
As long as Open Source is in their interest they wouldn't have a reason to enforce this patent. The moment Open Source stops benefiting them, and infact becomes a hindrence then they will try enforcing it. I really don't see that happening.
Thing is, since all Open Source benefits from the rest of Open Source (for example improvements in sendmail can help develop exim, and KDE/Gnome etc) then IBM will want to encourage payments to Open Source volunteers, regardless of who they are from since IBM will become better off as a result.
I think this (like the millions of other patents IBM has) is simply a defensive patent they own so no one else can.
No. All trade in shops in England is now done in kg. Stones are hardly ever used.
And pints?
A pint is a measurement of beer. It is simply tradition, and isn't a hinderance to everyday economic transactions (well, drinking probably is). All other drinks are sold in litres (wine, juice, milk etc).
ANd miles, miles per hour?
Yeah, I don't quite get why we still do this. I guess from an engineering point of view you'd want m/sec, so converting from miles/hour or km/hour doesn't make much difference.
For example, the inch is now _defined_ as 2.54 cm, it has nothing to do with some king's thumb or anything.
Personally I think 2.54cm is pretty arbitrary. Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light, which is, yet again, arbitrary.
The first attempts for standardising the inch were many hundreds of years ago, since it's so vital to have correct measurements for trade. Despite what most posts here seem to think, the Imperial Inch does not change every time the English monarch does.
...we are firm in our belief that the unchecked spread of Open Source Software, under the GPL, is a much more serious threat to our capitalist system than US corporations realise.
I dunno, I think the huge US corporations pose a greater threat.
Slashdot Mirror
You do know that on a local machine that X communication is done via Unix domain sockets right?
You do know that Unix domain sockets are the defacto IPC method for Unix OSs?
You do know that network transparency adds no overhead for applications running locally?
Oh well.
Because that would push the apparent TCO of Windows up?
Because those figures were meant as advertising and not as serious research?
I mean, come on. He'll just make up some excuse, which will benefit you nothing. There are far more interesting questions you could ask.
Sigh. No. In a communist/socialist system the state owns everything and just claims to do it in the name of the people.
Sigh. In the Communist system according to Marx the people own everything. There is no State.
Fascism has to do with totalitarianism and suppression of rights, not with property. The canonical fascist country (Nazi Germany) was capitalist.
There was massive state ownership of industry, and although, it could be argued, this was just for the war effort it was also true under Italian Fascism even during the relatively peaceful 20s.
LOL. And that was modded insightful...?
More insightful (and accurate) than some.
The fact there there are still vulnerabilities should come as a surprise to no one.
Indeed, however the hope is that the security problems will be fixed quickly, and that the developers wont ignore them, pretending they don't exist.
The really important thing as far as I'm concerned is the length of time needed to fix newly discovered bugs, not the number, and this is where the open source development model works so much better.
How about because it is there and we are here
Erm, right, this doesn't even consider the costs or benefits of such an action; just that we should attempt even the near impossible just because the probability of success isn't quite 0.
if we don't find a way off this rock before we turn it into a smoldering pile of nuclear waste our species isn't going to leave behind much of a legacy.
Striping the emotive language: We should colonise somewhere else soon because we are about to destroy this planet, and it is a lot cheaper to send a handful of people to Mars than to try and save the billions on Earth.
I think not.
Scarcity != poverty.
Something is scarce when there isn't enough of it.
Enough of it for what exactly? To satify (as far as we can tell) infinite human demand.
As a result it's unlikely any society will ever completely overcome scarcity.
The recording has hidden water markings in the audio, which list your friend as the legal licensee of the music. By pulling the track off the P2P network it's easy to find who's copy it is, and hence who has been copying it illegally.
I don't think your friend will lend you his stereo.
The other thing I was thinking about is: If the rovers are on opposite sides of the planet, then one is in the northern hemisphere and one is in the south.
As a result only one rover is about to go into the martian winter. For the other, rock on Summer!
Anyway, I think something is wrong in the article. Any ideas?
a)it looks like the only reason development started again was because of all the Xfree86 licensing hubbub(which isn't going to be around much longer, because Xfree86 will most likely cave). If the project did not have the merits to succeed before, I do not see how things have changed in such a way that it will be successful long-term, and this was a blatant "look at me" attempt. Y was dead, FreeDesktop was humming along quietly.
Did you read the bit at the top? "I was on holiday in Japan when the story broke" means he was in Japan on holiday, and so couldn't start dev then. Also, he wrote it for a "final year project for his masters degree", which doesn't sound like a look-at-me-attempt, but more of a I'd-like-to-pass-my-course attempt.
c)We already have an interesting, viable alternative(FreeDesktop)...and it's got heavy involvement with the major developers of Gnome and KDE, the two most popular desktop systems. Everyone is playing Chicken with Xfree86, while hedging their bet(and strengthening their position with Xfree86) by starting work with FreeDesktop. Y is nowhere to be seen in all of this, especially if it's only got one guy- versus a whole group of some of the best Linux programmers around.
How can you play chicken with an OS project??
Anyway, Y is nowhere to be seen since there was no centre for dev until yesterday. The mailing list has only just become active, and now it is there are lots of people interested in helping develop this. It's worth mentioning that the closed nature of development for X means lots of people are looking for something where they can have more of an impact and really get involved, which is exactly what Y can provide them.
Okay, it's not an X killer yet by a long shot, although Linux never started as a Unix killer, and look where it is now!
Just because you don't like it, don't call it otherwise.
Capitalism is the best system, if it is allowed to function properly. Please open a standard economics textbook and look up "free market" and you'll find that in a free market, as no one seller has any market power they must sell at the market price. If you don't sell at marginal cost, someone else will, undercutting you and putting you out of business. Hence the market price is the marginal cost.
Microsoft, once it discovered it was being undercut by a more efficient producer, deliberately dumped goods below marginal cost into a market. This creates inefficiency in the free market system meaning it can't operate. Microsoft is slightly better off, everyone else is far worse off.
Capitalism isn't just Competition-Competition-Competition... it's a lot more complicated than that. The best bits for capitalism aren't when one firm has defeated all others, but when lots of firms are competiting against each other at all times. Microsoft "competing" here is an attempt to remove competition (as a principle, not as in a firm) from the market. It's not good for capitalism.
The attempt by Microsoft to cut prices for one customer (preditory pricing against a competitor) is definitely anti-capitalist, since in a free-market situation you have to sell each product for the same price to all customers. Otherwise the system doesn't work efficiently and you end up with market failures such as monopoly.
In basic economics this is Microsoft attempting to eat into the consumer-surplus. It is anti-competitive and hence anti-capitalist.
You are right in that Linux is now competiting with Microsoft enough that they are having to lower their prices, which is a good thing. However, Microsofts response simply negates any competition Linux may pose, since they can lower prices for the few individuals who do threaten to swap until they promise not to and buy into the current lock-in situation. We'd have to wait until 10% of Microsoft's customers threaten to swap simultaniously for it to effect Microsofts bottom line.
Preditory pricing like this is a lot more worrying than with Internet Explorer. Okay, Microsoft bundled one piece of software into the cost of something a lot bigger, giving people the impression the smaller piece of software is free, hence Netscape lost. This is bad, but not nearly as specific an attack as they tried in Munich.
If Microsoft is able to sell the same software to different parties at different prices (ie the maximum price that party is willing to pay without swapping) then there is no hope for OSS use anywhere on a commercial basis. Microsoft can always afford to give discounts to the small few who think of switching.
...the moment they showed an interest in an OSS alternative that Microsoft turns up and offers them a huge discount on using Windows. It's quite lucky that they decided to pay $37.7 million for the OS option instead of the amazingly reduced dirt cheap $23.7 million for the Microsoft option.
If Microsoft is able to get away with this kind of preditory pricing, this will result in a much slower take up of the cheaper OS alternatives. So much for capitalism.
Slashdot is feeding the troll. Just because the original article claims to be a balanced warning into OSS, a little research shows all his points to be wrong.
Just another journalist trying to make a story people - move along.
What can you say or do in a forty minute long meeting? Why on earth would such a thing be news worthy, and get a reportage in any "Times", or on Slashdot? What astonishingly desperate personality culting is Slashdot pursuing today?
And how many minutes have you had with the Indian president? Considering how busy the man is (as any president will be) I think it is an important sign of how well OSS is doing now. This is important news for a site which claims "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters".
The fact that he even downloaded Stallmans biography ("Free as in Freedom" - which sounds more like a political manifesto to me) means that he devoted even more time to his guest. This is a sign of how serious the Indian President takes OSS.
Choices:
1. Pay for disposable DVD
or
2. Buy the permanent one and pay more.
Hmmm... Your point?
I'm glad. This kind of product simply shows a lack of respect for the consumer. Large corporations should all be putting the money into gaining consumer trust, rather than limiting consumer freedom.
I don't understand how making DVDs which deliberately fail is "limiting their freedom" any more than normal. Under the normal rental system you borrow a DVD for a day or two, and can watch it as many times as you want. At the end of this time you have to return it to the store. Surely this places a greater limit on a persons freedom? They have no choice but to return the video, or risk a fine etc
If you want to keep it longer than that, then shell out the extra cash to buy the permanent version. The reason this system has failed is not any notion about "freedom", but simply because it was incredibly over priced for the rentals market. It's not complicated.
The more the 2.6 kernel is accepted by companies the faster it'll get to that "critical point" where distributions will have to start using it not to feel left behind. And for those trying to sell Linux (with services etc) the 2.6 kernel will be an excellent bonus.
I also hope they'll be more stable than the 2.4 + 2.6patch was... I know a fair few people for whom lack of stable videocard support was the factor stopping them upgrade to 2.6.
And you got this information where?
The quote's from the article.
I'm just pointing out the difference between the article and the post linking to it. Although true that it is possible for the processor to run one instruction per cycle, it doesn't claim that in the article, and assuming it is the case just because it can be is a little careless.
The machines aren't as slow as the top post says... they don't run at 20MHz, they are "capable of carrying out about 20 million instructions per second". Depending on the complexity of the instructions, the processor actually runs several times faster than 20MHz.
"Especially the support for Microsoft Word 95 and Microsoft Word 97 documents has become much better."
I'm no expert, but considering OpenOffice can already open these file formats quite well (they are old), why does KOffice lag behind? I can understand difficulty in writing these files, but for reading them it shouldn't be nearly as difficult. They wouldn't have to reverse engineer the formats from scratch; they can simply read using the method from the GPLed OpenOffice code. Why the difference exactly?
I'd like to think that IBM won't enforce this patent to disrupt paid open source development because they now realise how important Linux, GNU, X, Gnome and KDE are to their business model. However, I suspect I'm just being naieve.
As long as Open Source is in their interest they wouldn't have a reason to enforce this patent. The moment Open Source stops benefiting them, and infact becomes a hindrence then they will try enforcing it. I really don't see that happening.
Thing is, since all Open Source benefits from the rest of Open Source (for example improvements in sendmail can help develop exim, and KDE/Gnome etc) then IBM will want to encourage payments to Open Source volunteers, regardless of who they are from since IBM will become better off as a result.
I think this (like the millions of other patents IBM has) is simply a defensive patent they own so no one else can.
So stones is a metric measurement?
No. All trade in shops in England is now done in kg. Stones are hardly ever used.
And pints?
A pint is a measurement of beer. It is simply tradition, and isn't a hinderance to everyday economic transactions (well, drinking probably is). All other drinks are sold in litres (wine, juice, milk etc).
ANd miles, miles per hour?
Yeah, I don't quite get why we still do this. I guess from an engineering point of view you'd want m/sec, so converting from miles/hour or km/hour doesn't make much difference.
For example, the inch is now _defined_ as 2.54 cm, it has nothing to do with some king's thumb or anything.
Personally I think 2.54cm is pretty arbitrary. Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light, which is, yet again, arbitrary.
The first attempts for standardising the inch were many hundreds of years ago, since it's so vital to have correct measurements for trade. Despite what most posts here seem to think, the Imperial Inch does not change every time the English monarch does.
...we are firm in our belief that the unchecked spread of Open Source Software, under the GPL, is a much more serious threat to our capitalist system than US corporations realise.
I dunno, I think the huge US corporations pose a greater threat.