Under the GPL, the licensee agrees not to sell or otherwise limit the reproduction of the software (though one is allowed to charge for costs of distribution, warranties, and services, as noted above in the discussion of Red Hat).
If he had just bothered to read this,he might have had a little crediblity. Instead, he chose to believe Microsoft FUD.
I can't speak from the perspective of having ADHD, however, my 4 siblings and I all had what seems like a strange situation in school. All of us craved learning. We all read everything we could get our hands on from as young as 4 years old, and we all ended up in "gifted and talented" classes. Thing is, right about 6th grade, just about every one of us shut down and burned out on school, and every one of us had a hard time passing grade after grade all the way through high school. None of us ever lost the desire to learn, and we each went after our own interests full throttle, but it seems we were pretty bored with school most of the time.
I'm not speaking as an expert here, but I tend to think that school (public education at least) is not geared toward children who think for themselves. Instead, it's designed to indoctrinate to a certain extent. I remember being ridiculed frequently as a student, not only by the other students, but by the teachers, as well, and always having to back up my seemingly outlandish points that contridicted the common thinking on whatever subject was being taught.
My point is, probably one of the best things you can do is give your child the freedom to think for herself. Give her the option of deciding for herself if the teachers are telling her the truth and the best method to accomplish the tasks at hand. Obviously, she has to respect the authority, but she doesn't have to take the knowledge they impart at face value. Collectivists love public education, because it makes everyone "equal", but in the end, the unique individuals suffer and are labeled with hard-to-define learning disorders so the rest of the group can cope with the person that doesn't think like they do.
Remember, Edison and Einstein were both labeled as imbeciles by their teachers.
1) I bet a lot of people wish Captain Kirk had replied this thoroughly.
2) I bet there is now, or there will soon be, a huge market for web developers that specialize in accessiblity. This is definitely a few steps further than making sure all the major browsers can view your content.
3) I wish I had thought of this when the interview was up, but how difficult is it to create websites with text to speech software in mind? Would it be better to have a section that spells all the words phonetically so they are the most understandable to the end user? It seems that it should be possible to automate that process, rather than having to maintain two versions of the site, or having to create audio files that play automatically with an onMouseover.
If I had mod points, I'd move this up, but the best I can do is agree.
One of the things I've wondered, however, is what does Microsoft have to lose by opening up SMB? It seems strange to me that nobody can see that most open operating systems can do it the correct way and the Microsoft way (at least limitedly), while Microsoft has self-imposed limitations that prevent them from being part of a much larger machine. Another example of these self-imposed limitations is the extremely limited selection of filesystems available to Windows (NTFS, FAT, FAT32), yet, in Linux, I probably have close to, if not over, 100 options that I can choose from including the Windows offerings.
wvWare has a library and a set of utilities. I use this all the time to convert Word attachments to HTML so I can read them.
wvHtml: convert your Word document into HTML4.0
wvLatex: convert your Word document into visually (pretty) correct LaTeX
wvCleanLatex: convert into 'cleaner' LaTeX containing less visual mark-up, more suitable for further use and LyX import. Work in progress
wvDVI: converts word to DVI. Requires 'latex'
wvPS: converts word to PostScript. Requires 'dvips'
wvPDF: converts word to Adobe PDF. Requires 'distill' from Adobe [Someone do a pdflatex or pdfhtml version:-)]
wvText: converts word to plain text. Textually correct output requires 'lynx.' For poor output, this doesn't require anything special.
wvAbw: converts word to Abiword format. (Far better just to use Abiword.)
wvWml: converts word to WML for viewing on portable devices like WebPhones and Palm Pilots.
wvRtf: a basic version exists
wvMime: can be plugged as a MIME helper application into your browser/mail client; presents the document on-screen inside GhostView, while all intermediate files generated go into the/tmp directory.
You don't want a pure democracy. That's the equivalent of mob rule, where the majority rules and the minority and dissenting opinion is effectively squelched. The founders of the US of A went through great lengths to protect the minority opinion and, if I remember correctly, it wasn't until Woodrow Wilson that the nation was referred to as a democracy.
A republic on the other hand, insists that the law rules regardless of what the majority wants. This is not popular a lot of times. For example, the majority of people in the USA want to give up freedoms for security, but the Constitution is effectively slowing down, if not preventing, the complete elimination of our freedoms in favor of security. The times that you do see the Constitution being ignored, you're seeing a great example of true democracy in action.
There is a whole section on freshmeat.net devoted to Sound Synthesis. I've used Reason, and it's a nice package, but I guarantee you that it's more than you need (it's VERY resource intensive as well). It's like using Photoshop because you like to crop and resize images, when The GIMP works great for that purpose.
Here's a comment that find incredibly insightful and relevant from here and here as posted by circletimessquare.
QUOTE
1) DENIAL
"September 11th doesn't really change anything."
2) ANGER
"John Ashcroft is an asshole!"
3) BARGAINING
"They might do this or that, but we can always march and petition and campaign!"
4) DEPRESSION
"I'm ashamed to be an American."
5) ACCEPTANCE
"I guess, after all, Islamic Fundamentalism really is the enemy."
As soon as this person made the issue America, they lost their own argument.
Dude, blood is on the hands of every nation on earth. Hypocrisy is equal opportunity.
Does America suck big time on some issues? Sure. No one is denying the obvious criticisms you have pointed out.
But surely you can see that America has more freedoms when it comes to the press, speech, etc., than China, for example, which actively seeks to control these things. Or Pakistan, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
Does this make America better than China or these other nations? Of course not. That is just nationalism. Nationalism stinks like racism or sexism stinks. So maybe we, and this includes you, can move beyond the America sucks/ America is better rhetoric and focus on the issues at hand: basic freedoms, regardless of where in the world we are.
Because no one else is talking about these issues in this thread as an "America is better" or "America is worse" kind of way except you. Who cares about that. Iraq is pursuing WMD. That sucks. All by itself that sucks. Whether America is the center of all evil in the universe or all Americans walk around with haloes of purity and innocence on their heads. Either way, this Iraqi prusuit of WMD still sucks. Period. End of story. Get it?
So I'll make you a deal: we'll move beyond the nationalist rhetoric as soon as YOU move beyond the nationalist rhetoric, capice?
Geez.;-P
ENDQUOTE
Not trying to karma whore, but if I post anonymously, it's likely a lot of people won't see it. I can honestly say I've seen myself go through this after September 11, 2001.
I'm sure this is a far-fetched idea, but I was just thinking about the fact that marketing droids came up with this "Digital Rights Management" which has been conveniently called "DRM" by everybody from manufacturers, resellers and slashdotters. The idea I had was that, instead of calling this massive problem by the name that the marketing types would prefer, we should go thru the trouble of at the very least saying the full name, and preferably the RMS version of "Digital Restrictions Management", so that Joe User is at least prompted to ask what it is. That way it doesn't get lost in the millions of other acronyms and abbreviations he has a hard time keeping up with, like RAM, P2P, P3P, etc, etc.
This is just a thought, but I think it'd be at least minimally beneficial.
Considering how often the government bungles just about anything it gets its hands on, it'll be interesting to see how somebody manages to screw up the whole thing. There is just no way they could have thought of everything.
WalMart does not sell PCs for a liiving. It's jusy one of many products.
If this product tanks WalMart will not be hurt at all.
WalMart does not need Uncle Bill's blessing to make money (see first point).
These are all actually good reasons for Wal-Mart to be the guinea pig to try this sort of "revolution in PC sales" -- which, indeed it is.
These are bare-bones, bottom of the pile PCs that are selling because they are cheap.
If somebody that is not even in the PC business can sell junk hardware with no OS or with a non-Microsoft OS, how much better do you think the big dogs will do when they rid themselves of the licensing chokehold that Microsoft puts on them? The only reason that chokehold exists is because the prevailing logic was that nobody would buy a PC without Windows. Wal-Mart proved them wrong.
I see a lot of people suggesting that it's likely that most of these cheap computers end up getting wiped clean and having Windows installed. However, I'd like to point out that most computer manufacturers and resellers are locking themselves into really bad situations with Microsoft only because they believe they can't sell these computers without an OS or with an OS other than Windows. Wal-Mart is proving otherwise. So, even if these computers get wiped clean, perhaps other major computer resellers will take note of the fact that they can sell their quality computers without having to lock themselves into the Microsoft trap. If you think about it, this could dramatically alter the way computers are sold in the very near future.
I think if you can answer that one question, you'll know whether or not you need to turn these kids in to "power users" that are CLI wizards or just introduce them to KDE.
I don't want to sound cynical, but it seems to me that most kids would mostly be concerned about the quality of their gaming experience more than uptime and intellectual property discussions, and in this case, Linux and *BSD may not provide a satisfactory experience. I want to be wrong about this, so feel free to correct my possible misconceptions.
It has become more apparent with each court case that the existing entertainment industry suffers from stifled creativity, since they, with their vast resources, are unable to make such an incredible technology known as decentralized filesharing work to their benefit.
I can see that this is a great way to get the actual paths and roads into a database to be used for mapping and so forth, but how do we complete this mapping solution with a way to label those paths and roads?
Does Sun make most of their money with their really nice hardware? If that's the case, what are the chances they could be considering opening the source for Solaris? I admit I'm fairly ignorant about Solaris, but it seems like this is a good example of a company that could benefit from opening the source of their software by, perhaps, generating a bigger demand for their hardware.
I remember reading a while back about a guy that convinced Nike to remove a few of the toxins from their rubber soles so they would cause less problems for the environment. I wonder if the same thing could be done with tires.
Slashdot Mirror
Under the GPL, the licensee agrees not to sell or otherwise limit the reproduction of the software (though one is allowed to charge for costs of distribution, warranties, and services, as noted above in the discussion of Red Hat).
If he had just bothered to read this,he might have had a little crediblity. Instead, he chose to believe Microsoft FUD.
1) The International Space Station becomes the American Space Station due to the lack of participation from other nations.
2) 10 years from now, the full project is launched. Yeah, this is hypothetical, just deal.
3) Teachers get excited and want to show their students the breaking news at cnn.com.
4) Censorware detects "ASS" all over the site and denies the teachers and students access to the biggest NASA news in years.
It's very easy to do a search at news.google.com with some of the words from the story summary and come up with the story elsewhere.
Yes, it's a nytimes.com link, but it's without the registration.
Cmdr and Mrs. Taco. Soon to follow, their children, Fish, Beef and Soft.
I can't speak from the perspective of having ADHD, however, my 4 siblings and I all had what seems like a strange situation in school. All of us craved learning. We all read everything we could get our hands on from as young as 4 years old, and we all ended up in "gifted and talented" classes. Thing is, right about 6th grade, just about every one of us shut down and burned out on school, and every one of us had a hard time passing grade after grade all the way through high school. None of us ever lost the desire to learn, and we each went after our own interests full throttle, but it seems we were pretty bored with school most of the time.
I'm not speaking as an expert here, but I tend to think that school (public education at least) is not geared toward children who think for themselves. Instead, it's designed to indoctrinate to a certain extent. I remember being ridiculed frequently as a student, not only by the other students, but by the teachers, as well, and always having to back up my seemingly outlandish points that contridicted the common thinking on whatever subject was being taught.
My point is, probably one of the best things you can do is give your child the freedom to think for herself. Give her the option of deciding for herself if the teachers are telling her the truth and the best method to accomplish the tasks at hand. Obviously, she has to respect the authority, but she doesn't have to take the knowledge they impart at face value. Collectivists love public education, because it makes everyone "equal", but in the end, the unique individuals suffer and are labeled with hard-to-define learning disorders so the rest of the group can cope with the person that doesn't think like they do.
Remember, Edison and Einstein were both labeled as imbeciles by their teachers.
There's a Terry Pratchett quote I love that says, "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions."
Standards make us more productive and efficient. Standards allow us to pull in all kinds of directions without running into eachother.
1) I bet a lot of people wish Captain Kirk had replied this thoroughly.
2) I bet there is now, or there will soon be, a huge market for web developers that specialize in accessiblity. This is definitely a few steps further than making sure all the major browsers can view your content.
3) I wish I had thought of this when the interview was up, but how difficult is it to create websites with text to speech software in mind? Would it be better to have a section that spells all the words phonetically so they are the most understandable to the end user? It seems that it should be possible to automate that process, rather than having to maintain two versions of the site, or having to create audio files that play automatically with an onMouseover.
If I had mod points, I'd move this up, but the best I can do is agree.
One of the things I've wondered, however, is what does Microsoft have to lose by opening up SMB? It seems strange to me that nobody can see that most open operating systems can do it the correct way and the Microsoft way (at least limitedly), while Microsoft has self-imposed limitations that prevent them from being part of a much larger machine. Another example of these self-imposed limitations is the extremely limited selection of filesystems available to Windows (NTFS, FAT, FAT32), yet, in Linux, I probably have close to, if not over, 100 options that I can choose from including the Windows offerings.
wvWare has a library and a set of utilities. I use this all the time to convert Word attachments to HTML so I can read them.
:-)]
/tmp directory.
wvHtml: convert your Word document into HTML4.0
wvLatex: convert your Word document into visually (pretty) correct LaTeX
wvCleanLatex: convert into 'cleaner' LaTeX containing less visual mark-up, more suitable for further use and LyX import. Work in progress
wvDVI: converts word to DVI. Requires 'latex'
wvPS: converts word to PostScript. Requires 'dvips'
wvPDF: converts word to Adobe PDF. Requires 'distill' from Adobe [Someone do a pdflatex or pdfhtml version
wvText: converts word to plain text. Textually correct output requires 'lynx.' For poor output, this doesn't require anything special.
wvAbw: converts word to Abiword format. (Far better just to use Abiword.)
wvWml: converts word to WML for viewing on portable devices like WebPhones and Palm Pilots.
wvRtf: a basic version exists
wvMime: can be plugged as a MIME helper application into your browser/mail client; presents the document on-screen inside GhostView, while all intermediate files generated go into the
intune.org is a musician community site that deals with all kinds of issues affecting musicians.
You don't want a pure democracy. That's the equivalent of mob rule, where the majority rules and the minority and dissenting opinion is effectively squelched. The founders of the US of A went through great lengths to protect the minority opinion and, if I remember correctly, it wasn't until Woodrow Wilson that the nation was referred to as a democracy.
A republic on the other hand, insists that the law rules regardless of what the majority wants. This is not popular a lot of times. For example, the majority of people in the USA want to give up freedoms for security, but the Constitution is effectively slowing down, if not preventing, the complete elimination of our freedoms in favor of security. The times that you do see the Constitution being ignored, you're seeing a great example of true democracy in action.
There is a whole section on freshmeat.net devoted to Sound Synthesis. I've used Reason, and it's a nice package, but I guarantee you that it's more than you need (it's VERY resource intensive as well). It's like using Photoshop because you like to crop and resize images, when The GIMP works great for that purpose.
Here's a comment that find incredibly insightful and relevant from here and here as posted by circletimessquare.
;-P
QUOTE
1) DENIAL
"September 11th doesn't really change anything."
2) ANGER
"John Ashcroft is an asshole!"
3) BARGAINING
"They might do this or that, but we can always march and petition and campaign!"
4) DEPRESSION
"I'm ashamed to be an American."
5) ACCEPTANCE
"I guess, after all, Islamic Fundamentalism really is the enemy."
As soon as this person made the issue America, they lost their own argument.
Dude, blood is on the hands of every nation on earth. Hypocrisy is equal opportunity.
Does America suck big time on some issues? Sure. No one is denying the obvious criticisms you have pointed out.
But surely you can see that America has more freedoms when it comes to the press, speech, etc., than China, for example, which actively seeks to control these things. Or Pakistan, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
Does this make America better than China or these other nations? Of course not. That is just nationalism. Nationalism stinks like racism or sexism stinks. So maybe we, and this includes you, can move beyond the America sucks/ America is better rhetoric and focus on the issues at hand: basic freedoms, regardless of where in the world we are.
Because no one else is talking about these issues in this thread as an "America is better" or "America is worse" kind of way except you. Who cares about that. Iraq is pursuing WMD. That sucks. All by itself that sucks. Whether America is the center of all evil in the universe or all Americans walk around with haloes of purity and innocence on their heads. Either way, this Iraqi prusuit of WMD still sucks. Period. End of story. Get it?
So I'll make you a deal: we'll move beyond the nationalist rhetoric as soon as YOU move beyond the nationalist rhetoric, capice?
Geez.
ENDQUOTE
Not trying to karma whore, but if I post anonymously, it's likely a lot of people won't see it. I can honestly say I've seen myself go through this after September 11, 2001.
According to the datasheet, the "Slim CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, CD-RW" is optional. I don't know if that means you have to pick one of those, however.
I'm sure this is a far-fetched idea, but I was just thinking about the fact that marketing droids came up with this "Digital Rights Management" which has been conveniently called "DRM" by everybody from manufacturers, resellers and slashdotters. The idea I had was that, instead of calling this massive problem by the name that the marketing types would prefer, we should go thru the trouble of at the very least saying the full name, and preferably the RMS version of "Digital Restrictions Management", so that Joe User is at least prompted to ask what it is. That way it doesn't get lost in the millions of other acronyms and abbreviations he has a hard time keeping up with, like RAM, P2P, P3P, etc, etc.
This is just a thought, but I think it'd be at least minimally beneficial.
Considering how often the government bungles just about anything it gets its hands on, it'll be interesting to see how somebody manages to screw up the whole thing. There is just no way they could have thought of everything.
WalMart does not sell PCs for a liiving. It's jusy one of many products.
If this product tanks WalMart will not be hurt at all.
WalMart does not need Uncle Bill's blessing to make money (see first point).
These are all actually good reasons for Wal-Mart to be the guinea pig to try this sort of "revolution in PC sales" -- which, indeed it is.
These are bare-bones, bottom of the pile PCs that are selling because they are cheap.
If somebody that is not even in the PC business can sell junk hardware with no OS or with a non-Microsoft OS, how much better do you think the big dogs will do when they rid themselves of the licensing chokehold that Microsoft puts on them? The only reason that chokehold exists is because the prevailing logic was that nobody would buy a PC without Windows. Wal-Mart proved them wrong.
I see a lot of people suggesting that it's likely that most of these cheap computers end up getting wiped clean and having Windows installed. However, I'd like to point out that most computer manufacturers and resellers are locking themselves into really bad situations with Microsoft only because they believe they can't sell these computers without an OS or with an OS other than Windows. Wal-Mart is proving otherwise. So, even if these computers get wiped clean, perhaps other major computer resellers will take note of the fact that they can sell their quality computers without having to lock themselves into the Microsoft trap. If you think about it, this could dramatically alter the way computers are sold in the very near future.
What is important to kids in an OS?
I think if you can answer that one question, you'll know whether or not you need to turn these kids in to "power users" that are CLI wizards or just introduce them to KDE.
I don't want to sound cynical, but it seems to me that most kids would mostly be concerned about the quality of their gaming experience more than uptime and intellectual property discussions, and in this case, Linux and *BSD may not provide a satisfactory experience. I want to be wrong about this, so feel free to correct my possible misconceptions.
What do kids value in an OS? Cynics want to know.
It has become more apparent with each court case that the existing entertainment industry suffers from stifled creativity, since they, with their vast resources, are unable to make such an incredible technology known as decentralized filesharing work to their benefit.
I can see that this is a great way to get the actual paths and roads into a database to be used for mapping and so forth, but how do we complete this mapping solution with a way to label those paths and roads?
If they were really concerned about cheaper hardware running Solaris, would they want to have an x86 version?
Does Sun make most of their money with their really nice hardware? If that's the case, what are the chances they could be considering opening the source for Solaris? I admit I'm fairly ignorant about Solaris, but it seems like this is a good example of a company that could benefit from opening the source of their software by, perhaps, generating a bigger demand for their hardware.
I remember reading a while back about a guy that convinced Nike to remove a few of the toxins from their rubber soles so they would cause less problems for the environment. I wonder if the same thing could be done with tires.
"What'd you say your name was?"
"Osama bin..errrr John."