Something that some people don't seem to be considering is the idea of punishment. If somebody commits murder, and it is somehow verifiable that they will never do it again, that doesn't exonerate them from the consequences. If I or one of my family members were murdered I would expect that the person if captured would be locked up and the key thrown away.
Your point about applications like 3dsmax and photoshop not coming over to linux is a little mis-placed. Those applications are never going to come over to the linux community because they are closed source, and even if they did, they would be poorly recieved for the same reason. I agree that there are gaps in linux's software portfolio, however making the argument that those gaps should be filled by proprietary software ported from the windows community will never be a viable option. And for the record, I get tired of people complaining about the gimp, it's a good program. It's not the same as photoshop and was never designed to be a 1 to 1 match. People complain about it because they are used to photoshop and have no desire to relearn their skills on a different program. (I actually am guilty of this too, I can't use photoshop, it's too different for me. When faced with the prospect of using photoshop on another machine to do photo editing, my first reaction is to simply go download a copy of the gimp so I can have something familiar to work in). It's all a matter of perspective really.
The poster seems to be insinuating that apple is somehow trying to dupe it's customers, but says right in his post that jobs is counting on people using windows, getting tired of glitches and slowly transitioning to OSX because it works better. I'm sorry, but I don't see a company providing it's customers REAL choice and counting on the quality of it's products to seal the deal. Just in case anyone is wondering, I'm not a mac user, just making an observation.
Amen, my sentiments exactly. Are people really that scared? I'm far more afraid of my government getting used to the idea of pushing it's citzens around than I am of a bunch of disorganized lunatics.
I agree with you 100%, which is why I hope they don't do as you suggest:) I would much rather see an open platform succeed, be it linux bsd or whatever. Hopefully this isn't viewed as flaimbait, it isn't intended to be, I just like Open Source.
I recently started coding in ruby, I'm not a rails developer. I've found it to be very useful for the kinds of scripting tasks that I've put to it. Everyone I've heard talk about it seems to be tired of listening to hype. Well it's not hype for me to say that I like the language and that it has been useful to me. If I had not picked up ruby, I probably would have picked up python instead. As it is, I'm very happy with the choice I made, and I've truly enjoyed the community support. All the rest is hype.
question, If microsoft is talking about taking all their applications and making all the information contained by those applications searchable by other people on the internet, isn't that sorta like saying to all the identity theives out there, "Hey, here's my stuff. Have at it."
I just happen to be from the last dieing days of the amiga, and I take offense to his characterizations of the amiga community in general.
The fact that he even mentioned it means he must have been in on it to a greater or lesser extent towards the amiga's end. If it's true that it takes one to know one, what does that say about him exactly?
That's the wonderful thing about having free software, if a forum desides to start charging it's members, start your own service and say, "hey guys, I'm moving over here, who's with me?"
You said >>Story telling is exactly what movies are >>supposed to be about, and long winding asides is >>exactly what movies aren't supposed to be about. >> >>My point is, the books are funny in a way that >>movies can't be funny
My objection to your point would be to point out every monty python movie/flying circus episode ever made. (I would include the kevin smith movies and office space, but they have a plot and storyline, and so while I believe they are increadibly funny, they don't really make my point about movies not having to have plot.) Movies can't be funny, pah.
I get tired of people making excuses for mediocre movies. Movie making is an art just like any other. In regard to the people who make movies there are those that suck, and those that don't suck. Personally if I feel a movie lacks inspiration, then while it may be watchable, it still probably belongs in the suck pile.
I'm sorry, but the people who wrote the article on the register as well as the person/people who posted this slashdot article, and possibly bruce perens, (although I'm sure his words were taken out of context just as everyone else's were who were a part of this article), are obviously trying to start a fight for no good reason. I read Linus's email, and it seamed reasonable to me. I get tired of free software zealots trying to ram their perogatives down everybody elses throats. I like free software, I like the GPL, I'm glad Richard Stallman is the type of guy who sticks to his guns on his moral issues. At least he always manages to do something constructive to try and effect change in the world rather than trying to defame other people that he might disagree with.
The author of this article suggests at one point that the gnome devs asking users who wish to submit ideas create a quick mockup is somehow unreasonable. I've found mockups to be instrumental in taking a user's idea, (which might be very good), and conveying it to a developer in a way that's meaningful. You couldn't achieve the same result in 100 pages of text.
If a user isn't smart enough to pull out GIMP and create such a mockup, they have no business making suggestions to the gnome devs anyway, they obviously don't know enough about computers to have meaningful input.
I've had a longstanding problem with the direction gnome has gone in, (which is why I've begun to use XFCE as an alternative), and she did a nice job mentioning some of the problems. No menu editing, the eradication of preferences that I thought were good to have like workspace switching by dragging the mouse to the edge of the screen. I personally like spatial nautilus, but I understand why many wouldn't. Certain difficiancies with gnome-terminal, like the fact that scrolling the window when maximized caused the text to get garbled for a couple of years before it was fixed.
Over time, I have started to understand why some of the features were dropped. Why wouldn't the old nautilus be supported as a standard option, because the devs are working exclusively on spatial nautilus. The old file manager isn't seeing any development time, so why expose it to unsuspecting users when it's not in active development anymore. (it's the same reason that the mozilla devs are discontinuing support of mozilla in favor of firefox). My much beloved workspace switching is in truth confusing for most users, and while I still wish I had the option, GNOME has long made it clear that they favor catering to the mass of drueling cretons who have trouble figuring out the difference between a single click and a double click over power users. This is also the reason they don't include a menu editor. They are counting on the program developers to include menu entries with their programs that make sense so that the user doesn't have to think about it, indeed doesn't have the means to screw something up.
While I understand their desire to shield the user, that's not the reason I started using linux, and it's this shift in paradigm that has caused me to use alternate environments like xfce. That is the beauty of OSS, there's always choice.
My point is that his critique is nothing but broad generalizations. Many of his complaints don't apply if you run the program on the platform that it was designed for. I use the gimp all the time and don't find the UI to be particularly difficult to understand. The fact that it is different from photoshop doesn't make it inferior which is what he seems to imply.
I'm sorry, but this review was written by a whiny mac user who can't handle more than one button on a mouse without becoming confused. If he's going to make valid complaints against the quality of the program, then I'm all ears, but I wonder if when he was complaining about the non-antialising diagonal lines, if he wasn't just using the wrong tool. There is a line drawing tool that purposfully doesn't antialize lines, and one that does. My guess is that brainless couldn't figure that out.
I have had issues with the program running slugishly on non-linux platforms, specifically the windows version, so this might be a valid complaint for people who use those platforms, however those problems evaporate when running the program on linux, which in truth is the platform the program was meant to run on anyway.
I hate reading biased reviews, they're next to worthless for someone really interested in the program being reviewed.
Coming from a Linux user's standpoint, I can see the phenomenon he is talking about, (as difficult as it is to admit). To go out and get proof of Linux zealotry, one has only to log onto any IRC server and join a #linux channel. You will never find a greater conglomeration of self righteous, elitist snobs anywhere on the net. The saddest part is that these people have the least effect on the actual progress of the community. While they sit there all day badmouthing everybody else and each other, developers are busy making the system better.
Now that I have finished putting a face on the dregs of the open source community, I would like to say that I'm a Linux supporter through and through. I tend to support open source solutions, & When I start projects of my own, I like opening them up because I believe in the ideals of the community. Allot of people use Linux for technical reasons, and it is arguably a very excellent solution based solely on technical merit, however, if technical merit were the only draw to using Linux, then Linux itself would never have been created. This article in summing up the personalities in the community seems to have overlooked the most important aspect of our community and relegated it to priesthood. Perhaps the priestly class should be a little more honest about their reasons for championing open source,and perhaps they try to explain it to people and are woefully misunderstood. The latter has been my own experience as I find it very difficult to explain to people why it is that I enjoy using Linux over other systems. It's arguably more work, (although not so much anymore). "Where is the payback?" they ask, "is it faster?", "is it more stable?", "is there no blue screen of death?". My answer has to be "no", these are not the reasons. I use the system because I exercise a certain ownership over the system that I can't have with other platforms. I flatly don't feel comfortable using other platforms anymore. I feel like someone has strings attached trying to bend me to their will when I use other systems. This is my reason for being here, and I feel it's a good reason. I champion the adoption of Linux for technical reasons, and when I hear people give complaints of what they're running that sound like some of the concerns I mentioned above, sometimes I give them a nudge over to my world, and sometimes they take the bait, and sometimes not.
this is my experience as one among many in the open source world.
Your an idiot, the situation your describing would mean holding the people who pick up the disks and unwittingly put them in the machines liable for the viruswriters actions. Exactly who is it that's going to enforce this wonderful rule you've concocted anyway? The Police, the FBI, the center for terrorist activities, oh great, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable solution. Why don't you hold yourself responsible for making dumb suggestions, how's that?
I love open source, I don't use closed source because I disagree with it and don't which to support it. I believe that the GPL is the best open source liscense because it is the most restrictive on those that would try and captialize on something that by it's nature should be free, however, I can see no argument in this mans logic. He is not attacking open source, he is simply stating that proprietary software has a place and indeed it does. If I were a buisinessman that needed software to do something, and I had the means to hire somebody to write software to fill my need to the letter, then fine. I currently do not fit into this catagory, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it. The danger of closed source software is that it becomes so pervasive that people start getting used to the idea of idea's being owned. An algorythm cannot by it's nature be owned any more than mathematical formuli, but corps stand allot to gain by playing the lets trade patents game. Keeps them in buisiness and undersirables out of the equation. They will learn that in this arena things are different, indaviduals do have a voice, and left with no other option we will use our voice to undercut them at their own game, helping ourselves, and ultimately them by making idea's that they trade to the point of stalemate anyway free for anybody to use. Software is meant to make things possible, not to be a commodity itself, but to make things in the real world run more smoothly, (ie product tracking systems, assembly line controls, calculations that automate safety systems, etc, etc, etc). Software is the platonic substance of legend, it doesn't exist anywhere but in the realm of imagination and yet it makes so many things possible. The value of software is not how much you can sell it for, but what it can do for you in your real world work. I realize that I seem to be countering my own point, however, a company paying to have software written and then keeping it to themselves for their own use is fine in my book. It's their attempt to invent standards for common use and make money off of the software itself rather than it's fruits that grates me. Microsoft has invented a buisiness model that totally goes against capitalism, in which the cost of production is nothing or next to nothing, but the returns are astounding. When they sell software, it's almost all profit, why do you think they have as much standing cash on hand as they have and they can afford to pay their company officers as much as they do, because they have nothing else to spend it on. This is not capitalism people, it is artificial monopoly enforced by copyright and patent law. Copyright and patents were never designed to be misused in such a fashion. All right, my rant is over, I'm sorry, Hope I didn't blow anyone's eardrum out.
Slashdot Mirror
Something that some people don't seem to be considering is the idea of punishment. If somebody commits murder, and it is somehow verifiable that they will never do it again, that doesn't exonerate them from the consequences. If I or one of my family members were murdered I would expect that the person if captured would be locked up and the key thrown away.
Your point about applications like 3dsmax and photoshop not coming over to linux is a little mis-placed. Those applications are never going to come over to the linux community because they are closed source, and even if they did, they would be poorly recieved for the same reason. I agree that there are gaps in linux's software portfolio, however making the argument that those gaps should be filled by proprietary software ported from the windows community will never be a viable option. And for the record, I get tired of people complaining about the gimp, it's a good program. It's not the same as photoshop and was never designed to be a 1 to 1 match. People complain about it because they are used to photoshop and have no desire to relearn their skills on a different program. (I actually am guilty of this too, I can't use photoshop, it's too different for me. When faced with the prospect of using photoshop on another machine to do photo editing, my first reaction is to simply go download a copy of the gimp so I can have something familiar to work in). It's all a matter of perspective really.
The poster seems to be insinuating that apple is somehow trying to dupe it's customers, but says right in his post that jobs is counting on people using windows, getting tired of glitches and slowly transitioning to OSX because it works better. I'm sorry, but I don't see a company providing it's customers REAL choice and counting on the quality of it's products to seal the deal. Just in case anyone is wondering, I'm not a mac user, just making an observation.
Amen, my sentiments exactly. Are people really that scared? I'm far more afraid of my government getting used to the idea of pushing it's citzens around than I am of a bunch of disorganized lunatics.
I agree with you 100%, which is why I hope they don't do as you suggest :) I would much rather see an open platform succeed, be it linux bsd or whatever. Hopefully this isn't viewed as flaimbait, it isn't intended to be, I just like Open Source.
I recently started coding in ruby, I'm not a rails developer. I've found it to be very useful for the kinds of scripting tasks that I've put to it. Everyone I've heard talk about it seems to be tired of listening to hype. Well it's not hype for me to say that I like the language and that it has been useful to me. If I had not picked up ruby, I probably would have picked up python instead. As it is, I'm very happy with the choice I made, and I've truly enjoyed the community support. All the rest is hype.
I'm impressed that he used the words holey moley.
the subject pretty much says it all.
question, If microsoft is talking about taking all their applications and making all the information contained by those applications searchable by other people on the internet, isn't that sorta like saying to all the identity theives out there, "Hey, here's my stuff. Have at it."
I just happen to be from the last dieing days of the amiga, and I take offense to his characterizations of the amiga community in general.
The fact that he even mentioned it means he must have been in on it to a greater or lesser extent towards the amiga's end. If it's true that it takes one to know one, what does that say about him exactly?
ok, that was funny.
That's the wonderful thing about having free software, if a forum desides to start charging it's members, start your own service and say, "hey guys, I'm moving over here, who's with me?"
You said
>>Story telling is exactly what movies are
>>supposed to be about, and long winding asides is
>>exactly what movies aren't supposed to be about.
>>
>>My point is, the books are funny in a way that
>>movies can't be funny
My objection to your point would be to point out every monty python movie/flying circus episode ever made. (I would include the kevin smith movies and office space, but they have a plot and storyline, and so while I believe they are increadibly funny, they don't really make my point about movies not having to have plot.) Movies can't be funny, pah.
I get tired of people making excuses for mediocre movies. Movie making is an art just like any other. In regard to the people who make movies there are those that suck, and those that don't suck. Personally if I feel a movie lacks inspiration, then while it may be watchable, it still probably belongs in the suck pile.
your a microsoft plant aren't you, I know that you are. I see through you buddy.
I'm sorry, but the people who wrote the article on the register as well as the person/people who posted this slashdot article, and possibly bruce perens, (although I'm sure his words were taken out of context just as everyone else's were who were a part of this article), are obviously trying to start a fight for no good reason. I read Linus's email, and it seamed reasonable to me. I get tired of free software zealots trying to ram their perogatives down everybody elses throats. I like free software, I like the GPL, I'm glad Richard Stallman is the type of guy who sticks to his guns on his moral issues. At least he always manages to do something constructive to try and effect change in the world rather than trying to defame other people that he might disagree with.
what an idiot
The author of this article suggests at one point that the gnome devs asking users who wish to submit ideas create a quick mockup is somehow unreasonable. I've found mockups to be instrumental in taking a user's idea, (which might be very good), and conveying it to a developer in a way that's meaningful. You couldn't achieve the same result in 100 pages of text. If a user isn't smart enough to pull out GIMP and create such a mockup, they have no business making suggestions to the gnome devs anyway, they obviously don't know enough about computers to have meaningful input. I've had a longstanding problem with the direction gnome has gone in, (which is why I've begun to use XFCE as an alternative), and she did a nice job mentioning some of the problems. No menu editing, the eradication of preferences that I thought were good to have like workspace switching by dragging the mouse to the edge of the screen. I personally like spatial nautilus, but I understand why many wouldn't. Certain difficiancies with gnome-terminal, like the fact that scrolling the window when maximized caused the text to get garbled for a couple of years before it was fixed. Over time, I have started to understand why some of the features were dropped. Why wouldn't the old nautilus be supported as a standard option, because the devs are working exclusively on spatial nautilus. The old file manager isn't seeing any development time, so why expose it to unsuspecting users when it's not in active development anymore. (it's the same reason that the mozilla devs are discontinuing support of mozilla in favor of firefox). My much beloved workspace switching is in truth confusing for most users, and while I still wish I had the option, GNOME has long made it clear that they favor catering to the mass of drueling cretons who have trouble figuring out the difference between a single click and a double click over power users. This is also the reason they don't include a menu editor. They are counting on the program developers to include menu entries with their programs that make sense so that the user doesn't have to think about it, indeed doesn't have the means to screw something up. While I understand their desire to shield the user, that's not the reason I started using linux, and it's this shift in paradigm that has caused me to use alternate environments like xfce. That is the beauty of OSS, there's always choice.
My point is that his critique is nothing but broad generalizations. Many of his complaints don't apply if you run the program on the platform that it was designed for. I use the gimp all the time and don't find the UI to be particularly difficult to understand. The fact that it is different from photoshop doesn't make it inferior which is what he seems to imply.
I'm sorry, but this review was written by a whiny mac user who can't handle more than one button on a mouse without becoming confused. If he's going to make valid complaints against the quality of the program, then I'm all ears, but I wonder if when he was complaining about the non-antialising diagonal lines, if he wasn't just using the wrong tool. There is a line drawing tool that purposfully doesn't antialize lines, and one that does. My guess is that brainless couldn't figure that out. I have had issues with the program running slugishly on non-linux platforms, specifically the windows version, so this might be a valid complaint for people who use those platforms, however those problems evaporate when running the program on linux, which in truth is the platform the program was meant to run on anyway. I hate reading biased reviews, they're next to worthless for someone really interested in the program being reviewed.
Coming from a Linux user's standpoint, I can see the phenomenon he is talking about, (as difficult as it is to admit). To go out and get proof of Linux zealotry, one has only to log onto any IRC server and join a #linux channel. You will never find a greater conglomeration of self righteous, elitist snobs anywhere on the net. The saddest part is that these people have the least effect on the actual progress of the community. While they sit there all day badmouthing everybody else and each other, developers are busy making the system better. Now that I have finished putting a face on the dregs of the open source community, I would like to say that I'm a Linux supporter through and through. I tend to support open source solutions, & When I start projects of my own, I like opening them up because I believe in the ideals of the community. Allot of people use Linux for technical reasons, and it is arguably a very excellent solution based solely on technical merit, however, if technical merit were the only draw to using Linux, then Linux itself would never have been created. This article in summing up the personalities in the community seems to have overlooked the most important aspect of our community and relegated it to priesthood. Perhaps the priestly class should be a little more honest about their reasons for championing open source,and perhaps they try to explain it to people and are woefully misunderstood. The latter has been my own experience as I find it very difficult to explain to people why it is that I enjoy using Linux over other systems. It's arguably more work, (although not so much anymore). "Where is the payback?" they ask, "is it faster?", "is it more stable?", "is there no blue screen of death?". My answer has to be "no", these are not the reasons. I use the system because I exercise a certain ownership over the system that I can't have with other platforms. I flatly don't feel comfortable using other platforms anymore. I feel like someone has strings attached trying to bend me to their will when I use other systems. This is my reason for being here, and I feel it's a good reason. I champion the adoption of Linux for technical reasons, and when I hear people give complaints of what they're running that sound like some of the concerns I mentioned above, sometimes I give them a nudge over to my world, and sometimes they take the bait, and sometimes not. this is my experience as one among many in the open source world.
Your an idiot, the situation your describing would mean holding the people who pick up the disks and unwittingly put them in the machines liable for the viruswriters actions. Exactly who is it that's going to enforce this wonderful rule you've concocted anyway? The Police, the FBI, the center for terrorist activities, oh great, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable solution. Why don't you hold yourself responsible for making dumb suggestions, how's that?
Ok, I'm trying to be original. By the way, to anyone actually reading this, this is so slashdot will post this message.
You misspelled write.
Freecraft is an excellent replacement for warcraft2, especially if you have the warcraft2 cd to grab the graphics off of.
I love open source, I don't use closed source because I disagree with it and don't which to support it. I believe that the GPL is the best open source liscense because it is the most restrictive on those that would try and captialize on something that by it's nature should be free, however, I can see no argument in this mans logic. He is not attacking open source, he is simply stating that proprietary software has a place and indeed it does. If I were a buisinessman that needed software to do something, and I had the means to hire somebody to write software to fill my need to the letter, then fine. I currently do not fit into this catagory, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it. The danger of closed source software is that it becomes so pervasive that people start getting used to the idea of idea's being owned. An algorythm cannot by it's nature be owned any more than mathematical formuli, but corps stand allot to gain by playing the lets trade patents game. Keeps them in buisiness and undersirables out of the equation. They will learn that in this arena things are different, indaviduals do have a voice, and left with no other option we will use our voice to undercut them at their own game, helping ourselves, and ultimately them by making idea's that they trade to the point of stalemate anyway free for anybody to use. Software is meant to make things possible, not to be a commodity itself, but to make things in the real world run more smoothly, (ie product tracking systems, assembly line controls, calculations that automate safety systems, etc, etc, etc). Software is the platonic substance of legend, it doesn't exist anywhere but in the realm of imagination and yet it makes so many things possible. The value of software is not how much you can sell it for, but what it can do for you in your real world work. I realize that I seem to be countering my own point, however, a company paying to have software written and then keeping it to themselves for their own use is fine in my book. It's their attempt to invent standards for common use and make money off of the software itself rather than it's fruits that grates me. Microsoft has invented a buisiness model that totally goes against capitalism, in which the cost of production is nothing or next to nothing, but the returns are astounding. When they sell software, it's almost all profit, why do you think they have as much standing cash on hand as they have and they can afford to pay their company officers as much as they do, because they have nothing else to spend it on. This is not capitalism people, it is artificial monopoly enforced by copyright and patent law. Copyright and patents were never designed to be misused in such a fashion. All right, my rant is over, I'm sorry, Hope I didn't blow anyone's eardrum out.