The plot thickens: you see, advertisement is now called an 'art' by dimwits for whatever reason they want. By lifting graffitti to the status of publicity, we are effectively bringing it to the level of art, gentlemen!
This is so painfully not art. Really, I can swear, NOT ART.
It's their computer: most people extend the concept of Windows to include their software. They don't even make the conceptual distinction between an OS and its applications. In fact they couldn't, simply because they are not computery-minded people.
Windows is such a strong brand that it doesn't even need to say what it is.
Point is that people won't switch to Windows-as-the-OS to Linux-as-the-OS. The idea of an OS-irrelevant world is that one is buying a product that contains OS + Applications. This bundle respects specific standards (binary format, DLL symbols, blah blah) but in the end for the user it's just a brand.
How's that for a sales pitch: "Use Business(tm) for the best biz experience; Use Home(tm) for all your digital lifestyle needs." End of story. There's no point in trying to sell X11. In fact you'rew better not telling people about it if you want to sell something...
Ouch! That hurts:) Seriously, it's great that you guys took initiative to make software installation easier to deal with libraries version. Out of curiosity, is there some sort of pressure on the Kernel/glibc people to experiment with alternate models of linking?
While I must admit having mixed up standard w/ quality standard, I do believe that there is a need for specific quality standards, for specific purposes. The NASA has some. Your company has some when it's looking at a potential business partner. Whether formal or informal, everyone does their business by following what they consider a standard of quality. Although they cannot be as hard and fast as technological standards, I believe it would be a good thing to have open source software strive for accreditations like ISO 9001.
It's not a question of freedome vs. lack thereof; it's a question of assessing objectively the quality of a product. If you are producing a car that does not meet specific levels of quality, then there are laws that will prevent you from selling it (thanks Ralph Nader, at least you didn't screw on that one!). In softwre, the situation can be different, and not as stringent as in the car business: not all software can kill you, but some software CAN kill you if not properly done. Or could corrupt your data. If MySQL was to get some sort of acknowledged certification that can prove that their software will not cause data corruption under such and such circumstances, then perhaps more people could convince their IT bosses to use it, save on licenses, and have the pleasure to extend it internally.
Freedom has nothing to do with quality, and that goes both ways. Having one will not strip you of the other.
You're so out of the loop, it's not even fun: yes everyone can fix it blah blah blah. But by WHAT standard can we say YES or NO is it good? It is a perfectly admirable and vital aspect of such software that it is open for modification, but the point of the idea is that you want to determine once and for all if such and such software complies with a specific set of requirements, expectations, behaviour, name it. The point in the end is to have software that is determined beyond its mere existence: if you know that a network utility supports TCP/IP, then you will be able to use it with other tools that support TCP/IP. Why? Because TCP/IP is a standard! And everyone know how it works, and how to use it. The idea of a standard of quality is to say, can we use this software for specific purpose, and be sure we won't get screwed by a little bug, that, well, you know you could have fixed yourselves, because the source is open, you see?
You're making an essentialist argument: because the nature of Linux is openness, therefore it can only be good.
When you have (good) standards, you have to worry less about how things work, and you can start just using them.
Doesn't mean that ALL free software MUST follow such standards, and that's the beauty of FLOSS
Or if Linux could instead accept something like NEXSTEP/Mac OS X Frameworks: a properly versioned system of dynamic libraries, no more symlinks, unfound symbols, linking errors because of path, LD_PATH or what have you. Just clean pre-binding, shared object discovery at runtime, and no more DLL hell.
Then just see how easy it will be to make packages work together.
Obviously you are new here... Or probably also a new computer user? Read up on the fact that IE's HTML runtime is a part of the OS on Win32. FF has to load everything the first time, whereas IE has a lot of stuff pre-loaded.
Actually, the format for RFC was defined in RFC3,
dating also from April 1969:
The content of a NWG note may be any thought, suggestion, etc. related to
the HOST software or other aspect of the network. Notes are encouraged to
be timely rather than polished. Philosophical positions without examples
or other specifics, specific suggestions or implementation techniques
without introductory or background explication, and explicit questions
without any attempted answers are all acceptable. The minimum length for
a NWG note is one sentence.
These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two reasons.
First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto
authoritative, and we hope to promote the exchange and discussion of
considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second, there is a natural
hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this
inhibition.
"The Intensive Care Unit" in which a man is living his entire life through television channels, never has any physical contact with the rest of the world, and when he finally meets his wife and children (whom he had by artificial insemination of his wife), they blow out and tear each other to pieces. Of course this is practically impossible, but it's a neat take on the sensory deprivation you get from not interacting enough with your physical friends. I see more the use of IM in cases where it can't be easily replaced (baby is sleeping, physical distance, or the need to pass an URL), but otherwise you should raise your ass from the chair.
Turner should not have presented his point on itch scratching as "duplication of effort" or "redundancy" because it's not the redundancy that is annoying. What do I care if there exists twenty different media players? I'll pick one, maybe the most popular, and be gone with the "problem" of choice.
The real problem is that open-sourcers are missing the opportunity of creating a unified platform (think: erasing the fundamental differences between KDE and GNOME). Damn! They can look at each other's code, so it's not like there's a patent stoppping them from doing so! I don't care if twenty people want to reinvent the wheel, but I'd like to be sure that I can use them all on my segway.
I agree partially with this guy insofar as
video games are a subset of the activities human
do in simulated manner. Playing a good game of
chess will shake your mind, and so do sports
(and sport will shake BOTH your spirits and
your fat), and that's a good thing. When you fight
with your little brother, you are often acting out a simulation (though you can easily fall back into 'real mode', i.e. hurt each other). But his article then is hardly new stuff: even the lion cubs play with each other and gain a lot of benefits from fighting without hurting. Video games are another method of creating a simulation, and it can be technically very advanced (although I admit that most games are for morons, still the possibilities are there).
But no video game will ever teach you how to cope with the unexciting, boring stuff that is pervasive in human life. Yes, it will teach you to persevere, but only if there is a shiny gold treasure at the end, or a big-boobed princess. I'm sorry, but this is rare in the real world. You need to persevere also for less glamorous things. Books (and to a certain extent theater/cinema) are probably the only make-believe place where you will confront these things. Read any Beckett lately?
The thing is that you can't learn everything through exciting simulation. And simulating isn't the end of learning. You may be expert in an educational video game about butchery, but if you've never touched a hindquarter, you can't be a butcher. Same thing with life: it's good to have a top-notch simulation area, but in the end, you have to go out and play it in the world.
Oh my! If you ever do that, be warned that you will find such amazing truths like Rebecca's passion for reviewing books. She only work 3h
a week and pays the rent with it. You might also want to know what is the real occupation of a top
ten reviewer who prefers SF and classic Literature, and more wholesome fun from the best and passionate book reviewers. Just try to click that "more" link to know "more" about these people.
There is something I find annoying with Slashdot,
it's the bad habit of posters to leech news from other sites that already refer to a previous coverage on another site. This is absurd: I click on Slashdot's link
to go to geek.com's link, which sends me to The Inquirer, from which I can finally have
the real thing. Is this only me that is irritated or what? Hey, when I read the same news first on OSNews (who at least have the decency to redirect to original sources more often) and that some hours after I see that same story on Slashdot, but with the link pointing to OSNews, I find that a bit ridiculous.
Not that I think it wrong to acknowledge that news posted on Slashdot came from another news aggregator (that's how one learns about the other ones), but the point is that you end up with a neverending arab telephone, and the guy down the line says black when you're posting white. Or else it's a new way to counter the slashdot effect, and I'm not just getting it.
I'm just amazed at how much people are getting this wrong. It is not the WHOLE of India that decided to switch to GNU/Linux, but only the state of Madhya
Pradesh. Guys, what would you have said if the headline was the American state of Arkansas, has opted to switch to Linux from Microsoft
In case you didn't know, Bhopal has been the site of the world's worst chemical disaster in 1984. A leak from the Union Carbide (an american company) nearby plant has killed and injured thousands of citizens, and the company has denied responsibility for a long time. See here for more info. Somehow, I'm not surprised that they want to avoid the presence of big american companies
You know what's better? When you are on their (ahem!) "Warehouse" page, the crossed-out price for WordPublisher is 339$; it's 179$ for PresenterPlus; and for 299$ SpreadsheetPro. Now click any of these ads, and you'll see the price dramatically reduce: instead of saving 339$ for WordPublisher, I'm saving only 229$ if I get it for free! And the same goes for the other software...
Reminds me of that old joke: a man comes after work to his house, and tells proudly his wife "Darling, you won't believe what genial idea I've had to save us money! Instead of taking the bus to go to work, I ran behind it and saved 2.25$ !" His wife, angried, answers "You damn fool! Why didn't you run behind a cab? You would have saved at least 10$!"
"When the project was opened two years ago, it was missing online help, spell-checking, and printing which had been based on proprietary commercial libraries. With release 6 the open source community has replaced these missing features."
Gimme a break with newbie bash and pretending to know all about people.You like using form as much as I may. I'm noting down "bumpkin" and "holier-than-thouness" for the next time I want to be tight-assed. And I'll take care to use a lot of compound words.
My point is simply that Katz's article is simply irrelevant in trying to find the essence of the net and that he's using the same kind of generalization that makes a "what has the world become" kind of article. Don't you feel that kind of pitiful look from Katz on the utilitarian outcome of the internet? What's the problem about having utilitarian stuff? I'm sorry, but that guy is simply doing an idealistic analysis of his subject. And by the way, understanding something does not imply accepting it.
Useless intellectual effort
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Holy shit, Jon Katz! You're really the epitome of intellectual minimalism. I'm studying literature in University, and I get sick whenever I hear
that high-brow-modern-culture commentator speaking of "locus", "shifts in perspective" or "defamiliarization." These are simply empty terms, abstract ideas not based on aything empirical, but only on the perspective one projects over the facts. Who cares about the "locus" (you like to sound intelligent, don't you?) of the Internet, when it's a damn _tool_ not a living being, an organic body or a person. You make me think of these pretentious culture writers in 'zines like Wired/Village Voice/etc that try to sound intelligent by using big words and big generalizations to chase the zeitgeist and are constantly referring to a golden age that never was. Won't you stop whining about the present, and acknowledge that it's no more like your adolescent dreams? You just do not want to look at what's interesting now and critique it. I guess you are the best example that Free Speech is no panacea. Did you know that freedom entails also responsibility? Like the responsibility of shutting up when you don't have anything brillant to say.
The real distinguishing factors are not the technology, they are the business positions.
Prithee sir, I guess you are missing Scott's point here. BeOS's architecture has (had?) strong departures from Windows's or OSX's. Think about the virtual database at the core of BFS, and the benefits it gives for searches: indexing files each time a file is written, working with attributes instead of extensions or commentaries. Same for pervasive
multithreading and servers (Hurd, anyone?) I'm not
techie enough to argue on what's better what's worse, but for some points, BeOS vs other OSes is just simply apples and oranges; it's not only a matter of marketing strategies. Anyone would like to argue that Hurd and Linux are roughly identical technologies with different brand names? I would rather not...
Slashdot Mirror
The plot thickens: you see, advertisement is now called an 'art' by dimwits for whatever reason they want. By lifting graffitti to the status of publicity, we are effectively bringing it to the level of art, gentlemen!
This is so painfully not art. Really, I can swear, NOT ART.
It's their computer: most people extend the concept of Windows to include their software. They don't even make the conceptual distinction between an OS and its applications. In fact they couldn't, simply because they are not computery-minded people. Windows is such a strong brand that it doesn't even need to say what it is. Point is that people won't switch to Windows-as-the-OS to Linux-as-the-OS. The idea of an OS-irrelevant world is that one is buying a product that contains OS + Applications. This bundle respects specific standards (binary format, DLL symbols, blah blah) but in the end for the user it's just a brand. How's that for a sales pitch: "Use Business(tm) for the best biz experience; Use Home(tm) for all your digital lifestyle needs." End of story. There's no point in trying to sell X11. In fact you'rew better not telling people about it if you want to sell something...
Ouch! That hurts :) Seriously, it's great that you guys took initiative to make software installation easier to deal with libraries version. Out of curiosity, is there some sort of pressure on the Kernel/glibc people to experiment with alternate models of linking?
While I must admit having mixed up standard w/ quality standard, I do believe that there is a need for specific quality standards, for specific purposes. The NASA has some. Your company has some when it's looking at a potential business partner. Whether formal or informal, everyone does their business by following what they consider a standard of quality. Although they cannot be as hard and fast as technological standards, I believe it would be a good thing to have open source software strive for accreditations like ISO 9001.
It's not a question of freedome vs. lack thereof; it's a question of assessing objectively the quality of a product. If you are producing a car that does not meet specific levels of quality, then there are laws that will prevent you from selling it (thanks Ralph Nader, at least you didn't screw on that one!). In softwre, the situation can be different, and not as stringent as in the car business: not all software can kill you, but some software CAN kill you if not properly done. Or could corrupt your data. If MySQL was to get some sort of acknowledged certification that can prove that their software will not cause data corruption under such and such circumstances, then perhaps more people could convince their IT bosses to use it, save on licenses, and have the pleasure to extend it internally.
Freedom has nothing to do with quality, and that goes both ways. Having one will not strip you of the other.
You're so out of the loop, it's not even fun: yes everyone can fix it blah blah blah. But by WHAT standard can we say YES or NO is it good? It is a perfectly admirable and vital aspect of such software that it is open for modification, but the point of the idea is that you want to determine once and for all if such and such software complies with a specific set of requirements, expectations, behaviour, name it. The point in the end is to have software that is determined beyond its mere existence: if you know that a network utility supports TCP/IP, then you will be able to use it with other tools that support TCP/IP. Why? Because TCP/IP is a standard! And everyone know how it works, and how to use it. The idea of a standard of quality is to say, can we use this software for specific purpose, and be sure we won't get screwed by a little bug, that, well, you know you could have fixed yourselves, because the source is open, you see?
You're making an essentialist argument: because the nature of Linux is openness, therefore it can only be good.
When you have (good) standards, you have to worry less about how things work, and you can start just using them.
Doesn't mean that ALL free software MUST follow such standards, and that's the beauty of FLOSS
Or if Linux could instead accept something like NEXSTEP/Mac OS X Frameworks: a properly versioned system of dynamic libraries, no more symlinks, unfound symbols, linking errors because of path, LD_PATH or what have you. Just clean pre-binding, shared object discovery at runtime, and no more DLL hell.
Then just see how easy it will be to make packages work together.
Obviously you are new here... Or probably also a new computer user? Read up on the fact that IE's HTML runtime is a part of the OS on Win32. FF has to load everything the first time, whereas IE has a lot of stuff pre-loaded.
If I were you I'd go get the cavalry pretty soon.
The content of a NWG note may be any thought, suggestion, etc. related to the HOST software or other aspect of the network. Notes are encouraged to be timely rather than polished. Philosophical positions without examples or other specifics, specific suggestions or implementation techniques without introductory or background explication, and explicit questions without any attempted answers are all acceptable. The minimum length for a NWG note is one sentence.
These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two reasons. First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto authoritative, and we hope to promote the exchange and discussion of considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second, there is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition.
"The Intensive Care Unit" in which a man is living his entire life through television channels, never has any physical contact with the rest of the world, and when he finally meets his wife and children (whom he had by artificial insemination of his wife), they blow out and tear each other to pieces. Of course this is practically impossible, but it's a neat take on the sensory deprivation you get from not interacting enough with your physical friends. I see more the use of IM in cases where it can't be easily replaced (baby is sleeping, physical distance, or the need to pass an URL), but otherwise you should raise your ass from the chair.
Turner should not have presented his point on itch scratching as "duplication of effort" or "redundancy" because it's not the redundancy that is annoying. What do I care if there exists twenty different media players? I'll pick one, maybe the most popular, and be gone with the "problem" of choice.
The real problem is that open-sourcers are missing the opportunity of creating a unified platform (think: erasing the fundamental differences between KDE and GNOME). Damn! They can look at each other's code, so it's not like there's a patent stoppping them from doing so! I don't care if twenty people want to reinvent the wheel, but I'd like to be sure that I can use them all on my segway.
I see this one coming: "no one is ever gonna ...
need more than 640 Mb of RAM"
I agree partially with this guy insofar as video games are a subset of the activities human do in simulated manner. Playing a good game of chess will shake your mind, and so do sports (and sport will shake BOTH your spirits and your fat), and that's a good thing. When you fight with your little brother, you are often acting out a simulation (though you can easily fall back into 'real mode', i.e. hurt each other). But his article then is hardly new stuff: even the lion cubs play with each other and gain a lot of benefits from fighting without hurting. Video games are another method of creating a simulation, and it can be technically very advanced (although I admit that most games are for morons, still the possibilities are there). But no video game will ever teach you how to cope with the unexciting, boring stuff that is pervasive in human life. Yes, it will teach you to persevere, but only if there is a shiny gold treasure at the end, or a big-boobed princess. I'm sorry, but this is rare in the real world. You need to persevere also for less glamorous things. Books (and to a certain extent theater/cinema) are probably the only make-believe place where you will confront these things. Read any Beckett lately? The thing is that you can't learn everything through exciting simulation. And simulating isn't the end of learning. You may be expert in an educational video game about butchery, but if you've never touched a hindquarter, you can't be a butcher. Same thing with life: it's good to have a top-notch simulation area, but in the end, you have to go out and play it in the world.
Actually, it's "autogeddon." Go read your
Ballard! (cf. Crash, Atrocity Exhibition, etc.)
You should call them to verify this:
Product and Sales Inquiries
1-888-GO-LINUX
1-888-465-4689
cf. SCO's own website
Oh my! If you ever do that, be warned that you will find such amazing truths like Rebecca's passion for reviewing books. She only work 3h a week and pays the rent with it. You might also want to know what is the real occupation of a top ten reviewer who prefers SF and classic Literature, and more wholesome fun from the best and passionate book reviewers. Just try to click that "more" link to know "more" about these people.
There is something I find annoying with Slashdot, it's the bad habit of posters to leech news from other sites that already refer to a previous coverage on another site. This is absurd: I click on Slashdot's link to go to geek.com's link, which sends me to The Inquirer, from which I can finally have the real thing. Is this only me that is irritated or what? Hey, when I read the same news first on OSNews (who at least have the decency to redirect to original sources more often) and that some hours after I see that same story on Slashdot, but with the link pointing to OSNews, I find that a bit ridiculous. Not that I think it wrong to acknowledge that news posted on Slashdot came from another news aggregator (that's how one learns about the other ones), but the point is that you end up with a neverending arab telephone, and the guy down the line says black when you're posting white. Or else it's a new way to counter the slashdot effect, and I'm not just getting it.
Of course we'd stand up and cheer... We would simply not yell that the American government is running Linux. :)
Gnah! I'm just fussy about details.
I'm just amazed at how much people are getting this wrong. It is not the WHOLE of India that decided to switch to GNU/Linux, but only the state of Madhya Pradesh. Guys, what would you have said if the headline was the American state of Arkansas, has opted to switch to Linux from Microsoft
In case you didn't know, Bhopal has been the site of the world's worst chemical disaster in 1984. A leak from the Union Carbide (an american company) nearby plant has killed and injured thousands of citizens, and the company has denied responsibility for a long time. See here for more info. Somehow, I'm not surprised that they want to avoid the presence of big american companies
Just my two maple-leaved cents
You know what's better? When you are on their (ahem!) "Warehouse" page, the crossed-out price for WordPublisher is 339$; it's 179$ for PresenterPlus; and for 299$ SpreadsheetPro. Now click any of these ads, and you'll see the price dramatically reduce: instead of saving 339$ for WordPublisher, I'm saving only 229$ if I get it for free! And the same goes for the other software...
Reminds me of that old joke: a man comes after work to his house, and tells proudly his wife "Darling, you won't believe what genial idea I've had to save us money! Instead of taking the bus to go to work, I ran behind it and saved 2.25$ !" His wife, angried, answers "You damn fool! Why didn't you run behind a cab? You would have saved at least 10$!"
Just a little look back...
"When the project was opened two years ago, it was missing online help, spell-checking, and printing which had been based on proprietary commercial libraries. With release 6 the open source community has replaced these missing features."
Gimme a break with newbie bash and pretending to know all about people.You like using form as much as I may. I'm noting down "bumpkin" and "holier-than-thouness" for the next time I want to be tight-assed. And I'll take care to use a lot of compound words.
My point is simply that Katz's article is simply irrelevant in trying to find the essence of the net and that he's using the same kind of generalization that makes a "what has the world become" kind of article. Don't you feel that kind of pitiful look from Katz on the utilitarian outcome of the internet? What's the problem about having utilitarian stuff? I'm sorry, but that guy is simply doing an idealistic analysis of his subject. And by the way, understanding something does not imply accepting it.
Holy shit, Jon Katz! You're really the epitome of intellectual minimalism. I'm studying literature in University, and I get sick whenever I hear that high-brow-modern-culture commentator speaking of "locus", "shifts in perspective" or "defamiliarization." These are simply empty terms, abstract ideas not based on aything empirical, but only on the perspective one projects over the facts. Who cares about the "locus" (you like to sound intelligent, don't you?) of the Internet, when it's a damn _tool_ not a living being, an organic body or a person. You make me think of these pretentious culture writers in 'zines like Wired/Village Voice/etc that try to sound intelligent by using big words and big generalizations to chase the zeitgeist and are constantly referring to a golden age that never was. Won't you stop whining about the present, and acknowledge that it's no more like your adolescent dreams? You just do not want to look at what's interesting now and critique it. I guess you are the best example that Free Speech is no panacea. Did you know that freedom entails also responsibility? Like the responsibility of shutting up when you don't have anything brillant to say.