I normally don't email around appeals to people, but the magnitude of this disaster is so large that I have emailed my friends informing them how to donate online.
I pointed people towards the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which as well as accepting donations online, also provides a convenient listing of Local Red Cross / Red Crescent which are probably better for donating through. For instance, I gave through the Canadian Red Cross since the Government of Canada is going to be matching private donations through them.
What do you gain by releasing no Source but giving your Software away for free anyway?
I get to hold on to my trade secrets for Really Cool Ways To Do Stuff that other people haven't thought of, which (despite what open source advocates might say) is definitely a right I have, and a capital asset for any business endeavours I might have. I also gain the ability to profit from modifications I make for other organizations because hey, if there's money to be made by modifying my work of art, then that money might as well exclusively come to me.
From developing both open source software and closed source but free (as in beer) software, I can tell you that the closed source stuff has been much, much more lucrative for me. Because it's lucrative I can keep writing free software, which benefits everyone. Sure, I still write open source software as a hobby but I recognize that it is a hobby, is nice to do for the community, but is not a way to make money. If I only wrote free open source software, today I would not be able to afford creating free software -- how is that better for everyone?.
Unfortunately, money matters. Take for instance the Apache Foundation, which are funded by business, or OpenBSD, FreeBSD (also funded) and what they provide for the larger community is tremendous. This is an excellent arrangement! But for small/private developers, open source software is a labour of love, and often not something that we can keep up.
Your should care that software is freely modifiable because you will be the one benefitting when someone else more knowledgable comes along and makes the product better. What happens when the noddy proprietary software vendor goes belly up - bang goes your investment
There is a lot of optimism and hopefulness about how releasing something under such a license benefits the end user (by getting a future improved product)... but in many cases code is left abandoned, and nobody really cares to do anything with it in the future. So a business (or individual) investing in software would do well to look at the usefulness first, the cost second (no fee == free) and go with the software if it meets their needs like this. Insisting modifiable source does not gain much extra in most cases, and excluding for example closed source free software is a foolish decision to make when that software today, and at least for the next while, would have met your needs and cost you nothing.
I take issue with the term "free software" being hijacked by what are, quite honestly, free/open source zealots. I'm posting free software on my site and keep getting inquiries about how I dare call it free, since it's not released under the GNU GPL, etc. Kind of insulting I think, because free software does not necessarily mean FOSS, and some people seem to be spitting on what I'm offering them.
I've been interested in free software for a long time -- that is, software I can acquire today and use for the forseeable future without owing anyone money or other compensation, including requiring registration (even if no fee). To me that's the essential quality of free software. If the source code is there, and if modifications are permitted, that's fine of course and is icing on the cake. The BSD license is beautiful.
But I think the time has come for GNU GPL zealots to realize that if they expect the world to call their brand of "free" the only type of "free", this is just being unrealistic and a bit obnoxious. If you are looking for free software, there is tons of it out there. Most of it you can't modify, sorry. Don't like it? Write your own GNU GPL'd free software. And if you are looking for only GNU GPL'd software, then go look for that exclusively, and stop bothering developers who go out of their way to make no-fee software of other (non-GPL) licenses.
Of course I understand the philosophy behind free/open source software (FOSS) and it's very pretty and everything, but it is just one brand of "free".
You know they also offer ogg vorbis streams of CBC radio (presumably after many complaints about their proprietary streaming... now if only the BBC could change from that awful RealMedia stuff)
espresso machines mysteriously satisfy all the Sims needs, Sims are suddenly comfortable with open relationships, and the social worker no longer cares how they treat their children
Potentially yes. I would favour better user education and improved software installation practices rather than a nasty, perpetual cleanup operation relying on tons of extra software. Keeping up with spyware (by scanning and recovering from it) is a losing game, as we all know after trying to clean up a family member's computer.
So people reallyshould be educated to start by finding software that is known to be free from spyware, from a site like CleanSoftware.org which was covered here earlier, rather than that awful download.com (please tell your friends and family to avoid download.com... so many modified/infected software is distributed from there!!)
This is just a matter of being careful about what you install. It's not hard to do, but it requires that the user know that they have to be careful when installing software.
Banning a tool is almost always a retarded move, be it a gun, a laser, encryption software, or a dvd copier.
You seriously consider a gun a tool? The thing is built to kill living creatures, animals or humans. That is its purpose, its design. It's not a tool, and it shouldn't be in the hands of any civilian.
Hmm... Enemy Territory runs quite well on my Linux system, and that's despite having a crappy low end ATI Radeon. Not quite as fast as under Windows but that's probably due to the video driver.
Enable glx, dri, and do some AGP tweaks...
Also makes one snicker... I recall content producers saying that selling high quality television/video streaming over the Internet is not feasible (the amount of data that has to be shipped). Well, they were wrong it seems... instead of putting all that money in lawyers' pockets, they could have helped develop technologies to produce new revenue streams. As is, they sat idly by while others made the technologies that will probably obsolete TV/movie content producers.
Overall, the progress is just astounding. When I compare clips of say movies from 3 years ago to ones you can find now, the file sizes have remained the same but the quality of both video and audio have gone way up. I don't know much about video codecs but I do recall back then there still being MPEG 4 in the game, so maybe it's more about modern tweaks?
i'd love to see today's kids pull off something underground. "Hey let's set up an elite MSN chat room and trade WMV files!"... "yah! wow this will be just like in the movie hackers!"... "hold on let me turn up some techno... "send me over the_swan_episode_3.wmv!"... "hey is that filename Unicode? iTunes is havin problems adding it to the playlist"... "This is the MSN Passport police, we have forwarded your logs to the MPAA"
If it's these stupid kids I've run across on IRC, there's nothing elite about it... just a bunch of people stealing movies, and the kids on the university connections with more bandwidth get distro privileges. Until they get caught and expelled, of course.
How do you make an international call? You call yourselves nerds??? #1, visit a phone booth and phreak a dialtone, hook up your MS-DOS powered PBX hunter, start dialing... #2 once you find a PBX, disable logging, #3 mask your CID, #4 dial Taiwan!
Required reading for everyone is Rosenhan's 1972 study, On Being Sane in Insane Places. Well known but often overlooked by psychiatrists, the experiment clearly demonstrates that in most cases, psychiatrists really have no fscking idea who is sane and who has real problems. The process of diagnosis and treatment of psychological problems is guided more by confirmatory testing -- seeking out to prove what you already believe is true. In this experiment, Rosenhan sent perfectly normal people to check themselves into institutions, and they were swiftly diagnosed with serious psychological problems.
Seriously, though, TV (and radio) are social engineering. Culture, opinion, taste, desire, even thoughts are cultivated and implanted through television
Wow. Yes! Let me add to this... over the past 3 years I have been studying marketing at university. One of the fundamental difficulties for marketers is predicting consumer behaviour -- consumers seem to have minds of their own, or they're too smart/stupid to follow marketers' wishes.
Then along comes TV and the mass media (including newspapers) and suddenly the people that used to have to predict consumer behaviour had a nice way to shape consumer behaviour. So now marketers don't just have to "measure" consumer demand and wishes, but can establish the consumer demand (think: tobacco industry, automobile industry, tickle me elmo...)
It's a lot easier to sell junk to someone you are simultaneously brainwashing into wanting your junk. They put up less of a fight and -- bonus points -- they actually like your junk;)
I think it would be safe to say that the same channels used by marketers are used for political agendas. This isn't a conspiracy theory, this is just fact of how people benefiting from control want to maintain that control. Very few organizations control so many millions of television, radio, and newspapers at once. Any "opinion" they want to become mainstream, becomes mainstream due to mere exposure effect. You'll notice that news reporting, for instance, is more like a chanting ritual (across TV, radio, newspaper) than intelligent reporting.
I'm pretty sure it's the same guy... I saw the One-Man Lord of the Rings at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival (like, two years ago...phhbbbbt to Chicago) and this guy is amazing. He works up a real good sweat running around, doing all the voice and physical stunts. At one point there was even a baby making distracting sounds in the audience, and he used the sounds as effects to add to his performance. The man is on speed or something, go see him if you can.
Gwynne Dyer is a sharp fellow (Canadian living in the UK). I have met him personally on a few occasions, he tends to have pretty reasonable insights into world politics. I'm not so sure how strong his science is, however. But from what I've seen from him over the years (Globe and Mail, etc.) he does not tend to seek to induce panic in people like many other journalists.
On Windows systems, no, it's not buffer overflows that are the major problem and the CPU's capabilities with respect to flagging memory pages will do absolutely nothing. Humans install viruses on Windows systems. They fall for tricks, it's a social problem. Sure there are still some buffer overflow issues.
Seriously, it ain't broke. Been working great for a long, long time. What will make UNIX, *BSD, Linux collectively strong is sticking to the same UNIX plan (as has been the goal with Linux from the start).
This giant earthquake and subsequent tsunami that's been in the news, preliminary reports of the casualties are at least 30,000 people. Do you realize how huge a number that is? And it's probably drastically under-reported, the waters swept through poor coastal lands in many Asian countries and carried bodies out to sea. I bet (but hope to God not) that the death toll is twice that, on the order of 60,000. But I suspect the death toll will climb because it always does, especially when information collection is weak in the disaster areas.
There is a huge natural disaster here on earth, without stuff raining from the sky on us. I guess all I'm saying is, disasters will happen, and as non-religious as I am I can only say that we should all pray that large disasters will not happen, and in bad times help out others who need help, because there's really nothing else you can do.
The FAQ explains what is meant by "free software" at the site; it is free as in what the user would care about. Open source is additionally marked as such.
For the purposes of this site, "free software" is any software that you can legitimately use without a time limit and without an obligation to pay, as a home/non-commercial user. This rules out shareware and leaves freeware, open source (e.g. licensed under the GNU GPL or BSD license), and some trial/demo software.
Slashdot Mirror
I normally don't email around appeals to people, but the magnitude of this disaster is so large that I have emailed my friends informing them how to donate online.
I pointed people towards the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which as well as accepting donations online, also provides a convenient listing of Local Red Cross / Red Crescent which are probably better for donating through. For instance, I gave through the Canadian Red Cross since the Government of Canada is going to be matching private donations through them.
From developing both open source software and closed source but free (as in beer) software, I can tell you that the closed source stuff has been much, much more lucrative for me. Because it's lucrative I can keep writing free software, which benefits everyone. Sure, I still write open source software as a hobby but I recognize that it is a hobby, is nice to do for the community, but is not a way to make money. If I only wrote free open source software, today I would not be able to afford creating free software -- how is that better for everyone?.
Unfortunately, money matters. Take for instance the Apache Foundation, which are funded by business, or OpenBSD, FreeBSD (also funded) and what they provide for the larger community is tremendous. This is an excellent arrangement! But for small/private developers, open source software is a labour of love, and often not something that we can keep up.
I take issue with the term "free software" being hijacked by what are, quite honestly, free/open source zealots. I'm posting free software on my site and keep getting inquiries about how I dare call it free, since it's not released under the GNU GPL, etc. Kind of insulting I think, because free software does not necessarily mean FOSS, and some people seem to be spitting on what I'm offering them.
I've been interested in free software for a long time -- that is, software I can acquire today and use for the forseeable future without owing anyone money or other compensation, including requiring registration (even if no fee). To me that's the essential quality of free software. If the source code is there, and if modifications are permitted, that's fine of course and is icing on the cake. The BSD license is beautiful.
But I think the time has come for GNU GPL zealots to realize that if they expect the world to call their brand of "free" the only type of "free", this is just being unrealistic and a bit obnoxious. If you are looking for free software, there is tons of it out there. Most of it you can't modify, sorry. Don't like it? Write your own GNU GPL'd free software. And if you are looking for only GNU GPL'd software, then go look for that exclusively, and stop bothering developers who go out of their way to make no-fee software of other (non-GPL) licenses.
Of course I understand the philosophy behind free/open source software (FOSS) and it's very pretty and everything, but it is just one brand of "free".
You know they also offer ogg vorbis streams of CBC radio (presumably after many complaints about their proprietary streaming... now if only the BBC could change from that awful RealMedia stuff)
Potentially yes. I would favour better user education and improved software installation practices rather than a nasty, perpetual cleanup operation relying on tons of extra software. Keeping up with spyware (by scanning and recovering from it) is a losing game, as we all know after trying to clean up a family member's computer.
... so many modified/infected software is distributed from there!!)
So people reallyshould be educated to start by finding software that is known to be free from spyware, from a site like CleanSoftware.org which was covered here earlier, rather than that awful download.com (please tell your friends and family to avoid download.com
This is just a matter of being careful about what you install. It's not hard to do, but it requires that the user know that they have to be careful when installing software.
Also makes one snicker... I recall content producers saying that selling high quality television/video streaming over the Internet is not feasible (the amount of data that has to be shipped). Well, they were wrong it seems... instead of putting all that money in lawyers' pockets, they could have helped develop technologies to produce new revenue streams. As is, they sat idly by while others made the technologies that will probably obsolete TV/movie content producers.
Overall, the progress is just astounding. When I compare clips of say movies from 3 years ago to ones you can find now, the file sizes have remained the same but the quality of both video and audio have gone way up. I don't know much about video codecs but I do recall back then there still being MPEG 4 in the game, so maybe it's more about modern tweaks?
i'd love to see today's kids pull off something underground. "Hey let's set up an elite MSN chat room and trade WMV files!" ... "yah! wow this will be just like in the movie hackers!" ... "hold on let me turn up some techno... "send me over the_swan_episode_3.wmv!" ... "hey is that filename Unicode? iTunes is havin problems adding it to the playlist" ... "This is the MSN Passport police, we have forwarded your logs to the MPAA"
If it's these stupid kids I've run across on IRC, there's nothing elite about it... just a bunch of people stealing movies, and the kids on the university connections with more bandwidth get distro privileges. Until they get caught and expelled, of course.
Seriously though... that's a good book, it's sitting right here on my bed stand.
How do you make an international call? You call yourselves nerds??? #1, visit a phone booth and phreak a dialtone, hook up your MS-DOS powered PBX hunter, start dialing... #2 once you find a PBX, disable logging, #3 mask your CID, #4 dial Taiwan!
disclaimer: don't do this, probably illegal
Then along comes TV and the mass media (including newspapers) and suddenly the people that used to have to predict consumer behaviour had a nice way to shape consumer behaviour. So now marketers don't just have to "measure" consumer demand and wishes, but can establish the consumer demand (think: tobacco industry, automobile industry, tickle me elmo...)
It's a lot easier to sell junk to someone you are simultaneously brainwashing into wanting your junk. They put up less of a fight and -- bonus points -- they actually like your junk
I think it would be safe to say that the same channels used by marketers are used for political agendas. This isn't a conspiracy theory, this is just fact of how people benefiting from control want to maintain that control. Very few organizations control so many millions of television, radio, and newspapers at once. Any "opinion" they want to become mainstream, becomes mainstream due to mere exposure effect. You'll notice that news reporting, for instance, is more like a chanting ritual (across TV, radio, newspaper) than intelligent reporting.
I'm pretty sure it's the same guy... I saw the One-Man Lord of the Rings at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival (like, two years ago...phhbbbbt to Chicago) and this guy is amazing. He works up a real good sweat running around, doing all the voice and physical stunts. At one point there was even a baby making distracting sounds in the audience, and he used the sounds as effects to add to his performance. The man is on speed or something, go see him if you can.
Gwynne Dyer is a sharp fellow (Canadian living in the UK). I have met him personally on a few occasions, he tends to have pretty reasonable insights into world politics. I'm not so sure how strong his science is, however. But from what I've seen from him over the years (Globe and Mail, etc.) he does not tend to seek to induce panic in people like many other journalists.
On Windows systems, no, it's not buffer overflows that are the major problem and the CPU's capabilities with respect to flagging memory pages will do absolutely nothing. Humans install viruses on Windows systems. They fall for tricks, it's a social problem. Sure there are still some buffer overflow issues.
Seriously, it ain't broke. Been working great for a long, long time. What will make UNIX, *BSD, Linux collectively strong is sticking to the same UNIX plan (as has been the goal with Linux from the start).
This giant earthquake and subsequent tsunami that's been in the news, preliminary reports of the casualties are at least 30,000 people. Do you realize how huge a number that is? And it's probably drastically under-reported, the waters swept through poor coastal lands in many Asian countries and carried bodies out to sea. I bet (but hope to God not) that the death toll is twice that, on the order of 60,000. But I suspect the death toll will climb because it always does, especially when information collection is weak in the disaster areas.
There is a huge natural disaster here on earth, without stuff raining from the sky on us. I guess all I'm saying is, disasters will happen, and as non-religious as I am I can only say that we should all pray that large disasters will not happen, and in bad times help out others who need help, because there's really nothing else you can do.