I think the most interesting part of the article was near the beginning, where it described him as being both idealistic and pragmatic. That's exactly the kind of person we need promoting Free software.
RMS was both at the start of his career - and, interestingly, he started fading out when he seemed to have lost the pragmatism (GNU/Linux, Hurd, etc.). Hopefully Miguel will avoid making a similar mistake.
To me, at least, it seems like he's got the world's best job: get paid to produce Free software. Not a bad gig.
It was _not_ to compare pirates to rapists. That's idiotic, I agree. What I was trying to point out was that negligence in protecting yourself is not an excuse for others to take advantage of you.
I'm sure with wonderfully far-sighted viewpoints as "piracy is fine", you shouldn't need to deliberately misinterpret me to make your points.
Precisely. If a company's gone through the trouble of trying to actually get you to work for them, this sort of thing is hardly a deal-breaker. Calmly cross out the line where it talks about owning your stuff. Discuss a compromise solution that involves more careful wording. Get it in writing, and make sure it's signed and you have a copy.
I feel like most of/. is living in the.com boom, still, where you basically wrote your own employment agreement if you knew how to use MS Office. No, those days are long gone, and we need to adjust instead of whining about how things are just so unfair. I mean, this whole "corporations are teh evil!" thing is getting stupid.
I forget which site did the review, but I think it was Anandtech. Anyways, Electrovaya notebooks would seem to get almost unbelievable battery life. They're not THAT much more expensive, either, IIRC.
"As always, those of you who whine about Debian being out of date have probably never looked at the packages available in unstable and testing."
And for those of us who've used Debian before, we can tell you that, every so often, unstable just breaks. It's not like it's planned, but the fact is, with so many package maintainers, something's bound to go wrong - and it usually does every few months. At that point, you've got to go and uninstall and reinstall packages to make dpkg not complain about weird circular dependency problems - an irony for a distribution that so many claim is the answer to "dependency hell".
You can't test to see how reliable Debian Unstable is, either. I mean, "Debian unstable works great for me" is kind of confusing as a statement. Did it work right a month ago? How about 36 days ago? 67 days ago? That is to say, it's impossible to actually be sure that it's working right any particular day because Debian unstable is constantly changing. Debian stable, SuSE, and RedHat simply don't have this problem, and it's why many people are not enamored of running Debian off the unstable packages repository.
Thus, Debian unstable is simply _not_ what you want for reliable updating and pain-free maintenance. Debian is many great things, but realize that it has big faults once you move out of stable. It pisses me off to no end when people proclaim Debian to be the most stable (in reference to the stable branch) and most up-to-date (in reference to unstable). It's the most stable OR the most up-to-date, not both.
Just thought I'd get that off my chest. I'm a big Debian proponent, but I'm not going to lie about what's going on with it.
One problem: stealing implies you owned the thing in the first place. Bad news: you never owned Mickey Mouse. Your wonderful cultural ties are fine and good, but that never implies ownership. You made that argument up, and while it probably has some merit, culture is in the eye of the beholder. I don't want laws based on such subjective classification.
Personally, I see Mickey Mouse as an _impediment_ to American culture. Mickey's a world-wide icon - he's not an American-specific cultural icon.
Good job with the anti-business rant and little "America is going down the tubes" spiel, though - I can see they earned you the +5 you didn't deserve.
So, basically, Gates throws a party, invites a bunch of rather important people, and then the government _dares_ to protect them for the night? This hardly seems wasteful - for once, the government is doing their job, and protecting people who really need to be protected. Keep in mind that Bill and friends face a much larger security threat than does the average/.'er.
I mean, come on, guys. Save the outrage for the outrageous. Would you be happier if Bill hired a private army equipped with military weapons to do the protection?
I don't understand your objection. They didn't infringe on Apple's copyrights or trademarks. Why shouldn't the reverse engineering be legal? Even the hated DMCA makes allowances for reverse-engineering compatibility.
It's _good business sense_. Apple is only going to come out of this looking like the bad guy who's trying to lock their customers in. Now's the time to compromise.
Gotta love the hypocrisy of/.. Apple threatens to invoke the DMCA against Real, and there's applause and cheers. Creative licenses a software patent to id, and there's mass boycotts threatened.
If Apple actually does invoke the DMCA, I'm not going to buy or use any of their products for the next ten years. Do the right thing, Apple: drop the DMCA threats, license to Real, and put on a good face about the situation.
The US broadband situation has been improving rapidly over the past couple years, though. Now that DSL has matured some, cable and DSL providers are finally directly competing. At the moment, it's generally on bandwidth (1.5mb down for $40 a month is a HUGE improvement over the past few years), but it'll have to move to price sooner or later.
If Verizon manages to pull off this FTTP thing (and there's a ton of demand for it in a lot of places, especially at $60 a month), you can probably expect competition to move us to a South Korean broadband situation pretty quickly. Without government subsidies, I doubt we'll ever see prices as low as in South Korea, but that's not really the biggest deal in the world.
SELinux is simply a proof of concept that NSA put out. They chose Linux because, well, it's a popular kernel, and they've got the code to it. If MS had handed over the Windows source code, you better believe NSA would have enhanced that OS instead. (true story, actually)
Trying to expand this to "TEH.GOV IS WATCHING LINUX!!!!" is laughable. I'm sure some of the geeks at NSA keep up with it, but there's no conspiracy here, sorry.
Um, the problem essentially boils down to: 1. You posted an ambiguous statement from CNN.com. The way _I_ read it was that Kerry supports keeping the PATRIOT Act in a form that lets it expire without Congress specifically voting as such. This is not _at all_ the same as saying "I will let it expire". 2. Kerry's OWN WORDS contradict what you just linked to, if we go with your interpretation.
Do we? I keep forgetting that/.'ers convieniently ignore the fact that Kerry isn't repealing the PATRIOT Act. Go to JK's website, do a search for "patriot act". There's no talk of repealing it, only "enhancing" it. And we all know what "enhance" means to a politician: take out the obviously scary stuff, and put in less-obvious scary stuff. I mean, the talk of "intelligence sharing" and "terrorist lists" should be raising big red alarms in your heads, but since Kerry's not Bush, it doesn't... or something like that.
If you think Kerry is just going to hand you everything you wanted on a silver platter because he's "not Bush", you're foolish and naive. You'll have civil liberties and rights with whomever wins. I find it repugnant how members of both parties have resorted to scare tactics at this point.
If Microsoft would simply integrate an X-server into Windows, I'd be satisfied with that. Still gotta buy the Windows and Office, yet I'm not actually forced to _use_ Windows. Sounds fair enough.
Wouldn't solve the games issue, but then again, even the X servers that Linux has don't have indirect rendering capabilities. Too bad...
I can think of any number of reasons Google would get hurt: 1. Someone finds a way to circumvent PageRank easily and reliably, basically nuking Google's worth as a search engine. Unlikely, but it could happen. 2. Yahoo or Microsoft come up with a better search technology. Not all the brilliant people in the world work for Google. 3. Gmail roll-out gets flubbed. Google's core expertise is not in making _consumers_ pay for things. This probably wouldn't hurt Google terribly, but stock price would go down (lack of confidence). 4. Something bad comes of the Orkut case. 5. Google gets sued for violating some odd software patent (or, "gets SCO'd", as I like to think of it), or just lands in regular legal trouble. 6. Bad management decisions (remember Aureal? Top of the world on sound cards, got killed by bad management)
I'm not asking people to chime in and tell me how TOTALLY UNLIKELY all this stuff is. It's just that I think it's foolish to believe Google is infallible. Just like every other company, they've got risk.
For those not in the know, introducing something to a committee means the "new bills Senate committee" (not the real name, but it conveys the point) is going to take a look at the thing. If they think it's worth their time, they'll spend some time revising it and then introduce it to the floor of the Senate for discussion and a vote.
Bills often change a _LOT_ during committee. And many of them die there. Considering how obviously stupid this one is, it's probably going to be killed in committee. Give the committee a little credit - for every bad bill that gets through, a hundred others die right there.
As usual, though,/. makes this look like a done deal waiting for the president's signature, when in fact it'll probably go nowhere. People might pay a little more attention if things were less alarmist all the time...
"The latest Fedora Core 2 debacle proves that this can lead to trouble (NVidia Binaries broken, etc.)."
Just to be clear, it was a standard (and reasonable) kernel option that broke the nVidia drivers - it's not like the FC2 team put a crazy patch in the kernel that broke them.
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I think the most interesting part of the article was near the beginning, where it described him as being both idealistic and pragmatic. That's exactly the kind of person we need promoting Free software.
RMS was both at the start of his career - and, interestingly, he started fading out when he seemed to have lost the pragmatism (GNU/Linux, Hurd, etc.). Hopefully Miguel will avoid making a similar mistake.
To me, at least, it seems like he's got the world's best job: get paid to produce Free software. Not a bad gig.
-Erwos
You should put up a HOWTO. I'd be interested in reading it.
-Erwos
Talk about missing the point.
It was _not_ to compare pirates to rapists. That's idiotic, I agree. What I was trying to point out was that negligence in protecting yourself is not an excuse for others to take advantage of you.
I'm sure with wonderfully far-sighted viewpoints as "piracy is fine", you shouldn't need to deliberately misinterpret me to make your points.
-Erwos
"it could be said that id did this to itself by hyping this game up a bit too much"
In other news, the girl who got raped when walking in the dark alley brought it upon herself.
-Erwos
Precisely. If a company's gone through the trouble of trying to actually get you to work for them, this sort of thing is hardly a deal-breaker. Calmly cross out the line where it talks about owning your stuff. Discuss a compromise solution that involves more careful wording. Get it in writing, and make sure it's signed and you have a copy.
/. is living in the .com boom, still, where you basically wrote your own employment agreement if you knew how to use MS Office. No, those days are long gone, and we need to adjust instead of whining about how things are just so unfair. I mean, this whole "corporations are teh evil!" thing is getting stupid.
I feel like most of
-Erwos
I forget which site did the review, but I think it was Anandtech. Anyways, Electrovaya notebooks would seem to get almost unbelievable battery life. They're not THAT much more expensive, either, IIRC.
-Erwos
Correct. In the case of testing, it's neither.
-Erwos
"As always, those of you who whine about Debian being out of date have probably never looked at the packages available in unstable and testing."
And for those of us who've used Debian before, we can tell you that, every so often, unstable just breaks. It's not like it's planned, but the fact is, with so many package maintainers, something's bound to go wrong - and it usually does every few months. At that point, you've got to go and uninstall and reinstall packages to make dpkg not complain about weird circular dependency problems - an irony for a distribution that so many claim is the answer to "dependency hell".
You can't test to see how reliable Debian Unstable is, either. I mean, "Debian unstable works great for me" is kind of confusing as a statement. Did it work right a month ago? How about 36 days ago? 67 days ago? That is to say, it's impossible to actually be sure that it's working right any particular day because Debian unstable is constantly changing. Debian stable, SuSE, and RedHat simply don't have this problem, and it's why many people are not enamored of running Debian off the unstable packages repository.
Thus, Debian unstable is simply _not_ what you want for reliable updating and pain-free maintenance. Debian is many great things, but realize that it has big faults once you move out of stable. It pisses me off to no end when people proclaim Debian to be the most stable (in reference to the stable branch) and most up-to-date (in reference to unstable). It's the most stable OR the most up-to-date, not both.
Just thought I'd get that off my chest. I'm a big Debian proponent, but I'm not going to lie about what's going on with it.
-Erwos
I'm gonna get hammered for this, but I'm hugely addicted to C&C: Generals Zero Hour when it comes to RTS games these days.
As for FPSes, uh, Doom3, and maybe Full Spectrum Warrior would be good choices?
-Erwos
One problem: stealing implies you owned the thing in the first place. Bad news: you never owned Mickey Mouse. Your wonderful cultural ties are fine and good, but that never implies ownership. You made that argument up, and while it probably has some merit, culture is in the eye of the beholder. I don't want laws based on such subjective classification.
Personally, I see Mickey Mouse as an _impediment_ to American culture. Mickey's a world-wide icon - he's not an American-specific cultural icon.
Good job with the anti-business rant and little "America is going down the tubes" spiel, though - I can see they earned you the +5 you didn't deserve.
-Erwos
So, basically, Gates throws a party, invites a bunch of rather important people, and then the government _dares_ to protect them for the night? This hardly seems wasteful - for once, the government is doing their job, and protecting people who really need to be protected. Keep in mind that Bill and friends face a much larger security threat than does the average /.'er.
I mean, come on, guys. Save the outrage for the outrageous. Would you be happier if Bill hired a private army equipped with military weapons to do the protection?
-Erwos
"Looking into !== threatening."
Really? So if I tell you I'm looking into libel laws to see if I can sue you for personal defamation, I'm not threatening to sue you for libel?
Implied threats are just as much threats as explicit ones. Apple is _implying_ that they would sue under the DMCA if they found such a clause.
-Erwos
I don't understand your objection. They didn't infringe on Apple's copyrights or trademarks. Why shouldn't the reverse engineering be legal? Even the hated DMCA makes allowances for reverse-engineering compatibility.
It's _good business sense_. Apple is only going to come out of this looking like the bad guy who's trying to lock their customers in. Now's the time to compromise.
-Erwos
Gotta love the hypocrisy of /.. Apple threatens to invoke the DMCA against Real, and there's applause and cheers. Creative licenses a software patent to id, and there's mass boycotts threatened.
If Apple actually does invoke the DMCA, I'm not going to buy or use any of their products for the next ten years. Do the right thing, Apple: drop the DMCA threats, license to Real, and put on a good face about the situation.
-Erwos
The US broadband situation has been improving rapidly over the past couple years, though. Now that DSL has matured some, cable and DSL providers are finally directly competing. At the moment, it's generally on bandwidth (1.5mb down for $40 a month is a HUGE improvement over the past few years), but it'll have to move to price sooner or later.
If Verizon manages to pull off this FTTP thing (and there's a ton of demand for it in a lot of places, especially at $60 a month), you can probably expect competition to move us to a South Korean broadband situation pretty quickly. Without government subsidies, I doubt we'll ever see prices as low as in South Korea, but that's not really the biggest deal in the world.
-Erwos
That's a rather paranoid way of putting it.
.GOV IS WATCHING LINUX!!!!" is laughable. I'm sure some of the geeks at NSA keep up with it, but there's no conspiracy here, sorry.
SELinux is simply a proof of concept that NSA put out. They chose Linux because, well, it's a popular kernel, and they've got the code to it. If MS had handed over the Windows source code, you better believe NSA would have enhanced that OS instead. (true story, actually)
Trying to expand this to "TEH
-Erwos
Um, the problem essentially boils down to:
1. You posted an ambiguous statement from CNN.com. The way _I_ read it was that Kerry supports keeping the PATRIOT Act in a form that lets it expire without Congress specifically voting as such. This is not _at all_ the same as saying "I will let it expire".
2. Kerry's OWN WORDS contradict what you just linked to, if we go with your interpretation.
I think someone's full of it, but it's not me.
-Erwos
"You are admitting that Kerry does want to take out the obviously scary stuff while leaving some behind."
Actually, what I was trying to point out was that Kerry was going to take some scary stuff out and then put more scary stuff in.
Look, vote for who you want to. Personally, I'm writing in McCain and Lieberman.
-Erwos
"You all have a clear choice this November."
/.'ers convieniently ignore the fact that Kerry isn't repealing the PATRIOT Act. Go to JK's website, do a search for "patriot act". There's no talk of repealing it, only "enhancing" it. And we all know what "enhance" means to a politician: take out the obviously scary stuff, and put in less-obvious scary stuff. I mean, the talk of "intelligence sharing" and "terrorist lists" should be raising big red alarms in your heads, but since Kerry's not Bush, it doesn't... or something like that.
2 00 4_0417a.html
Do we? I keep forgetting that
http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/pr_
If you think Kerry is just going to hand you everything you wanted on a silver platter because he's "not Bush", you're foolish and naive. You'll have civil liberties and rights with whomever wins. I find it repugnant how members of both parties have resorted to scare tactics at this point.
-Erwos
If Microsoft would simply integrate an X-server into Windows, I'd be satisfied with that. Still gotta buy the Windows and Office, yet I'm not actually forced to _use_ Windows. Sounds fair enough.
Wouldn't solve the games issue, but then again, even the X servers that Linux has don't have indirect rendering capabilities. Too bad...
-Erwos
I've never heard of Microsoft actively disallowing hardware to work.
-Erwos
I can think of any number of reasons Google would get hurt:
1. Someone finds a way to circumvent PageRank easily and reliably, basically nuking Google's worth as a search engine. Unlikely, but it could happen.
2. Yahoo or Microsoft come up with a better search technology. Not all the brilliant people in the world work for Google.
3. Gmail roll-out gets flubbed. Google's core expertise is not in making _consumers_ pay for things. This probably wouldn't hurt Google terribly, but stock price would go down (lack of confidence).
4. Something bad comes of the Orkut case.
5. Google gets sued for violating some odd software patent (or, "gets SCO'd", as I like to think of it), or just lands in regular legal trouble.
6. Bad management decisions (remember Aureal? Top of the world on sound cards, got killed by bad management)
I'm not asking people to chime in and tell me how TOTALLY UNLIKELY all this stuff is. It's just that I think it's foolish to believe Google is infallible. Just like every other company, they've got risk.
-Erwos
HAHA! Good one!
/.'ers got it.
Too damn bad none of the other
-Erwos
I agree.
/. makes this look like a done deal waiting for the president's signature, when in fact it'll probably go nowhere. People might pay a little more attention if things were less alarmist all the time...
For those not in the know, introducing something to a committee means the "new bills Senate committee" (not the real name, but it conveys the point) is going to take a look at the thing. If they think it's worth their time, they'll spend some time revising it and then introduce it to the floor of the Senate for discussion and a vote.
Bills often change a _LOT_ during committee. And many of them die there. Considering how obviously stupid this one is, it's probably going to be killed in committee. Give the committee a little credit - for every bad bill that gets through, a hundred others die right there.
As usual, though,
-Erwos
"The latest Fedora Core 2 debacle proves that this can lead to trouble (NVidia Binaries broken, etc.)."
Just to be clear, it was a standard (and reasonable) kernel option that broke the nVidia drivers - it's not like the FC2 team put a crazy patch in the kernel that broke them.
-Erwos