Take a look at Kosovo. In that area the vast majority of the population wants to secede, and their militia (the KLA) has as good or better weoponry than the average USA militia group, with a much larger membership and fanatic motivation.
Notice how successfully they are fighting against even a two-bit country like Serbia.
The "windows refund day" event was not optimized to gain money back for unwanted copies of Windows - it was optimized to draw media attention to the problem.
1000 people each going individually to 100 PC suppliers will cause nil interest, regardless of wether they succeed in getting a refund.
20 people going to Microsoft will get rebuffed, but gain news coverage.
Besides, don't most licenses contain lines stating that the license may be changed without warning?
So they can change the license under you to "you now owe us everything you have ever owned, currently own, and ever will own. You consent to being shot if you so much as murmur disagreement."
Or not.
No corporate lawyer worth a streetsweeper's salary would let their boss sign a blank cheque that big.
I'm wondering why more sites haven't adopted a SlashDot structure - user submitted news with threaded discussion forums. It cetainly seems to be a good formula.
Transparency minimizes the threat of criminal data misuse (they would get caught).
Transparency reduces the risk of big-brother government (we would see them plotting), although it increases the threat from extant big-brother government.
Transparency increases the threat from stupid laws, because sane policement who turned a blind eye would be seen doing it, and sacked.
Transparency maximizes the threat of "tyranny of the majority" and discrimination on the basis of lifestyle, at least in the short run. In the long run this may be mitigated by transparency to unbiased outsiders. But, if the vast majority of people in a wide area are biased, they may be able to collaborate with impunity in their discrimination.
Why was XML amongst the non-hackish technologies? It seems the very epitome of hackishness to me. (Although I'm hardly qualified, since I prefer NEdit over Emacs and have a sneaking fondness for programming in Ada.)
If I remember right, MacOS is pretty much one bloody huge shared lib sitting over unprotected hardware. It's at least as tangled-together, kernel and UI, as Win95.
MacOSX (once NeXT then Rhapsody) is much better; an object oriented web of libraries safely resting on a proper unix kernel (probably a hacked-up BSD variant).
The only similarities between the two OSes, really, are [a] the UI looks similar (it feels very different, though) and [b] a castrated version of MacOS ("carbon") is available in shared-lib form on top of the BSD kernel, for quick-n-dirty app porting. (same idea as Winelib, really)
Hypothetically, assuming Linux wins the desktop from MS, there will come a time when Wine compiled apps look and feel kludgy, slow, bloated, and ill-behaved. If Corel has tied themselves to a dying architecture, it could become a big problem to them. They should definitely asign a "back burner" team to bring CD3/unix up to parity with CD9/win32.
In the UK you are being filmed nearly everywhere - but the film is being captured by private individuals and companies, and not being correlated or stored. What we do have left to defend against is what the police forces would love most - networking of the video cameras, and automated broadband face-recognition scans for "known criminals". The tech to do these things is imminent, and is a very significant threat; it is ironic but true that without the option of crime, a society has no freedom either.
Shortcut to the desktop? (for non-tech users)
on
GNU News
·
· Score: 1
If you're using Window Maker then there isn't much on the desktop to switch to. Instead, to get at other apps, try alt-click on the menu bar which drops it to the bottom of the window pile, revealing whatever was underneath it. This also reveals the launch bar at the side. Also, if you want the "root menu", you can make a window roll up by double clicking on the title bar; repeating this will roll it back down again.
They were not attacking the real-life East Timor; they already have that by the short hairs. They were attacking a "virtual country" domain which had been set up to treat East Timor as an independent country.
The stupid "music industry" has gone and set itself up to take the heat from its own favored "fight the power" meme. The "disaffected teen" group, their primary market, is the group most likely to attack them over this. If they were trying to shoot themselves in the foot, their aim could not have been better.
The Linux community flocks together through cooperation without commitment. By solving every possible problem at once, we route around damage before it can even occur. We have no direction, because we have every direction. What heirarchy we have is bottom-up, as easily replaced as it was created.
Corporations pose a threat, but a different one than you envisage. We can flow around a corrupt disributor, or a corrupt leader. Two things threaten us. Firstly, fragmentation of our ability to share. With an ever increasing panoply of OSS-compliant licences that won't mix, our community can be forked and forked again to the point of impotence.
OpenSource is good, it's a foot in the door. But, unless we can start synchronising the licenses, we will be left worse off than before. A mature OpenSource program can't be re-licensed - too many people have contributed and cannot be traced for their permission. We would be free of monopoly companies, but not free to share our code.
And there's a second threat - mimics. By careful license design, a commercial company can create what at first glance looks "open" but with a sting in the tail - for example a "patches only" license that lets the company re-release the program under a closed license, trapping the open-source version in the form of a dated master file and a growing mess of patches.
This is why I find myself in reluctant agreement with the "license flamers" on slashdot - this is our greatest weakness, and the only true leverage point corporations have against us.
If I knew how, I'd have fixed it already. But seriously, some musings:
Money is abstract mediated exchange. Profit comes from an unequal exchange. Inequality here implies a power differential. Excepting extortion, this comes from scarcity. How much of scarcity is real nowadays, and how much has been engineered? (grain mountains, one-generation-only seeds, legal mini-monopolies thru intellectual property, etc.) And, how much scarcity need continue, with technologies to come? It does seem quite easy to enforce false scarcity, when backed by a monopoly control over something.
Power differentials seem inevitable. So, any exchange system will become unequal. Any unequal exchange system will of necessity flow into its least-energy form - abstract money. Hence the death of communism - they still wanted to keep exchange, partly because of an unfortunate addiction to the concept of work.
What is the alternative? Gifts. You don't expect recompense, and neither does anyone else. The problems: who will run the sewers? and, how to prevent someone extorting exchange? For the former, are there people who would like to do that? Do we have enough vocations to fill all the slots? Fot the second, only competition can provide protection - by preventing monopolies, no-one can get leverage to force re-commercialisation.
The biggest problem: how to transition, without pain? Now that, I'm working on...
I wonder if there's any way to contact her and persuade her to opensource it, before the corporate vultures snap this algorithm up and make it proprietary?
It's a simple calculation, really. If they win, they keep screwing the general populace for megabucks. If they fight and lose, they can still maintain their megabuck profits for a few years yet. Meanwhile they can cash in their stock options and bail out, leaving their replacements to take the fall.
If on the other hand they decide to ride the wave, their profits drop hugely. This would *really* rile the shareholders, and it would put a nasty big hole in their personal stock. The fact that this actually extends the lifespan of their company wouldn't enter into it.
I dropped out of college, and was unemployed for ages before I was finally able to convert my Linux programming skills into a job as a web developer. I was able to learn all the programming languages I needed just by reading manuals and example code, and then playing around. However I have not been taught much about existing comp.sci. theory, so I have probably "reinvented the wheel" many times. (and it has usually ended up triangular:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at Kosovo. In that area the vast majority of the population wants to secede, and their militia (the KLA) has as good or better weoponry than the average USA militia group, with a much larger membership and fanatic motivation.
Notice how successfully they are fighting against even a two-bit country like Serbia.
The "windows refund day" event was not optimized to gain money back for unwanted copies of Windows - it was optimized to draw media attention to the problem.
1000 people each going individually to 100 PC suppliers will cause nil interest, regardless of wether they succeed in getting a refund.
20 people going to Microsoft will get rebuffed, but gain news coverage.
Besides, don't most licenses contain lines stating that the license may be changed without warning?
So they can change the license under you to "you now owe us everything you have ever owned, currently own, and ever will own. You consent to being shot if you so much as murmur disagreement."
Or not.
No corporate lawyer worth a streetsweeper's salary would let their boss sign a blank cheque that big.
I'm wondering why more sites haven't adopted a SlashDot structure - user submitted news with threaded discussion forums. It cetainly seems to be a good formula.
Transparency minimizes the threat of criminal data misuse (they would get caught).
Transparency reduces the risk of big-brother government (we would see them plotting), although it increases the threat from extant big-brother government.
Transparency increases the threat from stupid laws, because sane policement who turned a blind eye would be seen doing it, and sacked.
Transparency maximizes the threat of "tyranny of the majority" and discrimination on the basis of lifestyle, at least in the short run. In the long run this may be mitigated by transparency to unbiased outsiders. But, if the vast majority of people in a wide area are biased, they may be able to collaborate with impunity in their discrimination.
Why was XML amongst the non-hackish technologies? It seems the very epitome of hackishness to me. (Although I'm hardly qualified, since I prefer NEdit over Emacs and have a sneaking fondness for programming in Ada.)
What (if any) changes would I see from a user's perspective, using a system built around this library as versus one built around the earler version?
If I remember right, MacOS is pretty much one bloody huge shared lib sitting over unprotected hardware. It's at least as tangled-together, kernel and UI, as Win95.
MacOSX (once NeXT then Rhapsody) is much better; an object oriented web of libraries safely resting on a proper unix kernel (probably a hacked-up BSD variant).
The only similarities between the two OSes, really, are [a] the UI looks similar (it feels very different, though) and [b] a castrated version of MacOS ("carbon") is available in shared-lib form on top of the BSD kernel, for quick-n-dirty app porting. (same idea as Winelib, really)
Someone makes a new element that's never existed in nature before, and before you know it, folks are designing a better bullet around it. :-/
I wanna pick myself a new species, this one sucks.
Hypothetically, assuming Linux wins the desktop from MS, there will come a time when Wine compiled apps look and feel kludgy, slow, bloated, and ill-behaved. If Corel has tied themselves to a dying architecture, it could become a big problem to them. They should definitely asign a "back burner" team to bring CD3/unix up to parity with CD9/win32.
In the UK you are being filmed nearly everywhere - but the film is being captured by private individuals and companies, and not being correlated or stored. What we do have left to defend against is what the police forces would love most - networking of the video cameras, and automated broadband face-recognition scans for "known criminals". The tech to do these things is imminent, and is a very significant threat; it is ironic but true that without the option of crime, a society has no freedom either.
If you're using Window Maker then there isn't much on the desktop to switch to. Instead, to get at other apps, try alt-click on the menu bar which drops it to the bottom of the window pile, revealing whatever was underneath it. This also reveals the launch bar at the side. Also, if you want the "root menu", you can make a window roll up by double clicking on the title bar; repeating this will roll it back down again.
They were not attacking the real-life East Timor; they already have that by the short hairs. They were attacking a "virtual country" domain which had been set up to treat East Timor as an independent country.
The stupid "music industry" has gone and set itself up to take the heat from its own favored "fight the power" meme. The "disaffected teen" group, their primary market, is the group most likely to attack them over this. If they were trying to shoot themselves in the foot, their aim could not have been better.
My guess: yep, you can send it in since the EULA still applies, and you will get a refund of "free" ($0.00)
Why need an ID? Just store the chip's official clockspeed in the same way as the ID would have been stored. Then there's no privacy invasion.
The Linux community flocks together through cooperation without commitment. By solving every possible problem at once, we route around damage before it can even occur. We have no direction, because we have every direction. What heirarchy we have is bottom-up, as easily replaced as it was created.
Corporations pose a threat, but a different one than you envisage. We can flow around a corrupt disributor, or a corrupt leader. Two things threaten us. Firstly, fragmentation of our ability to share. With an ever increasing panoply of OSS-compliant licences that won't mix, our community can be forked and forked again to the point of impotence.
OpenSource is good, it's a foot in the door. But, unless we can start synchronising the licenses, we will be left worse off than before. A mature OpenSource program can't be re-licensed - too many people have contributed and cannot be traced for their permission. We would be free of monopoly companies, but not free to share our code.
And there's a second threat - mimics. By careful license design, a commercial company can create what at first glance looks "open" but with a sting in the tail - for example a "patches only" license that lets the company re-release the program under a closed license, trapping the open-source version in the form of a dated master file and a growing mess of patches.
This is why I find myself in reluctant agreement with the "license flamers" on slashdot - this is our greatest weakness, and the only true leverage point corporations have against us.
If I knew how, I'd have fixed it already. But seriously, some musings:
Money is abstract mediated exchange. Profit comes from an unequal exchange. Inequality here implies a power differential. Excepting extortion, this comes from scarcity. How much of scarcity is real nowadays, and how much has been engineered? (grain mountains, one-generation-only seeds, legal mini-monopolies thru intellectual property, etc.) And, how much scarcity need continue, with technologies to come? It does seem quite easy to enforce false scarcity, when backed by a monopoly control over something.
Power differentials seem inevitable. So, any exchange system will become unequal. Any unequal exchange system will of necessity flow into its least-energy form - abstract money. Hence the death of communism - they still wanted to keep exchange, partly because of an unfortunate addiction to the concept of work.
What is the alternative? Gifts. You don't expect recompense, and neither does anyone else. The problems: who will run the sewers? and, how to prevent someone extorting exchange? For the former, are there people who would like to do that? Do we have enough vocations to fill all the slots? Fot the second, only competition can provide protection - by preventing monopolies, no-one can get leverage to force re-commercialisation.
The biggest problem: how to transition, without pain? Now that, I'm working on...
Are there any websites where I can learn more about VMS? (I don't have access to a university-caliber library that would have books covering VMS)
..when we already have Wine (and it's getting almost usable)
I wonder if there's any way to contact her and persuade her to opensource it, before the corporate vultures snap this algorithm up and make it proprietary?
So, who's going to rig a "merced simulator" for the Linux porting effort?
It's a simple calculation, really. If they win, they keep screwing the general populace for megabucks. If they fight and lose, they can still maintain their megabuck profits for a few years yet. Meanwhile they can cash in their stock options and bail out, leaving their replacements to take the fall.
If on the other hand they decide to ride the wave, their profits drop hugely. This would *really* rile the shareholders, and it would put a nasty big hole in their personal stock. The fact that this actually extends the lifespan of their company wouldn't enter into it.
I dropped out of college, and was unemployed for ages before I was finally able to convert my Linux programming skills into a job as a web developer. I was able to learn all the programming languages I needed just by reading manuals and example code, and then playing around. However I have not been taught much about existing comp.sci. theory, so I have probably "reinvented the wheel" many times. (and it has usually ended up triangular :-)
what does "linux-ize" mean -
... this has me confused.