Microsoft doesn't seem to complain about bloatware, although it no doubt exaggerates the perception of Windows slowness and instability. Being bundled by a leading PC vendor will certainly put pressure on Ubuntu and any flaws inherent in the distro or introduced by Dell will receive much closer scrutiny. Its features will be compared head to head with Vista and MacOSX and I am sure in many cases will be found lacking. But the bottom line is, this is an unprecedented chance for desktop Linux to move into mainstream, flaws can be fixed and now Dell itself will perhaps contribute to making Ubuntu an OS of choice for an average home user. Would the maintainers prefer to keep the inflated image due to small but technically literate userbase? I surely woudln't.
That said, I recently had to repair our babysitters machine and I had trouble reinstalling XP due to BIOS issues. After many tries, I installed Ubuntu and she seems to be much happier with it than the original system.
Marriage affects only the two consenting adults and their several offsprings. A guy buying a gun however is contemplating killing some unrelated people in certain situations, possibly me. So it's our right as a society to examine his reasoning and try to make sure that these situations are justifiable and plausible. Cars can also be bought on black market, and yet states license drivers and make the car dealers ask me for my license. I have to pass a test to prove that I will be a responsible driver. And my license can be revoked for reasons other than legal insanity or committing a crime, for example for getting too many tickets. I fail to see how guns are any less dangerous than cars or how more people need them in their lives.
3. Declaring someone mentally ill doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing state. There is nothing wrong with having a policeman and a psychiatrist present at a gun permit interview and judging that person to be of sound mind, calm disposition and having a legitimate use for the kind of gun they are planning to buy as well as skills to use and safeguard it properly (the last would do something to address black market). If they fail, they walk away with a pepper spray.
I realize that this is a challenging project. Perhaps Justice department should suspend their work on additional copyright infringement penalties in order to focus the necessary resources in that direction.
TFA claims that just because IBM and Redhat are involved in free software development, the code is somehow less free. The fact is that anyone can fork off Redhat and give away or sell support for their own distribution. In fact, this is commonly done.
Because we accept unnatural restrictions on consensual private activity between two people (sharing a file). A law should be beneficial to society at large and the benefit of just being a consumer or seller's terms just doesn't cut it. A reasonable benefit is to be able to use the work free of cost and to sell derivative works within our active lifetime.
Justice department to crack down even harder on murders
There are already ample penalties for copyright infringement and ways to shut them down. In fact, it makes no different for the guilty party if he is fined for $100M or $1B, since he will not be able to pay it off anyway. In the meantime, United States has a ridiculously high murder rate compared to other developed countries. Do any politicians up for election in 2008 care to address that? Like you know, stop sales of guns to mentally ill?
a) Governments were created in 80s, when computer word processors became available b) Governments today produce fundamentally different documents than 100 years ago
or
c) Quality of documentation shipped with products keeps increasing and really need such a complex format to express ?
Just because someone wants to play with a complex layout doesn't mean they need it to do their job. For private sector, sure let the market decide. But for a government I want all the e-paperwork to be expressed in a simplest possible format that everyone can write tools for to process and analyze.
I would think that, if you compare apples to apples (that is, if you could make an Apple-powered car), humans would get an MPG of like 500. Ignoring the supreme efficiency of biological systems over internal combustion engines, a human weighs around 200 pounds, while a car is around 3000 pounds. Humans travel at like 15MPH and most of us have a much slimmer profile than a Prius, futher reducing the aerodynamic drag. Humans still consume a big fraction of biking energy while driving cars and need an air conditioner in closed space, decreasing the effective fuel efficiency. Humans who regularly bike tend to consume significantly less oil per day than those who drive SUVs.
But small companies and open source groups will have trouble implementing such a complex standard in full. While this is an excellent move for ordinary citizens who can use OpenOffice to communicate with government, I wonder why government documents need such a complex standard? On the server side, the data will be anyway stored in a relational database. So what is wrong with plain HTML on client side (and some trivial spreadsheet format when needed)? It's not like government forms are a beauty of design art?
JavaScript is not the right language to write every application in. In fact for some, like sound recording, C++ is still the best unless you want to also listen to your garbage collection. Python sucks as a system shell - for example, you can not run a program by just typing it's name. Not all Linux users lack privacy and security needs of controlling both their data and versions of their applications. In fact, the whole point of open source is that you can customize apps for your own use as well as inspect their source code for security flaws. Any more questions?
Well, the ideological difference is supposed to be that under communism you get everything you need without currency, whereas under socialism you get a salary proportional to the amount of labor you perform. So basically, there never has been a communist country. The socialist one I used to lived in was pretty screwed up.
Do people enjoy being told that all their work, even their thoughts (intellectual property) belongs to a corporation, which in turn controls the politicians who pass laws to perpetuate this situation?
Oh well, I am not saying "download from Internet". Cable providers and DSL operators should be able to provide a fast download from a local storage device given financial incentive. As long as the download is under an hour, this beats driving to a store. But in any case, once I have a movie at home, I should be able to stream it across my local network or store it on my terabyte harddrive.
since they are taking a loss on the units to promote it
If they make a loss on an $600 unit which is crippled compared to a PC, it's one of the worst corporate inefficiencies in today's world. For the same price, you can buy a used car, pay a rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in many parts of the country, get a decent desktop from Dell or feed 100 children in India for a month. Don't tell me 100 parents can not assemble one playstation 3 in a month.
Ok, CDs and DVDs were not specifically designed for use in computers or anything besides standalone players. But what is the excuse for products introduced in 21 century? Where is support for building a library on a hard drive of a computer or DVR? Where are the computer drives that can play and record movies for a reasonable price? Where are the on-demand/online services to deliver an equivalent-quality movie over the wire? Both formats should go the way of Sony's minidisc and memory stick ATRAC players as consumers revolt and find other forms of entertainment.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I am driving a Prius with a 76hp gas engine and 67hp electric motor, giving me 143hp for acceleration/hills and 76hp sustained power. I drive at 65-75, depending on my mood and urgency of the trip. It has never been so urgent that I can not spare an extra 5 seconds for initial acceleration on the highway. There is absolutely no hint of vibration or overheating, in fact the car is nearly silent.
How do we feel about Microsoft's decision to exclude open source drivers by requiring signatures on everything in XP/Vista? Would we want them to rule out GPLed software based on MFC and.Net? It's no better for Linux to enforce a particular license for drivers or impose license restrictions on KDE/Qt apps. An operating system should be license-neutral for any applications and plugins it supports. A user should not be limited in what kind of hardware he can buy for his Linux computer.
How do we hold a candidate accountable if they switch their "views" to lure votes from the opposing party? Say, Obama becomes pro-life and pro-war after the primary, claiming that God spoke to him or something. In that sense, disregarding the early vote increases democracy by increasing the number of people who get to vote for the same "package" in a primary and in a presidential election.
Slashdot Mirror
... beat Mac users at number of hosted spambots in 8 seconds.
No! Haven't you heard of user account control? It was even advertised in this article!
Microsoft doesn't seem to complain about bloatware, although it no doubt exaggerates the perception of Windows slowness and instability. Being bundled by a leading PC vendor will certainly put pressure on Ubuntu and any flaws inherent in the distro or introduced by Dell will receive much closer scrutiny. Its features will be compared head to head with Vista and MacOSX and I am sure in many cases will be found lacking. But the bottom line is, this is an unprecedented chance for desktop Linux to move into mainstream, flaws can be fixed and now Dell itself will perhaps contribute to making Ubuntu an OS of choice for an average home user. Would the maintainers prefer to keep the inflated image due to small but technically literate userbase? I surely woudln't.
That said, I recently had to repair our babysitters machine and I had trouble reinstalling XP due to BIOS issues. After many tries, I installed Ubuntu and she seems to be much happier with it than the original system.
Marriage affects only the two consenting adults and their several offsprings. A guy buying a gun however is contemplating killing some unrelated people in certain situations, possibly me. So it's our right as a society to examine his reasoning and try to make sure that these situations are justifiable and plausible. Cars can also be bought on black market, and yet states license drivers and make the car dealers ask me for my license. I have to pass a test to prove that I will be a responsible driver. And my license can be revoked for reasons other than legal insanity or committing a crime, for example for getting too many tickets. I fail to see how guns are any less dangerous than cars or how more people need them in their lives.
This guy will have one ready in a couple of years.
1,2. RTFNEWS
3. Declaring someone mentally ill doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing state. There is nothing wrong with having a policeman and a psychiatrist present at a gun permit interview and judging that person to be of sound mind, calm disposition and having a legitimate use for the kind of gun they are planning to buy as well as skills to use and safeguard it properly (the last would do something to address black market). If they fail, they walk away with a pepper spray.
I realize that this is a challenging project. Perhaps Justice department should suspend their work on additional copyright infringement penalties in order to focus the necessary resources in that direction.
TFA claims that just because IBM and Redhat are involved in free software development, the code is somehow less free. The fact is that anyone can fork off Redhat and give away or sell support for their own distribution. In fact, this is commonly done.
Because we accept unnatural restrictions on consensual private activity between two people (sharing a file). A law should be beneficial to society at large and the benefit of just being a consumer or seller's terms just doesn't cut it. A reasonable benefit is to be able to use the work free of cost and to sell derivative works within our active lifetime.
Justice department to crack down even harder on murders
There are already ample penalties for copyright infringement and ways to shut them down. In fact, it makes no different for the guilty party if he is fined for $100M or $1B, since he will not be able to pay it off anyway. In the meantime, United States has a ridiculously high murder rate compared to other developed countries. Do any politicians up for election in 2008 care to address that? Like you know, stop sales of guns to mentally ill?
Because
a) Governments were created in 80s, when computer word processors became available
b) Governments today produce fundamentally different documents than 100 years ago
or
c) Quality of documentation shipped with products keeps increasing and really need such a complex format to express
?
Just because someone wants to play with a complex layout doesn't mean they need it to do their job. For private sector, sure let the market decide. But for a government I want all the e-paperwork to be expressed in a simplest possible format that everyone can write tools for to process and analyze.
I would think that, if you compare apples to apples (that is, if you could make an Apple-powered car), humans would get an MPG of like 500. Ignoring the supreme efficiency of biological systems over internal combustion engines, a human weighs around 200 pounds, while a car is around 3000 pounds. Humans travel at like 15MPH and most of us have a much slimmer profile than a Prius, futher reducing the aerodynamic drag. Humans still consume a big fraction of biking energy while driving cars and need an air conditioner in closed space, decreasing the effective fuel efficiency. Humans who regularly bike tend to consume significantly less oil per day than those who drive SUVs.
But small companies and open source groups will have trouble implementing such a complex standard in full. While this is an excellent move for ordinary citizens who can use OpenOffice to communicate with government, I wonder why government documents need such a complex standard? On the server side, the data will be anyway stored in a relational database. So what is wrong with plain HTML on client side (and some trivial spreadsheet format when needed)? It's not like government forms are a beauty of design art?
JavaScript is not the right language to write every application in. In fact for some, like sound recording, C++ is still the best unless you want to also listen to your garbage collection. Python sucks as a system shell - for example, you can not run a program by just typing it's name. Not all Linux users lack privacy and security needs of controlling both their data and versions of their applications. In fact, the whole point of open source is that you can customize apps for your own use as well as inspect their source code for security flaws. Any more questions?
Well, the ideological difference is supposed to be that under communism you get everything you need without currency, whereas under socialism you get a salary proportional to the amount of labor you perform. So basically, there never has been a communist country. The socialist one I used to lived in was pretty screwed up.
Do people enjoy being told that all their work, even their thoughts (intellectual property) belongs to a corporation, which in turn controls the politicians who pass laws to perpetuate this situation?
Sweden, Japan, India... Many countries or provinces have or once had an elected socialist government.
Oh well, I am not saying "download from Internet". Cable providers and DSL operators should be able to provide a fast download from a local storage device given financial incentive. As long as the download is under an hour, this beats driving to a store. But in any case, once I have a movie at home, I should be able to stream it across my local network or store it on my terabyte harddrive.
since they are taking a loss on the units to promote it
If they make a loss on an $600 unit which is crippled compared to a PC, it's one of the worst corporate inefficiencies in today's world. For the same price, you can buy a used car, pay a rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in many parts of the country, get a decent desktop from Dell or feed 100 children in India for a month. Don't tell me 100 parents can not assemble one playstation 3 in a month.
Ok, CDs and DVDs were not specifically designed for use in computers or anything besides standalone players. But what is the excuse for products introduced in 21 century? Where is support for building a library on a hard drive of a computer or DVR? Where are the computer drives that can play and record movies for a reasonable price? Where are the on-demand/online services to deliver an equivalent-quality movie over the wire? Both formats should go the way of Sony's minidisc and memory stick ATRAC players as consumers revolt and find other forms of entertainment.
But it crashes when I try to submit it. Oh well.
I have never firsthand met someone who rolled theirs
I guess you don't have much of a sixth sense.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I am driving a Prius with a 76hp gas engine and 67hp electric motor, giving me 143hp for acceleration/hills and 76hp sustained power. I drive at 65-75, depending on my mood and urgency of the trip. It has never been so urgent that I can not spare an extra 5 seconds for initial acceleration on the highway. There is absolutely no hint of vibration or overheating, in fact the car is nearly silent.
You don't have to bother with registration or obnoxious UI. And if you use a fairly unique nickname, you can still keep in touch with friends.
How do we feel about Microsoft's decision to exclude open source drivers by requiring signatures on everything in XP/Vista? Would we want them to rule out GPLed software based on MFC and .Net? It's no better for Linux to enforce a particular license for drivers or impose license restrictions on KDE/Qt apps. An operating system should be license-neutral for any applications and plugins it supports. A user should not be limited in what kind of hardware he can buy for his Linux computer.
How do we hold a candidate accountable if they switch their "views" to lure votes from the opposing party? Say, Obama becomes pro-life and pro-war after the primary, claiming that God spoke to him or something. In that sense, disregarding the early vote increases democracy by increasing the number of people who get to vote for the same "package" in a primary and in a presidential election.
Wow, got bitten by HTML tags myself.