People who are anti-social, who attempt to game the system for their own gain at our expense, are known to engage in other anti-social acts to bring about their own gain at others expense.
What a surprise.
How about, "People who don't think about what larger effect their actions will have are amoral, while people who recognize that their actions will have larger, detrimental effects on others and still engage in those actions are evil."
The way I look at it, a few years ago, you couldn't install Adobe Photoshop on a Unix based platform, because the code did not exist. The codebase was huge, and it was only written for Windows and Apples proprietary OS offering. When you asked for a copy for your Linux desktop, the reason the answer was no was because no one wanted to invest the massive amount of effort to write a new version.
Fast forward to now. There is a Adobe Photoshop codebase that works on Unix based platforms. When you ask for a copy for your Linux desktop, the reason the answer is no is because even though we've invested the effort and could give you what you want, for business reasons we choose not to do so at this time.
So, at this point, all it takes is people deciding it would be a good idea, all this software could become available at any time. There is no practical reason why it isn't possible, it's become a mere tactical/strategic decision.
That is a big gain for the Linux desktop, even if it isn't generating the kind of real world returns people might like at this point.
You're stuck in the "There's no long bearded man in the sky" view of religion. You need to realize that these personifications are part of the means of communicating wisdom through an oral tradition.
It's silliness to take these personifications literally, but you can see how different civilizations through the ages solved their problems through their mythologies, and look at how it turned out for them.
If you're going to have an active idea how you want your world to work, rather than a purely reactive one, it helps to have an awareness of some of the things people have collectively tried before.
Worst case, I'd tell them to go to hell, go grab some land that someone used to own before everything went to shit but no one is actually using, build a house, grow some food, have some kids. If those services collapse, no one will be telling me I can't.
So where is this majority of open source applications that outshine their closed source counterparts? Except for a few exceptions, those superior open source applications seem to be hiding very well.
Well, I'd say the majority of the exploitation of free software applications at this point lies in sites such as Slashdot, or Google, both of which deliver service and value to the entire globe, neither of which would have been possible without free software, regardless of the existence or lack thereof of a superior alternative. That's just my opinion.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not a rich guy, and I'm a slave to debt just like most people. If the financial sector goes to hell in a hand basket and stops being sustainable, I'm not going to be losing anything.
On the other hand, I'm smart, talented, healthy, educated, a problem solver, a useful person to have around. I don't rely on the interest return on my massive holdings to sustain some overinflated lifestyle.
So, why should I give a shit about these problems? Seems like it will make my life better the worse this gets.
The fact that the market forced vendors to begin offering XP as an option after they had shifted support to the new version of Windows is unprecedented.
This would be a pretty strong indicator that the market is not "satisfied that Win XP is good enough for their needs" like the article suggests, but that a significant segment are actively rejecting Vista as a bad product even on a brand new computer.
Which, of course, it is. Microsoft saw the writing on the wall, and they cashed in their chips. Which means, they saw that it was time to sell their install base out to third party interests instead of trying to keep hold of them.
We've all seen situations where the value of a good name is measured in how long it's purchaser can sell substandard goods at high markup before the name isn't good anymore.
That's what this is. The industry decided to back "Trusted Computing" despite it being contrary to the interests of consumers, and no one wants to buy it. That's why the new drivers don't work, why the old software is buggy, etc. The common person doesn't know why, but they know it's not working right, and they don't like it.
Vista is preinstalled on 99.999% of the world's new machinss so... {blah blah you know the rest}.
Close. Vista is preinstalled on less new machines now than when it was first introduced. First there was the big shiny "Vista for All" unveiling, then vendors started trying to get business by offering "Downgrade to WinXP available here!" and being successful at it.
a) The creation of something novel b) The exploitation of something new
The area that Open Source shines in is B. Now, it may be that you can achieve greater speed of deliverable in the A part by getting a bunch of antisocial bastards together to work hard on something so they can use it as leverage on the rest of us. But, at the end of the day, that leverage reduces the value of that creation.
If I invent something new, but you're not allowed to use it, there's no value created. The best thing you're allowed to use is the thing with the most value.
This is a fundamental principle behind invention and innovation. The reason openness is winning is because it empowers people more. All value comes from empowered individuals.
The fact of the matter is, if we can't use it, we don't care if you created it or not. It's irrelevant, and therefore meaningless.
In this new world order, you can achieve celebrity. Not "I've seen them on TV over and over, they must be a famous celebrity.", but "That person is a treasure of humanity, and we celebrate their existence and would like to support their future endeavors."
This is how you achieve power in this realm.
The old ways, of achieving power through leverage, those ways are on their way out. There will be a lot of blood and tears spilled over the coming years putting a stop to such evil conspirators as they attempt to wield their financial might to maintain the status quo, but at the end of the day, people who destroy the value of their own finest creations are doomed to failure.
Vista asked me a bunch of questions and then rebooted a few times and ran. XP has less hardware support and so is a bit trickier, since every time it sees an unrecognized piece of hardware it asks you for the disk. Worst case, you don't have the disk and fetch the driver online.
This is total fabrication. The entire world is actively working to avoid Vista because the hardware support is terrible, it's full of bugs, and it doesn't support all the legacy windows programs people use.
They reviewed a bargain basement PC and recommended people spend more so they can use an OS that made every top 10 worst product of the year list that matters. Clearly, this isn't a review, it's a MS advertisement.
And I think we can both agree that the patent system can't be blamed for Tesla getting screwed by Edison.
It was the patent system that was responsible for people like Edison getting the capacity to do the screwing. It was the underlying concept of property rights that provided the motive to hobble our infrastructure. The same sorts of underlying principles have led to the current oil crisis.
So no, I don't think we can agree on that. Capitalists, whatever their nature, deserve summary execution. They're guilty of crimes against humanity, one and all.
Oh well, Canada is closer anyway. I hear hookers are legal there... are they?
No, they're not. Well, hooking is legal, but soliciting is not. It is the speaking of the words of an agreement that are illegal, regardless of the act.
That said, you can find escort agencies aplenty in the Yellow Pages or the newspaper, and they're all whores. Used to be our number two crank calling target when I was a kid, right after churches.
Arguing over religion is like arguing over who's invisible friend is better.
That's not true.
Religion is a set of rules governing behavior of a human population. Religions are not subject to scientific testing, because you'd need to study a population of humans over several generations, with a control, and you'd be dead before the experiment was half over.
That's what makes them so much more interesting, debatable, and generally difficult to deal with than science. All you have to work with is deduction, observation of the aftermath of a bunch of experiments started by men long dead, and no control group. Yet, this problem domain is the most important there is, because it governs how we live.
Just because you like your problems neat and tidy, provable and falsifiable, that doesn't mean the world is obligated to reduce itself to your level.
Tesla was a genius, but there's no intirsic goodness in being a poor businessman and letting yourself get screwed.
See, I would say that being a good businessman and screwing other people makes you intrinsically evil, while refusing to screw people when you can, but instead sharing freely with them makes you intrinsically good.
In what way did Eddison's patents hold back Tesla? (this is a real question, I thought Tesla was very theroretical, and didn't realize that he was hampered by patents at all).
Let me just throw out some quotes about that subject:
Thomas Edison did not fully understand the light bulbs that he himself had invented. Though the carbon filaments would work from AC or DC current equally well, Edison himself believed his electric lights would only work with DC. It was to be years before he learned of his error. In any event, when Tesla first arrived in America in 1884, Edison had a large vested interest - both financial and emotional - in the DC power plants which he had been building, and which the "robber baron" J. Pierpont Morgan had been financing.
When Tesla arrived in the United States and sought Edison's backing for his new AC devices, therefore, Edison refused to listen.
"Hold up! Spare me that nonsense. It's dangerous. We're set up for direct current in America. People like it, and it's all I'll ever fool with."
Nonetheless Edison offered him a job, promising Tesla fifty thousand dollars if Tesla could redesign Edison's breakdown-prone DC generator designs. Tesla agreed and worked for the better part of a year redesigning the dynamos, also adding new automatic controls of Tesla's own design. The new generator designs were a vast improvement over Edison's originals. Upon completing the job Tesla went to Edison to collect the $50,000 promised for the task.
"Tesla," Edison replied, "you don't understand our American humor." And Tesla was never paid.
That's how Edison and Tesla got started, with Edison, who didn't have a clue why or how anything he was doing worked, ripping Tesla off. Eventually, after working labour gangs to survive, he caught the attention of Westinghouse and developed our modern AC power systems.
The agreements between Westinghouse and Tesla called for Tesla to recieve a royalty of two dollars and fifty cents for every horsepower of AC equipment sold. The royalties would be enough to make Tesla one of the wealthiest men in the world. (Were such royalties to be paid on equipment in use today, the royalties on AC generators alone would be worth more than seven and a half billion dollars.)
Tesla later realized that his would prove a burden to adoptation, so we ripped up his contract and gave up the rights. He was still a young man.
Here's another quote regarding how Edison reacted:
Dogs and cats began disappearing from the neighborhood around Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey.
Unable to challenge AC electricity on technical merits, Edison turned to using scare tactics instead. "Just as certain as death [AC power] will kill a customer within six months," he declared. Leaflets about the dangers of AC current were printed and distributed. Lobbying efforts were made in New York State to limit legal levels of electricity to 800 volts, making AC distribution impractical "as a matter of public safety". Perhaps most horrifying, though, were Edison's weekend demonstrations of the dangers of Tesla's work. Taking one of the frightened pets stolen from the streets of West Orange, Edison would place it on a sheet of metal, bring forth two wires attached to an AC generator, and announce to spectators, "Ladies and gentlemen, I shall now demonstrate the effects of AC current on this dog."
Edison's efforts to discredit AC electricity were, in the long run, unsuccessful. This did not, however, make Edison's lies or killings any less repugnant.
Later in life, Tesla would attempt to use subterfuge to create Wardenclyffe, a highly efficient means of wireless energy transmission that would be available freely without need for wires, passing it off to J. P. Morgan as a means of communication. When Morgan found out that he was attempting to create a means of transmission that was beyond control or metering and free for all, he axed the project beca
Edison definitely thought he knew this. He was a hack who had to use experiments to do everything, which is why he hired so many people to do the grunt work. To Edison, science was an industrial business process of data collection.
Contrast this with the efforts of such as Tesla, and you see an example of genius at work. Genius is about intuition. It's about having a massive jumble in your head that you assemble into a coherent system by deduction, then test afterwards.
Patents are about protecting people like Edison and those who make science a clever trick to hold over your fellow man and money off them. It's about protecting them from people like Tesla, who are idealistic and want to communicate the truths they see to be self-evident and see them exploited to the greatest degree possible, even if there's nothing in it for them.
Patents are, and have always been, economic weapons used to keep other people from knocking the King of the Castle down from his perch. They are uniformly bad for progress.
Google doesn't control shit. You guys talk as though they're the US Government. They've got market dominance for a glorified version of the Yellow Pages. That gives them zero hold on anything.
Now, they might be able to set themselves up as a barrier to advertisers reaching the public and prop up third parties in that fashion, but really, who is going to stick with a Yellow Pages that screws around with the listings?
It's not like there aren't a bakers dozen would be search giants waiting in the wings if they ever drop the ball.
The Google monopoly involves no leverage on anyone, which makes their position far more precarious than Microsoft ever was. If everyone went "What a bunch of dickheads, I don't want to deal with them anymore", that would be the end of Google, just like that.
Warren Buffet will never have to worry about paying the mortgage or the light bill. Sure, the Hollywood elite and super rich like George Soros can advocate higher taxes because they're economically untouchable. They have more money that anybody could spend in many lifetimes. The poor and lower middle class pay only minimal taxes. It's hard working middle class people trying to acquire wealth that are crushed by the jackboot of confiscatory taxation.
So, who is being served by the concepts of "Private Property" rather than "Personal Possessions"?
Who is being served by the concepts of "Freedom of Enterprise" rather than "Freedom of Action"?
Doesn't look like those ideas are supporting anyone but a scant few.
Slashdot Mirror
People who are anti-social, who attempt to game the system for their own gain at our expense, are known to engage in other anti-social acts to bring about their own gain at others expense.
What a surprise.
How about, "People who don't think about what larger effect their actions will have are amoral, while people who recognize that their actions will have larger, detrimental effects on others and still engage in those actions are evil."
People behave according to their character.
That's one way to look at it.
The way I look at it, a few years ago, you couldn't install Adobe Photoshop on a Unix based platform, because the code did not exist. The codebase was huge, and it was only written for Windows and Apples proprietary OS offering. When you asked for a copy for your Linux desktop, the reason the answer was no was because no one wanted to invest the massive amount of effort to write a new version.
Fast forward to now. There is a Adobe Photoshop codebase that works on Unix based platforms. When you ask for a copy for your Linux desktop, the reason the answer is no is because even though we've invested the effort and could give you what you want, for business reasons we choose not to do so at this time.
So, at this point, all it takes is people deciding it would be a good idea, all this software could become available at any time. There is no practical reason why it isn't possible, it's become a mere tactical/strategic decision.
That is a big gain for the Linux desktop, even if it isn't generating the kind of real world returns people might like at this point.
You're stuck in the "There's no long bearded man in the sky" view of religion. You need to realize that these personifications are part of the means of communicating wisdom through an oral tradition.
It's silliness to take these personifications literally, but you can see how different civilizations through the ages solved their problems through their mythologies, and look at how it turned out for them.
If you're going to have an active idea how you want your world to work, rather than a purely reactive one, it helps to have an awareness of some of the things people have collectively tried before.
Dude, I don't mean to be cruel, but I think you are in denial - most people are not in debt. Unless maybe you count a mortgage.
Yes, a mortgage is a debt. Just like a car loan, and a student loan. Most people are in debt. What planet do you come from?
Worst case, I'd tell them to go to hell, go grab some land that someone used to own before everything went to shit but no one is actually using, build a house, grow some food, have some kids. If those services collapse, no one will be telling me I can't.
So where is this majority of open source applications that outshine their closed source counterparts? Except for a few exceptions, those superior open source applications seem to be hiding very well.
Well, I'd say the majority of the exploitation of free software applications at this point lies in sites such as Slashdot, or Google, both of which deliver service and value to the entire globe, neither of which would have been possible without free software, regardless of the existence or lack thereof of a superior alternative. That's just my opinion.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not a rich guy, and I'm a slave to debt just like most people. If the financial sector goes to hell in a hand basket and stops being sustainable, I'm not going to be losing anything.
On the other hand, I'm smart, talented, healthy, educated, a problem solver, a useful person to have around. I don't rely on the interest return on my massive holdings to sustain some overinflated lifestyle.
So, why should I give a shit about these problems? Seems like it will make my life better the worse this gets.
The fact that the market forced vendors to begin offering XP as an option after they had shifted support to the new version of Windows is unprecedented.
This would be a pretty strong indicator that the market is not "satisfied that Win XP is good enough for their needs" like the article suggests, but that a significant segment are actively rejecting Vista as a bad product even on a brand new computer.
Which, of course, it is. Microsoft saw the writing on the wall, and they cashed in their chips. Which means, they saw that it was time to sell their install base out to third party interests instead of trying to keep hold of them.
We've all seen situations where the value of a good name is measured in how long it's purchaser can sell substandard goods at high markup before the name isn't good anymore.
That's what this is. The industry decided to back "Trusted Computing" despite it being contrary to the interests of consumers, and no one wants to buy it. That's why the new drivers don't work, why the old software is buggy, etc. The common person doesn't know why, but they know it's not working right, and they don't like it.
Vista is preinstalled on 99.999% of the world's new machinss so... {blah blah you know the rest}.
Close. Vista is preinstalled on less new machines now than when it was first introduced. First there was the big shiny "Vista for All" unveiling, then vendors started trying to get business by offering "Downgrade to WinXP available here!" and being successful at it.
OpenArena games still seem limited to FFA and with about 70 servers, the community is rather small.
Not in my experience. There are a bunch of CTF maps that are usually full of people.
Where does the value of creativity come from?
a) The creation of something novel
b) The exploitation of something new
The area that Open Source shines in is B. Now, it may be that you can achieve greater speed of deliverable in the A part by getting a bunch of antisocial bastards together to work hard on something so they can use it as leverage on the rest of us. But, at the end of the day, that leverage reduces the value of that creation.
If I invent something new, but you're not allowed to use it, there's no value created. The best thing you're allowed to use is the thing with the most value.
This is a fundamental principle behind invention and innovation. The reason openness is winning is because it empowers people more. All value comes from empowered individuals.
The fact of the matter is, if we can't use it, we don't care if you created it or not. It's irrelevant, and therefore meaningless.
In this new world order, you can achieve celebrity. Not "I've seen them on TV over and over, they must be a famous celebrity.", but "That person is a treasure of humanity, and we celebrate their existence and would like to support their future endeavors."
This is how you achieve power in this realm.
The old ways, of achieving power through leverage, those ways are on their way out. There will be a lot of blood and tears spilled over the coming years putting a stop to such evil conspirators as they attempt to wield their financial might to maintain the status quo, but at the end of the day, people who destroy the value of their own finest creations are doomed to failure.
Vista asked me a bunch of questions and then rebooted a few times and ran. XP has less hardware support and so is a bit trickier, since every time it sees an unrecognized piece of hardware it asks you for the disk. Worst case, you don't have the disk and fetch the driver online.
This is total fabrication. The entire world is actively working to avoid Vista because the hardware support is terrible, it's full of bugs, and it doesn't support all the legacy windows programs people use.
They reviewed a bargain basement PC and recommended people spend more so they can use an OS that made every top 10 worst product of the year list that matters. Clearly, this isn't a review, it's a MS advertisement.
And I think we can both agree that the patent system can't be blamed for Tesla getting screwed by Edison.
It was the patent system that was responsible for people like Edison getting the capacity to do the screwing. It was the underlying concept of property rights that provided the motive to hobble our infrastructure. The same sorts of underlying principles have led to the current oil crisis.
So no, I don't think we can agree on that. Capitalists, whatever their nature, deserve summary execution. They're guilty of crimes against humanity, one and all.
Oh well, Canada is closer anyway. I hear hookers are legal there... are they?
No, they're not. Well, hooking is legal, but soliciting is not. It is the speaking of the words of an agreement that are illegal, regardless of the act.
That said, you can find escort agencies aplenty in the Yellow Pages or the newspaper, and they're all whores. Used to be our number two crank calling target when I was a kid, right after churches.
Arguing over religion is like arguing over who's invisible friend is better.
That's not true.
Religion is a set of rules governing behavior of a human population. Religions are not subject to scientific testing, because you'd need to study a population of humans over several generations, with a control, and you'd be dead before the experiment was half over.
That's what makes them so much more interesting, debatable, and generally difficult to deal with than science. All you have to work with is deduction, observation of the aftermath of a bunch of experiments started by men long dead, and no control group. Yet, this problem domain is the most important there is, because it governs how we live.
Just because you like your problems neat and tidy, provable and falsifiable, that doesn't mean the world is obligated to reduce itself to your level.
Tesla was a genius, but there's no intirsic goodness in being a poor businessman and letting yourself get screwed.
See, I would say that being a good businessman and screwing other people makes you intrinsically evil, while refusing to screw people when you can, but instead sharing freely with them makes you intrinsically good.
Evil is a precursor to success in business.
In what way did Eddison's patents hold back Tesla? (this is a real question, I thought Tesla was very theroretical, and didn't realize that he was hampered by patents at all).
Let me just throw out some quotes about that subject:
Thomas Edison did not fully understand the light bulbs that he himself had invented. Though the carbon filaments would work from AC or DC current equally well, Edison himself believed his electric lights would only work with DC. It was to be years before he learned of his error. In any event, when Tesla first arrived in America in 1884, Edison had a large vested interest - both financial and emotional - in the DC power plants which he had been building, and which the "robber baron" J. Pierpont Morgan had been financing.
When Tesla arrived in the United States and sought Edison's backing for his new AC devices, therefore, Edison refused to listen.
"Hold up! Spare me that nonsense. It's dangerous. We're set up for direct current in America. People like it, and it's all I'll ever fool with."
Nonetheless Edison offered him a job, promising Tesla fifty thousand dollars if Tesla could redesign Edison's breakdown-prone DC generator designs. Tesla agreed and worked for the better part of a year redesigning the dynamos, also adding new automatic controls of Tesla's own design. The new generator designs were a vast improvement over Edison's originals. Upon completing the job Tesla went to Edison to collect the $50,000 promised for the task.
"Tesla," Edison replied, "you don't understand our American humor." And Tesla was never paid.
That's how Edison and Tesla got started, with Edison, who didn't have a clue why or how anything he was doing worked, ripping Tesla off. Eventually, after working labour gangs to survive, he caught the attention of Westinghouse and developed our modern AC power systems.
The agreements between Westinghouse and Tesla called for Tesla to recieve a royalty of two dollars and fifty cents for every horsepower of AC equipment sold. The royalties would be enough to make Tesla one of the wealthiest men in the world. (Were such royalties to be paid on equipment in use today, the royalties on AC generators alone would be worth more than seven and a half billion dollars.)
Tesla later realized that his would prove a burden to adoptation, so we ripped up his contract and gave up the rights. He was still a young man.
Here's another quote regarding how Edison reacted:
Dogs and cats began disappearing from the neighborhood around Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey.
Unable to challenge AC electricity on technical merits, Edison turned to using scare tactics instead. "Just as certain as death [AC power] will kill a customer within six months," he declared. Leaflets about the dangers of AC current were printed and distributed. Lobbying efforts were made in New York State to limit legal levels of electricity to 800 volts, making AC distribution impractical "as a matter of public safety". Perhaps most horrifying, though, were Edison's weekend demonstrations of the dangers of Tesla's work. Taking one of the frightened pets stolen from the streets of West Orange, Edison would place it on a sheet of metal, bring forth two wires attached to an AC generator, and announce to spectators, "Ladies and gentlemen, I shall now demonstrate the effects of AC current on this dog."
Edison's efforts to discredit AC electricity were, in the long run, unsuccessful. This did not, however, make Edison's lies or killings any less repugnant.
Later in life, Tesla would attempt to use subterfuge to create Wardenclyffe, a highly efficient means of wireless energy transmission that would be available freely without need for wires, passing it off to J. P. Morgan as a means of communication. When Morgan found out that he was attempting to create a means of transmission that was beyond control or metering and free for all, he axed the project beca
Edison definitely thought he knew this. He was a hack who had to use experiments to do everything, which is why he hired so many people to do the grunt work. To Edison, science was an industrial business process of data collection.
Contrast this with the efforts of such as Tesla, and you see an example of genius at work. Genius is about intuition. It's about having a massive jumble in your head that you assemble into a coherent system by deduction, then test afterwards.
Patents are about protecting people like Edison and those who make science a clever trick to hold over your fellow man and money off them. It's about protecting them from people like Tesla, who are idealistic and want to communicate the truths they see to be self-evident and see them exploited to the greatest degree possible, even if there's nothing in it for them.
Patents are, and have always been, economic weapons used to keep other people from knocking the King of the Castle down from his perch. They are uniformly bad for progress.
I fucking hate those things. Instant, permanent goodbye to the site that I see them on.
Advertising makes me think of men in suits being burnt at the stake.
Get a blackjack table! And Hookers!
Actually, forget the blackjack.
Google doesn't control shit. You guys talk as though they're the US Government. They've got market dominance for a glorified version of the Yellow Pages. That gives them zero hold on anything.
Now, they might be able to set themselves up as a barrier to advertisers reaching the public and prop up third parties in that fashion, but really, who is going to stick with a Yellow Pages that screws around with the listings?
It's not like there aren't a bakers dozen would be search giants waiting in the wings if they ever drop the ball.
The Google monopoly involves no leverage on anyone, which makes their position far more precarious than Microsoft ever was. If everyone went "What a bunch of dickheads, I don't want to deal with them anymore", that would be the end of Google, just like that.
Completely different beasts.
I think Canada should get a copyright on beavers.
Pay up, Mr. Flynt!
Warren Buffet will never have to worry about paying the mortgage or the light bill. Sure, the Hollywood elite and super rich like George Soros can advocate higher taxes because they're economically untouchable. They have more money that anybody could spend in many lifetimes. The poor and lower middle class pay only minimal taxes. It's hard working middle class people trying to acquire wealth that are crushed by the jackboot of confiscatory taxation.
So, who is being served by the concepts of "Private Property" rather than "Personal Possessions"?
Who is being served by the concepts of "Freedom of Enterprise" rather than "Freedom of Action"?
Doesn't look like those ideas are supporting anyone but a scant few.
But the difference is you can make a perfect copy of a digital format. You can't do that with analog formats, there's always some loss.
That's not loss. It's extra flavor.
Lucky you. I had to make do with a tape drive. Took a year of straight A's and delivering papers in the snow before I got my first floppy drive.
Whippersnappers... grumble grumble...