Same thing for me. The "Make a Donation" button on www.gentoo.org is kind of disturbing now (it's still there despite the guess in the article that it would be removed). Whether a distro is commercial or not is irrelevant when I choose a distro - I picked gentoo simply because I thought it was the best for my needs. However, this attempt to keep that unclear does not make me feel comfortable with it anymore. It's a shame since it has not only been a good distro on its technical merits but I've also appreciated things such as the weekly newsletter and the documentation. Maybe one should hope that more developers choose to work on the fork instead of gentoo and that many of gentoo's virtues will thus be present there too. What makes this even more of a shame is that on http://www.novell.com/linux/ gentoo is currently the most popular distro.
governments considering buying open source software is considered. Frequently people here say "right tool for the right job" and talk about open standards being more important than the software. What has surprised me is that so far I haven't encountered one of the most important arguments: The right choice for governments is not necessarily the best software for the lowest price. For companies that reasoning is the only sound one but for governments it's not since they need to take more things into consideration - such as jobs in their own country. Have you ever seen police cars in a country made by a non-domestic manufacturer if there is a domestic manufacturer? I simply don't understand why so many European governments are so happy to send money to Redmond instead of trying to increase employment in their country. Obviously MS Office is better than OpenOffice and whether the total cost of ownership of Windows is lower than that of Linux (for eg. government desktops) is debatable. Can you imagine what it would do for Linux if the German government decided that since there is a domestic supplier of operating systems (SuSE) that must be used even though compatibility with MS Office wouldn't be perfect and even though people would need re-training. And if the French did the same with Mandrake? Why can't governments (and others) see that with a little effort Linux can be considered just as generic an operating system as Windows - why, why, why? If they buy other domestic products simply because they're domestic why not apply the same logic to operating systems since with a little effort they can be just as generic as cars.
Wrong. Take biz 101 again. It's the shareholders who pay the taxes. Depending on legislation in different countries it can be indirect, ie. on the company's profits and/or direct on dividends and/or profit on increased stock value. In some states in the US there have been quite a lot of objections when both are applied since it makes the shareholders pay "double taxation" so it's likely to change to either one. If you claim that VAT is paid by the customer you've misunderstood it - it's easier to understand it if you think about how corporations always can deduct the VAT they've paid on their own purchases from the VAT on their own sales. That is, the tax is on valued added so it's taxation paid on the value which the company has created and which has thus lead to profits and/or increased stock value.
Nah, they're just learning encryption right from the start. Nobody I know has ever been able to read my handwriting and nowadays I simply tell them that it's encrypted since I can read it.
I remember once (long time ago) seeing a very funny drawing with too Martians smiling and holding up a picture of an empty surface with a few craters in front of a rover camera (so that we Earthians would think it's uninhabited). Has anybody else seen this? I'd love to find it since it was so funny so I'm sure the moderators will give you a +5, Funny if you can post a link:)
There's plenty of that already. IIRC all of the landers have had such cameras. This is one link and this is another to such images but there are plenty more (Google is your friend...). What I'd really like to see is, however, more than still images - ie. some movement by the rovers and so on. However, I assume that the scientific value of that wouldn't be much higher than that of high resolution still images and thus doesn't justify the amount of data that needs to be transferred.
According to Microsoft:"Office 2001 for Mac uses the same file format as Office 98 for Mac, so it's completely compatible. It's also completely compatible with Office 97 for Windows and Office 2000 for Windows. They all use the same format to save files."
(IIRC OpenOffice only has the "Save as Microsoft Word/Whatever 97/2000/XP" option).
But yes, I'm fully aware of the fact that opening older formats in newer works better than in the other direction, however; my point is that MS is forced to take into account that users that upgrade still need to be able to share files with those using older versions and thus they cannot completely break compatibility. And MS also realizes that they need to ensure that people use their formats as the obvious, default choice (and thus not ask too much "which formats can you read/write"), so albeit OpenOffice.org (etc.) have the disadvantage of being forced to reverse-engineer the formats MS isn't able to change them absolutely freely either, which was the concern the parent poster had.
Remember one thing: MS themselves are locked into their formats too. They are forced to maintain compatibility with older versions of their own programs - if they broke that with newer versions people wouldn't upgrade.
Maybe could combine the two since usually there are two approaches:
Theoretical - you know everything but simply can't get things to work in practice.
Practical - you don't know anything but get things to work.
So in a combination nothing works and nobody knows why.;)
Slashdot isn't providing any view of Microsoft - slashdot simply links to articles. Biased? Yes. Factually wrong? Not intentionally. There's a clear difference in responsibility between expressing your opinion and reporting something as a fact although you know it's incorrect.
Opinions expressed on slashdot are clearly opinions, as in comments with user names or anonymous cowards, and in addition to that "The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way."
My example of news broadcasts might have been confusing since, as you said, it's a limited resource. Maybe I should've taken as an example the free (as in paid for by advertising) newspapers which are distributed in many cities in Europe (I'm not sure if you have that in the US and therefore I wasn't sure if you'd be familiar with that and thus I chose not to pick that as an example although it would've been better since it isn't a limited resource) - they have the same editorial responsibility. And yes, as far as I can tell slashdot does implement editorial responsibility - if I submit as a story a link to goatse.cx and claim that there's proof that it's Bill Gates from behind I'm quite sure the editors wouldn't post it - not even once and certainly not dupe;) And lately there has been quite a few stories about attempts in many countries to implement some editorial responsibility on the Internet too but, obviously, due to the borderless access worldwide it's quite futile. However, I doubt that anybody would try to enforce it on anything other than the most well-known sites (such as Google). And I doubt that they would try to avoid responsibility by placing their business in another country. Porn sites are of course one more example of attempts to take responsibility ("Please verify that you're at least 18 years of age by clicking Enter.") But obviously there will always be sites, such as rotten.com, which try to avoid responsibility.
No, it's not the same as entertainment. You should compare it to news broadcasts instead since they're paid for with advertising and they have editorial responsibility.
Bush supporting that? Quite unlikely, I think - he'll probably stay out of it if he has paid his brain bill. But actually I hope he's stupid enough to intervene - the EU would certainly give him the finger and probably punish MS harder simply to prove a point.
Actually they can't. The thing is that they're providing a service to their customers (ie. us using it and "paying" for it by seeing the ads). And like all products and services provided by companies they are legally bound to live up to some standards (and reversed ranking would be too poor standards). Obviously I don't know the exact legislation in the US but considering all the law suits and facts such as McDonalds printing "Warning! Content is hot." on their apple pie packages I presume that the consumer rights legislation there is quite good too. I (as a European) know the European legislation a little bit better and there the precise definition for reasonable quality expected can be found out from the "consumer rights authorities" (loosely translated from Swedish and Finnish). So as an example: A warranty cannot be called a "warranty" unless it guarantees that the product will exceed the reasonable expectations defined by the authorities and even if it doesn't have a warranty the manufacturer is still required to replace it if it doesn't meet the reasonable expectations. So if eg. a printer has a 5 day warranty and it breaks down 6 months later you can be 100% sure the manufacturer will be forced to replace it (albeit few people go through the trouble of contacting the consumer rights authorities to enforce that). And the same thing applies here: Google cannot provide junk and claim it's a "search result".
"Because the browser is free, and the OS costs $" means: "The OS costs $ and you're forced to buy the browser too." And unfortunately enough people don't object to this (yet), since virtually everybody needs a web browser with their desktop OS now and instead of demanding to choose and pay for the browser of their choice they accept MS making the decision for them.
I doubt that since he's now trying to repair the damage that happened to US-Europe relations due to the Iraq war. And even if he did, I doubt that he'd succeed - after all, the US couldn't force through a second resolution through the UN Security Counsel due to European objections so it should be even harder to affect the EU's internal decisions.
Woops! Yes I should've pressed preview... - a part was left out when I tried to make my comment shorter... The reinvestment decisions are made before taxes, then the dividends (afterwards). But I don't quite understand how federal standards can allow you to write off revenue for donations?
Simple answer from an MBA student: No.
What you pay taxes for is: revenue - all costs
And retail value isn't a cost at all (the only thing that is, is the cost of the physical media).
To "optimize" your taxation (ie. so that your shareholders's wealth after taxes grows as much as possible) you pay suitable amounts of dividends (cost of capital you know...) before taxes. What else you're allowed to deduct in taxation varies in different countries - iirc. at least in some states in the US you're allowed to deduct the interest rate on loans (I'm European but have read quite a few American books on finance too).
Economics 101 for you why it's illegal. The following example of illegal behaviour can be found in almost every introductory book to the subject (it's a real classic!). This is the principle but the precise form of legislation is of course not the same in every country:
Chain A is the biggest in city X and starts selling petrol at a loss until every competitor within driving range has gone out of business (and A knows that they can keep selling at a loss longer than anyone else since they're the biggest chain). Then A becomes the only seller and sets prices at will, which will be maximizing "amount sold*price" instead of "price=the lowest for which anyone is willing to sell=the highest the least willing customers are willing to pay", which is what the price would settle at in perfect competition.
As far as software is concerned this is obviously quite far-fetched since here marginal cost (=the additional cost of producing exactly one more unit when you already have covered everything else, ie. wages, rent, whatever fixed costs etc.) matters whilst it's virtually nonexistent compared to fixed costs in the software industry.
I remember playing Thief II and being so concentrated on the game that a few times I noticed myself trying to move the mouse or press keys quietly so that the guards wouldn't hear me... So they're pretty damn good games when they make you feel that intensively that you're in the game.
I remember reading on the BBC's website about some plans the Russians had for a manned mission to Mars. According to them the most suitable crew is an all male one aged 50-60 since they are least likely to go nuts... And they're probably right since thanks to Mir the Russians do have the greatest amount of experience in keeping people in space for a long time - I recall that at least one of their cosmonauts spent enough time on Mir for a round-trip to Mars and managed to walk away from the capsule after the landing. Of course their attitude has been slightly different than the US one too - ie. "great, he survived - let's see if a few more months is possible" has been acceptable. The points I remember from the article were that men in general are always more willing to take risks and at that age they're least likely to do desperate (stupid) things to survive - ie. least likely to worry excessively not only themselves but also their offspring since paternal instincts don't remain as strong as maternal with age (having grown children being a prerequisite for the mission since then the problem with worrying about not getting a chance to reproduce is eliminated). And an all male crew wouldn't have any risk of sexual tension causing trouble either. I guess that psychology is a very important factor on such a mission since even though you might at first think that going would be a cool adventure you might feel different when you're in a small capsule and the planet we call home has become a tiny dot among many others in the darkness outside. The probability to go insane then is probably quite high for most of us - the same article mentioned one case of insanity in space: A senior commander on Mir once wanted to open the window to get some fresh air - mission control and the rest of the crew did get worried...
I have a problem with eclipse and the tomcat plugin for it: I can't get localization to work at all. I'm doing JSP-development and all non-English characters (i.e. in my case Finnish) come out as ??? and some English characters after them are missing on all pages when I use the plugin to start tomcat from eclipse. Eclipse itself shows them correctly when I've set LC_ALL=fi_FI@euro and the same thing if I run tomcat separately but not when I start it from eclipse. Then it runs so badly that strings with such characters in java classes cause nullpointerexceptions - due to incorrect lenghts caused by the characters missing after ???, I assume. Does anybody know how to fix this? Is there some additional locale setting in eclipse (well hidden since I haven't found it...) ?
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Same thing for me. The "Make a Donation" button on www.gentoo.org is kind of disturbing now (it's still there despite the guess in the article that it would be removed). Whether a distro is commercial or not is irrelevant when I choose a distro - I picked gentoo simply because I thought it was the best for my needs. However, this attempt to keep that unclear does not make me feel comfortable with it anymore. It's a shame since it has not only been a good distro on its technical merits but I've also appreciated things such as the weekly newsletter and the documentation. Maybe one should hope that more developers choose to work on the fork instead of gentoo and that many of gentoo's virtues will thus be present there too. What makes this even more of a shame is that on http://www.novell.com/linux/ gentoo is currently the most popular distro.
governments considering buying open source software is considered. Frequently people here say "right tool for the right job" and talk about open standards being more important than the software. What has surprised me is that so far I haven't encountered one of the most important arguments: The right choice for governments is not necessarily the best software for the lowest price. For companies that reasoning is the only sound one but for governments it's not since they need to take more things into consideration - such as jobs in their own country. Have you ever seen police cars in a country made by a non-domestic manufacturer if there is a domestic manufacturer? I simply don't understand why so many European governments are so happy to send money to Redmond instead of trying to increase employment in their country. Obviously MS Office is better than OpenOffice and whether the total cost of ownership of Windows is lower than that of Linux (for eg. government desktops) is debatable. Can you imagine what it would do for Linux if the German government decided that since there is a domestic supplier of operating systems (SuSE) that must be used even though compatibility with MS Office wouldn't be perfect and even though people would need re-training. And if the French did the same with Mandrake? Why can't governments (and others) see that with a little effort Linux can be considered just as generic an operating system as Windows - why, why, why? If they buy other domestic products simply because they're domestic why not apply the same logic to operating systems since with a little effort they can be just as generic as cars.
Wrong. Take biz 101 again. It's the shareholders who pay the taxes. Depending on legislation in different countries it can be indirect, ie. on the company's profits and/or direct on dividends and/or profit on increased stock value. In some states in the US there have been quite a lot of objections when both are applied since it makes the shareholders pay "double taxation" so it's likely to change to either one. If you claim that VAT is paid by the customer you've misunderstood it - it's easier to understand it if you think about how corporations always can deduct the VAT they've paid on their own purchases from the VAT on their own sales. That is, the tax is on valued added so it's taxation paid on the value which the company has created and which has thus lead to profits and/or increased stock value.
Nah, they're just learning encryption right from the start. Nobody I know has ever been able to read my handwriting and nowadays I simply tell them that it's encrypted since I can read it.
I remember once (long time ago) seeing a very funny drawing with too Martians smiling and holding up a picture of an empty surface with a few craters in front of a rover camera (so that we Earthians would think it's uninhabited). Has anybody else seen this? I'd love to find it since it was so funny so I'm sure the moderators will give you a +5, Funny if you can post a link :)
There's plenty of that already. IIRC all of the landers have had such cameras. This is one link and this is another to such images but there are plenty more (Google is your friend...). What I'd really like to see is, however, more than still images - ie. some movement by the rovers and so on. However, I assume that the scientific value of that wouldn't be much higher than that of high resolution still images and thus doesn't justify the amount of data that needs to be transferred.
According to Microsoft:"Office 2001 for Mac uses the same file format as Office 98 for Mac, so it's completely compatible. It's also completely compatible with Office 97 for Windows and Office 2000 for Windows. They all use the same format to save files."
(IIRC OpenOffice only has the "Save as Microsoft Word/Whatever 97/2000/XP" option).
But yes, I'm fully aware of the fact that opening older formats in newer works better than in the other direction, however; my point is that MS is forced to take into account that users that upgrade still need to be able to share files with those using older versions and thus they cannot completely break compatibility. And MS also realizes that they need to ensure that people use their formats as the obvious, default choice (and thus not ask too much "which formats can you read/write"), so albeit OpenOffice.org (etc.) have the disadvantage of being forced to reverse-engineer the formats MS isn't able to change them absolutely freely either, which was the concern the parent poster had.
Remember one thing: MS themselves are locked into their formats too. They are forced to maintain compatibility with older versions of their own programs - if they broke that with newer versions people wouldn't upgrade.
Maybe could combine the two since usually there are two approaches: ;)
Theoretical - you know everything but simply can't get things to work in practice.
Practical - you don't know anything but get things to work.
So in a combination nothing works and nobody knows why.
Slashdot isn't providing any view of Microsoft - slashdot simply links to articles. Biased? Yes. Factually wrong? Not intentionally. ;) And lately there has been quite a few stories about attempts in many countries to implement some editorial responsibility on the Internet too but, obviously, due to the borderless access worldwide it's quite futile. However, I doubt that anybody would try to enforce it on anything other than the most well-known sites (such as Google). And I doubt that they would try to avoid responsibility by placing their business in another country. Porn sites are of course one more example of attempts to take responsibility ("Please verify that you're at least 18 years of age by clicking Enter.") But obviously there will always be sites, such as rotten.com, which try to avoid responsibility.
There's a clear difference in responsibility between expressing your opinion and reporting something as a fact although you know it's incorrect.
Opinions expressed on slashdot are clearly opinions, as in comments with user names or anonymous cowards, and in addition to that "The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way."
My example of news broadcasts might have been confusing since, as you said, it's a limited resource. Maybe I should've taken as an example the free (as in paid for by advertising) newspapers which are distributed in many cities in Europe (I'm not sure if you have that in the US and therefore I wasn't sure if you'd be familiar with that and thus I chose not to pick that as an example although it would've been better since it isn't a limited resource) - they have the same editorial responsibility.
And yes, as far as I can tell slashdot does implement editorial responsibility - if I submit as a story a link to goatse.cx and claim that there's proof that it's Bill Gates from behind I'm quite sure the editors wouldn't post it - not even once and certainly not dupe
No, it's not the same as entertainment. You should compare it to news broadcasts instead since they're paid for with advertising and they have editorial responsibility.
Bush supporting that? Quite unlikely, I think - he'll probably stay out of it if he has paid his brain bill. But actually I hope he's stupid enough to intervene - the EU would certainly give him the finger and probably punish MS harder simply to prove a point.
Actually they can't. The thing is that they're providing a service to their customers (ie. us using it and "paying" for it by seeing the ads). And like all products and services provided by companies they are legally bound to live up to some standards (and reversed ranking would be too poor standards). Obviously I don't know the exact legislation in the US but considering all the law suits and facts such as McDonalds printing "Warning! Content is hot." on their apple pie packages I presume that the consumer rights legislation there is quite good too. I (as a European) know the European legislation a little bit better and there the precise definition for reasonable quality expected can be found out from the "consumer rights authorities" (loosely translated from Swedish and Finnish). So as an example: A warranty cannot be called a "warranty" unless it guarantees that the product will exceed the reasonable expectations defined by the authorities and even if it doesn't have a warranty the manufacturer is still required to replace it if it doesn't meet the reasonable expectations. So if eg. a printer has a 5 day warranty and it breaks down 6 months later you can be 100% sure the manufacturer will be forced to replace it (albeit few people go through the trouble of contacting the consumer rights authorities to enforce that). And the same thing applies here: Google cannot provide junk and claim it's a "search result".
"Because the browser is free, and the OS costs $" means: "The OS costs $ and you're forced to buy the browser too." And unfortunately enough people don't object to this (yet), since virtually everybody needs a web browser with their desktop OS now and instead of demanding to choose and pay for the browser of their choice they accept MS making the decision for them.
I doubt that since he's now trying to repair the damage that happened to US-Europe relations due to the Iraq war. And even if he did, I doubt that he'd succeed - after all, the US couldn't force through a second resolution through the UN Security Counsel due to European objections so it should be even harder to affect the EU's internal decisions.
The retail value still seems very very strange to me since that's usually a higher value than what you can write off if your warehouse burns down...
Woops! Yes I should've pressed preview... - a part was left out when I tried to make my comment shorter... The reinvestment decisions are made before taxes, then the dividends (afterwards). But I don't quite understand how federal standards can allow you to write off revenue for donations?
Simple answer from an MBA student: No.
What you pay taxes for is: revenue - all costs
And retail value isn't a cost at all (the only thing that is, is the cost of the physical media). To "optimize" your taxation (ie. so that your shareholders's wealth after taxes grows as much as possible) you pay suitable amounts of dividends (cost of capital you know...) before taxes. What else you're allowed to deduct in taxation varies in different countries - iirc. at least in some states in the US you're allowed to deduct the interest rate on loans (I'm European but have read quite a few American books on finance too).
Economics 101 for you why it's illegal. The following example of illegal behaviour can be found in almost every introductory book to the subject (it's a real classic!). This is the principle but the precise form of legislation is of course not the same in every country:
Chain A is the biggest in city X and starts selling petrol at a loss until every competitor within driving range has gone out of business (and A knows that they can keep selling at a loss longer than anyone else since they're the biggest chain). Then A becomes the only seller and sets prices at will, which will be maximizing "amount sold*price" instead of "price=the lowest for which anyone is willing to sell=the highest the least willing customers are willing to pay", which is what the price would settle at in perfect competition.
As far as software is concerned this is obviously quite far-fetched since here marginal cost (=the additional cost of producing exactly one more unit when you already have covered everything else, ie. wages, rent, whatever fixed costs etc.) matters whilst it's virtually nonexistent compared to fixed costs in the software industry.
I remember playing Thief II and being so concentrated on the game that a few times I noticed myself trying to move the mouse or press keys quietly so that the guards wouldn't hear me... So they're pretty damn good games when they make you feel that intensively that you're in the game.
I remember reading on the BBC's website about some plans the Russians had for a manned mission to Mars. According to them the most suitable crew is an all male one aged 50-60 since they are least likely to go nuts... And they're probably right since thanks to Mir the Russians do have the greatest amount of experience in keeping people in space for a long time - I recall that at least one of their cosmonauts spent enough time on Mir for a round-trip to Mars and managed to walk away from the capsule after the landing. Of course their attitude has been slightly different than the US one too - ie. "great, he survived - let's see if a few more months is possible" has been acceptable. The points I remember from the article were that men in general are always more willing to take risks and at that age they're least likely to do desperate (stupid) things to survive - ie. least likely to worry excessively not only themselves but also their offspring since paternal instincts don't remain as strong as maternal with age (having grown children being a prerequisite for the mission since then the problem with worrying about not getting a chance to reproduce is eliminated). And an all male crew wouldn't have any risk of sexual tension causing trouble either. I guess that psychology is a very important factor on such a mission since even though you might at first think that going would be a cool adventure you might feel different when you're in a small capsule and the planet we call home has become a tiny dot among many others in the darkness outside. The probability to go insane then is probably quite high for most of us - the same article mentioned one case of insanity in space: A senior commander on Mir once wanted to open the window to get some fresh air - mission control and the rest of the crew did get worried...
I have a problem with eclipse and the tomcat plugin for it: I can't get localization to work at all. I'm doing JSP-development and all non-English characters (i.e. in my case Finnish) come out as ??? and some English characters after them are missing on all pages when I use the plugin to start tomcat from eclipse. Eclipse itself shows them correctly when I've set LC_ALL=fi_FI@euro and the same thing if I run tomcat separately but not when I start it from eclipse. Then it runs so badly that strings with such characters in java classes cause nullpointerexceptions - due to incorrect lenghts caused by the characters missing after ???, I assume. Does anybody know how to fix this? Is there some additional locale setting in eclipse (well hidden since I haven't found it...) ?
I wonder if he's trying to solder with his server now...
I think you forgot one: ;)
"Lies, Damn Lies, "Score:5, Informative" Slashdot comments and Microsoft Adverts"
Everything is always Microsoft's fault but if you don't know how you can always turn to slashdot to get a completely objective explanation why.