Sticking to principles under every conceivable circumstance is called
dogma.
No, that's called being dogged, "To track or trail persistently".
Dogma, OTOH, is when your principles are not based on reason, but on some form of perceived enlightenment. The approach Stallman takes is founded in reason, on his own personal experiences, and thus is not dogma.
need to learn a little less from Stallman (follow your narrow principles singlemindedly wherever they lead) and a little more from Torvalds (be pragmatic and realistic about your circumstances to advance toward your goals).
In this, you are simply advocating liberalism over conservatism. As far as I know, nobody has shown either one of these to be a fundamentally superior approach.
I would be more careful about the claims you make. It is quite presumptuous of you to assume that you know better than RMS about how to lead the GNU project.
Now all the LGPL needs is static linking. I'll be happy to distribute the code for the library, but it's a pain to have to give library instructions when it could just be a stand alone program.
"It's a pain." Boo-hoo. If you went to the copyright holder and offered them money for a non-LGPL licensed version that you could statically link against, you'd get it. Why do so many people complain about open source software they are getting for free?
Using the software under the terms of the LGPL is the price you pay for free-as-in-beer usage of it. If you don't like it, go link against some other library.
And this is true. With GNU, I am not free to add value and then charge for that value. Technically, it is true, I can, but since I must also provide that value free of charge, the fact is sort of obviated.
You have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. The GPL says nothing about whether you can charge for the software or not. It simply says that when you distribute the software to somebody, you must also give them the source code.
Remember that re-encoding a lossy compression codec (MP3) to another lossy codec (Vorbis) will ensure that, at best, the re-encoded files will sound no better than the original ones.
You would notice more difference if you encoded the OGG files from the original source, instead of from MP3s that have already been lossily compressed.
So MS was found to have a monopoly on i86 IBM Clone PCs, whoop dee do.
Having a monopoly is not illegal. Using anti-competitive practices and product tying when you are a monopoly is illegal.
MS has triumphed on 99% of everything since because all the judges see that there is in fact NO CASE.
No, in fact, Jackson threw the book at them, and they got off on a technicality (he blabbed to the press before the case was over).
Suing for inclusion of IE into Windows for free? Well Sue ALL of Open source for being free then!
This statement is so idiotic, I don't know where to begin. First of all, Internet Explorer was originally a separate product. Microsoft then tied it to Windows when they saw that Netscape was remaining dominant in the browser market.
Second, "Open Source" is not a monopoly. If, for instance, Red Hat somehow gained monopoly status in the next few years, then they would be subject to the same rules that MS was subject to, in that they can't take separate products and bundle them with the monopoly product.
You are obviously giving away something of value in order to gain market share and destroy a competitor. THAT IS ILLEGAL, even when you don't have a "monopoly".
Are you kidding? Businesses give stuff away for free all the time, and it's not illegal in the slightest. Unless you are a monopoly, in which case different rules apply; the reason is to prevent horizontal expansion, and to prevent the monopoly from erecting barriers to entry in the monopolized market.
A monopoly, by definition, has no need to gain market share; and so anti-competitive acts and other things that were fair business when the weren't a monopoly are no longer fair, because they have no reason to use them except to maintain their monopoly status. And that's the whole point of antitrust law, so that monopolies are not indefinitely maintained.
I find that the O.S. and Linux crowd in general to have far LESS integrity than MS has ever shown. You and your post are further proof of that.
You have proven yourself to be such an idiot that I doubt anybody could care less what you think.
Imagine if the/. community proclaimed a boycott and refused to buy CDs for a month.
What if it's too late for a boycott? I haven't bought a major label CD in years. (I don't pirate major label music either, but I'm sure I'm part of the "decreasing rate of growth == PIRACY!" statistic.)
Since all you can measure through a boycott is the rate of change, you'd be banking on that not enough Slashdot readers hadn't already stopped buying major label CDs already. Otherwise, it wouldn't prove much.
essential for the OpenGL 1.4 specification is *apparently from ARB meetings* owned IP from Microsoft, which means NVidia has to license the technology to use it.
Have you ever seen MesaGL? Stop apologizing for NVidia. They've made their choice, and their hands have never been tied.
Yeah, there are so many other companies with superior products who will give us every single bit of code in their drivers.
I would argue that a piece of hardware with a completely open source driver that is feature-complete and stable *IS* a superior product. The term "superior" is very subjective.
FYI, Matrox G-series cards have a feature-complete open source driver, 3dfx cards all do, and most ATI cards have at least a working, if not feature-complete one.
Moron.
Insulting people with whom you disagree is not an efficient way to convince them of your point of view.
Now, as I understand it, it's unfortunate that much of the competitive edge nvidia's hardware has is actually the result of the proprietary code in their drivers. It's going to be hard to convince them to forego that, since it would endanger their cash flow.
Why don't they separate the parts of the driver from each other then? Keep the parts which represent their "competitive edge" closed, and at least open up the OS interface portion, which is almost certainly where most of the problems users have with them will lie.
As homeless scavengers or as genuine mining for new manufacturing?
Actually, I think they're doing both. The homeless scavengers boil the rare metals out of old equipment and sell them at cut-rate prices to the industry that needs them.
I often wonder when we will have to mine our landfills for raw materials. Everything will have to be recycled eventually, because mining the landfills will, one day, be cheaper than digging 1000 miles into the Earth for metal or oil.
For example, VCR/TV repair places in my town are either struggling or have already gone out of business. Things are so cheap these days that you might as well buy a new one when the old one breaks.
I can't load my instrument samples into RAM and do MIDI playback with them.
Ah, that may be the complication then. I have never done anything with software MIDI outside of rendering MIDI files to audio streams through timidity's built-in patches.
A complete graphics package with Gimp, blender, driver install, and a collection of scripts would be cool. It'd be cooler if it was a deb package.
You could always make a deb package that depends on all the packages you want to install. No sense lumping them all together into one package when there are more efficient ways of doing it.
(Debian already does this to some extent with "tasksel", btw.)
If only they would add decent wavetable synth support to Linux I would ditch Windows without thinking about it twice.
What were you having problems with? For sound cards without hardware MIDI, timidity seems to work great. If you have a MIDI card or daughtercard that you want to use, those work fine too; I use a Yamaha DB50XG on a Roland MPU-401AT ISA card that I control through a MIDI keyboard.
Perhaps if you were a bit more specific on the shortcomings, we could have a more engaging discussion.
If you don't read slashdot enough to be able to recall the posts he speaks of, then you are not informed/qualified enough on this topic to have this discussion listing all these (arguably obviouls) truisms.
Um, or maybe the posts don't exist? This is why citations are important whenever you're going to make an argument and expect to be taken seriously.
Sure, it's MY fault that I can't prove his argument...
When someone posts something that is factual, and you don't agree with it, that is not the definition of "invalid" or "generalization".
When someone makes sweeping claims of any sort, that is the book definition of generalization. Generalization is almost completely useless as an argumentation technique because it requires the vast majority of evidence to be clearly in favor of the argument, in order for holes not to be found. But if the vast majority of evidence is already in favor of the argument, there is rarely anything to argue about!
In effect, the original post was a baseless generalization, and none of the replies did anything to defend it whatsoever. If someone wishes to make an argument, they must provide evidence beyond appealing for the reader to accept it at face value. Otherwise, it is NOISE.
Perfectly on-topic and factual posts are modded down, if they don't fit the readers mindset. Completely infactual, outright lies and trolls are modded up if they're pro- linux.
You can be cynical all you want, but you'll have to point out said posts if you really want to make your point, instead of generalizing about it. When you generalize, at worst it makes you look like you're trolling, and at best it serves no useful purpose towards the end you would like to meet (a less biased Slashdot, I presume).
And I'll point out to others as oft as I feel appropriate, that the information and discussion they are hearing is from an overwhelmingly biased, cult-like following, who definately arent above stretching the truth to make a point.
I'm just not seeing the "overwhelming" bias part. For example, USA Today is a liberally slanted piece of news; it gets slammed left and right for that. But from its own readership? Hardly. Its readers read it because they know its reporters share their interests. If someone reads USA Today and doesn't like their slant (while being unable to refute them on a factual basis), they can go read The Washington Post. Why bother disrupting the flow of discussion on a site that doesn't share your ideals?
I remember when it was an actual news site, and not Linus' personal cheering section.
Shrug, to me it's still a news site; just because it covers news you'd prefer not to hear doesn't mean that it is without merit. I'm personally glad Unix and open source have a site where they can get coverage that is accessible to the "average Joe" net junkie. Yes, they might be a corporate mouthpiece for VA Software, but who honestly gives a fuck? The media is the media. If you trust the media in any form, you're doomed.
And it'd be a more productive use of your time to not try to change everyone who isn't satisfied with what Slashdot has evolved into.
Sorry, but it's a matter of the signal to noise ratio. If you go to alt.microsoft and start yelling about how everyone who posts on alt.microsoft sucks and how the newsgroup is completely useless, at the very least you're going to get killfiled, and possibly blocked from posting by your ISP. This is because alt.microsoft was created for disseminating relevant information and for on-topic discussion, not to hear the mindless rambling of trolls who had nothing better to do.
Just because Slashdot uses moderation instead of outright censorship doesn't mean that anti-Slashdot trolling is somehow useful to people who read Slashdot for content and on-topic discussion. In fact, it's a mind-numbing distraction, and my appeal for the idiocy to stop still stands.
"Hey guys linux look linux linux linux linux ms sucks linux linux OSX i love linux beowulf clusters."
Any 'variety' opinion wise is modded down into oblivion.
And then there's people like you, who do nothing but bitch about the Slashdot editors, users, and moderators, but still visit Slashdot anyway for some reason.
Are you masochistic, or what? If you don't like Slashdot's bias, go elsewhere for your news. (Try The Onion for unbiased reporting.) It'd be a more productive use of your time than trying to change everyone who is satisfied with what Slashdot has evolved into. Or are you just not concerned with using your time productively?
Uh, those are all wrappers around apt, hence you are using a single install system instead of having a standard way to record installed packages.
Then I don't understand your original point. MSI is a parallel to dpkg in this context.
For YOU. Not me, or any other person who uses free software and Unix for its rational benefits over the alternatives.
That's funny. I use free software and Unix for its rational benefits over the alternatives, and I still have a harder time getting basic desktop tasks done on Linux than on Windows.
I omitted "on the desktop" from my earlier statement.
Face it, all the standard things which people expect to be able to do with their PC are easier and work better on Windows.
I submit that is false in my case. Guess I'm not part of "people", eh?
Everything from working with MS Office documents (obviously)
:) Duh, just like it's easier to install a MSI-packaged program in windows, or it's easier to run an iptables script in Linux. How can you compare two systems on the basis of software that was intentionally only made available for one of those systems?
to ripping a DVD to a SVCD (less obviously)
Um, okay... try http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/
to playing a DVD (of course)
One click and a DVD inserted into my drive is playing in mplayer.
is easier and faster on windows.
This is perception, and it's anecdotal. Unless you post some numbers, and the exact context within which those numbers were obtained, we can only accept or reject this claim at face value.
No rebooting to play windows games,
*shrug* I have so many games at my fingertips I'd never be able to play them all, so this doesn't matter to me personally. However, I am a 3X-monthly subscriber to Transgaming in the hopes that their software will eventually become perfect enough to satisfy even you.
no problem viewing quicktime movies,
Codeweavers Crossover plugin does this for you and costs less than the Quicktime non-crippleware app does.
Also windows networking is easier than setting up samba
??? samba IS windows networking. If you're complaining about the configuration, any good distro handles the configuration through its own system. Debian's samba configuration consists of a few questions about the network and what shares you desire. If you're complaining about the client side, look at Gnomba. And realize that SMB was intended to be a proprietary solution, and it's only by luck and hard work that we happen to have an interoperable solution.
Hopefully coda will bring this to free/open systems soon, but it's still in its infancy really in spite of the fact that it mostly works.
AFS is a far better solution for a network filesystem than SMB or NFS, and is nearly 20 years mature. (See www.openafs.org for more information.)
Coda was developed as a branch from AFS. Coda's only advantage is that it supports detached operation on filesystems, so that you could take a notebook with you for instance, and have your work be automatically updated on your Coda cell when you plug your laptop back into the network at home. Coda has numerous disadvantages, in that releases are slow, it scales poorly, and has nearly nonexistent support for any uncommon OS.
The only real problem with AFS is that it is a complex system and takes time to understand enough to administer it. However, it is a snap to use and far more transparent than the "other" network filesystems.
I didn't say you couldn't DO things on Linux, but the fact is that Windows typically does desktop tasks better and/or faster than Unix simply because that's where the software is. It's not a statement of the quality of one platform or another.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing your post because you claimed quality of the system itself is lower (since you didn't!). But my point is that the quality of the desktop experience is highly subjective, and people like me who use, enjoy, and would prefer it over the alternatives cannot just be chalked up to "cognitive dissonants" like everyone else in this thread is trying to claim.
It's managed through a central interface but does not require you to use the same installer for everything. This makes sense!
Yes, isn't it nice? I enjoy being able to use aptitude, apt-get, gnome-apt, or dselect, as well as simply clicking an icon in KDE, to install packages.
But the point was, it was harder to get things done then, and it's harder to get things done now, comparing Linux to Windows.
For YOU. Not me, or any other person who uses free software and Unix for its rational benefits over the alternatives. Not everyone is a dogmatic or a zealot; they're just the ones that speak the loudest.
Slashdot Mirror
Logitech Z560 are a great set for the price.
Dogma, OTOH, is when your principles are not based on reason, but on some form of perceived enlightenment. The approach Stallman takes is founded in reason, on his own personal experiences, and thus is not dogma.
I would be more careful about the claims you make. It is quite presumptuous of you to assume that you know better than RMS about how to lead the GNU project.
Using the software under the terms of the LGPL is the price you pay for free-as-in-beer usage of it. If you don't like it, go link against some other library.
You would notice more difference if you encoded the OGG files from the original source, instead of from MP3s that have already been lossily compressed.
Having a monopoly is not illegal. Using anti-competitive practices and product tying when you are a monopoly is illegal.
No, in fact, Jackson threw the book at them, and they got off on a technicality (he blabbed to the press before the case was over).
This statement is so idiotic, I don't know where to begin. First of all, Internet Explorer was originally a separate product. Microsoft then tied it to Windows when they saw that Netscape was remaining dominant in the browser market.
Second, "Open Source" is not a monopoly. If, for instance, Red Hat somehow gained monopoly status in the next few years, then they would be subject to the same rules that MS was subject to, in that they can't take separate products and bundle them with the monopoly product.
Are you kidding? Businesses give stuff away for free all the time, and it's not illegal in the slightest. Unless you are a monopoly, in which case different rules apply; the reason is to prevent horizontal expansion, and to prevent the monopoly from erecting barriers to entry in the monopolized market.A monopoly, by definition, has no need to gain market share; and so anti-competitive acts and other things that were fair business when the weren't a monopoly are no longer fair, because they have no reason to use them except to maintain their monopoly status. And that's the whole point of antitrust law, so that monopolies are not indefinitely maintained.
You have proven yourself to be such an idiot that I doubt anybody could care less what you think.Yes, IHBT, whatever.
Since all you can measure through a boycott is the rate of change, you'd be banking on that not enough Slashdot readers hadn't already stopped buying major label CDs already. Otherwise, it wouldn't prove much.
FYI, Matrox G-series cards have a feature-complete open source driver, 3dfx cards all do, and most ATI cards have at least a working, if not feature-complete one.
Insulting people with whom you disagree is not an efficient way to convince them of your point of view.http://personalpages.tds.net/~rcarlsen/ce/future.
And this one:t xt
http://personalpages.tds.net/~rcarlsen/ce/gripes.
under "Most of all, I hate waste"
I think the quote, "Equipment is built with the dumpster in mind, not the repair shop." is particularly telling, especially coming from a tech.
What is your sound card?
(Debian already does this to some extent with "tasksel", btw.)
Perhaps if you were a bit more specific on the shortcomings, we could have a more engaging discussion.
Is it just me, or were the comments in this story like getting a free interview from Miguel on the .NET/Mono topic? :)
Sure, it's MY fault that I can't prove his argument...
When someone makes sweeping claims of any sort, that is the book definition of generalization. Generalization is almost completely useless as an argumentation technique because it requires the vast majority of evidence to be clearly in favor of the argument, in order for holes not to be found. But if the vast majority of evidence is already in favor of the argument, there is rarely anything to argue about!In effect, the original post was a baseless generalization, and none of the replies did anything to defend it whatsoever. If someone wishes to make an argument, they must provide evidence beyond appealing for the reader to accept it at face value. Otherwise, it is NOISE.
Just because Slashdot uses moderation instead of outright censorship doesn't mean that anti-Slashdot trolling is somehow useful to people who read Slashdot for content and on-topic discussion. In fact, it's a mind-numbing distraction, and my appeal for the idiocy to stop still stands.
Are you masochistic, or what? If you don't like Slashdot's bias, go elsewhere for your news. (Try The Onion for unbiased reporting.) It'd be a more productive use of your time than trying to change everyone who is satisfied with what Slashdot has evolved into. Or are you just not concerned with using your time productively?