Isn't the fact that MS has to cut their rates so low to sell a product at what is most cetainly a loss indicative of Linux's anti-competitive practices? I'm sure the time put into developing Linux cost more than nothing, so isn't Linux dumping its product on the market?
People whine about MS being a monopoly all the time, but this is at least as unfair as companies that operate in the third world dumping their slave-labor products on the US market to edge out honest American workers.
First of all, I'd like to congratulate this guy on his ability for economic insight. It has been clear for some time now that the software industry is moving from a product market to a services market, and top companies like IBM, Oracle and VA Software have seen this coming and are taking advantage of it. To put it simply, there is no profit to be had in selling software anymore.
However, right is a word that, in the English language, has several meanings. In this case, he is also right in a moral sense. Software authors are morally obligated to make their software and source code available to their users Free of charge. Any other action indicates that they wish to take away the rights of their users and forever enslave them under the tyranny of EULAs and closed-source software. They owe it to us, the buyers who have supported them for all these years, to let us see their source code.
I know that this view may generate a lot of controversy among those with a vested interest in seeing the rights of software users taken away, but I feel I must get this view out in the open and let my fellow open source coders know that they are not toiling away in a vacuum, that people out there do appreciate them. Thank you.
I'm glad to see that somebody out there is going to punish the P2P abusers. Pirates are giving P2P a bad name.
For example, I'm in a small, unsigned punk band. We distribute our music over P2P because it is a lot cheaper than getting webspace to host stuff and paying for bandwidth. But right now, we have to compete with all these ultra-shitty, ultra-popular bands like Metallica and Jon Bon Jovi for the eyes and ears of P2P users. On top of that, it gives us a bad name. People look at me funny when I say we distribute our music on KaZaA, like I'm some kind of criminal.
When we clean out the abusers and criminals from P2P and let the real people, the small-time, unsigned artists, get exposure, then we will have won. And I won't shed a single tear for these people who are fucking it up for the rest of us.
Considering that P2P programs like KazAA and others allow people to share huge amounts of copyrighted material, I'm surprised that they are only charging around $14,000 each. The amount of lost sales caused by each user improving the "quality" of files on P2P networks alone and encouraging others to pirate must be phenominal.
If I were these guys, I'd consider myself getting away with a slap on the wrist.
You would be much better off making your project Free software. Why?
Well, for one thing, the model of selling a product doesn't work in the software development industry. Programmers are morally obligated to give the code to their users and allow their users to freely modify and redistribute the code.
The real money in software is in the services industry. If your company writes the software, it doesn't necessarily have to document it. And, if you write the software, who else knows it as well as you do? You could make a fortune on writing extensions and ironing out bugs that existed in the original project. Just look at Redhat: they are actually making a profit through selling improvements to something that is buggy and hard to use otherwise.
Believe me, businesses pay big bucks for someone else to deal with their problems. Just look at how much your average consultant makes.
I also compiled Mosfet's hi-perfomance liquid style engine. The ui looks better than Windows, but that's not what we're debating.
Yeah, man, you can't beat the random noise left behind some "transparent" menus or the completely incorrect backgrounds left under some pulldown menus when you activate them. You'd think that open source people would be able to implement something as simple as alpha channels properly, but apparently that is not the case.
Or, you could save money, buy a motherboard with a high memory capacity and mount a RAM drive in Linux. Lots more bandwidth than SCSI, too, if you use DDR.
Therefore, the only person who can validate the fairness of any particular voting machine would be yourself. This goes far beyond understanding software code. You would also have to verify the hardware (every last connection!) and the compiler that is used to compile the software that runs on the voting machine. Practically speaking, this is impossible.
This is why electronic voting machines are a bad idea. Sure, they might be easier for senior citizens to use, but, unlike a paper ballot where any kind of tampering would be fairly obvious, electrons are simply not auditable. Therefore, paper ballot systems are almost infinitely* more reliable than electronic systems could ever hope to be.
* this is not based on any mathematical calculation.
What a weird and shitty day it has been. Being that I've been working on putting together this (worthless, totally amateur) video for broadcast journalism and working long afternoons and evenings at school, I'm pretty goddamn tired.
I'm too lazy to deal with Halloween. It ceased being a major event in my life sometime around when I started high school. So it rolled around un-noticed this year, kinda creeping up on me like yesterday when Sam (the girl I drive to school) asked me about it. "Umm, yeah... I'm not dressing up for Halloween." isn't something a girl (this girl) wants to hear. So she's sort of bummed. And I'm bummed.
Ever since I woke up this morning, things went downhill. It's probably because everyone else got to enjoy themselves at school. But I'm convinced that it's gotta be something more. I've been out of it. Did I mention that before?
Interesting story: I went to the gym this evening, and practically nobody was there. I figure, this is a little weird, being a weeknight and primetime and all that. I was at the gym in the first place because I kinda needed something to do to forget about what a shit day it had been, so I might as well plan ahead for the rest of the weekend. I call up Sam on my cellphone, but she doesn't seem to be there. Then I head home after working out, and I'm driving close to my neighborhood, and I see all these kids walking around with flash lights and all, and I figure there's a party going on somewhere. Then it dawns on me: it's Halloween, dumbfuck.
Fuck The Register. I swear, even Slashdot doesn't normally stoop to the levels of including "M$" in an article title, and The Reg is supposed to be on a higher level of journalism than this place anyway. What a bunch of garbage.
There is not such thing as "duplacated effort". The projects such as the KDE and Gnome exist to offer freedom choices for the OSS Linux community. Without such choices, we would just be stuck with the same old boring GUI like M$ users have to deal with.
The different projects have different goals, that's all. For example, KDE is a MS Windows copy, while Gnome is a Free Sofware alternative. Not only is there a diversity of licensing involved, but there is also a huge difference in the look and feel. Gnome has anti-aliased fonts, vectorable icons and Evolution email client. KDE has themes that sort of use transparency to try to look like Aqua (but screws up sometimes LOL we need to help them out more) and an office suite and even a web browser. Then of course, there is X-Windows, which is the UNIX equivalent of Microsoft Windows, but it can't run over networks like Windows can (it's fairly new and still a work in progress).
All in all, this whole integration thing can only be good, it helps reduce duplicated effort in the community and helps people focus towards a common goal rather than fracturing into a myriad of incompatable APIs and kernels.
This attempt to sidestep the law is outrageous! This is akin to GM not recalling the Pinto when it was found to have dangerous, exploding gas tank placement back in the 80's!
The distraction of cellphones that causes an increase in accidents has already been exhaustively proven by numerous scientific studies. The British government, obviously out to protect consumers from cellphone companies, thoughtfully outlawed the use of cellphones in cars. Think about the public safety implications: without a law such as this, you may be able to talk on your cellphone while driving, but you can also just be driving along, paying attention when some jackass in a suburban talking to his stock broker runs your ass over after running a red light.
I've seen it happen before, and it ain't pretty. So why do cellphone manufacturers have to constantly try to violate public safety standards?
I agree that Michael's analogy was a flawed one, but yours is even worse! You imply that the BSD license somehow prevents people from redistributing and copying code, while the GPL prevents the owners from retaining copyright on the code. Both of these suggestions are patently false.
If you don't understand things that fit under the broad description of "intellectual property law", then please don't try to make analogies to further misinform people. This is best explained in abstract terms, rather than analogies, as software has no analog in the physical world.
This looks like advertising copy that was taken from each of the manufacturers' sites. It's just all around, incredibly lame.
First of all, he expends about two paragraphs in description of each fan. That's it. No benchmarks. No measurements. Not even, as CmdrTaco pointed out, noise measurements. That's pretty damn sorry.
Furthermore, the token effort that he expended on each fan is comical. Part of his review includes such irrelevant gems as this:
"The Thermaltake Smart Case Fan 2 is presented in a compact and stylish box, with a yellow/orange color scheme to match the color of the fan itself."
I guess when you're not even presented with the most basic characteristics of a fan, you'd buy it based on the box color too!
Finally, I'm appalled by both Slashdot's and Tweakers Australia's misleading and dishonest title. Next generation fans? They're fans with goddamn LEDs on them! Who cares? There is absolutely nothing new, interesting or innovative on display here. Next generation might be those "fans" that wave and are nearly silent, or one of those new fans (researched by Sunon, maybe?) that has the motor run around the outside instead of blocking airflow by driving the blades from the center. But this? This is just flashy crap that is not "next generation" and shouldn't be advertised as such.
Speaking of advertising, how much is this guy making from banner views for taking advantage of Slashdot editors who refuse to read articles before they're posted?
I use machines running Jaguar every day, and, just as one expects, when you choose "Shutdown" from the Apple menu the computer... get ready for this... shuts down. It's really not that difficult, but, seeing as most here come from the unintuitive hell that is X11, I can imagine that you may be braindamaged enough for the obvious to escape you.
Wouldn't it be cool if there were a site that we could go to where we could find out about all these software releases? We could make it a center of the open source community, where developers can post news about revisions of their pet software projects.
Anyone got any name ideas? I was thinking of "Freshmeat", but I think I've seen that somewhere before...
It's no big deal. It's even less enforceable than all this crap the RIAA is giving the P2P users about pirating MP3s. Honestly, how would they be able to figure out that you are using a local proxy program to filter out all their advertising?
Or he could shell out the larger sum of money for a (new, when he's already got an x86) Mac and Final Cut Pro. Jesus you Mac fanatics are annoying. Yes Apple makes fine hardware, and steals decent OSs, but jesus people, it's not even relevent to this discussion.
Um, no. I'm not referring to Video For Tightwads. I'm talking about professional compositing software that post-production houses have. Most x86 machines running Linux excel at this role, especially when you consider the price/performance ratio. I'm simply mentioning that in my previous post because there is, in fact, high quality software available for Linux. Just not Free software.
I was impressed to see it actually captured on the first try... It's really nice to be able to have this kind of power in open source software and not have to boot to Windows just to edit video now.
That's really, really pathetic. You know what I did to capture digital video on one of the Macs at school? I plugged in the camera via Firewire, opened up iMovie, hit the "Play" button on the viewer, and then hit the "Capture" button. No additional configuration necessary.
Don't even get me started on the capabilities (or the lack thereof) of Free video editing applications. Even the feature set of iMovie makes them pale in comparison, and Final Cut Pro (which I have worked with extensively as part of a semester course on digital movie making) just completely blows them all away. I'm sorry, but Linux video editing with Free software is a complete joke. Use a Mac, it Just Works.
On the other hand, if you were willing to shell out the money required for a really nice x86 workstation and some of the high end compositing software supported under Linux, you'd definitely be good to go...
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when they start installing cameras to monitor the people who are monitoring the cameras?
People whine about MS being a monopoly all the time, but this is at least as unfair as companies that operate in the third world dumping their slave-labor products on the US market to edge out honest American workers.
However, right is a word that, in the English language, has several meanings. In this case, he is also right in a moral sense. Software authors are morally obligated to make their software and source code available to their users Free of charge. Any other action indicates that they wish to take away the rights of their users and forever enslave them under the tyranny of EULAs and closed-source software. They owe it to us, the buyers who have supported them for all these years, to let us see their source code.
I know that this view may generate a lot of controversy among those with a vested interest in seeing the rights of software users taken away, but I feel I must get this view out in the open and let my fellow open source coders know that they are not toiling away in a vacuum, that people out there do appreciate them. Thank you.
For example, I'm in a small, unsigned punk band. We distribute our music over P2P because it is a lot cheaper than getting webspace to host stuff and paying for bandwidth. But right now, we have to compete with all these ultra-shitty, ultra-popular bands like Metallica and Jon Bon Jovi for the eyes and ears of P2P users. On top of that, it gives us a bad name. People look at me funny when I say we distribute our music on KaZaA, like I'm some kind of criminal.
When we clean out the abusers and criminals from P2P and let the real people, the small-time, unsigned artists, get exposure, then we will have won. And I won't shed a single tear for these people who are fucking it up for the rest of us.
If I were these guys, I'd consider myself getting away with a slap on the wrist.
Well, for one thing, the model of selling a product doesn't work in the software development industry. Programmers are morally obligated to give the code to their users and allow their users to freely modify and redistribute the code.
The real money in software is in the services industry. If your company writes the software, it doesn't necessarily have to document it. And, if you write the software, who else knows it as well as you do? You could make a fortune on writing extensions and ironing out bugs that existed in the original project. Just look at Redhat: they are actually making a profit through selling improvements to something that is buggy and hard to use otherwise.
Believe me, businesses pay big bucks for someone else to deal with their problems. Just look at how much your average consultant makes.
Yeah, man, you can't beat the random noise left behind some "transparent" menus or the completely incorrect backgrounds left under some pulldown menus when you activate them. You'd think that open source people would be able to implement something as simple as alpha channels properly, but apparently that is not the case.
Or, you could save money, buy a motherboard with a high memory capacity and mount a RAM drive in Linux. Lots more bandwidth than SCSI, too, if you use DDR.
Therefore, the only person who can validate the fairness of any particular voting machine would be yourself. This goes far beyond understanding software code. You would also have to verify the hardware (every last connection!) and the compiler that is used to compile the software that runs on the voting machine. Practically speaking, this is impossible.
This is why electronic voting machines are a bad idea. Sure, they might be easier for senior citizens to use, but, unlike a paper ballot where any kind of tampering would be fairly obvious, electrons are simply not auditable. Therefore, paper ballot systems are almost infinitely* more reliable than electronic systems could ever hope to be.
* this is not based on any mathematical calculation.
Wow, I'll bet that's the last time you let your mom take out the dashboard, huh?
10/31/02 (hi, vergil!)
What a weird and shitty day it has been. Being that I've been working on putting together
this (worthless, totally amateur) video for broadcast journalism and working long
afternoons and evenings at school, I'm pretty goddamn tired.
I'm too lazy to deal with Halloween. It ceased being a major event in my life sometime around
when I started high school. So it rolled around un-noticed this year, kinda creeping up on me
like yesterday when Sam (the girl I drive to school) asked me about it. "Umm, yeah... I'm not
dressing up for Halloween." isn't something a girl (this girl) wants to hear. So she's sort of
bummed. And I'm bummed.
Ever since I woke up this morning, things went downhill. It's probably because everyone else
got to enjoy themselves at school. But I'm convinced that it's gotta be something more. I've
been out of it. Did I mention that before?
Interesting story: I went to the gym this evening, and practically nobody was there. I figure,
this is a little weird, being a weeknight and primetime and all that. I was at the
gym in the first place because I kinda needed something to do to forget about what a shit day it had
been, so I might as well plan ahead for the rest of the weekend. I call up Sam on my cellphone, but
she doesn't seem to be there. Then I head home after working out, and I'm driving close to my
neighborhood, and I see all these kids walking around with flash lights and all, and I figure
there's a party going on somewhere. Then it dawns on me: it's Halloween, dumbfuck.
Fuck The Register. I swear, even Slashdot doesn't normally stoop to the levels of including "M$" in an article title, and The Reg is supposed to be on a higher level of journalism than this place anyway. What a bunch of garbage.
The different projects have different goals, that's all. For example, KDE is a MS Windows copy, while Gnome is a Free Sofware alternative. Not only is there a diversity of licensing involved, but there is also a huge difference in the look and feel. Gnome has anti-aliased fonts, vectorable icons and Evolution email client. KDE has themes that sort of use transparency to try to look like Aqua (but screws up sometimes LOL we need to help them out more) and an office suite and even a web browser. Then of course, there is X-Windows, which is the UNIX equivalent of Microsoft Windows, but it can't run over networks like Windows can (it's fairly new and still a work in progress).
All in all, this whole integration thing can only be good, it helps reduce duplicated effort in the community and helps people focus towards a common goal rather than fracturing into a myriad of incompatable APIs and kernels.
The distraction of cellphones that causes an increase in accidents has already been exhaustively proven by numerous scientific studies. The British government, obviously out to protect consumers from cellphone companies, thoughtfully outlawed the use of cellphones in cars. Think about the public safety implications: without a law such as this, you may be able to talk on your cellphone while driving, but you can also just be driving along, paying attention when some jackass in a suburban talking to his stock broker runs your ass over after running a red light.
I've seen it happen before, and it ain't pretty. So why do cellphone manufacturers have to constantly try to violate public safety standards?
If you don't understand things that fit under the broad description of "intellectual property law", then please don't try to make analogies to further misinform people. This is best explained in abstract terms, rather than analogies, as software has no analog in the physical world.
Pardon me, that wasn't Sunon that was manufacturing the periphery-drive fan, it was YS Tech. You can find a much better review by an Australian here.
First of all, he expends about two paragraphs in description of each fan. That's it. No benchmarks. No measurements. Not even, as CmdrTaco pointed out, noise measurements. That's pretty damn sorry.
Furthermore, the token effort that he expended on each fan is comical. Part of his review includes such irrelevant gems as this:
I guess when you're not even presented with the most basic characteristics of a fan, you'd buy it based on the box color too!Finally, I'm appalled by both Slashdot's and Tweakers Australia's misleading and dishonest title. Next generation fans? They're fans with goddamn LEDs on them! Who cares? There is absolutely nothing new, interesting or innovative on display here. Next generation might be those "fans" that wave and are nearly silent, or one of those new fans (researched by Sunon, maybe?) that has the motor run around the outside instead of blocking airflow by driving the blades from the center. But this? This is just flashy crap that is not "next generation" and shouldn't be advertised as such.
Speaking of advertising, how much is this guy making from banner views for taking advantage of Slashdot editors who refuse to read articles before they're posted?
I use machines running Jaguar every day, and, just as one expects, when you choose "Shutdown" from the Apple menu the computer... get ready for this... shuts down. It's really not that difficult, but, seeing as most here come from the unintuitive hell that is X11, I can imagine that you may be braindamaged enough for the obvious to escape you.
If I ever star in a porno, can I steal your username?
No.
Anyone got any name ideas? I was thinking of "Freshmeat", but I think I've seen that somewhere before...
It's no big deal. It's even less enforceable than all this crap the RIAA is giving the P2P users about pirating MP3s. Honestly, how would they be able to figure out that you are using a local proxy program to filter out all their advertising?
Um, no. I'm not referring to Video For Tightwads. I'm talking about professional compositing software that post-production houses have. Most x86 machines running Linux excel at this role, especially when you consider the price/performance ratio. I'm simply mentioning that in my previous post because there is, in fact, high quality software available for Linux. Just not Free software.
That's really, really pathetic. You know what I did to capture digital video on one of the Macs at school? I plugged in the camera via Firewire, opened up iMovie, hit the "Play" button on the viewer, and then hit the "Capture" button. No additional configuration necessary.
Don't even get me started on the capabilities (or the lack thereof) of Free video editing applications. Even the feature set of iMovie makes them pale in comparison, and Final Cut Pro (which I have worked with extensively as part of a semester course on digital movie making) just completely blows them all away. I'm sorry, but Linux video editing with Free software is a complete joke. Use a Mac, it Just Works.
On the other hand, if you were willing to shell out the money required for a really nice x86 workstation and some of the high end compositing software supported under Linux, you'd definitely be good to go...
...as to how long it is until someone patents my genes?