should not be allowed to be carried on from the dark human history into the modern times. The Chinese governmnet should not be given any exemptions to the United Nations' Human Rights Declaration in the name of keeping an oppressive one-party system in place, or even in the name of Yet Another Thousand Years of Ethnically Unified China.
Everyone with any knowledge of the history of China - ancient or contemporary - knows about the deeply ingrained desire of the ethnically Chinese to live in a strong and unified China. Historians - and teachers - quote the eras without a single centralized leadership as times of absolute lawlessness and chaos. You can figure out the suggested cure yourselves.
But are the chinese people really better off under a single ethno-centric state? Their collective memory conveniently forgets that the chinese have never in their glorious past have actually had the personal freedoms to choose for themselves what is best for them. The precious few who dare to display free thinking that goes contrary to the Central Government's policy du-jour are imprisoned, executed or, if they're "lucky", exiled. Until recently the ordinary chinese had no knowledge whatsoever about the developments in rest of the world, or often even within China itself, outside their villages or counties.
Now such information is slowly trickling in; most of it twisted to suit the ends of the Central Government but even they can't prevent "unwanted information" from spreading. E.g. innocent stuff about workers' right to establish labor unions that is "enshrined" in PRC constitution but which noone is allowed to know about.
Anyway, the questionable end that justifies every means here is "(ethnic) unity at any cost". Now what is democracy? I recall a definition in a political science book that defines it simply as "how people decide their fate". There are no provisions for governments to kill their innocent citizens in the name of "continued stability" for the current regime. Real, deserved unity is only found through the ballot box. If you wish to live in oppressive past, give it your vote. But allow others to seek freedoms more in line with humanity's present and future.
People tend to call Microsoft Office just "Office". Corel ought to try and level the playing field by calling their package simply Corel Office, #1 to build the brand and #2 to commoditize the word Office (further than already with "WordPerfect Office") to strip MS from the current "monopoly" on that word, i.e. Office.
When people say they're using "Office", the question that should follow is: "from Corel or Microsoft?". That may make people say aloud the "monopolist word" and perhaps cause some subliminal introspection as well.
They can still sell WordPerfect under its distinct identity and promote it as a key component of the Corel Office. However, using WordPerfect in the suite's title creates the illusion that WordPerfect is the only component of any value in that Office suite, a low value proposition what comes to full Office suites.
Besides, eventually there will be Corel Office Deluxe that also includes the graphics applications that Corel is historically best known for. You simply can't bundle them under the name "WordPerfect Office". Last but not least, the word "WordPerfect" is probably associated by many as a perpetual runner-up while "Corel" has been gaining status as a contender for the crown (Corel's graphics apps, Corel's Office suite and Corel Linux the distro).
Imagine yourself shipwrecked on an uninhabited semi-paradise island on the Pacific knowing there were similarly shipwrecked wickedly wonderful geekgrrls on a neighbouring island but there were no physical means of getting there... Since you only managed to rescue the only items of any importance to you - a notebook and a solar panel - you'd want to waste no time setting up a chat connection to that real-paradise island.
Before setting out on that perilous Pacific cruise you had read on Slashdot about someone called Gilligan Bates (also known as Billigan) - a former billionaire who had found himself stranded on that very same island a few months earlier. Like you, he had also managed to hang on to his beloved laptop. But his was a new Pentium model running Windows Y2K. The bloated OS ran - when it wasn't sporting a blue screen - barely half an hour per recharge; and it always took more than half a day to get the battery full anyway. Worse, since everything from MS-Office down had been integrated into one humongous bundle most of that productive half hour got spent on operating the HD, and running MS-Diagnostics after bluescreens. Not that Billigan was even interested in the grrls across the straits - he was too small and limb to have found the courage to even wave at them - but he was desperate for a Word from the outside world on the situation of his declining worth. Well, the value of his declining stock fortune anyway. But none of the proprietary protocols newly-integrated into his software had been adopted by the near-by islanders so he couldn't even communicate with anyone. Before banging his head against a trunk of a palm tree til the final bluescreen got to _him_, he had carved one final message on lid of his laptop. It said: "These bloody savages, so obviously happy and care-free, must have been using free software and open protocols that weren't included in my all proprietary preload setup. God, oh god, I miss the preloading civilization! And cause I'm getting ever smaller and limber by the hour, I can't even reach the bananas any longer. The end is nigh..."
Thinking about the poor Billigan makes your grin ever wider. You plug in the solar panel, boot a few days old revision of MandHat and in half hour you've created a wireless LAN and started hacking your way through your favourite project while chatting with the increasingly interested geekgrrls from the other island. You look at the power gauge and, after an hour it tells you're at 90% and holding steady. As you start recompiling the kernel and one of the geekgrrls has started to become intimate online you laugh aloud. Not because the grrl told you that there aren't any bananas on their island, but because you know it really paid off to get that cheapo laptop with a curiously named CPU - Crusoe.
It's so nice to see you pro-MS Cowards showing up in force; even if you're only very few but busy and noisy nevertheless. Your presence, and behaviour, here makes it delightfully clear that the tables have turned and overnight you've become the freaks behind the window, the weirdos that just can't let go. Every post by a pro-MS Coward makes my grin wider.
While you're praying gods (or is there a monopoly in your "heaven" as well?), my thoughts are with the brave young women and men who saw what the computing world was becoming like and selflessly set out to build a platform that would be open and free for everyone. A world without bullies and extortion, with mutually beneficial sharing of knowledge and human resources that transcends national boundaries and financial barriers between the developing and developed countries. Hey all you Linux developers and users round the globe, consider yourselves HUGGED!
Stop hating and ask yourself why PowerPC CPUs aren't more popular in workstations, not to mention your average desktop computer.
Apple runs the show, and just to get access to a medium-priced PPC system (no DIY in any practicality, sorry) you're tied to the latter component of Apple's closed software/hardware platform. Need specs for those on-board chipsets? Sorry.
You "want to see a laptop with a coopermine processor last 5-6 hours". Who doesn't. What I'd like to see is a choice of (notebooks/desktops) running G4's, a thriving chip/board market and manufacturers opening up the specs so buyers aren't held hostage. (how many bought PCI PowerMacs cause Apple said they were supposed to be compatible with the upcoming-and-still-unreleased modern OS?)
Your ibook tickles your fancy. Great. Buy Apple if factors such as price, single-closed-source and aesthetics are to your liking. I'm fed up playing their game though, and the "x86" provides enough legs and a more acceptable combination of factors as far as my Open Source taste is concerned.
I'd love to see IBM and Moto _really_ promoting PowerPC as the heir to the x86 ecosystem. Apple has to do more than merely change its multi-hued spots into translucent ones to regain any level of credibility. Corporations don't need any incentive to keep their wares proprietary; they need some to realize the importance of openness. You made your point with your checkbook and so did I.
The Moz project is very important to the continuing success of Open Source platforms and while the code-donatin' heros know how much their work is appreciated I'd like to pass the team a few buck-equivalents from my long-ago-smashed piggybank.
Where is the website where I can get a secure connection, pull out my CC and make a symbolic financial contribution to the volunteer Mozzers?
Buy some hardware, get together for free beer or whatever - I'd just like to show my gratitude.
I truly hope so. Like myself, this/these MEEPT'er(s) get rarely too insightful but that's kinda OK. MEEPTer(s) is/are part of us, for better and for worse.
In fact,/. should try to get the original "MEEPT!" on tape for playback, say, every few minutes or so to simulate the printed/. experience.
(Hey MEEPTer, where's MEEPT.org/com/net? I wanna buy a MEEPT! tee-shirt!)
Like most of the readers (AFAICT), I do believe that competition is a Good Thing[tm]. AMD does keep some pressure on Intel to keep the prices from getting non-artificially high, but is there any evidence that AMD is anything but Microsoft-friendly?
Last I looked, AMD still advertised their CPUs as "Designed for MS-Windows". While Intel plays with the OS community to some extent, what does AMD, or their chipset partners such as VIA Inc., do?
And what does the phrase "Designed for Windows" actually mean wrt. CPUs? Softwarewise it sounds quite ominous, especially if you once used DR-DOS, OS/2, Lotus 1-2-3...
I must admit being a little disappointed with/.'s editorial laxness in these promotional cases. (H'uh, it was DirectorTaco himself!?)
A lot of the U.S.-centricity is understandable in the sense that issues regarding U.S. companies - and the "U.S. internet" - have usually some repercussions for the rest of the world as well. Not so with these continentally-challenged promotions. The geek, geekwannabe and geek-admirer world consists of Planet Earth (propably other planets too, but that's for another thread). If/. feels obliged to carry promotional coverage that is continentally-challenged I can easily vote with my fingers, but please, PLEASE, tag such "news for nerds" as "of North-American interest only!".
GPL is infectious for a reason. BSD allows taking the code behind the certain for re-packaging for a reason. Both have their places in the New Economy.
It is good to have (at least the choice of) a solid infrastructure that is free and open, and that is guaranteed to remain so. Nobody forces you to use it, but it is there nevertheless. Linux is one of those bedrocks that one can build upon, and GPL is the constitution that promises to keep things that way. "Great!", I hear you say.
Now, BSD allows and to large extent promotes similar, but not identical, sharing of sweat, blood and ideas. While in the GPL world there are no trade secrets or proprietary IP rights, the BSD license allows companies to keep their modified code away from competition. "Excellent!", I hear again.
And you're right on both accounts. GPL allows us to have a safe foundation upon which to build the New Economy together with many basic services, and some really fancy ones too. BSD on the other hand allows the profit-oriented classes to build for-fee services on the free and open GPL infrastructure safe in the knowledge that they will always have full access to the operational details of the infrastructure. BSD works for building bedrocks as well (as the thriving *BSD/OS market shows), but I personally wouldn't like to see any backstage-developed BSD/OS variant becoming THE dominant platform (cause Billy would just buy the rights with his weekly sodapop allowance, name the OS BS-winDows and we'd all be whisked back to the 80's faster than Gates can deny saying - on camera - that "DOJ has no teeth").
These licenses don't mix, but then again neither do you mix your pizza dough with the toppings. Yet the result tastes great and is blissfully filling.
Slashdot Mirror
should not be allowed to be carried on from the dark human history into the modern times. The Chinese governmnet should not be given any exemptions to the United Nations' Human Rights Declaration in the name of keeping an oppressive one-party system in place, or even in the name of Yet Another Thousand Years of Ethnically Unified China.
Everyone with any knowledge of the history of China - ancient or contemporary - knows about the deeply ingrained desire of the ethnically Chinese to live in a strong and unified China. Historians - and teachers - quote the eras without a single centralized leadership as times of absolute lawlessness and chaos. You can figure out the suggested cure yourselves.
But are the chinese people really better off under a single ethno-centric state? Their collective memory conveniently forgets that the chinese have never in their glorious past have actually had the personal freedoms to choose for themselves what is best for them. The precious few who dare to display free thinking that goes contrary to the Central Government's policy du-jour are imprisoned, executed or, if they're "lucky", exiled. Until recently the ordinary chinese had no knowledge whatsoever about the developments in rest of the world, or often even within China itself, outside their villages or counties.
Now such information is slowly trickling in; most of it twisted to suit the ends of the Central Government but even they can't prevent "unwanted information" from spreading. E.g. innocent stuff about workers' right to establish labor unions that is "enshrined" in PRC constitution but which noone is allowed to know about.
Anyway, the questionable end that justifies every means here is "(ethnic) unity at any cost". Now what is democracy? I recall a definition in a political science book that defines it simply as "how people decide their fate". There are no provisions for governments to kill their innocent citizens in the name of "continued stability" for the current regime. Real, deserved unity is only found through the ballot box. If you wish to live in oppressive past, give it your vote. But allow others to seek freedoms more in line with humanity's present and future.
People tend to call Microsoft Office just "Office". Corel ought to try and level the playing field by calling their package simply Corel Office, #1 to build the brand and #2 to commoditize the word Office (further than already with "WordPerfect Office") to strip MS from the current "monopoly" on that word, i.e. Office.
When people say they're using "Office", the question that should follow is: "from Corel or Microsoft?". That may make people say aloud the "monopolist word" and perhaps cause some subliminal introspection as well.
They can still sell WordPerfect under its distinct identity and promote it as a key component of the Corel Office. However, using WordPerfect in the suite's title creates the illusion that WordPerfect is the only component of any value in that Office suite, a low value proposition what comes to full Office suites.
Besides, eventually there will be Corel Office Deluxe that also includes the graphics applications that Corel is historically best known for. You simply can't bundle them under the name "WordPerfect Office". Last but not least, the word "WordPerfect" is probably associated by many as a perpetual runner-up while "Corel" has been gaining status as a contender for the crown (Corel's graphics apps, Corel's Office suite and Corel Linux the distro).
Imagine yourself shipwrecked on an uninhabited semi-paradise island on the Pacific knowing there were similarly shipwrecked wickedly wonderful geekgrrls on a neighbouring island but there were no physical means of getting there... Since you only managed to rescue the only items of any importance to you - a notebook and a solar panel - you'd want to waste no time setting up a chat connection to that real-paradise island.
Before setting out on that perilous Pacific cruise you had read on Slashdot about someone called Gilligan Bates (also known as Billigan) - a former billionaire who had found himself stranded on that very same island a few months earlier. Like you, he had also managed to hang on to his beloved laptop. But his was a new Pentium model running Windows Y2K. The bloated OS ran - when it wasn't sporting a blue screen - barely half an hour per recharge; and it always took more than half a day to get the battery full anyway. Worse, since everything from MS-Office down had been integrated into one humongous bundle most of that productive half hour got spent on operating the HD, and running MS-Diagnostics after bluescreens. Not that Billigan was even interested in the grrls across the straits - he was too small and limb to have found the courage to even wave at them - but he was desperate for a Word from the outside world on the situation of his declining worth. Well, the value of his declining stock fortune anyway. But none of the proprietary protocols newly-integrated into his software had been adopted by the near-by islanders so he couldn't even communicate with anyone. Before banging his head against a trunk of a palm tree til the final bluescreen got to _him_, he had carved one final message on lid of his laptop. It said: "These bloody savages, so obviously happy and care-free, must have been using free software and open protocols that weren't included in my all proprietary preload setup. God, oh god, I miss the preloading civilization! And cause I'm getting ever smaller and limber by the hour, I can't even reach the bananas any longer. The end is nigh..."
Thinking about the poor Billigan makes your grin ever wider. You plug in the solar panel, boot a few days old revision of MandHat and in half hour you've created a wireless LAN and started hacking your way through your favourite project while chatting with the increasingly interested geekgrrls from the other island. You look at the power gauge and, after an hour it tells you're at 90% and holding steady. As you start recompiling the kernel and one of the geekgrrls has started to become intimate online you laugh aloud. Not because the grrl told you that there aren't any bananas on their island, but because you know it really paid off to get that cheapo laptop with a curiously named CPU - Crusoe.
Can you see me grin?
It's so nice to see you pro-MS Cowards showing up in force; even if you're only very few but busy and noisy nevertheless. Your presence, and behaviour, here makes it delightfully clear that the tables have turned and overnight you've become the freaks behind the window, the weirdos that just can't let go. Every post by a pro-MS Coward makes my grin wider.
While you're praying gods (or is there a monopoly in your "heaven" as well?), my thoughts are with the brave young women and men who saw what the computing world was becoming like and selflessly set out to build a platform that would be open and free for everyone. A world without bullies and extortion, with mutually beneficial sharing of knowledge and human resources that transcends national boundaries and financial barriers between the developing and developed countries. Hey all you Linux developers and users round the globe, consider yourselves HUGGED!
Stop hating and ask yourself why PowerPC CPUs aren't more popular in workstations, not to mention your average desktop computer.
Apple runs the show, and just to get access to a medium-priced PPC system (no DIY in any practicality, sorry) you're tied to the latter component of Apple's closed software/hardware platform. Need specs for those on-board chipsets? Sorry.
You "want to see a laptop with a coopermine processor last 5-6 hours". Who doesn't. What I'd like to see is a choice of (notebooks/desktops) running G4's, a thriving chip/board market and manufacturers opening up the specs so buyers aren't held hostage. (how many bought PCI PowerMacs cause Apple said they were supposed to be compatible with the upcoming-and-still-unreleased modern OS?)
Your ibook tickles your fancy. Great. Buy Apple if factors such as price, single-closed-source and aesthetics are to your liking. I'm fed up playing their game though, and the "x86" provides enough legs and a more acceptable combination of factors as far as my Open Source taste is concerned.
I'd love to see IBM and Moto _really_ promoting PowerPC as the heir to the x86 ecosystem. Apple has to do more than merely change its multi-hued spots into translucent ones to regain any level of credibility. Corporations don't need any incentive to keep their wares proprietary; they need some to realize the importance of openness. You made your point with your checkbook and so did I.
The Moz project is very important to the continuing success of Open Source platforms and while the code-donatin' heros know how much their work is appreciated I'd like to pass the team a few buck-equivalents from my long-ago-smashed piggybank.
Where is the website where I can get a secure connection, pull out my CC and make a symbolic financial contribution to the volunteer Mozzers?
Buy some hardware, get together for free beer or whatever - I'd just like to show my gratitude.
MEEPT!? Hanging up?
/. should try to get the original "MEEPT!" on tape for playback, say, every few minutes or so to simulate the printed /. experience.
I truly hope so. Like myself, this/these MEEPT'er(s) get rarely too insightful but that's kinda OK. MEEPTer(s) is/are part of us, for better and for worse.
In fact,
(Hey MEEPTer, where's MEEPT.org/com/net? I wanna buy a MEEPT! tee-shirt!)
Like most of the readers (AFAICT), I do believe that competition is a Good Thing[tm]. AMD does keep some pressure on Intel to keep the prices from getting non-artificially high, but is there any evidence that AMD is anything but Microsoft-friendly?
Last I looked, AMD still advertised their CPUs as "Designed for MS-Windows". While Intel plays with the OS community to some extent, what does AMD, or their chipset partners such as VIA Inc., do?
And what does the phrase "Designed for Windows" actually mean wrt. CPUs? Softwarewise it sounds quite ominous, especially if you once used DR-DOS, OS/2, Lotus 1-2-3...
Dear Coward,
Bullard gets over Cowards with pleasure; no need for encouragement. Even American steroid-laden Cowards will do. Yeehaa!
w/ rough-tongue-in-your-cheek regards,
I must admit being a little disappointed with /.'s editorial laxness in these promotional cases. (H'uh, it was DirectorTaco himself!?)
/. feels obliged to carry promotional coverage that is continentally-challenged I can easily vote with my fingers, but please, PLEASE, tag such "news for nerds" as "of North-American interest only!".
A lot of the U.S.-centricity is understandable in the sense that issues regarding U.S. companies - and the "U.S. internet" - have usually some repercussions for the rest of the world as well. Not so with these continentally-challenged promotions.
The geek, geekwannabe and geek-admirer world consists of Planet Earth (propably other planets too, but that's for another thread). If
Director Taco - it just rolls off the tongue...
/. doesn't begin to change a la e.g. "Deja". Huh! The thought gave me Pointy Hair!
I just hope
GPL is infectious for a reason. BSD allows taking the code behind the certain for re-packaging for a reason. Both have their places in the New Economy.
It is good to have (at least the choice of) a solid infrastructure that is free and open, and that is guaranteed to remain so. Nobody forces you to use it, but it is there nevertheless. Linux is one of those bedrocks that one can build upon, and GPL is the constitution that promises to keep things that way. "Great!", I hear you say.
Now, BSD allows and to large extent promotes similar, but not identical, sharing of sweat, blood and ideas. While in the GPL world there are no trade secrets or proprietary IP rights, the BSD license allows companies to keep their modified code away from competition. "Excellent!", I hear again.
And you're right on both accounts. GPL allows us to have a safe foundation upon which to build the New Economy together with many basic services, and some really fancy ones too. BSD on the other hand allows the profit-oriented classes to build for-fee services on the free and open GPL infrastructure safe in the knowledge that they will always have full access to the operational details of the infrastructure. BSD works for building bedrocks as well (as the thriving *BSD/OS market shows), but I personally wouldn't like to see any backstage-developed BSD/OS variant becoming THE dominant platform (cause Billy would just buy the rights with his weekly sodapop allowance, name the OS BS-winDows and we'd all be whisked back to the 80's faster than Gates can deny saying - on camera - that "DOJ has no teeth").
These licenses don't mix, but then again neither do you mix your pizza dough with the toppings. Yet the result tastes great and is blissfully filling.