is Captcha's that people can't read either. digg.com is especially bad for that: it usually takes me 3 or 4 tries to get it "right", even when it looks obvious. Slashdot's are harder to read but I generally always get them the first time.
I got one raise while I was n school (minimum wage went up to $3.35 / hour). A friend got an unreported job for $5 an hour one summer, 84 hours a week cooking at a diner: he was our hero.
In those pre-Internet days, programming or technical jobs simply did not exist in my city. There were a few banks and big companies with mainframes but they had no interest in college kids. The university got two Apple 2e's my last year to augment the PDP-11, and we had limited access to a System 370 but it was expensive (long distance), there were only 2 keypunch machines that were always busy, and turnaround was hours, often next day. I remember being asked what a home computer was for and why anyone would want one: it was a fair question, since essentially no consumer software existed either.
I make several times the average wage in my area (you actually are above it) and almost never have to go over 40 hours per week so it did work out, but getting there was tough (I've laid block, finished sheetrock, etc.)
I lived at home and worked full time through college (at a much cheaper school than MIT) and picked and chose carefully which books I bought (I have copied whole textbooks in the library at 5 cents/page.) We all had our dreams then, but we knew that's all they were.
The difference being is that it's for opt-out requests instead of purchases.
Is that a difference? Slashdotting is the result of insufficient bandwidth to handle a temporary load composed of mostly bona fide page requests. That's not the same thing as going to a site solely to attack the operator, with no interest in any content beyond maybe using it in the attack.
BlueFrogger's went to a site with the express intention of breaking it / causing problems / costing the operators money. They were more artful than just doing lots of page loads to clog the server, but it was for the same purpose and it positively worked, judging by the response.
I suppose you could argue the precise definition of the word "Service" in DOS (*Frog attacks deny service (as in intended usage) to the website operators rather than the public?) Then again, does anyone really have a problem understanding what's going on here, or care enough to invent or learn a bunch of new acronyms to more precisely express the motivation for loading a URL?
If one defines "DOS" as "attack or interupt[sic] the normal business of a server or network", BlueFrog certainly did. They injected bad data rather than saturating routers and they weren't big enough to bring the servers down, but that's hair splitting. DOS adequately describes their attack except maybe for network security guys trying to defend against it.
Given that:
The Russian interests that killed Blue Frog used a DDOS (almost certainly coming from a botnet);
*Frog has always been based on a DOS against spammers (Blue Frog admittedly was not a botnet);
Black Frog wants to use a P2P network (euphemistically called a "frognet") to distribute their DOS over a bunch of user machines, using hidden servers for control;
I stand by my analysis. It pretty exactly describes what is going on.
It will be interesting to see how a many-to-many DDOS plays out.
... the Free World mentality. It must be something like the grown men who devote their spare time to creating their own race car: it looks cool, they did it all by themselves, but it will never run on a track or even down the street, just sit there with its chrome ClassPath logo shining in the sun, watching the Toyotas speed by. These people would love to get all the hard won knowledge of the professional racing teams for free.
The biggest problem I have w/ RMS is loudly using words like "ethical" and assuming that everyone means the same thing by them as he does. It's a common failing in the modern world (listen to US political parties pretending to disagree with each other sometime), but it makes a guy who was once supposedly a good engineer sound like the guys who are _really_ trying to destroy the world, and not by selling closed source software either.
In the end, Sun has the right to use any license they want, and the ethical choice in a free society is to support that. Anyone is welcome to try to convince others to change the social contract, but the good guys shouldn't do it by demonizing Sun, etc, because they won't accept someone else's non-advantageous license terms for their own work.
Our IT director has made the decision that, to speed up development times, we need to re-architect all of our existing code, from C++ to Java.
If your IT director is clueless enough to make a move like this without (obviously) asking advice from his developers first, the handwriting is on the wall: your company has had it, and their form of suicide includes expending their remaining funds on consultants. Start looking for a new job TODAY. By all means collect a paycheck while you're looking (you can also acquire some Java experience to sell to the next company) but don't ride the sinking ship too long. It's depressing.
"...Word 2007: direct publishing of blogs to the web from within the program" sums up what's wrong with Word (and Office, and Microsoft) better than anything else I could say.
Around 1980 or so I read a journal article describing a very primitive word processing system at a (much fancier than I could afford) university. I was fascinated by the idea (I'd be using a typewriter for several more years at that point) and spent a long time trying to create my own in DEC BASIC, despite the school having no printers except a couple of 9 pin DECWriters and an uppercase-only line printer that I wasn't important enough to use.)
Does anyone care about word processing any more? Is it all over, and all that matters is jamming in more and more features, whether or not they make sense or even work?
The name "torrent" would scare off the few IT managers willing to play with Apple: they wouldn't dare put anything that even suggests P2P on a company system (their VP may not know what a torrent is, but he's heard the name and thinks it's bad.)
If Apple distributes this and then some sleazy congressman manages to make it illegal, they'll have a big media (if not legal) problem and have to disable high profile system services.
If Apple distributes this, it will poison their relationship with the gangsters who control ITMS content (whether it has any bearing on song sharing or not.)
What possible use is it? Apple owns Akamai. Their updates download faster than just about anyone's. If they use a torrent system it _will_ be slower (end user upload speed), not faster, and someone will sooner or later figure out how to upload trojans in place of updates and really wreck their day.
If Apple wants to hurt themselves, it would be easier and cheaper to just start donating computers to Al Quaeda.
I haven't played with Parallels (no intel Mac) but I have used virtualization software before.
The 2 OS's usually coexist by way of shared folders, sort of like having them on a network. Running the Mac at the same doesn't make any security difference (dual booting may actually be worse, since XP running "alone" is more likely to be able to access the entire Mac partition rather than just a few explicitly shared folders.) Also, having the Mac available for most Internet functions reduces the need and risks of using Windows online.
Running an OS (particularly Windows) in a VM is vastly preferable to having it installed normally on a partition. Windows has to be reinstalled periodically; Norton Ghost or the like helps, but it's still a hassle. With (for example) VirtualPC, reinstalling windows amounts to starting from a backup image file. VirtualPC on Windows even lets you protect your virtual file systems, by letting you decide whether to save changes to the image file at any time. This means you can test new programs (what I mostly do) and then restore your drive to its previous state by rebooting the VM, or save changes if everything works.
I see value in dual booting, but unless you need that last 1% for games or hardware tests, virtualization wins overwhelmingly on pretty much every level (this laptop is enough faster than my office Dell that I can afford a little overhead.) This sounds like my next computer: I'm in no great hurry: I'll wait for the bugs to shake out, the processor to be upgraded once or twice, and a free copy of 10.5 to be loaded (hopefully w/ virtualization built in), and I'm there.
22 years ago I bought a Commodore 64 floppy drive ($179 then!) so I could play a copy of ZORK I found in a department store in upstate NY. I had never heard of such a thing before but I fell in love with the description on the package. I've played a lot of IF games since and I've always wanted to create one but I've never had time to try.
The problem I always had was similar to pixel-hunting in graphical games: phrasing a command exactly right. Many times I've given up, asked/bought a cheat book/etc, and found that I had guessed correctly already but had not been able to get the program to take it. (Other times it was a completely out of the box solution that was obvious to the author but not me. Fair game.)
It's not surprising that new converts are so rare and the market so small. Look what modern teenagers do for amusement: the last thing they want is something that requires them to slow down or think. These are the kids who think a movie is "real" while the book it came from isn't, for Pete's sake!
In the original Tour de France, no support of any kind was allowed: riders had one bike per race and had to repair it themselves. In the early days of auto racing, it was not unusual for racers to drive their own car to the track, compete, and drive home.
Every sport has gone this way: those who hope to make a living at it have to do whatever they can. If technology can give an edge to those who can afford it, they pretty much have to use it. Auto racing now costs so much that it can only be sustained by advertising, and all but the very top drivers are effectively employees.
Eventually race car drivers will simply sit in the car while it drives itself, providing a necessary human touch to a robotics competition. At least golf will (I think) be spared that fate.
For my part, I don't care enough about software "freeness" even to read the license as long as I'm sure I'm legally using it. If someone does care, there are no end of distros that cater to them. The Free folk can use teletypes for all of me; I'm not thrilled at having to hassle with installing video drivers because someone else is offended by them.
The most rabid of the free software types seem to be the ones who got supplied with equipment by MIT and paid to work with it rather than pumping gas to support their hobby. If a video card maker chooses to control software they wrote, that's their right. Calling them "unethical" because they don't buy into a license like the GPL that gives their rights to someone else is not going to hurt them; a total boycott by FSF supporters probably wouldn't cost nVidia enough business for them to notice. If they do, hopefully they won't decide to take it out on the rest of us that use and enjoy their drivers!
Cool, but I still won't buy one to dual boot
on
Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Another vote for virtualization! I currently have a bunch of Windows versions loaded in VirtualPC for Windows (test OS's) and I see two major advantages:
Backing up a Windows install or "reinstalling" means copying a file; no rebooting for Ghost, etc.
The Mac would always be there for anything I want that Windows can't do. I don't even set up Windows for internet use unless I'm developing internet-enabled software: I'd disable the network drivers if I didn't need to share files on my local (inside my firewall) network, but no Windows box is ever exposed to or used on the Internet except when testing something. That policy + unlimited complete backups of the OS saves me no end of problems.
So far I've found no insurmountable problems with this, including performance (I don't play games, though.) The day this is available on MacTel I'll buy one.
I don't think anyone seriously doubts that global warming is real, even the American government. What they're doing (not just the current administration, either, it's just more pragmatic than the last) is recognizing a few things that most of the world misses:
The ONLY way the first world standard of living can be maintained is through massive and ever-increasing industrialization.
Failing to maintain that SOL is a recipe for revolution (which not only liquidates the governmental elite, but turns us all into Mad Max, very quickly.)
Therefore, the government makes some (apparently insane) concessions to keep things stable a while longer.
The US Republican Party, with its ties to business, realizes that completely. They do their best to make an economy at least possible by helping business interests where they can (the US Democrats and most of Europe by contrast seem to think corporations can handle any level of taxation in order to support non-producers. As a result, most European economies are in even more disastrous shape than the US.)
Actually, I think Bush's overall plan is to keep things limping along for another 20 years in hopes that something will change. Practical fusion power would be ideal (though I personally can't see much cause for optimism there.) The theory is that business as usual followed by a huge crash in 20 years or so is better than a seriously depressed world economy with dangerous and exponential levels of unrest starting today.
The downside is that, at the rate we're going, Earth will be so trashed in 20 years that a whole lot more people are going to die when it all comes apart and we're left with stripmined national parks, sterile farmland, and empty oceans.
+ 8 for not explaining how much more productive the command line is (so it is, but it's also N/A to 98% of computer users, 99.5% not counting the ones who are never going to buy an OS anyway.)
I'm not typical in that I try to do as little customization as possible. Sometimes I have to change stuff (.vimrc, for example) but mostly I'd rather just adapt to the defaults.
There are exceptions, of course: most of the eye candy in XP is actively obnoxious, and making XP look as much as possible like 2K is the first thing I do when installing it. OSX (perhaps because its main design goal was not just to jam in as many features as possible) is much pleasanter to look at. I need very little customization on OSX, mostly getting rid of that !@#$ minimize-to-the-dock "feature."
Linux does strike a good balance: it's much easier to turn stuff off. On the other hand, I prefer Gnome largely because it has so many less stinking options to wade through.
But I'm flatly puzzled that you claim you can't find a decent text editor for Windows. What is it you want that the Mac has that UltraEdit or TextPad won't do?
Most Windows editors DO more than Mac editors; my problems come from using Mac's for so many years and getting thoroughly spoiled by the UI design.
I'm mostly using Context at the moment. It's not bad for free, but looks like it was designed by someone who never used it: everything is there, but it's awkward and painful to get to, sort of like using TextWrangler wearing mittens. And how could anyone have released that Find function?
I also use VS2003 quite a bit. It looks like a program designed by a large team who got points for adding features (like Office but not as grossly, and at least they mostly do work.) In between the incessant hangs and crashes and VSS failures every option I want is buried under a hundred I don't, in any of the assorted preferences panels hidden under various different menus in no apparent order.
I used to keep a copy of the old CodeWarrior IDE open when working with C++Builder (the gold standard for awful, awful, awful text editing.) Couldn't compile, but it was worth the effort to maintain a shadow project so I could pop over and type stuff. CW's macro capability on Mac (Applescript!) was a joke compared to VS, but I still preferred to use it because it didn't hours to figure out.
I'm not tempted by dual booting. I'm waiting until VirtualPC is updated (it works great on Windows: unlimited clean testing OS's without rebooting or reimaging.) I do most of my work on Windows these days but I'd love to have a Mac permanently available with shared disks (and no hassles w/ Windows networking to keep them working) and all the applications Windows has never gotten right (like internet, text editing.)
Running Windows and OSX (and Linux) on the same machine would be great, but I'm not interested in dual booting.
Dual booting means the computer has to be restarted every single time you need something in the alternate OS. I dual boot XP and Linux now: it bites, and I just don't get to Linux very much since I mostly use XP for work.
I'm using MS's VirtualPC on the same box. I have pretty much every OS they've made since Win95 available instantly (multiple versions in some cases) with little or no performance hit, and I can run as many at a time as I need. I can mark virtual disks readonly, so hosing an OS doesn't mean a reinstall or reimage (and "reimaging" is just replacing a disk file with a backup copy and restarting anyway.)
Realistically, it's better for most purposes than running the OS directly. If I could do that from OSX I'd buy a MacTel tomorrow (well, this year) and make my current white box Linux only. Otherwise I'll probably wait several years, at least until my last PPC machine dies.
These are natual rights. They describe how the world works and you have to actively subvert them in order to take them away.
Twenty sided dice describe how that world works too. So, does the act of writing software amount to the creation of something to which the author has a special right, or freeing from limbo a thing that always existed, has innate rights of its own, and conveys "natural" rights to anyone who touches it? (Hint: I don't place a piece of code above a child.)
If "natural rights" ever had any meaning at all, they've long since been "subverted" out of existence. And seeing as no two people (much less nations, religions, etc) could ever agree on what they were anyway, we're better off without. Nowadays using that term is almost enough to be modded Troll out of hand.
The problem lies in "We believe that every user of software has four basic rights" Where did they get these rights? Is software somehow different from every other kind of commodity / artwork / etc?
Every USER of software has the right to do whatever the software license says he can, subject to his own conscience. The AUTHOR of the software has the right to place any license he wants on his work: if he chooses to incorporate GPL software into it, he gives up that right (subjects his work to the license chosen by the original author.)
THIS is the reason I don't use the GPL. As far as RMS's concept of freedom, I don't care enough about that to even check the license if it's downloadable or buyable and does what I need. If I want to modify and redistribute (freely or otherwise), I limit myself to BSD-like licenses or pay the author. Yes, that does put a lot of good GPL stuff offlimits, but I respect its author's rights. I don't need any software badly enough to give up my own rights, however.
I couldn't care less about Mars. It's a "because it's there" project. A giant-size waste of money. Personally, I can think of hundreds of better things to spend public money on.
While that's true, it's still compelling and the most ultimately cool thing we could possibly accomplish (barely) in the near future. I regret that we probably have lost the chance, within the foreseeable future, to realistically even plan a manned trip to Mars, more than the trip itself. The odds of success would have been better in the '70's than they are now, given how little the basic technology has changed.
The key question is for intellectuals, not engineers. And that is the question of how to travel beyond our current limitations. Once we crack the physics of that, then we can deal with the engineering questions.
Probably true also: the fundamental challenge facing humanity is to find a new energy source that will last, not poison us all in the process, and hopefully be relevant to space travel. We could have a breakthrough in the next ten years (fusion might be practical after all, who knows, but technology is not getting anywhere with it) but if we don't, we're swiftly getting to the point where the lack of an answer is going to preclude much more searching for one.
The sad thing about the Shuttles going away is the uncertainty about ever getting into space again. It's an era I hate to see over, if for no other reason than memories of all the good SF I used to read before good SF stopped being written a few decades ago.
I consider the odds of the US ever landing on the moon again to be remote and the likelihood of a manned Mars mission to be just about zero. A project like that requires national resolve (not to mention resources and willingness to take risks) that we no longer have. I now believe western civilization peaked sometime in the '60's, coincidentally around the time of Project Apollo: nowadays we can't even keep our roads and bridges maintained, we're poised for the apocalypse in a few years when cheap energy runs out, and the decline of the social system is accelerating rapidly towards anarchy and warlord culture.
While China might manage a manned moon mission, I doubt they'll survive what's going to happen in the rest of the world before long, at least not in any condition to advance science. They're more likely to be the remnant that survives the next Dark Age (like Ireland was last time) and recivilizes / enslaves the savages living in North America in 500 years or so.
Sad, I wish we could have held out a little longer and walked on Mars just once. Maybe next time.
It's a pain to develop for: we have tons of workarounds that don't work perfectly, it takes a lot of time to make sure everything we need is supported, etc. We're trying to sell NT Only to our PHParasites on the theory that, while there's a lot of 98 machines left, a high percentage belong to businesses (non customers) or cheap/broke/minimal needs users (also not likely customers, and with disproportionate tech support costs.)
Getting rid of MacOS9 was easier and a bigger priority, considering how hard it became to support when Apple stopped and how nasty the problems involved were (MS does a much better job at documenting what doesn't work, or works different.) Same argument, more focus on non-OSX people being less likely to buy stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
is Captcha's that people can't read either. digg.com is especially bad for that: it usually takes me 3 or 4 tries to get it "right", even when it looks obvious. Slashdot's are harder to read but I generally always get them the first time.
I got one raise while I was n school (minimum wage went up to $3.35 / hour). A friend got an unreported job for $5 an hour one summer, 84 hours a week cooking at a diner: he was our hero.
In those pre-Internet days, programming or technical jobs simply did not exist in my city. There were a few banks and big companies with mainframes but they had no interest in college kids. The university got two Apple 2e's my last year to augment the PDP-11, and we had limited access to a System 370 but it was expensive (long distance), there were only 2 keypunch machines that were always busy, and turnaround was hours, often next day. I remember being asked what a home computer was for and why anyone would want one: it was a fair question, since essentially no consumer software existed either.
I make several times the average wage in my area (you actually are above it) and almost never have to go over 40 hours per week so it did work out, but getting there was tough (I've laid block, finished sheetrock, etc.)
I lived at home and worked full time through college (at a much cheaper school than MIT) and picked and chose carefully which books I bought (I have copied whole textbooks in the library at 5 cents/page.) We all had our dreams then, but we knew that's all they were.
Is that a difference? Slashdotting is the result of insufficient bandwidth to handle a temporary load composed of mostly bona fide page requests. That's not the same thing as going to a site solely to attack the operator, with no interest in any content beyond maybe using it in the attack.
BlueFrogger's went to a site with the express intention of breaking it / causing problems / costing the operators money. They were more artful than just doing lots of page loads to clog the server, but it was for the same purpose and it positively worked, judging by the response.
I suppose you could argue the precise definition of the word "Service" in DOS (*Frog attacks deny service (as in intended usage) to the website operators rather than the public?) Then again, does anyone really have a problem understanding what's going on here, or care enough to invent or learn a bunch of new acronyms to more precisely express the motivation for loading a URL?
Given that:
I stand by my analysis. It pretty exactly describes what is going on.
It will be interesting to see how a many-to-many DDOS plays out.
The more successful it is, the more the Internet will be too bogged down to be useful to anybody.
Also, if someone programs the botnet's to evolve to attack each other better, we're talking SkyNet right around the corner.
... the Free World mentality. It must be something like the grown men who devote their spare time to creating their own race car: it looks cool, they did it all by themselves, but it will never run on a track or even down the street, just sit there with its chrome ClassPath logo shining in the sun, watching the Toyotas speed by. These people would love to get all the hard won knowledge of the professional racing teams for free.
The biggest problem I have w/ RMS is loudly using words like "ethical" and assuming that everyone means the same thing by them as he does. It's a common failing in the modern world (listen to US political parties pretending to disagree with each other sometime), but it makes a guy who was once supposedly a good engineer sound like the guys who are _really_ trying to destroy the world, and not by selling closed source software either.
In the end, Sun has the right to use any license they want, and the ethical choice in a free society is to support that. Anyone is welcome to try to convince others to change the social contract, but the good guys shouldn't do it by demonizing Sun, etc, because they won't accept someone else's non-advantageous license terms for their own work.
If your IT director is clueless enough to make a move like this without (obviously) asking advice from his developers first, the handwriting is on the wall: your company has had it, and their form of suicide includes expending their remaining funds on consultants. Start looking for a new job TODAY. By all means collect a paycheck while you're looking (you can also acquire some Java experience to sell to the next company) but don't ride the sinking ship too long. It's depressing.
"...Word 2007: direct publishing of blogs to the web from within the program" sums up what's wrong with Word (and Office, and Microsoft) better than anything else I could say.
Around 1980 or so I read a journal article describing a very primitive word processing system at a (much fancier than I could afford) university. I was fascinated by the idea (I'd be using a typewriter for several more years at that point) and spent a long time trying to create my own in DEC BASIC, despite the school having no printers except a couple of 9 pin DECWriters and an uppercase-only line printer that I wasn't important enough to use.)
Does anyone care about word processing any more? Is it all over, and all that matters is jamming in more and more features, whether or not they make sense or even work?
The name "torrent" would scare off the few IT managers willing to play with Apple: they wouldn't dare put anything that even suggests P2P on a company system (their VP may not know what a torrent is, but he's heard the name and thinks it's bad.)
If Apple distributes this and then some sleazy congressman manages to make it illegal, they'll have a big media (if not legal) problem and have to disable high profile system services.
If Apple distributes this, it will poison their relationship with the gangsters who control ITMS content (whether it has any bearing on song sharing or not.)
What possible use is it? Apple owns Akamai. Their updates download faster than just about anyone's. If they use a torrent system it _will_ be slower (end user upload speed), not faster, and someone will sooner or later figure out how to upload trojans in place of updates and really wreck their day.
If Apple wants to hurt themselves, it would be easier and cheaper to just start donating computers to Al Quaeda.
I haven't played with Parallels (no intel Mac) but I have used virtualization software before.
The 2 OS's usually coexist by way of shared folders, sort of like having them on a network. Running the Mac at the same doesn't make any security difference (dual booting may actually be worse, since XP running "alone" is more likely to be able to access the entire Mac partition rather than just a few explicitly shared folders.) Also, having the Mac available for most Internet functions reduces the need and risks of using Windows online.
Running an OS (particularly Windows) in a VM is vastly preferable to having it installed normally on a partition. Windows has to be reinstalled periodically; Norton Ghost or the like helps, but it's still a hassle. With (for example) VirtualPC, reinstalling windows amounts to starting from a backup image file. VirtualPC on Windows even lets you protect your virtual file systems, by letting you decide whether to save changes to the image file at any time. This means you can test new programs (what I mostly do) and then restore your drive to its previous state by rebooting the VM, or save changes if everything works.
I see value in dual booting, but unless you need that last 1% for games or hardware tests, virtualization wins overwhelmingly on pretty much every level (this laptop is enough faster than my office Dell that I can afford a little overhead.) This sounds like my next computer: I'm in no great hurry: I'll wait for the bugs to shake out, the processor to be upgraded once or twice, and a free copy of 10.5 to be loaded (hopefully w/ virtualization built in), and I'm there.
22 years ago I bought a Commodore 64 floppy drive ($179 then!) so I could play a copy of ZORK I found in a department store in upstate NY. I had never heard of such a thing before but I fell in love with the description on the package. I've played a lot of IF games since and I've always wanted to create one but I've never had time to try.
The problem I always had was similar to pixel-hunting in graphical games: phrasing a command exactly right. Many times I've given up, asked/bought a cheat book/etc, and found that I had guessed correctly already but had not been able to get the program to take it. (Other times it was a completely out of the box solution that was obvious to the author but not me. Fair game.)
It's not surprising that new converts are so rare and the market so small. Look what modern teenagers do for amusement: the last thing they want is something that requires them to slow down or think. These are the kids who think a movie is "real" while the book it came from isn't, for Pete's sake!
from every other sport?
In the original Tour de France, no support of any kind was allowed: riders had one bike per race and had to repair it themselves. In the early days of auto racing, it was not unusual for racers to drive their own car to the track, compete, and drive home.
Every sport has gone this way: those who hope to make a living at it have to do whatever they can. If technology can give an edge to those who can afford it, they pretty much have to use it. Auto racing now costs so much that it can only be sustained by advertising, and all but the very top drivers are effectively employees.
Eventually race car drivers will simply sit in the car while it drives itself, providing a necessary human touch to a robotics competition. At least golf will (I think) be spared that fate.
For my part, I don't care enough about software "freeness" even to read the license as long as I'm sure I'm legally using it. If someone does care, there are no end of distros that cater to them. The Free folk can use teletypes for all of me; I'm not thrilled at having to hassle with installing video drivers because someone else is offended by them.
The most rabid of the free software types seem to be the ones who got supplied with equipment by MIT and paid to work with it rather than pumping gas to support their hobby. If a video card maker chooses to control software they wrote, that's their right. Calling them "unethical" because they don't buy into a license like the GPL that gives their rights to someone else is not going to hurt them; a total boycott by FSF supporters probably wouldn't cost nVidia enough business for them to notice. If they do, hopefully they won't decide to take it out on the rest of us that use and enjoy their drivers!
So far I've found no insurmountable problems with this, including performance (I don't play games, though.) The day this is available on MacTel I'll buy one.
The US Republican Party, with its ties to business, realizes that completely. They do their best to make an economy at least possible by helping business interests where they can (the US Democrats and most of Europe by contrast seem to think corporations can handle any level of taxation in order to support non-producers. As a result, most European economies are in even more disastrous shape than the US.)
Actually, I think Bush's overall plan is to keep things limping along for another 20 years in hopes that something will change. Practical fusion power would be ideal (though I personally can't see much cause for optimism there.) The theory is that business as usual followed by a huge crash in 20 years or so is better than a seriously depressed world economy with dangerous and exponential levels of unrest starting today.
The downside is that, at the rate we're going, Earth will be so trashed in 20 years that a whole lot more people are going to die when it all comes apart and we're left with stripmined national parks, sterile farmland, and empty oceans.
I'm not typical in that I try to do as little customization as possible. Sometimes I have to change stuff (.vimrc, for example) but mostly I'd rather just adapt to the defaults.
There are exceptions, of course: most of the eye candy in XP is actively obnoxious, and making XP look as much as possible like 2K is the first thing I do when installing it. OSX (perhaps because its main design goal was not just to jam in as many features as possible) is much pleasanter to look at. I need very little customization on OSX, mostly getting rid of that !@#$ minimize-to-the-dock "feature."
Linux does strike a good balance: it's much easier to turn stuff off. On the other hand, I prefer Gnome largely because it has so many less stinking options to wade through.
In short, you'll never please everybody.
Most Windows editors DO more than Mac editors; my problems come from using Mac's for so many years and getting thoroughly spoiled by the UI design.
I'm mostly using Context at the moment. It's not bad for free, but looks like it was designed by someone who never used it: everything is there, but it's awkward and painful to get to, sort of like using TextWrangler wearing mittens. And how could anyone have released that Find function?
I also use VS2003 quite a bit. It looks like a program designed by a large team who got points for adding features (like Office but not as grossly, and at least they mostly do work.) In between the incessant hangs and crashes and VSS failures every option I want is buried under a hundred I don't, in any of the assorted preferences panels hidden under various different menus in no apparent order.
I used to keep a copy of the old CodeWarrior IDE open when working with C++Builder (the gold standard for awful, awful, awful text editing.) Couldn't compile, but it was worth the effort to maintain a shadow project so I could pop over and type stuff. CW's macro capability on Mac (Applescript!) was a joke compared to VS, but I still preferred to use it because it didn't hours to figure out.
I'm not tempted by dual booting. I'm waiting until VirtualPC is updated (it works great on Windows: unlimited clean testing OS's without rebooting or reimaging.) I do most of my work on Windows these days but I'd love to have a Mac permanently available with shared disks (and no hassles w/ Windows networking to keep them working) and all the applications Windows has never gotten right (like internet, text editing.)
Running Windows and OSX (and Linux) on the same machine would be great, but I'm not interested in dual booting.
Dual booting means the computer has to be restarted every single time you need something in the alternate OS. I dual boot XP and Linux now: it bites, and I just don't get to Linux very much since I mostly use XP for work.
I'm using MS's VirtualPC on the same box. I have pretty much every OS they've made since Win95 available instantly (multiple versions in some cases) with little or no performance hit, and I can run as many at a time as I need. I can mark virtual disks readonly, so hosing an OS doesn't mean a reinstall or reimage (and "reimaging" is just replacing a disk file with a backup copy and restarting anyway.)
Realistically, it's better for most purposes than running the OS directly. If I could do that from OSX I'd buy a MacTel tomorrow (well, this year) and make my current white box Linux only. Otherwise I'll probably wait several years, at least until my last PPC machine dies.
Twenty sided dice describe how that world works too. So, does the act of writing software amount to the creation of something to which the author has a special right, or freeing from limbo a thing that always existed, has innate rights of its own, and conveys "natural" rights to anyone who touches it? (Hint: I don't place a piece of code above a child.)
If "natural rights" ever had any meaning at all, they've long since been "subverted" out of existence. And seeing as no two people (much less nations, religions, etc) could ever agree on what they were anyway, we're better off without. Nowadays using that term is almost enough to be modded Troll out of hand.
The problem lies in "We believe that every user of software has four basic rights" Where did they get these rights? Is software somehow different from every other kind of commodity / artwork / etc?
Every USER of software has the right to do whatever the software license says he can, subject to his own conscience. The AUTHOR of the software has the right to place any license he wants on his work: if he chooses to incorporate GPL software into it, he gives up that right (subjects his work to the license chosen by the original author.)
THIS is the reason I don't use the GPL. As far as RMS's concept of freedom, I don't care enough about that to even check the license if it's downloadable or buyable and does what I need. If I want to modify and redistribute (freely or otherwise), I limit myself to BSD-like licenses or pay the author. Yes, that does put a lot of good GPL stuff offlimits, but I respect its author's rights. I don't need any software badly enough to give up my own rights, however.
While that's true, it's still compelling and the most ultimately cool thing we could possibly accomplish (barely) in the near future. I regret that we probably have lost the chance, within the foreseeable future, to realistically even plan a manned trip to Mars, more than the trip itself. The odds of success would have been better in the '70's than they are now, given how little the basic technology has changed.
The key question is for intellectuals, not engineers. And that is the question of how to travel beyond our current limitations. Once we crack the physics of that, then we can deal with the engineering questions.
Probably true also: the fundamental challenge facing humanity is to find a new energy source that will last, not poison us all in the process, and hopefully be relevant to space travel. We could have a breakthrough in the next ten years (fusion might be practical after all, who knows, but technology is not getting anywhere with it) but if we don't, we're swiftly getting to the point where the lack of an answer is going to preclude much more searching for one.
The sad thing about the Shuttles going away is the uncertainty about ever getting into space again. It's an era I hate to see over, if for no other reason than memories of all the good SF I used to read before good SF stopped being written a few decades ago.
I consider the odds of the US ever landing on the moon again to be remote and the likelihood of a manned Mars mission to be just about zero. A project like that requires national resolve (not to mention resources and willingness to take risks) that we no longer have. I now believe western civilization peaked sometime in the '60's, coincidentally around the time of Project Apollo: nowadays we can't even keep our roads and bridges maintained, we're poised for the apocalypse in a few years when cheap energy runs out, and the decline of the social system is accelerating rapidly towards anarchy and warlord culture.
While China might manage a manned moon mission, I doubt they'll survive what's going to happen in the rest of the world before long, at least not in any condition to advance science. They're more likely to be the remnant that survives the next Dark Age (like Ireland was last time) and recivilizes / enslaves the savages living in North America in 500 years or so.
Sad, I wish we could have held out a little longer and walked on Mars just once. Maybe next time.
It's a pain to develop for: we have tons of workarounds that don't work perfectly, it takes a lot of time to make sure everything we need is supported, etc. We're trying to sell NT Only to our PHParasites on the theory that, while there's a lot of 98 machines left, a high percentage belong to businesses (non customers) or cheap/broke/minimal needs users (also not likely customers, and with disproportionate tech support costs.)
Getting rid of MacOS9 was easier and a bigger priority, considering how hard it became to support when Apple stopped and how nasty the problems involved were (MS does a much better job at documenting what doesn't work, or works different.) Same argument, more focus on non-OSX people being less likely to buy stuff.