Yes, grumpiness is an appropriate response to bad products from people who've done better in the past.
are you upset that Apple made the Dock the way they did,
I think I was pretty clear there.
or are you confusing Exposé with the Dock?
Of course not. Expose isn't the Dock, but it and Dock are both task-switching UIs, and Expose seems good because the only other official method is the horrible Dock. If OS X had come with a decent task-switcher from the beginning, Expose wouldn't seem have attracted much attention when it was eventually released.
Which is the task-switching you find better:
OS 9 with a combination of cycle-keys and pulldown menu is the best. (Some Linux desktops have that system too) Windows2k is next. NextStep is quite bad, but I can barely remember the feel of it. The OS X dock is worse than any of them.
If that is not the case, then please clarify.
Here are some famous HCI buzzwords: Muscle Memory, Fitt's Law, discoverability, responsiveness, consistent metaphor, scrubbing.
Each of those is a well-documented design issue for which OS 9 was praised, but which OS X did as bad as Windows, or sometimes even worse. Any of those you don't know about, google should be able to explain.
Hey Mac users: raise your hand if you've tried to reproduce the effect of the OS 9 Apple Menu by dragging a folder with links to your programs into the Dock. Now raise your other hand if you enjoy manually updating it when installing another program. Raise your foot if you like hovering the mouse for 6/10th of a second waiting for that menu to open.
The Dock is just a big advertisement for the new graphics pipeline in OS X. They got the ability to stretch window contents into funny shapes, and wanted to see that effect more often.
Click Magnification and set it to Max. You'll be able to see your icons fine. You'll be able to see what's on minimized browsers. You'll be able to see which emails you kept open....
Hurray! If I make the Dock incredibly huge, I can actually sometimes tell what icons mean. So what that I don't have space for actual applications anymore...
If the Dock could be moved to the left or right edge of the screen, then it wouldn't matter so much. Taking 256 pixels from the bottom row of a widescreen monitor is much worse than using the same space from the side. But NO, the Dock can't be moved.
The Dock gives you three fine choices: 1. Tiny icons that tell you nothing. 2. Huge icons that show little thumbnails, which waste tons of screen space. 3. Small icons which balloon into big ones when you go nearby, causing all the icons to shove around so they're harder to click on.
No, icon zooming is a bad idea. Things shouldn't move around like that, it makes the system harder to use.
Icon zooming doesn't have to move anything around. It merely provides an enlarged picture of the icon as a kind of faster tooltip hint as to what you're about to click on. That picture is not itself sensitive to clicking, so it doesn't effectively move anything. The only role it serves is to reduce errors when going to click on a small icon, because an accidental mis-aim will be revealed before you actually wait for the whole application to come up.
Icon zooming in general should not be confused with the bad implementation of icon magnification in the Macintosh Dock, which does in fact move things around, and is bad like you said.
Yeah, a great innovation. First you just have to disgard the perfectly fine task-switching from OS and replace it with a huge taskbar knock-off filled with amorphous, textless icons to create an interface that only looks good when you're standing on a podium in front of 300 people. Then when you finally come out with something halfway sensible, it will appear that much better in comparison. Rule 1 to being cute: keep an ugly friend nearby.
Expose is like "Coke Classic" following on "New Coke"- they screwed up the previous release so badly, that anything different at all seems like a godsend.
Thinking of Windows as an operating system is the same as thinking of Linux + BASH + XFree + KDE as an "operating system."
Well, that IS what "operating system" means, after all...
A single low-level kernel is NOT an operating system, it's just part of one. The Linux kernel, for example, is not by itself an operating system, since it cannot operate alone.
"A tidal wave of XYZ" has been an English idiom for decades, as a hyperbolic variation of "outpouring". In the past few years people had started to replace it with tsunami ("to be more scientifically accurate"), but that trend may have halted.
Sure, people will continue to use this phrase for a long time, but maybe saying it within a few days of a really terrible train wreck is very unsensitive to the victims.
But there hasn't been a terrible train wreck in the past few days- not in comparison to what goes unreported except in Oddly Enough sidebars.
Within the past year, there have been other train accidents killing 3 or 4 times the number of victims. This one has got attention because it's Japan, "not 3rd world", "they're civilized like us", "they are so safety-concious", etc.
I am reminded of how on August 30, 1997, Taliban soldiers cut the heads off of 200 innocent people. But it didn't get any press in the USA, because a rich European was in a car crash the same day.
Renicing it as suggested doesn't do much. If you were a Linux expert, I'd say install a kernel with pre-emptible syscalls... but if your distribution doesn't supply that already, I don't think the benefit would be worth the work you put in.
(Unless you consider "learning more about Linux kernels" to be a benefit on its own, in which case, go ahead)
Wow, I never knew you could flip the installer CDs upside down to access the Mac version! Kudos to Microsoft for pre-emptively supporting cross-platform users.
But if you ignore it, it does mean the harm is nonexistent.
Completely backwards. If you ignore something, that directly implies that the something does exist. Otherwise, the sentence "She ignored it" would be nonsense. Saying "I ignored the flaming schoolbus down the street" is a way of claiming that a bus was actually burning.
There was a video from the 1970s of a quarterback who finished the big game with a broken leg. I had thought it was impressive- but now you tell me that since he was ignoring the pain, he had never really been injured at all.
And where does this leave George Lucas? That's what you're not remembering, it's HIS stuff.
That's a circular argument. It's only HIS stuff because the long term provided by copyright law makes it his. We are saying that copyright should be shortened with legislation.
Your objection makes as much sense as: "Because alcohol is illegal, Prohibition should never be repealed"
And where does this leave George Lucas?
Hypothetically, if copyright lasted only about 30 years, it would leave George Lucas with the $3 billion dollars he's already earned over that time period. In my opinion, that is more than sufficient compensation for his previous artistic works.
Giving him more money will not make Star Wars any better (in fact, maybe if he had less money, he would've focused more on making Episode 1 a better movie)
AC: I don't know who you are, but I'm pretty sure you're less qualified on this question than he is.
Yes, I am less qualified. So, that's why I'm giving my answer based on repeating what he's written. If you respect Mr. Moglen, you therefore agree I'm correct. Or if you still disagree, you need to reread whatever you think you saw.
Nope. Bill Gates doesn't SELL you a copy of Windows - he LICENSES it.
You are alleging that the computer stores across America are committing thousands of cases of fraud per day. Every time they give out a "Sales Reciept" with "Microsoft Office" on it, they certifying that it has just been legally sold.
If you disagree, phone your state District Attorney!
It's the difference between your right to smash all the walls in a house you own , and your utter lack of rights to smash all the walls in a house you rent.
Microsoft has suggested they might someday move to renting out software, but it hasn't happened yet.
Re:Such Innovation In a Time of Little
on
We Love Katamari
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· Score: 1
"Placescape Torment", a USA RPG regarded as highly creative, fulfills 4 out of those 7. Knights of the Old Republic hits a lot too.
Any government, church or anything else hat isn't a group of rebels is evil and only helps you in order to make you fulfil their plans. Rebels are always good.
The USA thinks rebels are always good, too. They were founded by rebels... Star Wars, anyone? And, rebels are by definition underdogs. Either rebels = good and badguy = strong, or badguy = weak and game = boring.
If there's a mention of N objects somewhere you can be sure one part of your mission involves acquiring or destroying those N objects.
A feature also common to Hollywood screenwriting an American game design. It's economy of description: why mention something if you aren't going to show it later?
The evil guy will always complete his plan for the destruction of the world 99%, the player killing him will make the world barely survive and all the problems disappear.
Something that's happened to James Bond only 24 times.
Considering Hitlers strategy first, are you honestly telling me Hitler would go to war with France, England, (possibly Italy depending on what concessions we gave them), most probably America & given the opportunity to retake poland (which they did later in the war) the USSR all on the same day?
Well, that doesn't matter, because he wouldn't have had to. We were talking about Britain specifically, not everyone else. Also, it wasn't the invasion of Poland that really lead to the most famous example of British appeasement, but Austria-Hungary.
But ignoring that, even if they did "go to war" with him, those other nations didn't have the armies or mobility to do anything more than make empty threats. No land force could withstand the blitzkrieg, and no pilots could challenge the Luftwaffe. Even pretending that German training and equipment wasn't superior to anything else, they were also more numerous. Plus, the great distance any of those countries would need to travel to intervene would've made their respondents even more vulnerable.
Going to war with Hitler at that time would've meant either doing nothing (and showing that your big speech is hollow), or rushing your troops and armaments off to their destructions.
when we finally went to war (again IIRC) our army was actually *smaller* than it was at the time we began appeasement.
Maybe the army was, I don't recall exactly, but the no-draft policy of the time was obviously a problem there. However, the RAF was not smaller, it was enormously bigger, especially in terms of half-way modern planes. The first critical battle was in the sky, not on the ground, so the army didn't directly matter.
The Battle Over Britain was a proud moment, but if the defenders had possessed only Gloucester Gladiators instead of Hawker Hurricanes, it would be remembered as merely a valiant last stand.
Chamberlain as British Prime Minister oversaw one of the most massive military buildups in modern history and instituted a peacetime draft. He also compromised with Hitler over the Sudetenland, largely after being advised by his generals that the United Kingdom was in no military position to fight Hitler. Although Churchill is credited with having fought the war against Hitler, it was Chamberlain's rebuilding of the depleted British military that gave Churchill an army, navy and air force capable of fighting, although popular myth continues to see Chamberlain as just an appeaser.
It is questionable he would have had the same victories if the French had gone on the offensive
No, it isn't. The firepower and armor of the Nazis, compared against the utter non-portability of the French defensive guns, plus their lack of rehearsal of a war of manuver, means that a French offensive would've just died tired.
The French military leaders were still thinking of the stationary battle-lines of the Great War. Men like De Gaulle new better, but he wasn't influential in their military at that time. Maybe if he'd risen to run the country 5 years earlier he could've whipped them into shape, but at the time of initial Nazi expansion, it was too late.
The failure of Marxist states is due in part to the vile incompetence of the individual dictators who ran them.
No Marxist state has ever failed, because no Marxist state has ever existed.
Marxism clearly says that communism should arise from a broad revolution of the workers after they have been fully exploited by ubiquitous capitalism. Neither Russia, China, or Cuba was a capitalistic nation (certainly not mature capitalism) at the time of the so-called "Communist revolution". Those dictators who mentioned weren't following Marx's plan, but instead conciously went against it.
can't be used as evidence that there is something a bit fishy about alchemy.
No. Those people were trying to follow alchemic procedures directly. Nobody has even tried Marxism yet. That doesn't mean it can actually work, but the failure of the several non-Marxist states that labelled themselves "Communist" doesn't serve as evidence against it either.
I'm not merely saying they didn't reach Marx's desired conclusions, but they also didn't even use his described starting point.
I simply figured that it had to be a kid's movie, since they made "C-3P0s," the breakfast cereal clearly targeted towards kids. Or Boba Fett underoos, which can not by any stretch of the imagination be for adults.
Neither of those happened in the period I'm talking about.
. Star Wars, following the grand tradition of those adventures, was for kids.
Star Wars was for people who had liked Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon as kids, and wanted the nostalgic kick of seeing a higher-budget, more serious version onscreen.
George Lucas was one of those people. He, an adult, made a movie he wanted to see. Hundreds of millions of other adults agreed. Just read interviews with him if you want to see him specifically say that the reason "Episode 1" was so different from the original trilogy is that he was now a parent, and had changed to making movies his kids would enjoy.
let alone allowed to be present without there being anyone to oppose them.
That's a good analog to the important reason why criminal trials are required to have two opposing lawyers who are very partisan (as opposed to occasional suggestions to ban all lawyers).
It is inevitable that one side or the other will get the benefit of aggressively biased legal advice, so the surest way to approximate accuracy is to require both sides to have a lawyer, so there is at least a chance that the distortions introduced by one may be counterbalanced by the other.
The whole
"CAN" != "WOULD", therefore "CAN" = "CAN'T" is entirely the product of your own, apparently disjointed, mind.
Let me apologize for supposing you could comprehend your own post without help. So, I'll spell it out for you. Sentence (b):
"Just because software CAN be fixed, doesn't mean it WOULD be."
That's true, that's fine. It is the observation that "CAN" != "WOULD", the left side of my summary equation.
Now sentence (a):
"if the author decides to screw me around, not fix a bug, or just generally bugger off and move on to a new project, I'm JUST as screwed as if it were MS who did it."
More explicitly, that says "If the author of any program, including an OSS once, discontinues it, a users is in equally as much trouble as if a proprietary developer like Microsoft had done so".
If Microsoft discontinues a project, then users have absolutely no legal way to continue it themselves. They "CAN'T" get it fixed. However, you said that a discontinued OSS project means "I'm JUST as screwed". That phrase "just as" is an indicator of equality, or "==".
So, since we've established that you "CAN'T" fix an MS product, and you say OSS products are the same, that means you believe we "CAN'T" fix them either. That happens to be false, because we CAN fix them. But you have decided that we can't, because you've noticed that "CAN" != "WOULD".
This kind of logical mistake is a kind of "false dichotomy". By noticing that a value is not 100%, a person decides it must then be exactly 0%, instead of any of the many intermediate values. George W Bush thinks that way, but I don't recommend it for anyone else.
If you can't understand what you're typing, don't be suprised when you can't understand the responses either.
Then it's not profitable in the bigger picture, now is it?
Exactly, it isn't profitable overall, which is why the company won't pursue it. Which is why you were wrong to claim that the company would always be willing to make small alterations to their programs, if they were offered enough money to cover costs plus a moderate profit.
but even *I* know that "profitable" means more than just "being able to sell something for more than it costs to produce it."
Specifically, it means able to sell for more than costs + the federal interest rate, but that doesn't really matter.
One has nothing to do with the other. Monopolies remove competition, thus allowing companies to exploit thier customers, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything we were discussing, which is the discontinuation of projects that stop being profitable.
Non-OSS software is a monopoly on the ability to edit that software. You have claimed that if some users have enough money to convince a programmer to make desired changes to an OSS project, they also have enough money to entice the corporate owner of a proprietary program to make those same changes.
That is false, for several reasons, including that because so many more programmers could potentially do the job on OSS software, they will be competing against each other, reducing the amount the users would need to pay them. The proprietary software's programmers don't have that competitive pressure, so the amount they'd ask is likely to remain above what the users could pay.
I said that just because it was POSSIBLE to resume work on any given project, that it is not guaranteed, and if it is NOT resumed, the end result, from the USERS' points of view, is the same.
No, that is not what you said. Possibly a hacker is infiltrating your PC to disparage your public image. For reference, what you posted is this:
if the author decides to screw me around, not fix a bug, or just generally bugger off and move on to a new project, I'm JUST as screwed as if it were MS who did it.
And, obviously, it is quite different from what you now claim to have written.
I said that just because it was POSSIBLE to resume work on any given project, that it is not guaranteed, and if it is NOT resumed, the end result, from the USERS' points of view, is the same.
Even if that were what you intented to say, it isn't true either, for reasons that have mean repeatedly explained to you, and which you have repeatedly ignored, often by falsly claiming to have already addressed them elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
It is the same reason for my URL I gibe http://localhost:8080
Too bad that many of today's browsers come up with http://localhost.be/ when clicking there.
Yes, grumpiness is an appropriate response to bad products from people who've done better in the past.
are you upset that Apple made the Dock the way they did,
I think I was pretty clear there.
or are you confusing Exposé with the Dock?
Of course not. Expose isn't the Dock, but it and Dock are both task-switching UIs, and Expose seems good because the only other official method is the horrible Dock. If OS X had come with a decent task-switcher from the beginning, Expose wouldn't seem have attracted much attention when it was eventually released.
Which is the task-switching you find better:
OS 9 with a combination of cycle-keys and pulldown menu is the best. (Some Linux desktops have that system too)
Windows2k is next.
NextStep is quite bad, but I can barely remember the feel of it.
The OS X dock is worse than any of them.
If that is not the case, then please clarify.
Here are some famous HCI buzzwords:
Muscle Memory, Fitt's Law, discoverability, responsiveness, consistent metaphor, scrubbing.
Each of those is a well-documented design issue for which OS 9 was praised, but which OS X did as bad as Windows, or sometimes even worse. Any of those you don't know about, google should be able to explain.
Hey Mac users: raise your hand if you've tried to reproduce the effect of the OS 9 Apple Menu by dragging a folder with links to your programs into the Dock. Now raise your other hand if you enjoy manually updating it when installing another program. Raise your foot if you like hovering the mouse for 6/10th of a second waiting for that menu to open.
The Dock is just a big advertisement for the new graphics pipeline in OS X. They got the ability to stretch window contents into funny shapes, and wanted to see that effect more often.
Click Magnification and set it to Max.
You'll be able to see your icons fine. You'll be able to see what's on minimized browsers. You'll be able to see which emails you kept open....
Hurray! If I make the Dock incredibly huge, I can actually sometimes tell what icons mean. So what that I don't have space for actual applications anymore...
If the Dock could be moved to the left or right edge of the screen, then it wouldn't matter so much. Taking 256 pixels from the bottom row of a widescreen monitor is much worse than using the same space from the side. But NO, the Dock can't be moved.
The Dock gives you three fine choices:
1. Tiny icons that tell you nothing.
2. Huge icons that show little thumbnails, which waste tons of screen space.
3. Small icons which balloon into big ones when you go nearby, causing all the icons to shove around so they're harder to click on.
No, icon zooming is a bad idea. Things shouldn't move around like that, it makes the system harder to use.
Icon zooming doesn't have to move anything around. It merely provides an enlarged picture of the icon as a kind of faster tooltip hint as to what you're about to click on. That picture is not itself sensitive to clicking, so it doesn't effectively move anything. The only role it serves is to reduce errors when going to click on a small icon, because an accidental mis-aim will be revealed before you actually wait for the whole application to come up.
Icon zooming in general should not be confused with the bad implementation of icon magnification in the Macintosh Dock, which does in fact move things around, and is bad like you said.
For example, Expose was the big hit of Panther
Yeah, a great innovation. First you just have to disgard the perfectly fine task-switching from OS and replace it with a huge taskbar knock-off filled with amorphous, textless icons to create an interface that only looks good when you're standing on a podium in front of 300 people. Then when you finally come out with something halfway sensible, it will appear that much better in comparison. Rule 1 to being cute: keep an ugly friend nearby.
Expose is like "Coke Classic" following on "New Coke"- they screwed up the previous release so badly, that anything different at all seems like a godsend.
Thinking of Windows as an operating system is the same as thinking of Linux + BASH + XFree + KDE as an "operating system."
Well, that IS what "operating system" means, after all...
A single low-level kernel is NOT an operating system, it's just part of one. The Linux kernel, for example, is not by itself an operating system, since it cannot operate alone.
nor is there an idiom about tsunamis.
"A tidal wave of XYZ" has been an English idiom for decades, as a hyperbolic variation of "outpouring". In the past few years people had started to replace it with tsunami ("to be more scientifically accurate"), but that trend may have halted.
Sure, people will continue to use this phrase for a long time, but maybe saying it within a few days of a really terrible train wreck is very unsensitive to the victims.
But there hasn't been a terrible train wreck in the past few days- not in comparison to what goes unreported except in Oddly Enough sidebars.
Within the past year, there have been other train accidents killing 3 or 4 times the number of victims. This one has got attention because it's Japan, "not 3rd world", "they're civilized like us", "they are so safety-concious", etc.
I am reminded of how on August 30, 1997, Taliban soldiers cut the heads off of 200 innocent people. But it didn't get any press in the USA, because a rich European was in a car crash the same day.
How do I change X's priority?
Renicing it as suggested doesn't do much. If you were a Linux expert, I'd say install a kernel with pre-emptible syscalls... but if your distribution doesn't supply that already, I don't think the benefit would be worth the work you put in.
(Unless you consider "learning more about Linux kernels" to be a benefit on its own, in which case, go ahead)
Translation for all you Unix and NetWare admins out there:it's like hopping over to a client site and giving root on your laptop to their admins.
Funny thing is, the first 3 releases of Mac OS X did exactly that. It even worked with Airport at Starbucks.
Microsoft Office 2004? Yeah, it is for Mac.
Wow, I never knew you could flip the installer CDs upside down to access the Mac version! Kudos to Microsoft for pre-emptively supporting cross-platform users.
Eventually, I'll have sunk a king's ransom into an old, unsupported bit of software, probably several times what MS, Adobe, Intuit, etc...
And in related news, the Constituional guarantee of Freedom of Speech is worthless, because some people can't afford TV advertisements.
But if you ignore it, it does mean the harm is nonexistent.
Completely backwards. If you ignore something, that directly implies that the something does exist. Otherwise, the sentence "She ignored it" would be nonsense. Saying "I ignored the flaming schoolbus down the street" is a way of claiming that a bus was actually burning.
There was a video from the 1970s of a quarterback who finished the big game with a broken leg. I had thought it was impressive- but now you tell me that since he was ignoring the pain, he had never really been injured at all.
And where does this leave George Lucas? That's what you're not remembering, it's HIS stuff.
That's a circular argument. It's only HIS stuff because the long term provided by copyright law makes it his. We are saying that copyright should be shortened with legislation.
Your objection makes as much sense as: "Because alcohol is illegal, Prohibition should never be repealed"
And where does this leave George Lucas?
Hypothetically, if copyright lasted only about 30 years, it would leave George Lucas with the $3 billion dollars he's already earned over that time period. In my opinion, that is more than sufficient compensation for his previous artistic works.
Giving him more money will not make Star Wars any better (in fact, maybe if he had less money, he would've focused more on making Episode 1 a better movie)
AC: I don't know who you are, but I'm pretty sure you're less qualified on this question than he is.
Yes, I am less qualified. So, that's why I'm giving my answer based on repeating what he's written. If you respect Mr. Moglen, you therefore agree I'm correct. Or if you still disagree, you need to reread whatever you think you saw.
Well then I never get to talk.
Magic worlds: "Off the record", "employee who refused to give his name"... that's why people do those things.
Nope. Bill Gates doesn't SELL you a copy of Windows - he LICENSES it.
You are alleging that the computer stores across America are committing thousands of cases of fraud per day. Every time they give out a "Sales Reciept" with "Microsoft Office" on it, they certifying that it has just been legally sold.
If you disagree, phone your state District Attorney!
It's the difference between your right to smash all the walls in a house you own , and your utter lack of rights to smash all the walls in a house you rent.
Microsoft has suggested they might someday move to renting out software, but it hasn't happened yet.
"Placescape Torment", a USA RPG regarded as highly creative, fulfills 4 out of those 7. Knights of the Old Republic hits a lot too.
Any government, church or anything else hat isn't a group of rebels is evil and only helps you in order to make you fulfil their plans. Rebels are always good.
The USA thinks rebels are always good, too. They were founded by rebels... Star Wars, anyone? And, rebels are by definition underdogs. Either rebels = good and badguy = strong, or badguy = weak and game = boring.
If there's a mention of N objects somewhere you can be sure one part of your mission involves acquiring or destroying those N objects.
A feature also common to Hollywood screenwriting an American game design. It's economy of description: why mention something if you aren't going to show it later?
The evil guy will always complete his plan for the destruction of the world 99%, the player killing him will make the world barely survive and all the problems disappear.
Something that's happened to James Bond only 24 times.
Well, that doesn't matter, because he wouldn't have had to. We were talking about Britain specifically, not everyone else. Also, it wasn't the invasion of Poland that really lead to the most famous example of British appeasement, but Austria-Hungary.
But ignoring that, even if they did "go to war" with him, those other nations didn't have the armies or mobility to do anything more than make empty threats. No land force could withstand the blitzkrieg, and no pilots could challenge the Luftwaffe. Even pretending that German training and equipment wasn't superior to anything else, they were also more numerous. Plus, the great distance any of those countries would need to travel to intervene would've made their respondents even more vulnerable.
Going to war with Hitler at that time would've meant either doing nothing (and showing that your big speech is hollow), or rushing your troops and armaments off to their destructions.
when we finally went to war (again IIRC) our army was actually *smaller* than it was at the time we began appeasement.
Maybe the army was, I don't recall exactly, but the no-draft policy of the time was obviously a problem there. However, the RAF was not smaller, it was enormously bigger, especially in terms of half-way modern planes. The first critical battle was in the sky, not on the ground, so the army didn't directly matter.
The Battle Over Britain was a proud moment, but if the defenders had possessed only Gloucester Gladiators instead of Hawker Hurricanes, it would be remembered as merely a valiant last stand.
You may like to read more about how Chamberlain used the "appeasement" period to buy weapons. Don't bother clicking, I'll paste the summary:
It is questionable he would have had the same victories if the French had gone on the offensive
No, it isn't. The firepower and armor of the Nazis, compared against the utter non-portability of the French defensive guns, plus their lack of rehearsal of a war of manuver, means that a French offensive would've just died tired.
The French military leaders were still thinking of the stationary battle-lines of the Great War. Men like De Gaulle new better, but he wasn't influential in their military at that time. Maybe if he'd risen to run the country 5 years earlier he could've whipped them into shape, but at the time of initial Nazi expansion, it was too late.
The failure of Marxist states is due in part to the vile incompetence of the individual dictators who ran them.
No Marxist state has ever failed, because no Marxist state has ever existed.
Marxism clearly says that communism should arise from a broad revolution of the workers after they have been fully exploited by ubiquitous capitalism. Neither Russia, China, or Cuba was a capitalistic nation (certainly not mature capitalism) at the time of the so-called "Communist revolution". Those dictators who mentioned weren't following Marx's plan, but instead conciously went against it.
can't be used as evidence that there is something a bit fishy about alchemy.
No. Those people were trying to follow alchemic procedures directly. Nobody has even tried Marxism yet. That doesn't mean it can actually work, but the failure of the several non-Marxist states that labelled themselves "Communist" doesn't serve as evidence against it either.
I'm not merely saying they didn't reach Marx's desired conclusions, but they also didn't even use his described starting point.
I simply figured that it had to be a kid's movie, since they made "C-3P0s," the breakfast cereal clearly targeted towards kids. Or Boba Fett underoos, which can not by any stretch of the imagination be for adults.
Neither of those happened in the period I'm talking about.
. Star Wars, following the grand tradition of those adventures, was for kids.
Star Wars was for people who had liked Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon as kids, and wanted the nostalgic kick of seeing a higher-budget, more serious version onscreen.
George Lucas was one of those people. He, an adult, made a movie he wanted to see. Hundreds of millions of other adults agreed. Just read interviews with him if you want to see him specifically say that the reason "Episode 1" was so different from the original trilogy is that he was now a parent, and had changed to making movies his kids would enjoy.
I've never seen an ATM or Airport Flight Information kiosk with a kernel panic
I have seen display panels on LCD screens on airplane seats go through the typical Linux bootup. Some Delta planes have them.
let alone allowed to be present without there being anyone to oppose them.
That's a good analog to the important reason why criminal trials are required to have two opposing lawyers who are very partisan (as opposed to occasional suggestions to ban all lawyers).
It is inevitable that one side or the other will get the benefit of aggressively biased legal advice, so the surest way to approximate accuracy is to require both sides to have a lawyer, so there is at least a chance that the distortions introduced by one may be counterbalanced by the other.
"CAN" != "WOULD", therefore "CAN" = "CAN'T"
is entirely the product of your own, apparently disjointed, mind.
Let me apologize for supposing you could comprehend your own post without help. So, I'll spell it out for you. Sentence (b):
That's true, that's fine. It is the observation that "CAN" != "WOULD", the left side of my summary equation.
Now sentence (a):
More explicitly, that says "If the author of any program, including an OSS once, discontinues it, a users is in equally as much trouble as if a proprietary developer like Microsoft had done so".
If Microsoft discontinues a project, then users have absolutely no legal way to continue it themselves. They "CAN'T" get it fixed. However, you said that a discontinued OSS project means "I'm JUST as screwed". That phrase "just as" is an indicator of equality, or "==".
So, since we've established that you "CAN'T" fix an MS product, and you say OSS products are the same, that means you believe we "CAN'T" fix them either. That happens to be false, because we CAN fix them. But you have decided that we can't, because you've noticed that "CAN" != "WOULD".
This kind of logical mistake is a kind of "false dichotomy". By noticing that a value is not 100%, a person decides it must then be exactly 0%, instead of any of the many intermediate values. George W Bush thinks that way, but I don't recommend it for anyone else.
If you can't understand what you're typing, don't be suprised when you can't understand the responses either.
Then it's not profitable in the bigger picture, now is it?
Exactly, it isn't profitable overall, which is why the company won't pursue it. Which is why you were wrong to claim that the company would always be willing to make small alterations to their programs, if they were offered enough money to cover costs plus a moderate profit.
but even *I* know that "profitable" means more than just "being able to sell something for more than it costs to produce it."
Specifically, it means able to sell for more than costs + the federal interest rate, but that doesn't really matter.
One has nothing to do with the other. Monopolies remove competition, thus allowing companies to exploit thier customers, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything we were discussing, which is the discontinuation of projects that stop being profitable.
Non-OSS software is a monopoly on the ability to edit that software. You have claimed that if some users have enough money to convince a programmer to make desired changes to an OSS project, they also have enough money to entice the corporate owner of a proprietary program to make those same changes.
That is false, for several reasons, including that because so many more programmers could potentially do the job on OSS software, they will be competing against each other, reducing the amount the users would need to pay them. The proprietary software's programmers don't have that competitive pressure, so the amount they'd ask is likely to remain above what the users could pay.
I said that just because it was POSSIBLE to resume work on any given project, that it is not guaranteed, and if it is NOT resumed, the end result, from the USERS' points of view, is the same.
No, that is not what you said. Possibly a hacker is infiltrating your PC to disparage your public image. For reference, what you posted is this:
if the author decides to screw me around, not fix a bug, or just generally bugger off and move on to a new project, I'm JUST as screwed as if it were MS who did it.
And, obviously, it is quite different from what you now claim to have written.
I said that just because it was POSSIBLE to resume work on any given project, that it is not guaranteed, and if it is NOT resumed, the end result, from the USERS' points of view, is the same.
Even if that were what you intented to say, it isn't true either, for reasons that have mean repeatedly explained to you, and which you have repeatedly ignored, often by falsly claiming to have already addressed them elsewhere.