"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Easier to say it than to do it.
"Public safety is more important than public convenience."
Anyway, I think that the quote doesn't take into account that public safety IS public convenience sometimes. The fact I swear at my cell when someone's jamming it to prevent a bomb from detonating doesn't mean I don't think they should've done that.
And anyway I would say that cell phones are FAR from being an essential liberty.
It's different. Every computer comes with an OS as well, but that's not what he's complaining about. If the car you want was only available with a certain stereo manufactured by a company you don't like... now that would be a bit closer.
But still not enough. Because the OS is more like the engine. It is a far more important component to the laptop than a stereo is to the car.
The fact is, when you buy a car you can choose the manufacturer you want, and you will have a few different engines to choose from with each one of them. But that's not the way it works with computers. Especially with laptops.
And by the way, there is a reason if Microsoft is considered a monopoly you know? It is not like slashdot linux zealots are as strong as to directly influence politics.
Diego Rey
PS: Microsoft CAN point a gun at your head to make you buy their products (all companies can to a certain degree). If you need what they offer but have little alternatives to it (because they don't want other products to be compatible), they ARE forcing you to buy their products. It's as simple as that.
The idea that people can change products whenever they want doesn't take into account problems such as the costs of such changes.
"Mod me down if you must, but it's the honest truth. Generalizing groups of people, companies, or ideas is always unfair biased bull shit."
No it's not. Everyone has the right to think as they wish, as long as they understand that theirs is just one side of the coin. I myself think that Microsoft is a bad company (evil?) overall, because that's what my experience has taught me in the past. I also think that free software will probably be responsible for destroying many companies, but it will also give birth to many others. Something like Darwin's evolution theory. The fact that some companies are going to die just means they didn't adapt to the surrounding.
Being politically correct about what you say doesn't mean you can't lean towards one position or another. And saying you hate windows or linux doesn't make you a racist nor anything like it.
And I'm not saying you should go around insulting people you don't like. I'm just saying there's a line that divides what you can from what you can't say, but your opinions on companies are not anywhere near that line.
"So, the problem with Linux is that your company is too cheap to hire a competent receptionist who can learn the basics of very similar software packages in-house in a reasonable amount of time?"
Like it or not, the fact that you're pretty familiar with Linux doesn't make it easy to learn for a Windows user. And believe me, with the ammount of PC ignorant people in the world, it's not a matter of having the money to hire the right receptionist.
The point is not that a migration to Linux is impossible... but that it is a radical change in the way you are going to work from now on. And changes are not always good.
"For your general word processing and spreadsheeting applications, Open Office isn't really that much different. If she can learn to blindly click buttons on Office, there's no reason she can't learn to do it on Open Office. If that were really true, we'd all still be using WordPerfect."
That's crap, sorry. The fact you were able to learn to use Office just means you were able to learn office. The fact that two applications do the same kind of work doesn't make them equally complex to understand. Especially when people has only been trained to learn to use Windows properly in the last few years.
Changes are required sometimes, and the time for everyone to learn the ways of linux will come. But that doesn't mean people must struggle to keep up with the technological advancements each time a new standard comes out, especially when their field is not the technological field. The costs of constantly looking for advantages may eventually bite your ass too. Because retraining a bunch of people who learnt work mechanically on programs they've used for years may prove to be a disadvantage rather than an advantage for your production.
"You can even train a mouse to do rudimentary, repetitive tasks. Just how much dumber are your receptionists?"
This is an oversimplification of their work. Otherwise I fail to understand why we can't put mice to work on computers.
I know that everyone can learn to use different software suites. But is it worth it for your company to do so now? It all depends on what you consider to be the problems and benefits that it will bring. It is not the kind of change that can be made lightly.
"On top of that, I can't imagine that the cost difference of hiring new receptionists, especially from a temp agency, are going to offset productivity gains and cost savings for the rest of the company if Linux is a viable consideration otherwise. If it does, maybe you need to consider firing your HR group and getting people who don't just knee-jerk hire every receptionist that walks in the door..."
Beg you pardon but I think you are forgetting something there. If the moment you hired your receptionists you didn't care about linux that doesn't make your receptionists a bunch of ignorant people.
It's all a matter of what is the right tool for the job. Linux is coming up quite nicely but how many companies require that you "know" linux as a receptionist? The point is not the receptionists... the point is simply most companies don't consider Linux as a possible alternative for such work yet. The reasons behind such decisions? I don't know, but evidently Linux still has spots to conquer.
And on a side note... how good would it be for the image of your company to fire all the people without linux experience when you didn't ask for such experience in the first place? You see, Linux may be nice, but you seem to think that the objective for all companies should be to embrace it when they probably couldn't care less about it. Don't get me wrong, I like linux... but I am trying to be realistical on this issue.
"You're just making exuses. You must be a manager."
The work of managers is way too complex to be solved by making harsh changes in the way your employees work or by firing them.
"Except the biggest thing holding Linux back is that it's not easy enough for the average user that isn't particularly computer literate."
And not only.
It is scary for most people to learn that they will have no-one to blame if the program is crap. Now people will tell me they can get a coder and fix the program or something, but does the illiterate user want to hire a team of coders to be able to use a computer program? Does the small company have the resources to do this?
The illiterate PC user wants to be told what he should use. He doesn't care about the reasons. He wants to use his PC without the hassle of becoming a geek.
Something like Windows offers all that.
Now this is not against open source. But I felt like those where good reasons why a computer illiterate may not yet want to join the open source crowd. I can see open source excelling in the more technology oriented fields... but that doesn't help Joe much.
"If they had no value to you, you wouldn't want to copy them anyway.
Ergo, they do have value to you - which means that you should pay for them."
I think that you have just hit an important point here. IMHO, the reason behind piracy is that most people find that game titles have a value to them, but such a value outweighted by the cost by far.
"And besides,... Gimp environment is Linux friendly not OSX friendly (Gimp behaves completely different than any other software on OSX)."
It's a MacGimp review, not a review of Gimp for Linux or Windows. It is written on top of the review. He wasn't saying Gimp sucks... but the Mac port of it, which is pretty different.
The fact that Gimp for Linux rocks doesn't make the Mac port any better. And the same probably applies to Photoshop the other way round.
Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify pirating an artist's music.
Beg you pardon but morality has NOTHING to do with piracy. It may be your personal belief that it's wrong to download a song to sample it, as you've stated, but that doesn't make it morally wrong to others who may have completely different beliefs. Laws are not intrinsecally right, and if you think they are it means you're not being objective.
But from a legal point of view you're right: it's currently illegal to share copyrighted material in most countries. And while I agree that sharing music which took a great effort to compose is not fair, I am not going to silently accept it when a big company tries to scare 13 year old kids and make them pay gold for something that is worth just dimes.
And SCO is evil
To me it is. They're trying to do the same thing the RIAA wants to do with their trials. That is to win money by scaring people.
Because what we're basically seeing here is a big company scaring individuals into paying them money with no real proof whatsoever. In no trial would internet logs or copied IPs be considered as proof. But the RIAA has the power to scare people into paying them money in sight of a trial. And basically there's no way out from there.
Wake up. This is a business model, and by not complaining, you're accepting it. Or are you telling me that if I record a movie from TV and lend it to a friend I should be sued for thousands of dollars too? Because that's no different from sharing songs, you know?
But hey, laws are laws... and you better be careful with what you do, cos next thing you know they will be coming after YOU.
If you take the time to actually read what's claimed in this patent (on/.? yeah right...) this isn't as broad a patent as a lot of readers seem to think it is.
Isn't the purpose of slashdot to bring us "News for nerds..."? Or is that "Links for nerds..."? Cos if the news items in the front page are not clear it's not like it's the fault of the readers.
Anyway, to me the patent still seems pretty generic. While it is not wide in scope I can't see how anyone can have rights to ideas which require no effort to come up with. Actually, I can't see how someone can have rights to ideas at all.
What I am saying is NOT that the internet should have no rules at all, but trying to enforce your country's rules on the internet is NOT A GOOD OR REALISTIC APPROACH. The only thing you will achieve is people from other countries trying to avoid having anything to do with your country.
How do you think an italian citizen feels when they see that they can't do uncensored searches on google.it because the US dmca laws apply to it as well? Does it seem fair to you? How would you feel if google.com banned searches on the word "democracy" because the servers are in a communist country?
I don't care where the servers are to be honest, for google.it and google.com.ar, and google.com.br are not targetted for an US audience. If anything it should be ruled by international laws.
And this is not trying to promote cybercrime as you seem to believe. Just mutual respect.
This is ridiculous. I think the US (government) should stop pretending their laws apply to online material just because people can access the internet from their country. I mean, why on earth do I have to have censored search results?
It would be just as silly if people in the US couldn't do searches on certain words because my country thinks it's not OK for the search engine to provide such results.
If they want filterning then they should run such filters on google.com only. I can't see how the DMCA should apply to google.it or google.com.ar or any other such domain.
Einstein also predicted that the rotation of an object would alter space and time, dragging a nearby object out of position compared to the predictions of Newtonian physics.
Which means that the satellite could end up sucking me up into space?
No they must have installed one of those evil open source programs on the satellite. They are more subject to viruses and hackers and byte-overheating. And you can go to hell just for watching them run.
The difference is who is taking the money from you, and what for.
From SCO you would be buying a license that protects you from being sued by them, and only them. From these other guys you would be paying a liability license that protects you from whoever it is that wants to sue you.
Now if that's not enough of a difference there is the moral implications of paying SCO. By doing so you are supporting their business model. You are asking for other companies to use it and ask you for a difference fee to protect you from them too. Like in most things, many people will prefer the short term advantage, even though it comes with the promise of long term disadvantages. But that doesn't make it right.
So putting the money SCO asks and the money that these guys ask on the same level is not fair. The service you are paying for is totally different (if SCO's license can be called a service...).
However I just look as this forum and I can't fail to notice that most of the mainstream languages are so because of what they can offer to a certain target of people. For instance you can see how C / C++ remain unbeaten in the low-level programming field. A friend of mine told me perl is used a lot in science (and web programming as well). Something like Java is quite useful for multi-platform development. Visual Basic makes fast development for Windows true. And of course other languages have their purposes too.
So to put it simple, I get the feeling that the future will divide programmers into different fields of programming. Much more than we are split now, that is. So I am not sure that the "wave of the future" will be just one winner, like it's been in the past. I already can see that there are several winners for several different reasons.
MSV C++ 6.x was what? Like the previous version to what's available today?
Contrary to what you seem to believe, Visual Studio 6 is still being used by a lot of people. Otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have released a new service pack for it like a week ago:
Anyway... the point is that Microsoft tends to abuse standards by leading people to believe their programs support these standards. But they end up creating their own non-compliant implementations and you are stuck with them. The same thing happened with Java in the past and lead to a lot of critisism towards what they were trying to achieve (ie take-over such standard by creating their "improved" version of it).
I will talk about MSV C++ 6.x as it was the last version I used of it (for compatibility reasons)...
The problem with me was not that MSV C++ didn't let me do things I could do with other compilers. The problem was mostly about plain ISO C++ compliance. Just to give you an example, the following is a problem I found in MSV C++ when trying to port a program:
for (<B>int counter</B>;...) {
somecode; }
for (<B>int counter</B>;...) {
somecode; }
This code would not compile in MSVC++ 6.x telling me that the same variable had been defined twice. Now while this could seem like a simple problem to solve, it meant going through 7000+ lines of code and declaring the variable outside the for loop every single time.
According to the C++ standard, the scope of the variable that is declared inside the "for" loop is limited to the loop. In other words, this code is legal according to the C++ standard, but Visual C++ 6 couldn't compile it successfully.
MSVC++ is considered one of the least compliant C++ compiler implementations available for this, and many other reasons.
To back up a bit what I said, here goes a google link to a discussion regarding VC++'s ISO compliance. If you follow the selected sub-thread you will also find a reply from one of the developers of MSVC++ in which he clearly states that Microsoft's main goal was not to create a fully compliant C++ compiler, but rather to implement upon the standard specifications and create a sort of Microsoft C++ standards.
A small quote:
"The main decision the C++ team was faced with in this release was to either devote most of the effort to compliance issues, or to have a stab at making sure C++ on Microsoft platforms was still a viable language to use to write code in a managed execution environment. We chose the latter."
Slashdot Mirror
Oh my... for a second I though this was about wiring your neighbors.
Diego Rey
Easier to say it than to do it.
Anyway, I think that the quote doesn't take into account that public safety IS public convenience sometimes. The fact I swear at my cell when someone's jamming it to prevent a bomb from detonating doesn't mean I don't think they should've done that.
And anyway I would say that cell phones are FAR from being an essential liberty.
Diego Rey
Is it just me or does that sound like "When Windows goes down, they will still be able to steer"?
It's different. Every computer comes with an OS as well, but that's not what he's complaining about. If the car you want was only available with a certain stereo manufactured by a company you don't like... now that would be a bit closer.
But still not enough. Because the OS is more like the engine. It is a far more important component to the laptop than a stereo is to the car.
The fact is, when you buy a car you can choose the manufacturer you want, and you will have a few different engines to choose from with each one of them. But that's not the way it works with computers. Especially with laptops.
And by the way, there is a reason if Microsoft is considered a monopoly you know? It is not like slashdot linux zealots are as strong as to directly influence politics.
Diego Rey
PS: Microsoft CAN point a gun at your head to make you buy their products (all companies can to a certain degree). If you need what they offer but have little alternatives to it (because they don't want other products to be compatible), they ARE forcing you to buy their products. It's as simple as that.
The idea that people can change products whenever they want doesn't take into account problems such as the costs of such changes.
No it's not. Everyone has the right to think as they wish, as long as they understand that theirs is just one side of the coin. I myself think that Microsoft is a bad company (evil?) overall, because that's what my experience has taught me in the past. I also think that free software will probably be responsible for destroying many companies, but it will also give birth to many others. Something like Darwin's evolution theory. The fact that some companies are going to die just means they didn't adapt to the surrounding.
Being politically correct about what you say doesn't mean you can't lean towards one position or another. And saying you hate windows or linux doesn't make you a racist nor anything like it.
And I'm not saying you should go around insulting people you don't like. I'm just saying there's a line that divides what you can from what you can't say, but your opinions on companies are not anywhere near that line.
Diego Rey
What are the implications of this law mixed with the internet? Would I have to pay a tax to Illinois when people from Illinois buy my programs?
If I do have to pay taxes based on where people buys from, isn't that an incentive to discriminate customers because of where they live?
Diego Rey
Like it or not, the fact that you're pretty familiar with Linux doesn't make it easy to learn for a Windows user. And believe me, with the ammount of PC ignorant people in the world, it's not a matter of having the money to hire the right receptionist.
The point is not that a migration to Linux is impossible... but that it is a radical change in the way you are going to work from now on. And changes are not always good.
That's crap, sorry. The fact you were able to learn to use Office just means you were able to learn office. The fact that two applications do the same kind of work doesn't make them equally complex to understand. Especially when people has only been trained to learn to use Windows properly in the last few years.
Changes are required sometimes, and the time for everyone to learn the ways of linux will come. But that doesn't mean people must struggle to keep up with the technological advancements each time a new standard comes out, especially when their field is not the technological field. The costs of constantly looking for advantages may eventually bite your ass too. Because retraining a bunch of people who learnt work mechanically on programs they've used for years may prove to be a disadvantage rather than an advantage for your production.
This is an oversimplification of their work. Otherwise I fail to understand why we can't put mice to work on computers.
I know that everyone can learn to use different software suites. But is it worth it for your company to do so now? It all depends on what you consider to be the problems and benefits that it will bring. It is not the kind of change that can be made lightly.
Beg you pardon but I think you are forgetting something there. If the moment you hired your receptionists you didn't care about linux that doesn't make your receptionists a bunch of ignorant people.
It's all a matter of what is the right tool for the job. Linux is coming up quite nicely but how many companies require that you "know" linux as a receptionist? The point is not the receptionists... the point is simply most companies don't consider Linux as a possible alternative for such work yet. The reasons behind such decisions? I don't know, but evidently Linux still has spots to conquer.
And on a side note... how good would it be for the image of your company to fire all the people without linux experience when you didn't ask for such experience in the first place? You see, Linux may be nice, but you seem to think that the objective for all companies should be to embrace it when they probably couldn't care less about it. Don't get me wrong, I like linux... but I am trying to be realistical on this issue.
The work of managers is way too complex to be solved by making harsh changes in the way your employees work or by firing them.
Diego Rey
And not only.
It is scary for most people to learn that they will have no-one to blame if the program is crap. Now people will tell me they can get a coder and fix the program or something, but does the illiterate user want to hire a team of coders to be able to use a computer program? Does the small company have the resources to do this?
The illiterate PC user wants to be told what he should use. He doesn't care about the reasons. He wants to use his PC without the hassle of becoming a geek.
Something like Windows offers all that.
Now this is not against open source. But I felt like those where good reasons why a computer illiterate may not yet want to join the open source crowd. I can see open source excelling in the more technology oriented fields... but that doesn't help Joe much.
I don't know. If I saw pacman running around I would surely feel an urge to run after him... anyone would do it.
And in New York there is quite a LOT of people.
Diego
All you need is a baseball bat, a good pair of shoes and the fun is guaranteed.
Diego
But if you find a rotten apple lying in the middle of the street are you supposed to eat it?
Diego
I think that you have just hit an important point here. IMHO, the reason behind piracy is that most people find that game titles have a value to them, but such a value outweighted by the cost by far.
Diego Rey
It's a MacGimp review, not a review of Gimp for Linux or Windows. It is written on top of the review. He wasn't saying Gimp sucks... but the Mac port of it, which is pretty different.
The fact that Gimp for Linux rocks doesn't make the Mac port any better. And the same probably applies to Photoshop the other way round.
Diego Rey
Beg you pardon but morality has NOTHING to do with piracy. It may be your personal belief that it's wrong to download a song to sample it, as you've stated, but that doesn't make it morally wrong to others who may have completely different beliefs. Laws are not intrinsecally right, and if you think they are it means you're not being objective.
But from a legal point of view you're right: it's currently illegal to share copyrighted material in most countries. And while I agree that sharing music which took a great effort to compose is not fair, I am not going to silently accept it when a big company tries to scare 13 year old kids and make them pay gold for something that is worth just dimes.
To me it is. They're trying to do the same thing the RIAA wants to do with their trials. That is to win money by scaring people.
Because what we're basically seeing here is a big company scaring individuals into paying them money with no real proof whatsoever. In no trial would internet logs or copied IPs be considered as proof. But the RIAA has the power to scare people into paying them money in sight of a trial. And basically there's no way out from there.
Wake up. This is a business model, and by not complaining, you're accepting it. Or are you telling me that if I record a movie from TV and lend it to a friend I should be sued for thousands of dollars too? Because that's no different from sharing songs, you know?
But hey, laws are laws... and you better be careful with what you do, cos next thing you know they will be coming after YOU.
Diego Rey
Isn't the purpose of slashdot to bring us "News for nerds..."? Or is that "Links for nerds..."? Cos if the news items in the front page are not clear it's not like it's the fault of the readers.
Anyway, to me the patent still seems pretty generic. While it is not wide in scope I can't see how anyone can have rights to ideas which require no effort to come up with. Actually, I can't see how someone can have rights to ideas at all.
Diego Rey
What I am saying is NOT that the internet should have no rules at all, but trying to enforce your country's rules on the internet is NOT A GOOD OR REALISTIC APPROACH. The only thing you will achieve is people from other countries trying to avoid having anything to do with your country.
How do you think an italian citizen feels when they see that they can't do uncensored searches on google.it because the US dmca laws apply to it as well? Does it seem fair to you? How would you feel if google.com banned searches on the word "democracy" because the servers are in a communist country?
I don't care where the servers are to be honest, for google.it and google.com.ar, and google.com.br are not targetted for an US audience. If anything it should be ruled by international laws.
And this is not trying to promote cybercrime as you seem to believe. Just mutual respect.
Diego Rey
This is ridiculous. I think the US (government) should stop pretending their laws apply to online material just because people can access the internet from their country. I mean, why on earth do I have to have censored search results?
It would be just as silly if people in the US couldn't do searches on certain words because my country thinks it's not OK for the search engine to provide such results.
If they want filterning then they should run such filters on google.com only. I can't see how the DMCA should apply to google.it or google.com.ar or any other such domain.
Diego Rey
I bet you wouldn't know you need more than an unsigned 32 bit integer before you hit it.
On a side note I would really like to know which one is page number 1.
Diego Rey
Which means that the satellite could end up sucking me up into space?
Diego
No they must have installed one of those evil open source programs on the satellite. They are more subject to viruses and hackers and byte-overheating. And you can go to hell just for watching them run.
Or so Billy says...
Diego
The difference is who is taking the money from you, and what for.
From SCO you would be buying a license that protects you from being sued by them, and only them. From these other guys you would be paying a liability license that protects you from whoever it is that wants to sue you.
Now if that's not enough of a difference there is the moral implications of paying SCO. By doing so you are supporting their business model. You are asking for other companies to use it and ask you for a difference fee to protect you from them too. Like in most things, many people will prefer the short term advantage, even though it comes with the promise of long term disadvantages. But that doesn't make it right.
So putting the money SCO asks and the money that these guys ask on the same level is not fair. The service you are paying for is totally different (if SCO's license can be called a service...).
Diego Rey
I agree with your post on most of your points.
However I just look as this forum and I can't fail to notice that most of the mainstream languages are so because of what they can offer to a certain target of people. For instance you can see how C / C++ remain unbeaten in the low-level programming field. A friend of mine told me perl is used a lot in science (and web programming as well). Something like Java is quite useful for multi-platform development. Visual Basic makes fast development for Windows true. And of course other languages have their purposes too.
So to put it simple, I get the feeling that the future will divide programmers into different fields of programming. Much more than we are split now, that is. So I am not sure that the "wave of the future" will be just one winner, like it's been in the past. I already can see that there are several winners for several different reasons.
My 2 cents,
Diego Rey
MSV C++ 6.x was what? Like the previous version to what's available today?
Contrary to what you seem to believe, Visual Studio 6 is still being used by a lot of people. Otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have released a new service pack for it like a week ago:
VisualStudio
Anyway... the point is that Microsoft tends to abuse standards by leading people to believe their programs support these standards. But they end up creating their own non-compliant implementations and you are stuck with them. The same thing happened with Java in the past and lead to a lot of critisism towards what they were trying to achieve (ie take-over such standard by creating their "improved" version of it).
Diego Rey
The problem with me was not that MSV C++ didn't let me do things I could do with other compilers. The problem was mostly about plain ISO C++ compliance. Just to give you an example, the following is a problem I found in MSV C++ when trying to port a program:This code would not compile in MSVC++ 6.x telling me that the same variable had been defined twice. Now while this could seem like a simple problem to solve, it meant going through 7000+ lines of code and declaring the variable outside the for loop every single time.
According to the C++ standard, the scope of the variable that is declared inside the "for" loop is limited to the loop. In other words, this code is legal according to the C++ standard, but Visual C++ 6 couldn't compile it successfully.
MSVC++ is considered one of the least compliant C++ compiler implementations available for this, and many other reasons.
To back up a bit what I said, here goes a google link to a discussion regarding VC++'s ISO compliance. If you follow the selected sub-thread you will also find a reply from one of the developers of MSVC++ in which he clearly states that Microsoft's main goal was not to create a fully compliant C++ compiler, but rather to implement upon the standard specifications and create a sort of Microsoft C++ standards.
A small quote:
And the link to the discussion:
google.com
Diego Rey
You find yourself inside a dark room. There is a locked door in front of you. You have a key in your hand.
Input: open door
The door is locked.
Input: use key
What for?
Input: use key with door
You can't use the key with that.
Input: look door
The door is plain brown. There is a lock keeping it close.
Input: use key on lock
You get shocked.
Diego