The US is a lot more sprawled out than Europe, so public transportation has a harder time working over here. Go to New York and you'll see a solid public transportation system, because the city population is so compact that it becomes effective.
That's the difference between a vendors that supports you and one that doesn't.
NVidia isn't a problem under Linux because they actually put out decent drivers for it. But ATI support is horrid, because the company barely puts any effort into Linux drivers.
I can't believe how many whingeing morons I've seen tonight saying "Argh! no source!! ev1l!!" and "aww, only five gigs! stingy bastards, I won't be able to run my eCommerce site on _that!_"
The reason many of us go "Argh, no source, evil" is because we've been burned by close source vendors in the past. In fact, I have a current problem that is caused by our use of a close sourced product. I upgraded our servers to use NPTL on glibc so we can implement apache in a more enterprise mode of operation.
Well, that NPTL switch broke our backup application on Linux. I could fix the problem in 5 minutes if I had the source code to it, in fact I had to do just that when the NPTL switch broke portmap on my home server. But because the app is closed source I have to call the vendor and try to explain to them #1 what the problem is I'm having(get past their level 1 support morons) and #2 beg and hope to God that they already have an updated verson that's NPTL compliant.
But odds are they won't have an update(the famous, "That's not a supported configuration" bullshit line) which means I'll be screwed. Worse yet, my boss actually paid money to them so I could have the plesure of getting screwed over.
So in general I give out a big helping of "No thank you" to any closed source program on my servers. It has nothing to do with the money, I just don't like being under the thumb of a single vendor's support program.
The problem is that flying is by nature extremely dangerous. If a car breaks down you simply coast to a stop at the side of the road. Even with car accidents, many times the accident is a glancing blow and you slide or tumble to a stop hundreds of feet away.
But with flying every accident or failure can mean plumetting straight towards the planet.
It would be like driving around in a car, except that if your car broke down or you ended up in an accident you always slammed into an unmovable concrete wall going 200 mph.
And that doesn't even take into consideration factors like turbulance, downdrafts and all the other funny things the air can just suddenly do to you.
I think we're already experiencing something similar to that with just the internet. For example, we've had diet fads before but the current Atkins / low carb craze is just insane.
I mean, everywhere you go it's low carb this, low carb that, even Coke and Pepsi have low carb versions. Not to mention low carb beers??
Would the low carb craze have been as pervasive, as quick to take off, if it wasn't for the internet? And what happens in another 100 years when communication technology really starts to get advanced?
IMHO the OSS community is underperforming in picking up new technology and good ideas.
Hardly. There are a lot of OSS projects that are leading the way with new technologies and in implementing good ideas.
But in quite a few areas it's not at all uncommon to see slow support for new tech. The community divides about how to implement the new ideas, which slows things down, but that division fosters competition and provides a base for testing out different ways of getting the new tech out the door.
Sometimes doing it well is better than doing it first.
Basically they're reverse geometry rigid gas permeable contact lenses that reshape your eyes. Bad vision is caused by bumps and ridges in our visible part of the eye and Ortho-K is the art of flattening that part of the eye to correct vision. Your eyes are elastic and will hold their shape for 24-48 hours if you reshape them. So you wear these contacts at night and have good vision for the rest of the day. With Ortho-K the contacts are specially designed for you based off a laser map of your eye and the use of cad-like software to create the lenses.
I had mild vision problems(used glasses to read and watch tv, didn't for anything else) and I use ortho-k to give me 20/15 vision all the time.
Ortho-K has been around since the 60's, but has only recently gotten better due to tech like eye laser mapping and good software for designing the lenses. You never hear about it though because Lasik is all the rage.
My vision was around 20/25 in one eye and 20/30 in another. I mostly had mild astigmatism in both eyes, enough to need glasses for crisp vision but not enough for driving and so on.
Lasik wasn't an option because my prescription was so mild. I also didn't want to wear contacts all the time. So enter Ortho-K.
Basically Ortho-K is hard contact lenses(RGP lenses) that you wear at night and they reshape your eyes. The reshaping is temporary, but it lasts anywhere from 24-48 hours after you remove the lenses. It's 100% safe and completely reversable. The only down side is that you have to wear contacts lenses when you sleep and it's not an option if your vision is real bad.
The doctor I went to nailed my vision down to 20/15 vision in both eyes. As I grow older and my eyesight changes, he can simply alter my prescription and keep my vision at this level.
No doubt the "patent" also applies to various Linux distributions, but obviously they're not being sued because there's little money in them.
With all the hubub over software patents being a danger to open source software, you have to wonder whether or not they're a bigger danger to commercial companies. After all, if you're going to sue someone you're going to go after a company with money. Even better if they're public, as you might be able to extort them into settling behind the scenes since a lawsuit might hurt their share prices.
1) They're apathetic about new technology. 2) If the old language does what they want, why upgrade. It's *Personal* Home Page, after all, not corporate homepage. 3) Why make things more complex, for very little benifit.
You forgot:
4) Because it works.
I've been the admin for Apache/PHP servers for close to 6 years now and I've not ever had PHP cause a single crash. You can have complete idiots writing PHP scripts and you don't have to worry about them taking down you're entire server with a bad piece of code.
The truth of the matter is that people like me don't care which side of the OO fence PHP is on, we just want something that works and we don't want to get phone calls on our off hours about something crashing. PHP is a solid solution for that.
VHS will probably fade out of use like audio cassette tapes have. CDR is cheap and there are a lot of other ways to record sound media, so you don't really need audio cassettes anymore.
DVD recording is getting to be pretty cheap and you have VCR alternatives, like Tivo, that will probably become more and more common(like cable companies implementing the technology), so eventually VHS will just become pointless.
Best Buy's customer service has been in decline for a decade. A couple years back I bought a Geforce 3 card from them, only to find that the card in the box had been switched for some generic piece of junk. Took it back and of course they claimed I had to go through the manufacturer for a return. This went back and forth between them and the manufacturer until I had the manager at the store call the manufacturer himself.
After that, he agreed that it wasn't the manufacturer's fault and that the card could've been swapped out by one of their employees or a customer return and skrink wrapped back up, but they weren't going to do anything about it.
So I called my bank and disputed the charges. After reviewing the details, they sided with me and rejected Best Buy's charges.
It would've been possible for Best Buy to look up my 10+ years of sales/return history with them to see if I was trying to rip them off, but they just don't care. Worse, their attitude is that it's more cost effective to lose customers than pay for customer service. So I spend my $2k+ a year tech splurging at Circuit City instead.
There are lots of stores out there and heck, Best Buy doesn't even offer the best prices anymore, the internet does. But if I walk into a brick and morter store it's because I want service beyond what I'd get out of an internet sale. If I have a problem, I want to be able to talk face to face with a person that can, within reason, solve the issue.
But Best Buy doesn't offer that anymore. It'll be interesting to see if other stores follow their lead.
I think the "speed advantage" of source based distributions is small to non-existant. The advantage to them is the ability to exclude/include support for various compile time features(if you don't need TLS auth in a ftp deamon why compile it in?) and easier cross platform support.
By "automatically" the guy meant that portage is built to use distcc if you simply flip a switch in it's config file. The packages are even written to not use distcc for those pieces of software that won't compile correctly under it.
So in the Gentoo world, yeah, that's pretty friggen automatic.
The study compares security alerts between OSes, but one problem with that is that at least under Linux vendors not only release alerts for the core OS, but for applications as well.
If The Gimp has a security issue a Linux vendor will issue an alert for it.
If Photoshop has a security issue, MS won't inform you.
Also most alerts I see for Linux are pro-active, someone finding a bug that may be exploitable. Most alerts I see for MS are reactive, pluging a hole that has been exploited. That's the primary difference between open and closed source software. Not the number of bugs found, but when they're found and how fast they get fixed.
French bashing is hardly only an American thing, go to Canada and start talking to people about Quebec. I'm sure there's plenty of French jokes in in the UK as well.
It's not that it's poorly written(though MS products were never designed around security, because their customers were never interested in it), it's that they typically aren't proactive on fixing issues like this.
OSS projects are better at this because practically anyone can submit a bug fix and individual reputations are on the line if something doesn't get fixed.
So am I like the last person on Earth that doesn't use cell phones? The boss bought me one for work, but it just sits on my desk gathering dust. If anyone calls me on it I immediately tell them to call my landline.
Heck, when I mentioned I didn't carry one to my sister she asked, "What do you do if your car breaks down?". I responded, "Um, walk?".
I guess it's amazing humans survived without them for so long. Frankly I don't see the appeal. I like being out of contact when I leave the house. It's relaxing.
Stallman's arguement isn't that selling the software is unethical just that prohibiting others from owning it is.
No one prohibits you from modifying a car you buy because you own the car. But with proprietary software you're not allowed to modify it when you buy it, because you don't own it.
It's like buying a car but only being able to drive it if you rent software from the car dealer so you can start it up. That would be silly, and yet before the FSF we could only run computer hardware by renting the software used to make the computer run.
I'm 33 and have newphews and nieces that are 16-22. We're basically a generation apart, but the sad thing is that I listen to the exact same music they do. Do I listen to the same music my parents do? No. Why? Because the music I listen to is very different.
But music hasn't evolved much since the 70's, so bands today sound like they did then. If it had evolved I'd hate the music my nieces and newphews like and they'd lament that I just didn't understand it.
A new video game I bought, Battlefield Vietnam, featured select tracks from songs from the early 70's. While playing it I was shocked at how good those songs were, not because I could recognize good music when I heard it(even though it was good), but because you could drop any one of those tracks on a modern alt/rock music station and it'd sound like any other song on the radio today. Music just hasn't evolved much in the past 30 years.
It was a good show, the reasons they listed why the music industry is in such trouble:
CD sales in the 80's caused a massive boom in the industry because everyone was replacing their older records. This caused major industry corps to come in and gobble everyone up, because they wanted in on the action.
But the new corp culture revolved around quarterly reports and set schedules. So musicians are pressured to produce on a schedule to meet profit quotas. This doesn't make for good music.
MTV also changed the face of music. If you can get on MTV you get massive exposure. The problem with MTV though is that it's about image as much as it is about the music. So we end up with pop stars like Britney Spears who's pretty to look at but sounds like drek.
Clear Channel now owns a significant amount of radio stations and they will only accept so many new songs in a week. Record people now look for a "sellable" song that the stations will play(basically something just like they're playing already) because you want that mass exposure to hook people into buying your album. It's not about good music, it's about having a hit single.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone used DSPAM with xmail?
The US is a lot more sprawled out than Europe, so public transportation has a harder time working over here. Go to New York and you'll see a solid public transportation system, because the city population is so compact that it becomes effective.
That's the difference between a vendors that supports you and one that doesn't.
NVidia isn't a problem under Linux because they actually put out decent drivers for it. But ATI support is horrid, because the company barely puts any effort into Linux drivers.
I can't believe how many whingeing morons I've seen tonight saying "Argh! no source!! ev1l!!" and "aww, only five gigs! stingy bastards, I won't be able to run my eCommerce site on _that!_"
The reason many of us go "Argh, no source, evil" is because we've been burned by close source vendors in the past. In fact, I have a current problem that is caused by our use of a close sourced product. I upgraded our servers to use NPTL on glibc so we can implement apache in a more enterprise mode of operation.
Well, that NPTL switch broke our backup application on Linux. I could fix the problem in 5 minutes if I had the source code to it, in fact I had to do just that when the NPTL switch broke portmap on my home server. But because the app is closed source I have to call the vendor and try to explain to them #1 what the problem is I'm having(get past their level 1 support morons) and #2 beg and hope to God that they already have an updated verson that's NPTL compliant.
But odds are they won't have an update(the famous, "That's not a supported configuration" bullshit line) which means I'll be screwed. Worse yet, my boss actually paid money to them so I could have the plesure of getting screwed over.
So in general I give out a big helping of "No thank you" to any closed source program on my servers. It has nothing to do with the money, I just don't like being under the thumb of a single vendor's support program.
The problem is that flying is by nature extremely dangerous. If a car breaks down you simply coast to a stop at the side of the road. Even with car accidents, many times the accident is a glancing blow and you slide or tumble to a stop hundreds of feet away.
But with flying every accident or failure can mean plumetting straight towards the planet.
It would be like driving around in a car, except that if your car broke down or you ended up in an accident you always slammed into an unmovable concrete wall going 200 mph.
And that doesn't even take into consideration factors like turbulance, downdrafts and all the other funny things the air can just suddenly do to you.
I think we're already experiencing something similar to that with just the internet. For example, we've had diet fads before but the current Atkins / low carb craze is just insane.
I mean, everywhere you go it's low carb this, low carb that, even Coke and Pepsi have low carb versions. Not to mention low carb beers??
Would the low carb craze have been as pervasive, as quick to take off, if it wasn't for the internet? And what happens in another 100 years when communication technology really starts to get advanced?
IMHO the OSS community is underperforming in picking up new technology and good ideas.
Hardly. There are a lot of OSS projects that are leading the way with new technologies and in implementing good ideas.
But in quite a few areas it's not at all uncommon to see slow support for new tech. The community divides about how to implement the new ideas, which slows things down, but that division fosters competition and provides a base for testing out different ways of getting the new tech out the door.
Sometimes doing it well is better than doing it first.
Orthokeratology or Ortho-K for short.
Basically they're reverse geometry rigid gas permeable contact lenses that reshape your eyes. Bad vision is caused by bumps and ridges in our visible part of the eye and Ortho-K is the art of flattening that part of the eye to correct vision. Your eyes are elastic and will hold their shape for 24-48 hours if you reshape them. So you wear these contacts at night and have good vision for the rest of the day. With Ortho-K the contacts are specially designed for you based off a laser map of your eye and the use of cad-like software to create the lenses.
I had mild vision problems(used glasses to read and watch tv, didn't for anything else) and I use ortho-k to give me 20/15 vision all the time.
Ortho-K has been around since the 60's, but has only recently gotten better due to tech like eye laser mapping and good software for designing the lenses. You never hear about it though because Lasik is all the rage.
My vision was around 20/25 in one eye and 20/30 in another. I mostly had mild astigmatism in both eyes, enough to need glasses for crisp vision but not enough for driving and so on.
Lasik wasn't an option because my prescription was so mild. I also didn't want to wear contacts all the time. So enter Ortho-K.
Basically Ortho-K is hard contact lenses(RGP lenses) that you wear at night and they reshape your eyes. The reshaping is temporary, but it lasts anywhere from 24-48 hours after you remove the lenses. It's 100% safe and completely reversable. The only down side is that you have to wear contacts lenses when you sleep and it's not an option if your vision is real bad.
The doctor I went to nailed my vision down to 20/15 vision in both eyes. As I grow older and my eyesight changes, he can simply alter my prescription and keep my vision at this level.
See http://www.ortho-k.net/ for more information.
No doubt the "patent" also applies to various Linux distributions, but obviously they're not being sued because there's little money in them.
With all the hubub over software patents being a danger to open source software, you have to wonder whether or not they're a bigger danger to commercial companies. After all, if you're going to sue someone you're going to go after a company with money. Even better if they're public, as you might be able to extort them into settling behind the scenes since a lawsuit might hurt their share prices.
1) They're apathetic about new technology.
2) If the old language does what they want, why upgrade. It's *Personal* Home Page, after all, not corporate homepage.
3) Why make things more complex, for very little benifit.
You forgot:
4) Because it works.
I've been the admin for Apache/PHP servers for close to 6 years now and I've not ever had PHP cause a single crash. You can have complete idiots writing PHP scripts and you don't have to worry about them taking down you're entire server with a bad piece of code.
The truth of the matter is that people like me don't care which side of the OO fence PHP is on, we just want something that works and we don't want to get phone calls on our off hours about something crashing. PHP is a solid solution for that.
VHS will probably fade out of use like audio cassette tapes have. CDR is cheap and there are a lot of other ways to record sound media, so you don't really need audio cassettes anymore.
DVD recording is getting to be pretty cheap and you have VCR alternatives, like Tivo, that will probably become more and more common(like cable companies implementing the technology), so eventually VHS will just become pointless.
Best Buy's customer service has been in decline for a decade. A couple years back I bought a Geforce 3 card from them, only to find that the card in the box had been switched for some generic piece of junk. Took it back and of course they claimed I had to go through the manufacturer for a return. This went back and forth between them and the manufacturer until I had the manager at the store call the manufacturer himself.
After that, he agreed that it wasn't the manufacturer's fault and that the card could've been swapped out by one of their employees or a customer return and skrink wrapped back up, but they weren't going to do anything about it.
So I called my bank and disputed the charges. After reviewing the details, they sided with me and rejected Best Buy's charges.
It would've been possible for Best Buy to look up my 10+ years of sales/return history with them to see if I was trying to rip them off, but they just don't care. Worse, their attitude is that it's more cost effective to lose customers than pay for customer service. So I spend my $2k+ a year tech splurging at Circuit City instead.
There are lots of stores out there and heck, Best Buy doesn't even offer the best prices anymore, the internet does. But if I walk into a brick and morter store it's because I want service beyond what I'd get out of an internet sale. If I have a problem, I want to be able to talk face to face with a person that can, within reason, solve the issue.
But Best Buy doesn't offer that anymore. It'll be interesting to see if other stores follow their lead.
I think the "speed advantage" of source based distributions is small to non-existant. The advantage to them is the ability to exclude/include support for various compile time features(if you don't need TLS auth in a ftp deamon why compile it in?) and easier cross platform support.
By "automatically" the guy meant that portage is built to use distcc if you simply flip a switch in it's config file. The packages are even written to not use distcc for those pieces of software that won't compile correctly under it.
So in the Gentoo world, yeah, that's pretty friggen automatic.
The study compares security alerts between OSes, but one problem with that is that at least under Linux vendors not only release alerts for the core OS, but for applications as well.
If The Gimp has a security issue a Linux vendor will issue an alert for it.
If Photoshop has a security issue, MS won't inform you.
Also most alerts I see for Linux are pro-active, someone finding a bug that may be exploitable. Most alerts I see for MS are reactive, pluging a hole that has been exploited. That's the primary difference between open and closed source software. Not the number of bugs found, but when they're found and how fast they get fixed.
French bashing is hardly only an American thing, go to Canada and start talking to people about Quebec. I'm sure there's plenty of French jokes in in the UK as well.
It's not that it's poorly written(though MS products were never designed around security, because their customers were never interested in it), it's that they typically aren't proactive on fixing issues like this.
OSS projects are better at this because practically anyone can submit a bug fix and individual reputations are on the line if something doesn't get fixed.
I signed up for it when it first came out and it's worked for me pretty well. I got one sales call since then and reported them.
They're not quite that dumb. They'd leave the existing technologies alone and instead just use the bill to kill off any new innovation.
Consumers won't complain about missing products they've never seen or heard of.
So am I like the last person on Earth that doesn't use cell phones? The boss bought me one for work, but it just sits on my desk gathering dust. If anyone calls me on it I immediately tell them to call my landline.
Heck, when I mentioned I didn't carry one to my sister she asked, "What do you do if your car breaks down?". I responded, "Um, walk?".
I guess it's amazing humans survived without them for so long. Frankly I don't see the appeal. I like being out of contact when I leave the house. It's relaxing.
Here you go:
5 /2 5/1838201&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=134
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0
Stallman's arguement isn't that selling the software is unethical just that prohibiting others from owning it is.
No one prohibits you from modifying a car you buy because you own the car. But with proprietary software you're not allowed to modify it when you buy it, because you don't own it.
It's like buying a car but only being able to drive it if you rent software from the car dealer so you can start it up. That would be silly, and yet before the FSF we could only run computer hardware by renting the software used to make the computer run.
I'm 33 and have newphews and nieces that are 16-22. We're basically a generation apart, but the sad thing is that I listen to the exact same music they do. Do I listen to the same music my parents do? No. Why? Because the music I listen to is very different.
But music hasn't evolved much since the 70's, so bands today sound like they did then. If it had evolved I'd hate the music my nieces and newphews like and they'd lament that I just didn't understand it.
A new video game I bought, Battlefield Vietnam, featured select tracks from songs from the early 70's. While playing it I was shocked at how good those songs were, not because I could recognize good music when I heard it(even though it was good), but because you could drop any one of those tracks on a modern alt/rock music station and it'd sound like any other song on the radio today. Music just hasn't evolved much in the past 30 years.
It was a good show, the reasons they listed why the music industry is in such trouble:
CD sales in the 80's caused a massive boom in the industry because everyone was replacing their older records. This caused major industry corps to come in and gobble everyone up, because they wanted in on the action.
But the new corp culture revolved around quarterly reports and set schedules. So musicians are pressured to produce on a schedule to meet profit quotas. This doesn't make for good music.
MTV also changed the face of music. If you can get on MTV you get massive exposure. The problem with MTV though is that it's about image as much as it is about the music. So we end up with pop stars like Britney Spears who's pretty to look at but sounds like drek.
Clear Channel now owns a significant amount of radio stations and they will only accept so many new songs in a week. Record people now look for a "sellable" song that the stations will play(basically something just like they're playing already) because you want that mass exposure to hook people into buying your album. It's not about good music, it's about having a hit single.