I mean, I've created a small library which is comprised of a few thousands lines of code and I released it under the GPL. Yet, although it is a GPLed project, I wouldn't even want to compare it to Apache or the linux kernel, let alone count it as an equal.
The guy wasn't exactly writing drivers. He was picking up Creative's drivers and tweaking off some checks. But yes, the guy is no dumb knob to be able to do that.
Well, that would be fine and dandy if the real problem behind Creative's Windows Vista drivers were the result of incompetence. On the other hand, what daniel_k said made me strongly believe that Creative was intentionally fucking up the drivers in order to make their products appear rotten in Windows Vista and then force their users into an upgrade cycle. That has nothing to do with misunderstanding a hacker's mentality. That's screwing us all, the potential clients, up the ass.
I'm far from being an expert in TXTMob but it appears that it relies on user-defined mailing lists to send and receive text messages. That's probably what the NYC lawyers are looking for.
As basically nowadays everything is privately owned and even governments are beginning to delegate and privatize public services and management of public property and assets, your argument of "no free speech in private property" ends up meaning that the concept of free speech will only be valid in theory and in practice we experience widespread censorship.
You have a point. Nonetheless, we already have languages and tools which advanced the user-friendly aspect of programming quite a bit, not to mention WYSIWYG RAD tools which dumb things down quite a bit. Moreover, some complex languages like C++ are currently blessed with programming toolkits like Qt which make it possible for someone to put up a simple application in a matter of minutes. And then we have that ton of interpreted languages, some of them almost read like english.
But even with all that progress behind our backs, we are only seeing myspace-bound mouse potatoes.
Indeed. The people pushing heterogeneous multicore systems (i.e., AMD) state that heterogeneous cores are the future while people pushing homogeneous, large scale multicore systems (i.e., Tilera) state that homogeneous multi-core systems will be the norm. Meanwhile IBM, which happens to be pushing both technologies through their big iron and their cell, states that both will be the future....
However, what multiple cores might do is enable previously impractical tasks to be done on modest PCs. Things like NP problems, optimizations, simulations. Of course these things are already being done, but not on the same scale as things like, say, spreadsheets, video/sound/picture editing, gaming, blogging, etc. I'm talking about relatively ordinary people being able to do things that now require supercomputers, experimenting and creating on their own laptops. Multi core programs can be written to make this feasible.
Idealisms... Unfortunately reality doesn't play by those rules, as thirty years ago bright minds predicted that knowing how to program a machine with high level programing languages would be also a trivial thing for "relatively ordinary people". So what do we see? The "relatively ordinary people" do have powerful computers but they don't go much further than chatrooms, myspace and blogs.
One could say that it's very popular but at my last check, pclinuxos was more popular. http://www.distrowatch.com/ agrees.
So you presented distrowatch as the basis of your allegation that the obscure PClinuxOS distribution is somehow more popular than Ubuntu. Do you happen to know that what distrowatch measures isn't the install base of the individual linux distributions but in fact the number of hits on a certain distrowatch page that covers a certain distro? That means that, if you have an happy idiot who likes to spend it's day refreshing some obscure distrowatch's distro page then that distro is bound to get hugely popular. Heck, the fact that distrowatch lists something named Sabayon as more popular than Mandriva, Slackware, Gentoo and even Debian should be a clear sign that Distrowatch is a joke at measuring the popularity of linux distributions.
Hey, maybe you should I don't know... read up on your history before making stupid comments? I did read the article. It specifically said there was one internet cafe in the entire country. You'd find more even in poorer African countries.
That's an amusing remark as a) it's clear that you don't have a clue about what you are talking about and b) once you realize what you said was bullshit, you promptly contradict yourself. After all, in the previous message you claimed that "the Cuban government hasn't allowed internet access into their country" but now you state that yes, the Cuban government does in fact allow internet access but somehow other countries have more "internets". Very amusing indeed.
There is no U.S. blockade of Cuba, that happened only during the Cuban missile crisis. Any other country is still free to trade with Cuba without intervention from the U.S.. The Soviet Union continued to do so during the cold war.
You are really funny. After all, what you are claiming goes directly against the US's government policy regarding Cuba for the last... four decades. Why not learn a thing or two about the US's embargo against Cuba, specially the hardening of the restrictions done in the past 10 years through the Helms-Burton Act, before spewing your ignorance all around your posts? Maybe next you will try to claim that the US hadn't anything to do with the bay of pigs fiasco, I bet.
And they aren't socialists, it's communism.
Funny stuff! I see that ignorance can produce really funny things. I mean, you spew your nonsense about Cuba and you don't even know that Cuba is in fact a socialist republic that has adopted a socialist constitution. Heck, you may even believe that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (URSS) couldn't possibly be tied to socialism. Impossible!
The U.S. spent billions if not trillions fighting the soviet union in the 80's and we basically won. But you're probably not from the U.S. so you'll go on making up history to make us look like the bad guy while the people of Cuba continue to live under a dictator with restricted freedom.
And as the soviet union crumbled, Cuba stopped being a socialist state. Right... And of course, all the propaganda that keeps being fed to you will, along with the profound ignorance and total lack of understand of the issue being discussed that you displayed, makes you an authority on Cuba's history and governance. Right...
It is said that ignorance is bliss and, based on the nonsense that you keep on posting, I do believe that you are an extremely happy idiot.
No one in their right mind claims that Cuba's hold on the national media is a good thing. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the Cuban state's grip on the national media wasn't exactly implemented due to some sadistic motivation to screw all Cubans. In fact, the reasoning behind that grip was national security, as it was known by then that the US's reaction to losing their grip on any latin america country's governance was to attack the newly implemented government. Those attacks always involved manipulating the country's public opinion through the US's control of the country's media networks, with the intent of shaping the people's minds with nasty propaganda campaign. So, when Castro dethroned the US's private dictator he cut down, he was already expecting that type of retaliation, which forced him to regain control of the nation's media outlets and never let go.
But hey, don't take my word on it. You can simply look into Venezuela's 2002 coup, the involvement of the Venezuela's "independent" media and the US's influence on the attempt to overthrow a democratically elected, popular president.
Not to mention, it doesn't make any sense applying the per capita income calculation to Cuba. It's true that the average Cuban "salary" is low but, unlike profoundly capitalist nations such as the US, all basic human needs are provided by the state. Things such as healthcare, education, housing, public transportation and even food are freely provided by the state. That means that, unlike what happens in capitalist nations like the US, Cubans don't spend their salary on basic human needs. We are talking about expenses that, in the US, would cover more than the average person's paycheck. How many americans find themselves bankrupt due to not having enough cash to pay their medical bills or education?
Sorry but you are letting your ignorance get ahead of your judgement. If you had simply read the article, you would know that the Cuban government does indeed allow internet access in Cuba. The problem is that internet access isn't cheap and, as Cuba's economy is in shambles thanks to the US' blockade, there isn't all that money floating around to spend on luxuries.
But hey, why let facts get ahead of your pretty rant against those evil Cuban socialists?
That is all find and dandy. Nonetheless, if you paid a bit of attention to what is being posted to this discussion before unleashing your dim wit through your post, you would've noticed that a fair share of posters were already clamoring the subversive nature of these networks. Things like dropping freedom wireless cards, running wifi access point freedom blimps and dumping loads of freedom USB flash drives filled with US propaganda on Cuba's beaches were already being seriously suggested as a means to help these courageous file sharing freedom fighters. And yet you try to label someone stating the obvious (which you've clearly weren't able to get it through your little mind) as being "a complete simpleton". How quaint.
About 16 years ago, in a time of floppy disks, 486s and joysticks, I also was a part of such a network. Media such as the anarchist cookbook and all kinds of software were passed around by hand through packs of floppy disks from one person to another, spreading through everyone.
Mind you, that took place in a western european country, a free country with freedom of expression as best as the world could muster. Yet, that network, which TFA tries to label as a sign of subversive actions against a government went ahead anyway. How could that be?
The thing is, that has absolutely nothing to do with dissent or trying to overthrow any government. People form data sharing networks because they want to share data. With the internet we belong to multiple P2P networks. Before that we had FTPs. Before that we had BBS. If there is no electronic network available then that doesn't stop anyone. Instead of a computer network, people networks are formed. Nowadays, instead of floppy disks or even CD-RWs we have USB mass storage devices such as flash drives.
So quite simply the article is nothing more than yet another piece of anti-Cuba propaganda. Just because there are people in Cuba sharing media around does that mean that they do it with subversive intentions in mind? If you fire up your FTP client does it mean that you are also trying to overthrow your country's government? What about your USB drive? And what about SD cards? What a rebellion.
Get another card. Reward manufacturers supporting Open Source by supporting them.
Have you ever tried to get your hands on a wireless network card that is fully supported under linux? Currently, the best products available are at best the ones that run on those binary blob drivers. How exactly do you vote with your money if there isn't a single apt candidate out there?
ndiswrapper isn't the first choice to run some hardware. It's the very last choice, which people are forced to take instead of being forced to not use anything.
Not quite. Politicians end up using the lawsuit weapon as a damage minimization tool. When the damaging information is already out and there is no possibility to make it go away, to avoid looking corrupt they usually start a bunch of lawsuits so that they can get some spotlight time to announce the world that the entire scandal is nothing more than a smear campaign targeting an innocent, upright citizen. They use that time to tell the world (at least their constituents) that the accusations are nothing more than vicious lies and that they are going to fight those nasty, evil liars and bring them to justice. Then the lawsuit goes on very uninterestingly, the media loses interest on the case, everyone forgets the whole thing and then it doesn't matter the outcome of the case. After all, the last thing that their constituents have heard about that problem was that that honorable politician was fighting those liars who were trying to smear his good name.
With Microsoft's OOXML dead and with a pack of FLOSS office suites evolving quite nicely (openoffice, koffice, etc...) , that revenue stream will soon dry out. It will be the very same scenario involving linux and windows.
The problem is various legal systems are unprepared for the fight, which is why he claims we must change the structure of the Internet.
Oh that's just great. So just because poor mr Dempsey woke up one day believing that someone wasn't ready for a fictional fight then we all should just drop the world's communications infrastructures and rebuild it according to mr Dempsey's vision. For the sake of those poor unprepared legal systems, of course. And also the world's safety. And the children, now that we are at it.
What mr Dempsey is advocating is nothing more than taking over the control of the medium. No one has it and he wants it badly, claiming that it's in everyone's best interests to be controlled by an overreaching, totalitarian organization. Well guess what mr Dempsey, the internet works great just as it is and no one benefits from having a righteous mr Dempsey, head of the internets, fighting the fight that those poor, fictional legal systems are supposedly incapable of carrying out.
And how do you, exactly, express a complex, hierarchical configuration (as is often needed for real servers, not your typical home *NIX box serving your e-mail) in an unambigious, standard, predictable, system-independent way using ini files?
You mean, like YAML? Granted, it isn't a ISO standard (yet?) but that hasn't stopped microsoft nor anyone from using INI files for the past... twenty years?
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I mean, I've created a small library which is comprised of a few thousands lines of code and I released it under the GPL. Yet, although it is a GPLed project, I wouldn't even want to compare it to Apache or the linux kernel, let alone count it as an equal.
The guy wasn't exactly writing drivers. He was picking up Creative's drivers and tweaking off some checks. But yes, the guy is no dumb knob to be able to do that.
Well, that would be fine and dandy if the real problem behind Creative's Windows Vista drivers were the result of incompetence. On the other hand, what daniel_k said made me strongly believe that Creative was intentionally fucking up the drivers in order to make their products appear rotten in Windows Vista and then force their users into an upgrade cycle. That has nothing to do with misunderstanding a hacker's mentality. That's screwing us all, the potential clients, up the ass.
I'm far from being an expert in TXTMob but it appears that it relies on user-defined mailing lists to send and receive text messages. That's probably what the NYC lawyers are looking for.
As basically nowadays everything is privately owned and even governments are beginning to delegate and privatize public services and management of public property and assets, your argument of "no free speech in private property" ends up meaning that the concept of free speech will only be valid in theory and in practice we experience widespread censorship.
Don't be fooled. NOAA is only there to try to make this whole issue look like a storm in a tea cup. Sneaky bastards.
They are trying to develop the funniest joke in the world.
And judging by the current number of posts, someone added this article to the do-not-care list.
Isn't that the motto of IBM's business model?
You have a point. Nonetheless, we already have languages and tools which advanced the user-friendly aspect of programming quite a bit, not to mention WYSIWYG RAD tools which dumb things down quite a bit. Moreover, some complex languages like C++ are currently blessed with programming toolkits like Qt which make it possible for someone to put up a simple application in a matter of minutes. And then we have that ton of interpreted languages, some of them almost read like english.
But even with all that progress behind our backs, we are only seeing myspace-bound mouse potatoes.
Indeed. The people pushing heterogeneous multicore systems (i.e., AMD) state that heterogeneous cores are the future while people pushing homogeneous, large scale multicore systems (i.e., Tilera) state that homogeneous multi-core systems will be the norm. Meanwhile IBM, which happens to be pushing both technologies through their big iron and their cell, states that both will be the future....
Do you start to detect a pattern here?
Idealisms... Unfortunately reality doesn't play by those rules, as thirty years ago bright minds predicted that knowing how to program a machine with high level programing languages would be also a trivial thing for "relatively ordinary people". So what do we see? The "relatively ordinary people" do have powerful computers but they don't go much further than chatrooms, myspace and blogs.
So you presented distrowatch as the basis of your allegation that the obscure PClinuxOS distribution is somehow more popular than Ubuntu. Do you happen to know that what distrowatch measures isn't the install base of the individual linux distributions but in fact the number of hits on a certain distrowatch page that covers a certain distro? That means that, if you have an happy idiot who likes to spend it's day refreshing some obscure distrowatch's distro page then that distro is bound to get hugely popular. Heck, the fact that distrowatch lists something named Sabayon as more popular than Mandriva, Slackware, Gentoo and even Debian should be a clear sign that Distrowatch is a joke at measuring the popularity of linux distributions.
You don't have to go much further to get other sources of statistics that show that Ubuntu is the second most popular distro behind Debian and that pclinuxos doesn't even appear in the chart.
That's an amusing remark as a) it's clear that you don't have a clue about what you are talking about and b) once you realize what you said was bullshit, you promptly contradict yourself. After all, in the previous message you claimed that "the Cuban government hasn't allowed internet access into their country" but now you state that yes, the Cuban government does in fact allow internet access but somehow other countries have more "internets". Very amusing indeed.
You are really funny. After all, what you are claiming goes directly against the US's government policy regarding Cuba for the last... four decades. Why not learn a thing or two about the US's embargo against Cuba, specially the hardening of the restrictions done in the past 10 years through the Helms-Burton Act, before spewing your ignorance all around your posts? Maybe next you will try to claim that the US hadn't anything to do with the bay of pigs fiasco, I bet.
Funny stuff! I see that ignorance can produce really funny things. I mean, you spew your nonsense about Cuba and you don't even know that Cuba is in fact a socialist republic that has adopted a socialist constitution. Heck, you may even believe that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (URSS) couldn't possibly be tied to socialism. Impossible!
And as the soviet union crumbled, Cuba stopped being a socialist state. Right... And of course, all the propaganda that keeps being fed to you will, along with the profound ignorance and total lack of understand of the issue being discussed that you displayed, makes you an authority on Cuba's history and governance. Right...
It is said that ignorance is bliss and, based on the nonsense that you keep on posting, I do believe that you are an extremely happy idiot.
No one in their right mind claims that Cuba's hold on the national media is a good thing. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the Cuban state's grip on the national media wasn't exactly implemented due to some sadistic motivation to screw all Cubans. In fact, the reasoning behind that grip was national security, as it was known by then that the US's reaction to losing their grip on any latin america country's governance was to attack the newly implemented government. Those attacks always involved manipulating the country's public opinion through the US's control of the country's media networks, with the intent of shaping the people's minds with nasty propaganda campaign. So, when Castro dethroned the US's private dictator he cut down, he was already expecting that type of retaliation, which forced him to regain control of the nation's media outlets and never let go.
But hey, don't take my word on it. You can simply look into Venezuela's 2002 coup, the involvement of the Venezuela's "independent" media and the US's influence on the attempt to overthrow a democratically elected, popular president.
Not to mention, it doesn't make any sense applying the per capita income calculation to Cuba. It's true that the average Cuban "salary" is low but, unlike profoundly capitalist nations such as the US, all basic human needs are provided by the state. Things such as healthcare, education, housing, public transportation and even food are freely provided by the state. That means that, unlike what happens in capitalist nations like the US, Cubans don't spend their salary on basic human needs. We are talking about expenses that, in the US, would cover more than the average person's paycheck. How many americans find themselves bankrupt due to not having enough cash to pay their medical bills or education?
Sorry but you are letting your ignorance get ahead of your judgement. If you had simply read the article, you would know that the Cuban government does indeed allow internet access in Cuba. The problem is that internet access isn't cheap and, as Cuba's economy is in shambles thanks to the US' blockade, there isn't all that money floating around to spend on luxuries.
But hey, why let facts get ahead of your pretty rant against those evil Cuban socialists?
That is all find and dandy. Nonetheless, if you paid a bit of attention to what is being posted to this discussion before unleashing your dim wit through your post, you would've noticed that a fair share of posters were already clamoring the subversive nature of these networks. Things like dropping freedom wireless cards, running wifi access point freedom blimps and dumping loads of freedom USB flash drives filled with US propaganda on Cuba's beaches were already being seriously suggested as a means to help these courageous file sharing freedom fighters. And yet you try to label someone stating the obvious (which you've clearly weren't able to get it through your little mind) as being "a complete simpleton". How quaint.
About 16 years ago, in a time of floppy disks, 486s and joysticks, I also was a part of such a network. Media such as the anarchist cookbook and all kinds of software were passed around by hand through packs of floppy disks from one person to another, spreading through everyone.
Mind you, that took place in a western european country, a free country with freedom of expression as best as the world could muster. Yet, that network, which TFA tries to label as a sign of subversive actions against a government went ahead anyway. How could that be?
The thing is, that has absolutely nothing to do with dissent or trying to overthrow any government. People form data sharing networks because they want to share data. With the internet we belong to multiple P2P networks. Before that we had FTPs. Before that we had BBS. If there is no electronic network available then that doesn't stop anyone. Instead of a computer network, people networks are formed. Nowadays, instead of floppy disks or even CD-RWs we have USB mass storage devices such as flash drives.
So quite simply the article is nothing more than yet another piece of anti-Cuba propaganda. Just because there are people in Cuba sharing media around does that mean that they do it with subversive intentions in mind? If you fire up your FTP client does it mean that you are also trying to overthrow your country's government? What about your USB drive? And what about SD cards? What a rebellion.
Have you ever tried to get your hands on a wireless network card that is fully supported under linux? Currently, the best products available are at best the ones that run on those binary blob drivers. How exactly do you vote with your money if there isn't a single apt candidate out there?
ndiswrapper isn't the first choice to run some hardware. It's the very last choice, which people are forced to take instead of being forced to not use anything.
Not quite. Politicians end up using the lawsuit weapon as a damage minimization tool. When the damaging information is already out and there is no possibility to make it go away, to avoid looking corrupt they usually start a bunch of lawsuits so that they can get some spotlight time to announce the world that the entire scandal is nothing more than a smear campaign targeting an innocent, upright citizen. They use that time to tell the world (at least their constituents) that the accusations are nothing more than vicious lies and that they are going to fight those nasty, evil liars and bring them to justice. Then the lawsuit goes on very uninterestingly, the media loses interest on the case, everyone forgets the whole thing and then it doesn't matter the outcome of the case. After all, the last thing that their constituents have heard about that problem was that that honorable politician was fighting those liars who were trying to smear his good name.
With Microsoft's OOXML dead and with a pack of FLOSS office suites evolving quite nicely (openoffice, koffice, etc...) , that revenue stream will soon dry out. It will be the very same scenario involving linux and windows.
Oh that's just great. So just because poor mr Dempsey woke up one day believing that someone wasn't ready for a fictional fight then we all should just drop the world's communications infrastructures and rebuild it according to mr Dempsey's vision. For the sake of those poor unprepared legal systems, of course. And also the world's safety. And the children, now that we are at it.
What mr Dempsey is advocating is nothing more than taking over the control of the medium. No one has it and he wants it badly, claiming that it's in everyone's best interests to be controlled by an overreaching, totalitarian organization. Well guess what mr Dempsey, the internet works great just as it is and no one benefits from having a righteous mr Dempsey, head of the internets, fighting the fight that those poor, fictional legal systems are supposedly incapable of carrying out.
You mean, like YAML? Granted, it isn't a ISO standard (yet?) but that hasn't stopped microsoft nor anyone from using INI files for the past... twenty years?
Nonetheless, they do have a nice set of tatas.