You, sir, win the award for worst analogy ever. Restaurants only stay in business if enough people patronize them to make the restaurant worth running. Web pages, on the other hand, are almost, if not totally free to toss up. Some things are crap, some things are gold, but I think the crap to gold ratio goes way up as the number of pages increases. The crap that goes up on the internet stays up, the crappy restaurants don't. Google's PageRank is supposed to filter out things that no one else thinks is worthy of linking to, which can eliminate much of the problems caused by a high crap to gold ratio, but the gradparent's statement that adding many more web pages may harm results is a perfectly plausible assertion.
I'm as big a fan of open source as the next geek, but I'm not sure the connection between open-source software and book replacement is really clear.
Textbooks are expensive. Open source software is cheap. Pocket PC hardware costs as much as one or two textbooks, so if you can replace a whole bookshelf with a Pocket PC, that's quite an accomplishment. Paying for software to run on it would double the price.
How is it missing the point? Did you read the part of the article that mentioned the open source nature of it? "They are wi-fi enabled and run on licence-free open source software to keep costs down." The only reason they recieved this gift is because people allowed their software to be freely used and distributed. That is the point.
Multiple browsers are always going to be a better solution than one dominant browser.
I agree, but there is more than one Free HTML rendering engine, both of which I mentioned in my post. I think Free software is a higher ideal to aspire to than eliminating monocultures, but there are definitely reasons to have differing opinions on that. I was just explaining why many people don't care about Opera.
There's no reason for me to root for Firefox since I don't like it and won't use it
That's a ballsy assertion. Firefox will always be free for you to use, so there's a chance that it may be a better choice for you than Opera at some point.
Consumers want their consoles to have open development platforms whether they know it or not. Imagine the kinds of things people would have done with the PSP right now if Sony actually allowed it. It's understandable why they don't: they make money off of games sales that go through them, whereas some indie developer selling games off his website would get them nothing. The sad truth is that you'll never get such a nice piece of hardware as the PSP for a good price with an open development platform. This device looks nice, but it's missing WiFi. Instead it has a radio that only communicates with other units. I'm sure the other PSP specs are better than this device as well, but it'll be interesting to see what people can do with it when it comes out since they won't have to waste time working around firmware upgrades and the like.
You don't get it. Firefox is a good browser, but there are other good browsers out there as well, such as Opera. There is one thing that sets Firefox apart from Opera, though. It's Free software. Firefox is mine, so of course I'm going to be rooting for it (even though I mainly use Epiphany, another Gecko based browser). When Opera gets nice features, that's nice and all, but that doesn't really do anything for me. I can't try to integrate the browser into GNOME or do anything else that would make the browser more useful for me, because it's not Free.
On the other hand, when Konqueror gets nifty new features, that makes me almost as happy as when Epiphany or Firefox themselves do. Konqueror is mine as well, even though I rarely use it. I know that if at some point, basing the web functionality of GNOME on Mozilla becomes too much of a hassle for various reasons, something like GTK-WebCore could be used as a replacement, thanks to the good work the KHTML people have done.
Opera isn't mine. Even if I paid for a license, it still wouldn't be mine. I still might use it if they come up with some nifty features that are compelling enough, but I'd be rooting for Firefox to catch up so I could go back. There's no reason for me to root for Opera, so that's why I, and quite a few others I suppose, don't really care about Opera.
I think we have a bit of hope though. In a speech in front of the Senate, Bill Frist, the leader of the Senate Republicans, used the "s"-word when discussing this issue. "It isn't just a matter of faith, it's a matter of science." Yeah, I was shocked too. If we're lucky, the bill in question will be passed so we can be done with Bush's inane stem cell research policy.
Get rid of most of the teachers after grade 5 or so and let people who can utilize the vast array of self-tutorials, peer-forums and the sheer power of the internet to learn.
You're missing the point of a grade school education. Chances are, your niece is interested in mathematics in the first place. It's easy to pick up things that you're interested. The main point of grade school is to learn how to learn. Along the way you pick up knowledge that is nice for a productive member of society to have. If your niece doesn't like writing essays, she won't learn how to do that in a teacher-less form of education. Have you seen how much self-motivation most kids lack these days? Your niece is the exception, not the rule.
It saddens me how much teaching is looked down upon as a profession when it is one of the most essential profesions out there. The problem with education in America is that we don't have enough able teachers. The plethora of bad teachers is why you think they're so expendable.
Dvorak harps on about how Creative Commons licensed works hurt his ability to ask someone for permission to copy their work. It does nothing of the sort. If you want to use a Creative Commons licensed work in a way not approved by the license, you ask the creator just like you would otherwise. The reasoning behind the noncommercial license he derides is that the author wants commercial uses to be paid for. That's no different from works under full copyright.
You can still quote Creative Commons licensed writings all you want. The license doesn't affect fair use at all. The only time you need to worry about getting a license to copy a work is when it exceeds fair use.
If you're going to denounce somethign with such vitriol, you should probably at least understand it first.
I agree with the points Asa makes about migration and installing programs, and of these, I'll address the one where I know progress is being made.
Installing programs has been a pain for new Linux users for a long time. It's hard enough to adjust to the new paradigm of getting programs from a central repository, and laying an inadequate interface on top of that doesn't help much either. The main problem with Synaptic, the best apt frontend I've used, is that you have to wade through tons of packages for libraries and servers that few end users will ever touch. To fix this, Ross Burton put together a program that lets you install and remove programs through a tree that mirrors the Applications menu. Instead of installing some cryptic package, you're adding a menu entry. It may not be perfect, but it's vastly simpler. I'm currently working on expanding the program to let you install any application, among other things.
The other issue that people have with installing applications is that the repository might not have the latest, greatest version that the user wants. Ubuntu freezes a set of packages and stabilizes them, which is an approach that works for many users and keeps things bug free. For the next version, the backports project will be come an official part of Ubuntu, making it easier for users to choose if they want the latest packages or the most stable ones. Users won't have to try to install the Firefox binary that the MoFo provides since they'll be able to get it straight from the repositories, precluding any weird library incompatibility problems.
And since when does a fricken blog rate enough to be included here as "news"? It's a blog...which is just random masturbation of words for the amusement of the blogger himself.
I thought nerds were supposed to be progressive and free-thinking. It's horribly close-minded of you to think that just because someone expresses their sentiments on their blog, it deserves less attention than if they had done so on the front page of the New York Times. The reputation of the author is an important aspect of evaluating a piece of rhetoric, and being on the front page of the New York Times does give you a bit of that. In the community, Asa already has a bit of a reputation built up, which is why this rant posted by him is more likely to be put on Slashdot than mine would be, so lacking reputation shouldn't be one of the issues you have with this article. So what is it then? Are you just trying to hop on the bandwagon of Slashdotters who have an issue with blogs for some reason? How about you just read the article and evaluate it for what it actually says?
Everybody seems to think "well just because it doesn't work like Windows then it is flawed."
The article wasn't supposed to be a fair analysis of Linux. New users don't give thing fair analyses. If they don't like the button order and don't want to adapt, they won't use it. That was his point.
I hate it when people tout autopackage as a panacea. On it's own website it says that it's not intended to be a replacement for traditional package management systems, it's supposed to supplement them. What benefit do you think would come from using an autopackage based distro? One package for all distros? You can already install.debs and.rpms on all distros using alien. Regardless, if you're not using the native package management system that your distro uses, the result isn't always perfect.
Also, wanting the distro to be apt based and autopackage based in the same breath is kind of contradictory. The power of apt is based on having large repositories of every program a user could want to install. You have centralized control and you can update and install all your applications from the same place. Autopackage is good because it fills in the gap when distributions ultimately fail to meet this goal. It's not ideal since it introduces a second place for you to have to deal with (un)installation, but it's better than the alternatives. You don't base a distribution on autopackage. In theory you probably could, but there would be quite a few drawbacks and not many benefits. The cross-distro compatibility would only benefit users of other distros, and you would sacrifice mature package management systems for one that isn't even intended for the task you're shoehorning it into.
Autopackage is a good thing, but if you're going to promote it, at least know what it's for.
Firefox uses its own cross-platform toolkit, XUL, not Qt.
Using Qt would make them have to pay for licenses or GPL their program. Since it's not GPL'd already, I assume they have a good reason for doing so. That assumption is most likely wrong, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Many developers aren't well versed in cross-platform development, so hiring developers based on that criteria would probably come at a premium. A Windows-only program, while not ideal, works for most, if not all people. Most people at least have a Windows machine lying around, can run the program in Wine, or have access to a Windows machine at a library. Is it really worth wasting tax money to cater to the small percentage of people that this slightly inconveniences?
If you watch the security changelogs - or the regular changelogs - of ubuntu packages, you'll see that nine out of ten get made by debian, adapted to ubuntu and thrown to the ubuntu servers. Some are just renamed to "-ubuntu" and passed on. And a very few are actually maintained by ubuntu themselves.
Instead of brains, the roaches have ganglia: clumps of nerve cells on various parts of their bodies. ... "It was kind of a no-brainer that (Hertz's bot) would be a piece we would include..."
Is anyone else annoyed that their is no real Windows "updater" for iTunes, and each update basically requires iTunes to reinstall, sometimes clobbering my settings that tell Quicktime to stop bothering me?
You mean you can't just apt-get install itunes?
Oh wait... neither can I. But apt-get install pymusique is even better.
You can hibernate, boot into Windows, and then come back to Linux with everything how you had it. Hibernating works on almost all computers these days.
Almost all car commercials state that the demonstrations are occurring on a closed course. Speeding is perfectly legal on a closed course, and car buyers may want to know of the kind of performance they could get out of the car in such a situation. If they said "buy this car so you can get to work on time," there might be an issue.
I'm guessing you didn't read the decision, which isn't all that surprising. They specifically state that the Betamax rule didn't apply at all in this case. The issue in this case was that the companies promoted their software for the purpose of infringing on copyright. Just because the software was capable of legal uses doesn't mean the law turns a blind eye to people who are trying to profit off of massive copyright infingement, which is exactly what Grokster and Streamcast were trying to do. The more people who infringed on copyright, the more ad revenue they got.
The part of the ruling that I take issue with is that they cite advertising their services as a Napster replacement as proof that they were trying to get people to infringe on copyright with their services. That makes no sense. File sharing networks were a relatively new thing at the turn of the century, and many people wouldn't know what they were talking about if they advertised it as such. However, everyone had heard of Napster. Instead of just saying "Use our file sharing network," they could say "Use our file sharing network! It's kind of like Napster!" and people would automatically understand. That's not illegal, that's just smart advertising.
Regardless, Grokster and Streamcast are extemely stupid companies who were trying to get sued for name recognition, and they should have expected to have to pay for it in the end.
Isn't this the basis of copyright -- credits and permission?!
Copyright just prevents people from copying your work. Fair use provides for using portions of it for the purpose of analysis, which is exactly what you're doing. Orwell's lawyers didn't jump on you when you wrote a paper on Animal Farm in high school.
If you don't want people knowing what you think, don't publish your ideas on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, win the award for worst analogy ever. Restaurants only stay in business if enough people patronize them to make the restaurant worth running. Web pages, on the other hand, are almost, if not totally free to toss up. Some things are crap, some things are gold, but I think the crap to gold ratio goes way up as the number of pages increases. The crap that goes up on the internet stays up, the crappy restaurants don't. Google's PageRank is supposed to filter out things that no one else thinks is worthy of linking to, which can eliminate much of the problems caused by a high crap to gold ratio, but the gradparent's statement that adding many more web pages may harm results is a perfectly plausible assertion.
I'm as big a fan of open source as the next geek, but I'm not sure the connection between open-source software and book replacement is really clear.
Textbooks are expensive. Open source software is cheap. Pocket PC hardware costs as much as one or two textbooks, so if you can replace a whole bookshelf with a Pocket PC, that's quite an accomplishment. Paying for software to run on it would double the price.
How is it missing the point? Did you read the part of the article that mentioned the open source nature of it? "They are wi-fi enabled and run on licence-free open source software to keep costs down." The only reason they recieved this gift is because people allowed their software to be freely used and distributed. That is the point.
Multiple browsers are always going to be a better solution than one dominant browser.
I agree, but there is more than one Free HTML rendering engine, both of which I mentioned in my post. I think Free software is a higher ideal to aspire to than eliminating monocultures, but there are definitely reasons to have differing opinions on that. I was just explaining why many people don't care about Opera.
There's no reason for me to root for Firefox since I don't like it and won't use it
That's a ballsy assertion. Firefox will always be free for you to use, so there's a chance that it may be a better choice for you than Opera at some point.
Consumers want their consoles to have open development platforms whether they know it or not. Imagine the kinds of things people would have done with the PSP right now if Sony actually allowed it. It's understandable why they don't: they make money off of games sales that go through them, whereas some indie developer selling games off his website would get them nothing. The sad truth is that you'll never get such a nice piece of hardware as the PSP for a good price with an open development platform. This device looks nice, but it's missing WiFi. Instead it has a radio that only communicates with other units. I'm sure the other PSP specs are better than this device as well, but it'll be interesting to see what people can do with it when it comes out since they won't have to waste time working around firmware upgrades and the like.
You don't get it. Firefox is a good browser, but there are other good browsers out there as well, such as Opera. There is one thing that sets Firefox apart from Opera, though. It's Free software. Firefox is mine, so of course I'm going to be rooting for it (even though I mainly use Epiphany, another Gecko based browser). When Opera gets nice features, that's nice and all, but that doesn't really do anything for me. I can't try to integrate the browser into GNOME or do anything else that would make the browser more useful for me, because it's not Free.
On the other hand, when Konqueror gets nifty new features, that makes me almost as happy as when Epiphany or Firefox themselves do. Konqueror is mine as well, even though I rarely use it. I know that if at some point, basing the web functionality of GNOME on Mozilla becomes too much of a hassle for various reasons, something like GTK-WebCore could be used as a replacement, thanks to the good work the KHTML people have done.
Opera isn't mine. Even if I paid for a license, it still wouldn't be mine. I still might use it if they come up with some nifty features that are compelling enough, but I'd be rooting for Firefox to catch up so I could go back. There's no reason for me to root for Opera, so that's why I, and quite a few others I suppose, don't really care about Opera.
I think we have a bit of hope though. In a speech in front of the Senate, Bill Frist, the leader of the Senate Republicans, used the "s"-word when discussing this issue. "It isn't just a matter of faith, it's a matter of science." Yeah, I was shocked too. If we're lucky, the bill in question will be passed so we can be done with Bush's inane stem cell research policy.
You create the file and BAM!
. html
It gets spicy?
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/000469
Get rid of most of the teachers after grade 5 or so and let people who can utilize the vast array of self-tutorials, peer-forums and the sheer power of the internet to learn.
You're missing the point of a grade school education. Chances are, your niece is interested in mathematics in the first place. It's easy to pick up things that you're interested. The main point of grade school is to learn how to learn. Along the way you pick up knowledge that is nice for a productive member of society to have. If your niece doesn't like writing essays, she won't learn how to do that in a teacher-less form of education. Have you seen how much self-motivation most kids lack these days? Your niece is the exception, not the rule.
It saddens me how much teaching is looked down upon as a profession when it is one of the most essential profesions out there. The problem with education in America is that we don't have enough able teachers. The plethora of bad teachers is why you think they're so expendable.
Dvorak harps on about how Creative Commons licensed works hurt his ability to ask someone for permission to copy their work. It does nothing of the sort. If you want to use a Creative Commons licensed work in a way not approved by the license, you ask the creator just like you would otherwise. The reasoning behind the noncommercial license he derides is that the author wants commercial uses to be paid for. That's no different from works under full copyright.
You can still quote Creative Commons licensed writings all you want. The license doesn't affect fair use at all. The only time you need to worry about getting a license to copy a work is when it exceeds fair use.
If you're going to denounce somethign with such vitriol, you should probably at least understand it first.
Slashdot UIDs over 900000 make me seem authoritative.
There's no RDP server in GNOME, just a client. I don't even think the client is included in a stock GNOME installation, but some distros add it.
I agree with the points Asa makes about migration and installing programs, and of these, I'll address the one where I know progress is being made.
Installing programs has been a pain for new Linux users for a long time. It's hard enough to adjust to the new paradigm of getting programs from a central repository, and laying an inadequate interface on top of that doesn't help much either. The main problem with Synaptic, the best apt frontend I've used, is that you have to wade through tons of packages for libraries and servers that few end users will ever touch. To fix this, Ross Burton put together a program that lets you install and remove programs through a tree that mirrors the Applications menu. Instead of installing some cryptic package, you're adding a menu entry. It may not be perfect, but it's vastly simpler. I'm currently working on expanding the program to let you install any application, among other things.
The other issue that people have with installing applications is that the repository might not have the latest, greatest version that the user wants. Ubuntu freezes a set of packages and stabilizes them, which is an approach that works for many users and keeps things bug free. For the next version, the backports project will be come an official part of Ubuntu, making it easier for users to choose if they want the latest packages or the most stable ones. Users won't have to try to install the Firefox binary that the MoFo provides since they'll be able to get it straight from the repositories, precluding any weird library incompatibility problems.
Things are getting better.
And since when does a fricken blog rate enough to be included here as "news"? It's a blog...which is just random masturbation of words for the amusement of the blogger himself.
I thought nerds were supposed to be progressive and free-thinking. It's horribly close-minded of you to think that just because someone expresses their sentiments on their blog, it deserves less attention than if they had done so on the front page of the New York Times. The reputation of the author is an important aspect of evaluating a piece of rhetoric, and being on the front page of the New York Times does give you a bit of that. In the community, Asa already has a bit of a reputation built up, which is why this rant posted by him is more likely to be put on Slashdot than mine would be, so lacking reputation shouldn't be one of the issues you have with this article. So what is it then? Are you just trying to hop on the bandwagon of Slashdotters who have an issue with blogs for some reason? How about you just read the article and evaluate it for what it actually says?
Everybody seems to think "well just because it doesn't work like Windows then it is flawed."
The article wasn't supposed to be a fair analysis of Linux. New users don't give thing fair analyses. If they don't like the button order and don't want to adapt, they won't use it. That was his point.
There was a talk on Dirac at GUADEC, which you can watch at the bottom of this page. (Ogg Theora video)
I hate it when people tout autopackage as a panacea. On it's own website it says that it's not intended to be a replacement for traditional package management systems, it's supposed to supplement them. What benefit do you think would come from using an autopackage based distro? One package for all distros? You can already install .debs and .rpms on all distros using alien. Regardless, if you're not using the native package management system that your distro uses, the result isn't always perfect.
Also, wanting the distro to be apt based and autopackage based in the same breath is kind of contradictory. The power of apt is based on having large repositories of every program a user could want to install. You have centralized control and you can update and install all your applications from the same place. Autopackage is good because it fills in the gap when distributions ultimately fail to meet this goal. It's not ideal since it introduces a second place for you to have to deal with (un)installation, but it's better than the alternatives. You don't base a distribution on autopackage. In theory you probably could, but there would be quite a few drawbacks and not many benefits. The cross-distro compatibility would only benefit users of other distros, and you would sacrifice mature package management systems for one that isn't even intended for the task you're shoehorning it into.
Autopackage is a good thing, but if you're going to promote it, at least know what it's for.
If you watch the security changelogs - or the regular changelogs - of ubuntu packages, you'll see that nine out of ten get made by debian, adapted to ubuntu and thrown to the ubuntu servers. Some are just renamed to "-ubuntu" and passed on. And a very few are actually maintained by ubuntu themselves.
Or you could just look on Ubuntu's web page on the matter. It's no secret that without Debian, there would be no Ubuntu.
Instead of brains, the roaches have ganglia: clumps of nerve cells on various parts of their bodies.
...
"It was kind of a no-brainer that (Hertz's bot) would be a piece we would include..."
Zing!
You mean you can't just apt-get install itunes?
Oh wait... neither can I. But apt-get install pymusique is even better.
You can hibernate, boot into Windows, and then come back to Linux with everything how you had it. Hibernating works on almost all computers these days.
Almost all car commercials state that the demonstrations are occurring on a closed course. Speeding is perfectly legal on a closed course, and car buyers may want to know of the kind of performance they could get out of the car in such a situation. If they said "buy this car so you can get to work on time," there might be an issue.
I'm guessing you didn't read the decision, which isn't all that surprising. They specifically state that the Betamax rule didn't apply at all in this case. The issue in this case was that the companies promoted their software for the purpose of infringing on copyright. Just because the software was capable of legal uses doesn't mean the law turns a blind eye to people who are trying to profit off of massive copyright infingement, which is exactly what Grokster and Streamcast were trying to do. The more people who infringed on copyright, the more ad revenue they got.
The part of the ruling that I take issue with is that they cite advertising their services as a Napster replacement as proof that they were trying to get people to infringe on copyright with their services. That makes no sense. File sharing networks were a relatively new thing at the turn of the century, and many people wouldn't know what they were talking about if they advertised it as such. However, everyone had heard of Napster. Instead of just saying "Use our file sharing network," they could say "Use our file sharing network! It's kind of like Napster!" and people would automatically understand. That's not illegal, that's just smart advertising.
Regardless, Grokster and Streamcast are extemely stupid companies who were trying to get sued for name recognition, and they should have expected to have to pay for it in the end.
Copyright just prevents people from copying your work. Fair use provides for using portions of it for the purpose of analysis, which is exactly what you're doing. Orwell's lawyers didn't jump on you when you wrote a paper on Animal Farm in high school.
If you don't want people knowing what you think, don't publish your ideas on the Internet.