Sorry, but at least when you come to Americium or Polonium, I think the people would not like to hear you saying that.
C'mon. Is it really a matter of pride to have your country name related to a chemical element that is unstable, highly radioactive and has no application whatsoever - like Americium od Polonium? Would you want to have your country or city insulted by jokes like "Damn, this place is decaying so quickly! Looks like it has shorter half-life than its chemical element".
1. No support
2. No bugfixes
3. Get the source code for free
It is a sort of philosophy on approaching software distribution. If you want me to go really deep I could explain your its metaphysics, I hope you'll trust me on that. These three points were the Unix philosophy in the 1970's. Not because the Unix creators wanted them to be like this, just because AT&T was not allowed to sell any software on commercial basis. Oddly enough, these three points - written actually by AT&T lawyers - are quite close to what we can call now GNU philosophy. So the GNU community is fighting the biggest monopoly of our days - Microsoft - using philosophy founded by the lawyers of the biggest monopoly of 1940's-1970's, AT&T.
Unix started as a way to run a non-vender-supported OS on cheap PDP-11s.
Also its creators did a lot to encourage independent porting on VAXen and other 70's machines.
Unix eventually became highly commercialized and proprietized, but it started life as a hobbyist project (of sorts).
I'd rather not use the term "hobbyist". AT&T was bound by anti-trust regulations to supply their inventions to universities. Scientists took it the way they like the best - with emphasis on peer review and free circulation of information (free as in beer and as in speech). I think that "scientific" or "academic" is a better description. After all, they weren't amateurs.
Come'on. You can make your Windows installation secure. You can make your Linux or MacOS installation insecure. Windows users are usually less tech-savvy than Linux users - and there is much more of them. But if we'd have a different situation - a Linux monopoly on the OS market, with 95% users running unpatched RedHat as a root (because setting different users and privileges would be too cumbersome for them), all of them using the same email client, we'd have the same situation.
People need to start being responsible, if they are to be the 'system administrators' of computers that they connect to the Internet.
I agree. When your car causes damage, you can't defend yourself saying "it wasn't me, it was my car". Even if indeed it was not technically your fault - for example, the accident was caused by brakes malfunction - you are still guilty, because it is your damned responsibility to have working brakes. Why on Earth with the computers it should be any different?
Sure, the electronics on the MiG were a pain in the arse, but they apparently worked OK.
Well, doesn't a sentence like "electronics on this fighter is poor but the rest is OK" resemble me something like "It's a great TV-set, just the screen quality is poor"?...
Care to cite a reference for your version of events?
Unfortunately not. I remember a press commentary to the news that the ex-Luftwaffe MiG's were given to Poland as a "gift". The commentary was pointing out that after millions of deutschmarks and euros put into modernizing MiG's to meet NATO standards, they are still virtually worthless and thus Luftwaffe decided that it's better to give them away for free rather than drown another megaeuro into further modernization. For Poles, it is also not a machine of a choice but simply a stop-gap solution until the F-16's arrive. That was the general line of that commentary.
The reason you don't know of any good products out of Communist countries is not because they suck but because Western countries didn't import them. There were trade embargoes against all Communist states (including modern day ones like Cuba; China, of course, is an exception because capitalists will sell their soul for money). If there were no embargoes, you would have seen more of it...
Believe me, I've seen plenty of them. Much more than I'd ever want to. Communist-made cars. Communist-made TV sets. Communist-made stereo sets. It was the crappiest crap I've ever seen. You'd have to actually try it to believe it. The quality of these products was beyond the wildest imagination of anyone in the Western world. If you never drove Lada or Yugo, if you never watched TV on the Yunost TV-set, if you never had a Raketa watch, you don't know the true meaning of the word "crap".
It wasn't _better_ than Panthers or Tigers. Soviets could just manufacture more of these.
MiG29
Again - it used to be a legend of Soviet aircraft industry, but actually when independent evaluations became possible (after reunification of West and East Germany) turned out to be a crap. German Air Forces are giving them away for free, certainly not because they find them superior to F-16'.s
There are accusations that Chinese prisons produce products are often sold in foreign countries with the profits going to the PRC government.
I hear them most often from non-profit organizations, like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International.
most prisoners in Chinese prisons are there for what are generally regarded as crimes in the West.
You mean, if I'd say loudly in some western country that Tibet has interesting culture or that Christianity is actually not that bad for a religion, I could get sent to a labor camp somewhere near Paris or San Francisco? Good to know.
This is what people used to say about Taiwan, and before Taiwan, Japan. Now, Taiwan is responsible for producing a number of Apple's computers (...) Japan started out life by creating second-rate consumer goods like watches and cameras. While their watches haven't improved that much (j/k), Nikon et al produce some of the best cameras you can buy. Not that it was always like that. And what about Honda/Toyota, etc? (...) And so it will be with China.
Sir, I think you're comparing apples and oranges now (no pun intended). In Taiwan and Japan, there is some sort of law. If your contractor fails to do his duty, you can sue him and the one with better argument (and better lawyers) will win. In a communist state, the one with a brother-in-law in the politburo will always win, no matter the case, no matter the lawyers. I doubt this sort of economy can ever evolve the way a Taiwanese or Japanese or even Malaysian or South Korean could. You can succesfully produce crappy cars like Yugo or Lada, or cheap Chinese toys and T-shirts in a communist states. But never ever in history of communism we have seen anything we could call a "quality product" coming from these countries (vodka doesn't count). Prove me I'm wrong - name one good brand of anything coming from any twentieth century communist state. Cars? Cameras? Computers? Watches? Yes, they all made them. And they all sucked stronger than Lenchen Demuth ever sucked Karl Marx's penis.
The leadership we're talking about here is production only. I don't see how having more low wage workers to exploit equates to development leadership (...) The more low-paid jobs available, the more competition for labour, and as a result, better working conditions and pay.
The problem is that China uses prisoners of concentration camps as the main source of "cheap labour". Which is not really their own invention, Hitler and Stalin tried it years before the Chinese. However, the example of the Third Reich or the Soviet Union hardly proves your thesis. Those workers, who still are lucky to be "free" (think "free as much as you can be in the USSR, not free as in beer") gain actually nothing from competing with "cheap labour" of prisoners in shackles. And don't think that hi-tech industry cannot use this sort of labour - the entire Soviet rocket and jet propulsion programme was created in Gulag by prisoners like Korolev or Tupolev.
Funny thing about those anti-Apple trolls. They used to put those rants into any Apple-related discussion. Now they start to put them into anything laptop-related - which means they equate "laptop manufacturer" with "Apple" in their own minds. And I can agree with that:-)
With PDAs becoming faster and more capable, is there still a market for plane calculators? Palm (and others) must have tons of (free) software to do the same with your PDA.
With mobile phones becoming more capable and subnotebooks becoming lighter and smaller, is there still a market for PDA's?
OK guys - I know that questions like this most often are modded down as "flamebait" or "troll", but I HONESTLY want to know, what is the point now of buying a non-x86 and non-PowerPC workstation. Mod me down if you please, but also mod up an answer that would provide an insightful, informative and interesting explanation. I mean, I understand it for the early 1990's. When "Jurassic Park" was a big hit at the movies, the sitiuation was pretty obvious - you had these single-user, single-tasking OS'es like Windows 3.11 or MacOS 7 on one hand, and those powerful Unix boxen on the other hand. It was obvious, that you need a special dedicated machine to run high-end graphics tasks and another machine just to read the MS Office documents or play Doom. But now - what is the freakin' point, if you can run MS Office and all the latest games on a high-end personal computer (be it the PowerMac G5 or some x86 machine) and ALSO have your favorite Unix flavor running on it like charm? Where is the market niche for a workstation incompatible with the majority of commercial software?
I have a fairly good knowledge of the Amiga scene, where - for obvious reasons - almost all the game releases of late 1990's were independent games. Some of them were actually quite good and I really miss them on the mainstream platforms. Amiga coders were doing some true magic with optimizing 3D engines to cope with high-screen true-color animations on ancient processors like the 68040. The quality of their work was superb. However, it was rarely followed by the quality of the scriptwriting and graphics design. Now here's my question: why is it easier to find a guy who will spend many sleepless and unpaid nights writing the game engine - than to find a guy who would put a similar effort in writing a good story or drawing an interesting texture? This resulted in weird "sort-of-games", that were actually nothing more than a blazing fast 3D engine and just a couple of rooms to show that it works. What's the point?
as I said they're different kind of freedoms, one is not necessarily more free than the other. Which one you consider more free is simply based on which kind of freedom you value most.
Actually, there is a philosophical tool to roughly measure "more free" and "less free" kinds of freedom, IIRC developed by Isaiah Berlin. It's the concept of "negative freedom" vs "positive freedom". Despite the name, negative freedom is better than positive, as it gives you more options. When I say - "you have the right to wear a blue hat", I give you positive freedom. When I say - "I don't care about the kind of hat you wear", I give you negative freedom. Obviosly, your personal freedom is broader in the latter case.
This concept is particularly useful when discussing totalitarian ideologies vs liberal ones. Dictatorship often claim to give their citizens more positive freedom ("our citizens have right to this, that and that... and nothing else") while democracies give negative freedom ("our citizens can do anything that's not prohibited").
So, back to the GPL/BSD - I think it offers mostly "positive freedom" ("you have right to this and that, anything else is prohibited") while the BSD offers mostly "negative freedom" ("this and that is prohibited; otherwise, do as you please").
If I could be really honest with you, I am not really thrilled by the whole concept of the Woznet. I mean, Woz is and always was my hero, but of what practical use is that? Woz says, that you can monitor your dog... well, I don't have one and don't intend to. So, is Woznet anything more than just an electronic leash?
If you sat down and said to yourself:
"self, I want lots of money, I think I'll try to invent something" - I guarantee, you'll get nowhere.
On the other hand, if I'll say to myself "self, there is someone with poor eyesight, maybe we could help him", self will reply "for how much? If it's not phat, I'd rather continue reading slashdot".
And no, I don't work at Blockbuster, actually I have something quite phat:-)
Those of you of moderate to low income (I'm talking. . . making less than 7 figures per year, to put it in perspective with pre-reniassance nobility), who require corrective eye lenses, imagine yourself unable to beg, borrow, or steal a pair of glasses for yourself. Even crude ones.
Would anyone invest his time and money to develop eyeglasses if there would be no secure mechanism to guarantee some phat profit from that investment? Imagine yourself unable to beg, borrow, or steal a pair of glasses because no one bothered to invent them.
Didn't we hear this in 1997 from Larry Ellison? The mythos of "cheap disposable terminals" or "network computers" sounds very well from the technical point of view but it's still against the economics. Low-end yet fully equipped PC's are just too damn cheap to buy. Face it - the era of a mainframe machine surrounded by VT terminals was gone when Vanilla Ice was a big star.
Put the default installation in front of your grandma. If she can't download and install software, it is too complex. This means no command line BS. Double-clicking an icon should run an installation wizard.
Your test could well end here. Explaining double-clicking to a complete layman can be a torture (especially the subtle difference between double clicking and twin clicking - if the delay between clicks is longer than the preset interval, you no longer "double" click, you just click twice; now please, explain it to your noble grandma; then start explaining why double-clicking on the right or middle button won't have the same result and acually why you say "click" when you should say "left click" etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd call that an important use of it, to be honest.
I stand corrected. Actually, in the meantime I have googled that the Poles can also be proud of the practical applications of "their" element.
Damn. Google first, post later. When will I learn?
Such conditions do not exist in nature
Only if you don't count stars as nature.
Sorry, but at least when you come to Americium or Polonium, I think the people would not like to hear you saying that.
C'mon. Is it really a matter of pride to have your country name related to a chemical element that is unstable, highly radioactive and has no application whatsoever - like Americium od Polonium? Would you want to have your country or city insulted by jokes like "Damn, this place is decaying so quickly! Looks like it has shorter half-life than its chemical element".
1. No support
2. No bugfixes
3. Get the source code for free
It is a sort of philosophy on approaching software distribution. If you want me to go really deep I could explain your its metaphysics, I hope you'll trust me on that. These three points were the Unix philosophy in the 1970's. Not because the Unix creators wanted them to be like this, just because AT&T was not allowed to sell any software on commercial basis. Oddly enough, these three points - written actually by AT&T lawyers - are quite close to what we can call now GNU philosophy. So the GNU community is fighting the biggest monopoly of our days - Microsoft - using philosophy founded by the lawyers of the biggest monopoly of 1940's-1970's, AT&T.
Unix started as a way to run a non-vender-supported OS on cheap PDP-11s.
Also its creators did a lot to encourage independent porting on VAXen and other 70's machines.
Unix eventually became highly commercialized and proprietized, but it started life as a hobbyist project (of sorts).
I'd rather not use the term "hobbyist". AT&T was bound by anti-trust regulations to supply their inventions to universities. Scientists took it the way they like the best - with emphasis on peer review and free circulation of information (free as in beer and as in speech). I think that "scientific" or "academic" is a better description. After all, they weren't amateurs.
Come'on. You can make your Windows installation secure. You can make your Linux or MacOS installation insecure. Windows users are usually less tech-savvy than Linux users - and there is much more of them. But if we'd have a different situation - a Linux monopoly on the OS market, with 95% users running unpatched RedHat as a root (because setting different users and privileges would be too cumbersome for them), all of them using the same email client, we'd have the same situation.
People need to start being responsible, if they are to be the 'system administrators' of computers that they connect to the Internet.
I agree. When your car causes damage, you can't defend yourself saying "it wasn't me, it was my car". Even if indeed it was not technically your fault - for example, the accident was caused by brakes malfunction - you are still guilty, because it is your damned responsibility to have working brakes. Why on Earth with the computers it should be any different?
Do not be stupid. Of course it is a valid defence. Most viruses do not need an unsecure os, just a clueless person.
But then again: since when "your honour, I'm clueless" is a valid defence?
Sure, the electronics on the MiG were a pain in the arse, but they apparently worked OK.
Well, doesn't a sentence like "electronics on this fighter is poor but the rest is OK" resemble me something like "It's a great TV-set, just the screen quality is poor"?...
Care to cite a reference for your version of events?
Unfortunately not. I remember a press commentary to the news that the ex-Luftwaffe MiG's were given to Poland as a "gift". The commentary was pointing out that after millions of deutschmarks and euros put into modernizing MiG's to meet NATO standards, they are still virtually worthless and thus Luftwaffe decided that it's better to give them away for free rather than drown another megaeuro into further modernization. For Poles, it is also not a machine of a choice but simply a stop-gap solution until the F-16's arrive. That was the general line of that commentary.
The reason you don't know of any good products out of Communist countries is not because they suck but because Western countries didn't import them. There were trade embargoes against all Communist states (including modern day ones like Cuba; China, of course, is an exception because capitalists will sell their soul for money). If there were no embargoes, you would have seen more of it...
Believe me, I've seen plenty of them. Much more than I'd ever want to. Communist-made cars. Communist-made TV sets. Communist-made stereo sets. It was the crappiest crap I've ever seen. You'd have to actually try it to believe it. The quality of these products was beyond the wildest imagination of anyone in the Western world. If you never drove Lada or Yugo, if you never watched TV on the Yunost TV-set, if you never had a Raketa watch, you don't know the true meaning of the word "crap".
T34
It wasn't _better_ than Panthers or Tigers. Soviets could just manufacture more of these.
MiG29
Again - it used to be a legend of Soviet aircraft industry, but actually when independent evaluations became possible (after reunification of West and East Germany) turned out to be a crap. German Air Forces are giving them away for free, certainly not because they find them superior to F-16'.s
There are accusations that Chinese prisons produce products are often sold in foreign countries with the profits going to the PRC government.
I hear them most often from non-profit organizations, like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International.
most prisoners in Chinese prisons are there for what are generally regarded as crimes in the West.
You mean, if I'd say loudly in some western country that Tibet has interesting culture or that Christianity is actually not that bad for a religion, I could get sent to a labor camp somewhere near Paris or San Francisco? Good to know.
This is what people used to say about Taiwan, and before Taiwan, Japan. Now, Taiwan is responsible for producing a number of Apple's computers (...) Japan started out life by creating second-rate consumer goods like watches and cameras. While their watches haven't improved that much (j/k), Nikon et al produce some of the best cameras you can buy. Not that it was always like that. And what about Honda/Toyota, etc? (...) And so it will be with China.
Sir, I think you're comparing apples and oranges now (no pun intended). In Taiwan and Japan, there is some sort of law. If your contractor fails to do his duty, you can sue him and the one with better argument (and better lawyers) will win. In a communist state, the one with a brother-in-law in the politburo will always win, no matter the case, no matter the lawyers. I doubt this sort of economy can ever evolve the way a Taiwanese or Japanese or even Malaysian or South Korean could. You can succesfully produce crappy cars like Yugo or Lada, or cheap Chinese toys and T-shirts in a communist states. But never ever in history of communism we have seen anything we could call a "quality product" coming from these countries (vodka doesn't count). Prove me I'm wrong - name one good brand of anything coming from any twentieth century communist state. Cars? Cameras? Computers? Watches? Yes, they all made them. And they all sucked stronger than Lenchen Demuth ever sucked Karl Marx's penis.
The leadership we're talking about here is production only. I don't see how having more low wage workers to exploit equates to development leadership (...) The more low-paid jobs available, the more competition for labour, and as a result, better working conditions and pay.
The problem is that China uses prisoners of concentration camps as the main source of "cheap labour". Which is not really their own invention, Hitler and Stalin tried it years before the Chinese. However, the example of the Third Reich or the Soviet Union hardly proves your thesis. Those workers, who still are lucky to be "free" (think "free as much as you can be in the USSR, not free as in beer") gain actually nothing from competing with "cheap labour" of prisoners in shackles. And don't think that hi-tech industry cannot use this sort of labour - the entire Soviet rocket and jet propulsion programme was created in Gulag by prisoners like Korolev or Tupolev.
Funny thing about those anti-Apple trolls. They used to put those rants into any Apple-related discussion. Now they start to put them into anything laptop-related - which means they equate "laptop manufacturer" with "Apple" in their own minds. And I can agree with that :-)
With PDAs becoming faster and more capable, is there still a market for plane calculators? Palm (and others) must have tons of (free) software to do the same with your PDA.
With mobile phones becoming more capable and subnotebooks becoming lighter and smaller, is there still a market for PDA's?
OK guys - I know that questions like this most often are modded down as "flamebait" or "troll", but I HONESTLY want to know, what is the point now of buying a non-x86 and non-PowerPC workstation. Mod me down if you please, but also mod up an answer that would provide an insightful, informative and interesting explanation. I mean, I understand it for the early 1990's. When "Jurassic Park" was a big hit at the movies, the sitiuation was pretty obvious - you had these single-user, single-tasking OS'es like Windows 3.11 or MacOS 7 on one hand, and those powerful Unix boxen on the other hand. It was obvious, that you need a special dedicated machine to run high-end graphics tasks and another machine just to read the MS Office documents or play Doom. But now - what is the freakin' point, if you can run MS Office and all the latest games on a high-end personal computer (be it the PowerMac G5 or some x86 machine) and ALSO have your favorite Unix flavor running on it like charm? Where is the market niche for a workstation incompatible with the majority of commercial software?
I have a fairly good knowledge of the Amiga scene, where - for obvious reasons - almost all the game releases of late 1990's were independent games. Some of them were actually quite good and I really miss them on the mainstream platforms. Amiga coders were doing some true magic with optimizing 3D engines to cope with high-screen true-color animations on ancient processors like the 68040. The quality of their work was superb. However, it was rarely followed by the quality of the scriptwriting and graphics design. Now here's my question: why is it easier to find a guy who will spend many sleepless and unpaid nights writing the game engine - than to find a guy who would put a similar effort in writing a good story or drawing an interesting texture? This resulted in weird "sort-of-games", that were actually nothing more than a blazing fast 3D engine and just a couple of rooms to show that it works. What's the point?
as I said they're different kind of freedoms, one is not necessarily more free than the other. Which one you consider more free is simply based on which kind of freedom you value most.
Actually, there is a philosophical tool to roughly measure "more free" and "less free" kinds of freedom, IIRC developed by Isaiah Berlin. It's the concept of "negative freedom" vs "positive freedom". Despite the name, negative freedom is better than positive, as it gives you more options. When I say - "you have the right to wear a blue hat", I give you positive freedom. When I say - "I don't care about the kind of hat you wear", I give you negative freedom. Obviosly, your personal freedom is broader in the latter case.
This concept is particularly useful when discussing totalitarian ideologies vs liberal ones. Dictatorship often claim to give their citizens more positive freedom ("our citizens have right to this, that and that... and nothing else") while democracies give negative freedom ("our citizens can do anything that's not prohibited").
So, back to the GPL/BSD - I think it offers mostly "positive freedom" ("you have right to this and that, anything else is prohibited") while the BSD offers mostly "negative freedom" ("this and that is prohibited; otherwise, do as you please").
If I could be really honest with you, I am not really thrilled by the whole concept of the Woznet. I mean, Woz is and always was my hero, but of what practical use is that? Woz says, that you can monitor your dog... well, I don't have one and don't intend to. So, is Woznet anything more than just an electronic leash?
If you sat down and said to yourself: "self, I want lots of money, I think I'll try to invent something" - I guarantee, you'll get nowhere.
:-)
On the other hand, if I'll say to myself "self, there is someone with poor eyesight, maybe we could help him", self will reply "for how much? If it's not phat, I'd rather continue reading slashdot".
And no, I don't work at Blockbuster, actually I have something quite phat
I don't think history supports this thesis. Why did the Venetian craftsmen develop optometrics? Because THEIR sight was poor?
Those of you of moderate to low income (I'm talking. . . making less than 7 figures per year, to put it in perspective with pre-reniassance nobility), who require corrective eye lenses, imagine yourself unable to beg, borrow, or steal a pair of glasses for yourself. Even crude ones.
Would anyone invest his time and money to develop eyeglasses if there would be no secure mechanism to guarantee some phat profit from that investment? Imagine yourself unable to beg, borrow, or steal a pair of glasses because no one bothered to invent them.
cheap disposable terminals on the desktop
Didn't we hear this in 1997 from Larry Ellison? The mythos of "cheap disposable terminals" or "network computers" sounds very well from the technical point of view but it's still against the economics. Low-end yet fully equipped PC's are just too damn cheap to buy. Face it - the era of a mainframe machine surrounded by VT terminals was gone when Vanilla Ice was a big star.
Put the default installation in front of your grandma. If she can't download and install software, it is too complex. This means no command line BS. Double-clicking an icon should run an installation wizard.
Your test could well end here. Explaining double-clicking to a complete layman can be a torture (especially the subtle difference between double clicking and twin clicking - if the delay between clicks is longer than the preset interval, you no longer "double" click, you just click twice; now please, explain it to your noble grandma; then start explaining why double-clicking on the right or middle button won't have the same result and acually why you say "click" when you should say "left click" etc.)