XML is a fad, plain and simple. It isn't superior to custom file formats in any way.
That's not the point. A custom format tailored to a particular program is always going to be better. XML is supposed to be a standard. It's supposed to make things simpler for people by having a standard way of configuring programs.
Wow! True insight on/.! I happen to agree with your thinking quite a bit.
Whoa buddy! Let's not start giving each other blowjobs just yet.
There were probably very few WMDs left in Iraq by the time we invaded, and the humanitarian photo-op stuff is nice PR. The real deal is that we get a nice base of operations in the area (right next to our pals Iran and Syria, no less!), and an easier time keeping an eye on the shenanigans over there.
This doesn't bother you? Shouldn't you care that your government is doing some shady stuff and exploiting other people and other countries for their sake only?
At least, that's what I hope. I have very strong doubts about GWB's intellect, but the fact is that he is not the government. He's just a figurehead, mostly. He's got a lot of smart people working for him, and while I don't necessarily feel that they make the decisions I would make in their position, I don't think they're idiots, either.
Well I'm glad you aren't in charge of anything. The entire administration has looked like fools trying to cover up this mess. Nearly every prominent member of the administration has made conflicting statements. Besides, the Executive branch has more power now than they have had in the past 100 years at least. The unbalance of power is just as bad as having terrible president alone.
That is such crap. I love when people say it because it proves how ignorant they are. Prove it! That is just another lame, conservative lie to avoid blame.
Do you want to tell that to the parents of soldiers still dying over there?
They single out two or three people who want the U.S. to leave, while ignoring the all the people who realize we need to stay to rebuild the country.
Please get out from under your rock. There are more than just a few people who want the US to leave.
While he (and most people) hate the fact that there's an arms race, it's still a sad fact of life that there IS one, and we have to compete or lose. And we have a lot to lose. Don't think that the person that kicks the U.S.'s ass is going to be a benign dictator.
That seems like the same train of thought as Korea, Pakistan, and China. The problem is that your view is extremely short-sighted. If we continue at this rate eventually weapons WILL be used and when they are it's not going to be pretty for ANYONE on earth.
I think both sides have a point. I have a friend who is a sysadmin for a school system. He told me a funny story recently about one of the principals, who has a PhD might I add. The following is a recreation:
Principal: I have to turn my computer on every morning.
My Friend: And?
P: Well I never had to do that before.
M: What do you mean?
P: Well usually I just go to shutdown at night and in the morning I just log back on.
M: And? What's different now?
P: Now I have to press the power button. I never had to do that before.
M: Well let me come down there and see what you mean because I don't see the problem.
My friend then leaves to go to this particular school to see what the problem is. He gets there a few minutes later and goes with the Principal to the computer in question. She shows him exactly what she does at night. Then she explains again that she used to do the same thing but she never had to press the power button in the morning.
What happened was that someone had changed the default setting from "logoff" to "shutdown". The dialog box for this pops up everytime you shutdown but she never once read it. A principal, with a PhD, couldn't read a pop up dialog box. This is either pure laziness or pure stupidity, either of which is a constant source of headache for people doing tech support. I had a roomate once who had similar stories about working tech support for a University.
On the other hand, some tech support is totally worthless. It seems that most technical people in general are more knowledgable than tech support. My sysadmin friend also has many other stories about tech support for the servers they buy. Most of the time the support is of no help at all. It's come to the point that they'll end up figuring the problem out by themselves when tech support can't fix it, then they turn around and tell the tech support how to fix it. How rediculous!
Ever heard of a guy named Stalin? yeah he was the 2nd Premier of the Soviet Union. he killed MILLIONS of russians etc. because of paranoia
Exactly. Thanks for proving my point. Stalin killed millions of people because of, as you said, paranoia, not communism. By your logic I should blame capitalism for Vietnam.
I didn't mean to imply that. Rather, it is likely, if open source software were funded by the government then it would make sense to use it within the government. Thus any interaction with the government would enforce open standards and this would trickle down. Open systems complying with open standards would dominate. This is what would lead to widespread open source use.
I say that if local government wishes to fund open-source stuff for the betterment of their community, then more power to them. But getting the federal government involved in something like this would just result in decreasing the overall quality of the work, simply because of the beaurocracy that people will have to deal with.
I don't see this as being a problem. The code is GPLed. Anyone can work on it, not just government employees. This would just insure that there were government employees getting paid to work on the code.
Public funding is nearly ALWAYS a bad thing. It distorts the market place and a distorted market place means inefficiently allocated recourses. That's economic 101. It's a BAD THING.
That's crap. It may distort capitalism and it may be bad for capitalsim but who cares? People are more important than the rich getting richer. Personal wealth is not the end-all be-all.
What level of support do you want for OSS? Do you want the kind of funding that will allow the development effort to tackle Microsoft in every arena? Presumably that would mean MS revenue - profits = $few billion. Why stop with MS? Why not fund an effort to rival Oracle? Another $few billion. And of course various industries have dominant packages that would be suitable targets of OSS.
It won't take billions for each MS product to be reproduced. Most of the applications are better, very close, or almost as good as MS products. It would take very little money, if any to produce software on par. Fortunately almost all other major software vendors, including Oracle, have a hand in Linux. Improving Linux would only improve their products.
Nice to see you are aligned with Communism, which has claimed more lives than all the wars in the modern age COMBINED.
That's the dumbest statement I have ever heard. I hope you don't think that link you provided is proof of anything. It's just radical right wing rhetoric.
He should be bankrupting the Ponzi schemes which steal goods of working people and give them to lazy shits, but unfortunately he is spending faster than the Liar-In-Chief Clinton(unlike Bush he actually lied, and under oath).
How is taxing "stealing"? The government has the right to tax, it's in the Constitution. Why do conservatives always think that it's steal from the rich to feed the lazy? The poor get taxed less, not the other way around. The rich aren't taxed more because they can afford it, the poor are taxed less because they can't afford it. If flat taxes were introduced the government would have to raise taxes for the poor to cover costs and your tax rate would probably stay the same because decreasing it would cut more money than was gained by making the poor pay more. Americans are the richest people in the richest country, if that's not enough for you too bad. At least Clinton lied under oath about getting a blowjob while Bush lied to the public and killed thousands of innocent people.
Idiots like you wouldnt even be able to speak your mind without wars, or limited government, but you spit on them anyway.
Idiots like you wouldn't have any rights at all if people like me weren't constantly fighting for them.
The best part, which I'm surprised you didn't mention is that as this would benefit anyone using a computer and the world is becoming based around computers. You can't do anything at large universities anymore without a computer. You have to pick classes, get your grades, contact your professors, do research, etc, etc. Now at home you can pay bills, email, buy things, get credit reports, entertain yourself, and much, much more (including voting in the future). The computer is becoming a necessity and there is no doubt that it will be at least as important as a phone in the future, although they will be more important than that in my opinion.
Now imagine that you had a government standard operating system that cost the taxpayers nothing for the government to implement it. Imagine not having to kick in for Windows everytime you bought a computer. Imagine lower prices for every major industry that used computers. A free framework for home, corporate, industy, and government computer use sounds like a good idea to me. Why wouldn't you want to fund something like that?
While I don't necessarily believe that Open Source is true communism I do agree with most of everything else the parent poster said. The anti-linux zealots love to use the word commmunism because people in the US have been socialized to believe communism is evil, which is rediculous. It is an economic system not a type of government. Like the parent post mentioned, different systems may work better in different situations. Local phone service and cable are not capitalistic systems yet no one cries traitor about them.
Another great point the parent poster mentions is the fact that software can be reproduced as much as needed without actually taking away from anyone else. This is important because it is commonly overlooked by the anti-linux zealots. They love to call the open source crowd "thieves" because of the SCO lawsuit but even if there is SCO code in the kernel, no user would be a theif. Besides the fact that code is copyrighted (which is meant to protect copying of published works, which is not the case with propietary software), the end user did not know about the code, and more importantly no person is deprived of that "stolen" code.
Back to the topic at hand...
Should free software be subsidized? No. Not yet at least. Obviously some people are not ready for it. If free software becomes dominant and acceptable by the masses in the future then I believe it might be a good idea, as long as government is not as crooked as it is now and that's a big "if".
Personally I believe that Microsoft fanboys have finally lost any ground to attack linux on technical merits so now they have to attack open source as anti-american. I haven't really heard the "communist/socialist" FUD until more recently. It at least wasn't as prevalent as it is now until the 2.4 kernel. The 2.4 kernel and the advancement of individual distros in this time awoke a fear amongst people with blind allegiances to other operating systems. They'll attempt to kill it in anyway they can to help save Bill's criminal monopoly.
The package system, aside from the fact that it builds from source by default (which has now been proven to be of no meaningful benefit to most users)
That's not entirely true. Building from source gives you control of what support you want to add. The USE variables are the upside to this method.
And no self-respecting corporation would install an unmaintainable distribution consisting mostly of beta and untested software that 24+ hours of dedicated, hands-on attention to install on typical hardware.
Actually there is an unstable branch to Gentoo for beta and untested software. I use Gentoo stable and never had a single problem with it. Most "self-respecting" corporations that do use Gentoo tend to have a seperate build machine where they can build binaries and emerge them on the other machines.
If the efforts of Gentoo developers were put towards improving an existing non-commercial distributions such as Debian, or improving the open source programs themselves, it would clearly be advancing the cause of Linux -- instead they are duplicating existing work and stepping backward in time, producing a product that almost no one wants, and no one at all needs, and this doesn't help linux at all.
This is just garbage. Gentoo is not Debian. Gentoo is after a different market. It is about fine-grained control, it's not just a non-commercial distro with good package management. Those two things just happen to be an added benefit. The control Gentoo offers is powerful yet simple. That's what people like. To say that Gentoo is something that nobody needs or wants is very naive. It is positively something people want since it is growing rapidly. I would hope it is something people need, since it was created to fill a need.
It doesn't, it's just a time consuming load of hogwash leet wannabees jump onto to say 'I use a source distro!'
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Oh I just can't help it. First of all...NO. You'd be surprised to find out that there are many experienced Linux users using Gentoo. It's about choice and it's about control. Gentoo gives its users the most fine grained control of any Linux distro and it does it in a very usable way. See my sig for details.
Gentoo does force a lot of people to learn more about Linux than they do whether they like it or not. This is not to say that it's not possible with other distros but there are no gui utilities for Gentoo and so the users are forced to use the CLI much more and are forced to edit config files much more, giving them a crash course education in Linux. Whether this is the best way or not is debatable, but whether or not people tend to learn more with Gentoo, well, that is not debatable. Read the forums. Personally I'm happy that a lot of newbies are jumping in with Gentoo and learning a lot more off the bat than they would with Red Hat or Mandrake. To each his own. Let's not fight about distros, at least we're all using Linux.
I don't think it's fashionable to use Gentoo although it seems quite fashionable to bash Gentoo.
the gentoo-sources kernel is not a stock kernel. It is highly patched. Vanilla-sources is the stock kernel. I've compiled both and vanilla is much quicker.
Yes. Because for every Britney or Justin there are a hundred Airs or Midnight Oils or Polyphonic Sprees. Kill the pop hits, and you kill the little-knowns.
Not really. Lesser known bands make much more from concerts than record sales. The only point of having a record label is to they can distribute your record to different markets. Bands only make a very small percentage of what you pay for an average CD anyway. Lesser known bands survive by touring relentlessly and if music is what they love, I don't see a problem with them having to make their money that way. I'm not terribley concerned with the welfare of millionaire pop stars.
I totally agree with you. People are so lazy today that they can't take a class to learn how to use powerful software. Instead they implement a less sophisticated but easier to use program and expect everyone to use and be happy with that. Productivity is not increased with a dumbed down design and untrained employees. This is not a specifically Windows vs Linux argument. The path chosen is often for less powerful or even buggy software just because it is (or seems) easier to use.
For example, the college I went to used to use Hummingbird HostExplorer to pick classes for the upcoming semester and to view grades. It was very fast and efficient and it only took a couple of minutes to learn how to set it up and navigate with it. Then they switched to PeopleSoft and web based naviagtion. It was slow, unreliable, and generally hated by everyone, even the non-technical people. It was just more efficient to learn how to use HostExplorer.
BTW Hummingbird HostExplorer has a commandline interface.
A lot of sour-grapers claim that this is MS protecting their monopoly, but the fact is, MS is not going to be stifled because Linux does not have the workforce or the focus to keep pace.
Are you that naive? Tell me how the.doc format has improved so greatly by its constant changing? Office isn't even interoperable with itself. It only is if you buy the newest one. That certainly sounds like a money-making scam to me.
We might not want to live in a world where the patent office "pushes innovation by ownership," but it's the reality of Capitalism. You can't turn off cash flow, or you essentially turn off innovation and invention.
It seems to be working the other way around. The cash flow flooding into Microsoft has stagnated innovation and invention, not that they invented much before. Their desktop hasn't really changed much since windows 98.
Of course Open Source Software is the best example of my previous statement put to the test, but I can still hold to it, because even the best OSS people still have to go out and get jobs to make their OSS Lives work. I've seen examples of OSS projects failing all over the place becasue it costs money to even do OSS.
It is expected that OSS people have jobs. No one ever claimed you could do OSS and nothing else. It takes a dedicated effort to see a project through. Some people get in over their head and projects fail. It's the same thing with propietary systems.
All I'm saying is, OSS is a very idealistic set of projects. Idealism is an awesome thing, but when it faces reality, it sometimes less than perfect.
I don't think anyone ever claimed OSS was perfect, just better.
Microsoft, and everyone else that has patent claims, has to be respected. It's part of the REALITY of our world today. If OSS software is unfairly stealing the work of Microsoft, then it's liable; I'm liable.
This is where I start to see that you are actually a Troll. If you run Open Source Software you are NOT liable for it. It is not your fault if someone puts tainted code into a program you use. That's the way the law works in the US at least. Besides, I don't think OSS projects would "steal" code from an inferior product anyway.
2 million loud people don't mean a thing. 250 million people with no opinion do.
I guess the fact that only half of the population voted in 2000 means that half the population doesn't care who is president then. 50% is a large number of people not caring, so let's just install a dictator. I mean, no one cares, only half the people spoke up about who they wanted for president.
There is a reason the founders of our country feared mob rule. There are a lot of uninformed people out there who don't know any better and couldn't care less. That doesn't mean it's not an issue. It means that these media conglomerates are trying to make a buck and don't really want to be showing this stuff on their front pages or their TV stations. Intelligent people read independent sources that don't have anything to gain from media consolidation.
I live in a state where recently there was a dispute between two local newspapers. One is locally owned and the other is nationally owned. There was a running fued in the editorials because the nationally owned paper's parent company had been buying up all the competition and violated the FCC rules of the time. The local paper of course pointed this out while the national paper deciding to run an article about how the FCC decision was a good one. Most people read the nationally owned paper because it has better distribution. Does this mean it is a better paper with better articles? No. It just means they don't have the means to distribute that the larger company does. So we end up with a very large positive bias towards the FCC rules change based on the fact that they don't want to report something that affects them negatively. An intelligent person would look elsewhere for more information. Unfortunatley most people watch FOX NEWS and maybe read their local paper, which is most likely owned by the Tribune company. This isn't diverse and independent reporting.
Take those 500 channels that are spread across satelite, DirectTV, cable, and broadcast (I think only claiming that there are 500 is being very nice)
I'm not sure if you know this but they carry mostly the same channels. It's not as if every carrier has their own 500 unique channels. My parents have digital satelite and I have digital cable and it's pretty much the same crap.
The 1973 family could tune into less than 10 independant stations. That still means the number of media producers has grown by at least a factor of 5. With the Internet and large pipes into homes and more desire from people, I only see this number getting bigger.
I don't think you get it. There was obviously less demand in 1973 because TV was still a relatively new technology. As the business of TV became very profitable, more and more stations popped up, and then more and more stations were bought out by larger companies. I'm pointing out that it is not valid to say it is more diverse now then it was in 1973 because the technology was too new for it to be more diverse then it was. There were not enough players to make it as diverse because TV was still in its infancy, not any other reason.
Then you launch into some random babbling about demand not being high enough in the 1970s to create this competition effect
To be honest that was pretty much an asides. I was only making the point that the diversity was based on nothing but the infancy of technology, as I have said earlier. This happens with any form of media. It will become more diverse as more players become involved and then it will become less diverse as more of those players buy up the competition. I'd prefer the stage inbetween instead of being content with the current mess because it offers me 500 channels (and I still can't find any good programming for the most part) The real point of that matter is that there really is only a few large corporations that own most of everything. This sense of competition because we have 500 TV stations is not as it seems. Viacom, Disney, News Corporation, and AOL Time Warner own a very large portion of those stations.
If you are referring to politics in general, I would have to question what news you've been watching for the past month. It seems the major headline every day has something to do with the WMD claims and the impact they had on the war.
This actually illustrates my point exactly. I have been reading about forged documents, constructed lies about connections between Hussein and Bin Laden, and other such news for months upon months in independent newspapers and magazines while it has only recently recieved notice among the major news stations and only because there was no way to hide it or deny it anymore.
Ok you've shown who owns 14 channels. How about the other 486? Please continue. It might surprise you to see how many different media companies there actually are. Of course, it may put a damper on your argument too.
Get a clue, they were examples, they are not the only ones. If you actually take the time to look it up, most TV stations are not owned independently. They are owned by larger corporations that sometimes do a decent job in hiding that fact. Fox owns 35 stations and Viacom owns 39 stations, nevermind its 200 CBS affiliates. GE owns 13 stations and 220 NBC affiliates. ABC's ten stations alone cover 24% of the nation, and that's not including its affiliates.
The point is that just because you are not aware of who owns what doesn't mean that they are all independent channels.
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That's not the point. A custom format tailored to a particular program is always going to be better. XML is supposed to be a standard. It's supposed to make things simpler for people by having a standard way of configuring programs.
Whoa buddy! Let's not start giving each other blowjobs just yet.
There were probably very few WMDs left in Iraq by the time we invaded, and the humanitarian photo-op stuff is nice PR. The real deal is that we get a nice base of operations in the area (right next to our pals Iran and Syria, no less!), and an easier time keeping an eye on the shenanigans over there.
This doesn't bother you? Shouldn't you care that your government is doing some shady stuff and exploiting other people and other countries for their sake only?
At least, that's what I hope. I have very strong doubts about GWB's intellect, but the fact is that he is not the government. He's just a figurehead, mostly. He's got a lot of smart people working for him, and while I don't necessarily feel that they make the decisions I would make in their position, I don't think they're idiots, either.
Well I'm glad you aren't in charge of anything. The entire administration has looked like fools trying to cover up this mess. Nearly every prominent member of the administration has made conflicting statements. Besides, the Executive branch has more power now than they have had in the past 100 years at least. The unbalance of power is just as bad as having terrible president alone.
That is such crap. I love when people say it because it proves how ignorant they are. Prove it! That is just another lame, conservative lie to avoid blame.
Do you want to tell that to the parents of soldiers still dying over there?
They single out two or three people who want the U.S. to leave, while ignoring the all the people who realize we need to stay to rebuild the country.
Please get out from under your rock. There are more than just a few people who want the US to leave.
While he (and most people) hate the fact that there's an arms race, it's still a sad fact of life that there IS one, and we have to compete or lose. And we have a lot to lose. Don't think that the person that kicks the U.S.'s ass is going to be a benign dictator.
That seems like the same train of thought as Korea, Pakistan, and China. The problem is that your view is extremely short-sighted. If we continue at this rate eventually weapons WILL be used and when they are it's not going to be pretty for ANYONE on earth.
Principal: I have to turn my computer on every morning.
My Friend: And?
P: Well I never had to do that before.
M: What do you mean?
P: Well usually I just go to shutdown at night and in the morning I just log back on.
M: And? What's different now?
P: Now I have to press the power button. I never had to do that before.
M: Well let me come down there and see what you mean because I don't see the problem.
My friend then leaves to go to this particular school to see what the problem is. He gets there a few minutes later and goes with the Principal to the computer in question. She shows him exactly what she does at night. Then she explains again that she used to do the same thing but she never had to press the power button in the morning.
What happened was that someone had changed the default setting from "logoff" to "shutdown". The dialog box for this pops up everytime you shutdown but she never once read it. A principal, with a PhD, couldn't read a pop up dialog box. This is either pure laziness or pure stupidity, either of which is a constant source of headache for people doing tech support. I had a roomate once who had similar stories about working tech support for a University.
On the other hand, some tech support is totally worthless. It seems that most technical people in general are more knowledgable than tech support. My sysadmin friend also has many other stories about tech support for the servers they buy. Most of the time the support is of no help at all. It's come to the point that they'll end up figuring the problem out by themselves when tech support can't fix it, then they turn around and tell the tech support how to fix it. How rediculous!
Exactly. Thanks for proving my point. Stalin killed millions of people because of, as you said, paranoia, not communism. By your logic I should blame capitalism for Vietnam.
I didn't mean to imply that. Rather, it is likely, if open source software were funded by the government then it would make sense to use it within the government. Thus any interaction with the government would enforce open standards and this would trickle down. Open systems complying with open standards would dominate. This is what would lead to widespread open source use.
I don't see this as being a problem. The code is GPLed. Anyone can work on it, not just government employees. This would just insure that there were government employees getting paid to work on the code.
That's crap. It may distort capitalism and it may be bad for capitalsim but who cares? People are more important than the rich getting richer. Personal wealth is not the end-all be-all.
What level of support do you want for OSS? Do you want the kind of funding that will allow the development effort to tackle Microsoft in every arena? Presumably that would mean MS revenue - profits = $few billion. Why stop with MS? Why not fund an effort to rival Oracle? Another $few billion. And of course various industries have dominant packages that would be suitable targets of OSS.
It won't take billions for each MS product to be reproduced. Most of the applications are better, very close, or almost as good as MS products. It would take very little money, if any to produce software on par. Fortunately almost all other major software vendors, including Oracle, have a hand in Linux. Improving Linux would only improve their products.
That's the dumbest statement I have ever heard. I hope you don't think that link you provided is proof of anything. It's just radical right wing rhetoric.
He should be bankrupting the Ponzi schemes which steal goods of working people and give them to lazy shits, but unfortunately he is spending faster than the Liar-In-Chief Clinton(unlike Bush he actually lied, and under oath).
How is taxing "stealing"? The government has the right to tax, it's in the Constitution. Why do conservatives always think that it's steal from the rich to feed the lazy? The poor get taxed less, not the other way around. The rich aren't taxed more because they can afford it, the poor are taxed less because they can't afford it. If flat taxes were introduced the government would have to raise taxes for the poor to cover costs and your tax rate would probably stay the same because decreasing it would cut more money than was gained by making the poor pay more. Americans are the richest people in the richest country, if that's not enough for you too bad. At least Clinton lied under oath about getting a blowjob while Bush lied to the public and killed thousands of innocent people.
Idiots like you wouldnt even be able to speak your mind without wars, or limited government, but you spit on them anyway.
Idiots like you wouldn't have any rights at all if people like me weren't constantly fighting for them.
Now imagine that you had a government standard operating system that cost the taxpayers nothing for the government to implement it. Imagine not having to kick in for Windows everytime you bought a computer. Imagine lower prices for every major industry that used computers. A free framework for home, corporate, industy, and government computer use sounds like a good idea to me. Why wouldn't you want to fund something like that?
Another great point the parent poster mentions is the fact that software can be reproduced as much as needed without actually taking away from anyone else. This is important because it is commonly overlooked by the anti-linux zealots. They love to call the open source crowd "thieves" because of the SCO lawsuit but even if there is SCO code in the kernel, no user would be a theif. Besides the fact that code is copyrighted (which is meant to protect copying of published works, which is not the case with propietary software), the end user did not know about the code, and more importantly no person is deprived of that "stolen" code.
Back to the topic at hand...
Should free software be subsidized? No. Not yet at least. Obviously some people are not ready for it. If free software becomes dominant and acceptable by the masses in the future then I believe it might be a good idea, as long as government is not as crooked as it is now and that's a big "if".
Personally I believe that Microsoft fanboys have finally lost any ground to attack linux on technical merits so now they have to attack open source as anti-american. I haven't really heard the "communist/socialist" FUD until more recently. It at least wasn't as prevalent as it is now until the 2.4 kernel. The 2.4 kernel and the advancement of individual distros in this time awoke a fear amongst people with blind allegiances to other operating systems. They'll attempt to kill it in anyway they can to help save Bill's criminal monopoly.
www.gentoo.org So why is the rest of the site still running Gentoo then?
That's not entirely true. Building from source gives you control of what support you want to add. The USE variables are the upside to this method.
And no self-respecting corporation would install an unmaintainable distribution consisting mostly of beta and untested software that 24+ hours of dedicated, hands-on attention to install on typical hardware.
Actually there is an unstable branch to Gentoo for beta and untested software. I use Gentoo stable and never had a single problem with it. Most "self-respecting" corporations that do use Gentoo tend to have a seperate build machine where they can build binaries and emerge them on the other machines.
If the efforts of Gentoo developers were put towards improving an existing non-commercial distributions such as Debian, or improving the open source programs themselves, it would clearly be advancing the cause of Linux -- instead they are duplicating existing work and stepping backward in time, producing a product that almost no one wants, and no one at all needs, and this doesn't help linux at all.
This is just garbage. Gentoo is not Debian. Gentoo is after a different market. It is about fine-grained control, it's not just a non-commercial distro with good package management. Those two things just happen to be an added benefit. The control Gentoo offers is powerful yet simple. That's what people like. To say that Gentoo is something that nobody needs or wants is very naive. It is positively something people want since it is growing rapidly. I would hope it is something people need, since it was created to fill a need.
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Oh I just can't help it. First of all...NO. You'd be surprised to find out that there are many experienced Linux users using Gentoo. It's about choice and it's about control. Gentoo gives its users the most fine grained control of any Linux distro and it does it in a very usable way. See my sig for details.
Gentoo does force a lot of people to learn more about Linux than they do whether they like it or not. This is not to say that it's not possible with other distros but there are no gui utilities for Gentoo and so the users are forced to use the CLI much more and are forced to edit config files much more, giving them a crash course education in Linux. Whether this is the best way or not is debatable, but whether or not people tend to learn more with Gentoo, well, that is not debatable. Read the forums. Personally I'm happy that a lot of newbies are jumping in with Gentoo and learning a lot more off the bat than they would with Red Hat or Mandrake. To each his own. Let's not fight about distros, at least we're all using Linux.
I don't think it's fashionable to use Gentoo although it seems quite fashionable to bash Gentoo.
If you compile different drivers into the kernel then it will make a difference in the compile time of the kernel, which was one of the tests.
the gentoo-sources kernel is not a stock kernel. It is highly patched. Vanilla-sources is the stock kernel. I've compiled both and vanilla is much quicker.
Not really. Lesser known bands make much more from concerts than record sales. The only point of having a record label is to they can distribute your record to different markets. Bands only make a very small percentage of what you pay for an average CD anyway. Lesser known bands survive by touring relentlessly and if music is what they love, I don't see a problem with them having to make their money that way. I'm not terribley concerned with the welfare of millionaire pop stars.
For example, the college I went to used to use Hummingbird HostExplorer to pick classes for the upcoming semester and to view grades. It was very fast and efficient and it only took a couple of minutes to learn how to set it up and navigate with it. Then they switched to PeopleSoft and web based naviagtion. It was slow, unreliable, and generally hated by everyone, even the non-technical people. It was just more efficient to learn how to use HostExplorer.
BTW Hummingbird HostExplorer has a commandline interface.
The proof is in the pudding:
Hummingbird HostExplorer at Uconn
Are you that naive? Tell me how the .doc format has improved so greatly by its constant changing? Office isn't even interoperable with itself. It only is if you buy the newest one. That certainly sounds like a money-making scam to me.
It seems to be working the other way around. The cash flow flooding into Microsoft has stagnated innovation and invention, not that they invented much before. Their desktop hasn't really changed much since windows 98.
Of course Open Source Software is the best example of my previous statement put to the test, but I can still hold to it, because even the best OSS people still have to go out and get jobs to make their OSS Lives work. I've seen examples of OSS projects failing all over the place becasue it costs money to even do OSS.
It is expected that OSS people have jobs. No one ever claimed you could do OSS and nothing else. It takes a dedicated effort to see a project through. Some people get in over their head and projects fail. It's the same thing with propietary systems.
All I'm saying is, OSS is a very idealistic set of projects. Idealism is an awesome thing, but when it faces reality, it sometimes less than perfect.
I don't think anyone ever claimed OSS was perfect, just better.
Microsoft, and everyone else that has patent claims, has to be respected. It's part of the REALITY of our world today. If OSS software is unfairly stealing the work of Microsoft, then it's liable; I'm liable.
This is where I start to see that you are actually a Troll. If you run Open Source Software you are NOT liable for it. It is not your fault if someone puts tainted code into a program you use. That's the way the law works in the US at least. Besides, I don't think OSS projects would "steal" code from an inferior product anyway.
I guess the fact that only half of the population voted in 2000 means that half the population doesn't care who is president then. 50% is a large number of people not caring, so let's just install a dictator. I mean, no one cares, only half the people spoke up about who they wanted for president.
There is a reason the founders of our country feared mob rule. There are a lot of uninformed people out there who don't know any better and couldn't care less. That doesn't mean it's not an issue. It means that these media conglomerates are trying to make a buck and don't really want to be showing this stuff on their front pages or their TV stations. Intelligent people read independent sources that don't have anything to gain from media consolidation.
I live in a state where recently there was a dispute between two local newspapers. One is locally owned and the other is nationally owned. There was a running fued in the editorials because the nationally owned paper's parent company had been buying up all the competition and violated the FCC rules of the time. The local paper of course pointed this out while the national paper deciding to run an article about how the FCC decision was a good one. Most people read the nationally owned paper because it has better distribution. Does this mean it is a better paper with better articles? No. It just means they don't have the means to distribute that the larger company does. So we end up with a very large positive bias towards the FCC rules change based on the fact that they don't want to report something that affects them negatively. An intelligent person would look elsewhere for more information. Unfortunatley most people watch FOX NEWS and maybe read their local paper, which is most likely owned by the Tribune company. This isn't diverse and independent reporting.
I'm not sure if you know this but they carry mostly the same channels. It's not as if every carrier has their own 500 unique channels. My parents have digital satelite and I have digital cable and it's pretty much the same crap.
The 1973 family could tune into less than 10 independant stations. That still means the number of media producers has grown by at least a factor of 5. With the Internet and large pipes into homes and more desire from people, I only see this number getting bigger.
I don't think you get it. There was obviously less demand in 1973 because TV was still a relatively new technology. As the business of TV became very profitable, more and more stations popped up, and then more and more stations were bought out by larger companies. I'm pointing out that it is not valid to say it is more diverse now then it was in 1973 because the technology was too new for it to be more diverse then it was. There were not enough players to make it as diverse because TV was still in its infancy, not any other reason.
Then you launch into some random babbling about demand not being high enough in the 1970s to create this competition effect
To be honest that was pretty much an asides. I was only making the point that the diversity was based on nothing but the infancy of technology, as I have said earlier. This happens with any form of media. It will become more diverse as more players become involved and then it will become less diverse as more of those players buy up the competition. I'd prefer the stage inbetween instead of being content with the current mess because it offers me 500 channels (and I still can't find any good programming for the most part) The real point of that matter is that there really is only a few large corporations that own most of everything. This sense of competition because we have 500 TV stations is not as it seems. Viacom, Disney, News Corporation, and AOL Time Warner own a very large portion of those stations.
This actually illustrates my point exactly. I have been reading about forged documents, constructed lies about connections between Hussein and Bin Laden, and other such news for months upon months in independent newspapers and magazines while it has only recently recieved notice among the major news stations and only because there was no way to hide it or deny it anymore.
Get a clue, they were examples, they are not the only ones. If you actually take the time to look it up, most TV stations are not owned independently. They are owned by larger corporations that sometimes do a decent job in hiding that fact. Fox owns 35 stations and Viacom owns 39 stations, nevermind its 200 CBS affiliates. GE owns 13 stations and 220 NBC affiliates. ABC's ten stations alone cover 24% of the nation, and that's not including its affiliates.
The point is that just because you are not aware of who owns what doesn't mean that they are all independent channels.