notice that I posed it as a question, not a statement
and as far as make xconfig is concerned, I was meaning the thing that it gets you to, which is menu-driven reconfiguration of the kernel - if M$ can get away with calling the Start Menu an innovation, I think the OSS community can get away with that.
As far as desktops that work with multiple WM's, I'd like some elaboration on that - as far as I was aware, KDE and Gnome were the first that worked that way, with the "desktop" feature set being built into the interface for most other OSes and other desktops for systems like X being built into the window manager or equivalent.
On a side note, are there any arguments against Free software that are actually more specific than "stifles innovation"?
Sure, I can think of a way the Open Source movement threatens the American Way.
Think long and hard about the values of the OSS community. . . community owned product, everyone takes part in the production process, everyone reaps the benefits of the production process.
a) He was joking
b) Amish people will build barns for people outside the Amish community, and there is a demand for them, because when the Amish build barns, the build damn good barns.
I'm not sure how M$ can actually sit there and claim that the Open Source movement threatens innovation. . . esp. with the number of innovations that I'm pretty sure it fostered.
I'm curious now, how many of the following things that I consider pretty cool features of linux or *BSD have been exhibited in a previous non-OSS project:
$ make xconfig
X and all its windowmanager goodness
ports
SCSI emulation
dual booting
pluggable text editors (emacs &c)
desktop systems that can work with multiple WMs
coffee
I really am pretty sure they are just so confused about how to deal with OSS that they can't think of anything other than FUD tactics to protect their corporate interests.
Re:What about the anti-genetic backlash?
on
Genetic Stone Soup
·
· Score: 2
If the public wants GM-free foods then they'll get it thanks to the free market, and indeed there are so-called "organic" products on the market
I have a friend who is a homesteader, and from talking to her I have learned that isn't necessarily true. It is getting nearly impossible for farmers themselves to grow non-GM food. The problem is that GM food often cross-breeds with non-GM crops in farms miles away. Which is a real problem, since often GM crops are not capable of producing viable offspring. Farmers' crops are failing to reproduce becasue a generation that comes after one that crossbreeds with GM plants cannot reproduce.
I won't deny that there are plenty of great things that can come from GM food, but we HAVE to take it slow. . we're playing with stuff we barely understand here, and companies such as Monsanto that produce GM foods aren't exactly known for being responsible.
They can be ignored quite easily, by choosing not to buy their products . In a capitlist society your purchasing power is your weapon, and by denying companies your money you send a clear message to them about their products and actions.
I happen to live in a town where this is impossible. Most people don't even know what GM food is, let alone care whether or not they are buying it, so all the local markets, even the small ones, sell GM food. I am currently trying to find a farmer in the area who is willing to sell me food, but trying to find non-GM foods is a bit like trying to buy a computer without Windows preinstalled, if you know what I mean.
Motorola released a press release today stating they "think the whole issue of getting those Iridium satellites knocked out of the air just got resolved."
The people who are calling for this site to be taken down are the same people who call for the Green Bay Packers to change their name because it is cruel to animals.
and I think this site is fucking hilarious. In the 19 years on this earth I have grown enough to know when someone is making a joke for the sake of how ridiculous it is, and I can laugh.
Part of me hopes the site is a commentary on how pet lovers really do raise their pets. . . but the humor is a little to unsophisticated for that.
Scheme: Functional language, very stack based, makes heavy use of LISP-style lists, funky weak-ass typing scheme, extremely recursive syntax. . . essentially lambda calculus on steroids.
Pascal: Imperative language. Annoying typing scheme that the programmer is always tripping over, standard infix imperative language type syntax. . . Basically, C without all the things that make C C.
I'm failing to see the family resemblance here. . could someone help me out?
That would be damn cool, but also damn impossible to program. . . I think that there should also be something dealing with increasing levels of beauraucracy as your country grows, so that it starts to become socially unstable if the beuraucrats don't handle their wants efficiently enough. . . that seems to be a real limiting agent in many large civilizations. (hence why Switzerland can reach ZPG and the US doesn't have a chance in hell at it.)
True that businesses don't wanna just build the cluster themselves. . . I think it's more than just that they dont want to do it, though. From the eyes of a business, it's not an option. Businesses want security, and they want to know that if the system breaks, they can have an expert show up when they need them. Otherwise, they'd have to pay to have a staffer full-time who knows how to fix a down Cray Beowulf Cluster, which is fiscally stupid. Much wiser to pay the extra money in the first place to have a prepackaged system with a service plan so that you have the experties only when you need it.
I think you missed the point. Unlike most senseless violence, the Challenger explosion wasn't just a billion dollars down the tube and 7 dead astronauts. There is something more grisly horrible about a plane wreck, but seeing the Challenger blow up spoke to people on an entirely different level. We saw a symbol of a vital part of ourselves crash into the ocean that day.
Except that new versions of windows aren't distros any more than Slack 4 is a different distro from Slack 7.1. It's all Windows, and it's all Slack.
Then again, with M$'s fscked up versioning system, where the number jumps from 3.11 to 95 when it should've been to 4.0, then to 98 when it should still be 4.1 or 4.2 (sorry, kids, but I just can't consider a driver update a new version.) It's hard to tell what's what in the Windows world anymore. . .
If I were in charge of hire'nfire, I'd see winning the IOCCC as a definite plus. . . to write a well-obfuscated C program takes good knowledge of C and a love for programming, are both hopefully Good Things in the eyes of an employer.
and how can you blame closed-source? So far it seems like all the great graphical systems are closed source software - it seems to be coming from compaies either trying to stay competitive (DirectX) or trying to get a foothold (Be, NeXTstep, etc)
No free TV can't be good for the US economy, given how strongly it depends on TV advertising. No channel surfing, certainly a lot fewer kids watching Saturday morning cartoons for hours on end, People will watch a lot less TV if they suddenly have to pay to watch a show they don't like a whole lot.
OTOH, I do wonder about some things in OpenGL. . admittedly it's the only set of graphics libraries I've ever used (Last time I did graphics programming it was pure DOS VGA programming), but a lot of stuff I do involves plotting the screen one pixel at a time. Hence, I find it annoying that it seems to take as many as 4 function calls to put a pixel.
I certainly haven't leveled a profiler on the X code, but I'm still pretty certain that the reason for it being so slow is that it is designed to run over a network. . . the client/server architecture is very versatile, but it does creat another abstraction layer.
Not to mention, if the company really is in a position where your presence means life or death, as you implied, your friends' jobs' days are numbered, anyway. Don't sacrifice a good carreer move on your part for the sake of a battle you cannot win.
..to see such a sweet OS crippled by lack of proper GUI design.
Eh, unlike the point about mouse buttons, which is a troll, the one about linux's GUI is more or less true.
In truth, the interface part of the GUI is great. I live for using Gnome - I love the way I can put so much customization into the way I can have the stuff laid out on my screen. The only thing it compares to in my mind is some plugins for MacOS. And KDE ain't so bad, either.
But the krap that's running under it just pisses me off. OK, one thing I love X for is XDM. I can feel right at home even in a computer lab across campus. And I understand the need for a certain level of abstraction that creates issues when I'm working remotely like that. But why the hell do I have to deal with it when I'm sitting right in front of the damn box? Why can't stuff that is standard on other GUI's be standard on X too, rather than added features that are a pain to patch into the whole system?
and I'm not going to even start on getting an X server set up. . .
What are these market forces, and why should they hurt an OSS *BSD project any more than they hurt GNU/Linux?
From what I can tell, I don't know about FreeBSD (it seems that many people just see it as a Linux with less hardware support), but OpenBSD seems to be doing well because of its repuptation for security, and NetBSD is the only option for people who want to be running a *nix (or a Free OS) on many machines that are simply ignored by most every other software project.
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notice that I posed it as a question, not a statement
and as far as make xconfig is concerned, I was meaning the thing that it gets you to, which is menu-driven reconfiguration of the kernel - if M$ can get away with calling the Start Menu an innovation, I think the OSS community can get away with that.
As far as desktops that work with multiple WM's, I'd like some elaboration on that - as far as I was aware, KDE and Gnome were the first that worked that way, with the "desktop" feature set being built into the interface for most other OSes and other desktops for systems like X being built into the window manager or equivalent.
Sure, I can think of a way the Open Source movement threatens the American Way.
Think long and hard about the values of the OSS community. . . community owned product, everyone takes part in the production process, everyone reaps the benefits of the production process.
I'd say we're pretty damn close to Marxism.
a) He was joking
b) Amish people will build barns for people outside the Amish community, and there is a demand for them, because when the Amish build barns, the build damn good barns.
I'm not sure how M$ can actually sit there and claim that the Open Source movement threatens innovation. . . esp. with the number of innovations that I'm pretty sure it fostered.
I'm curious now, how many of the following things that I consider pretty cool features of linux or *BSD have been exhibited in a previous non-OSS project:
$ make xconfig
X and all its windowmanager goodness
ports
SCSI emulation
dual booting
pluggable text editors (emacs &c)
desktop systems that can work with multiple WMs
coffee
I really am pretty sure they are just so confused about how to deal with OSS that they can't think of anything other than FUD tactics to protect their corporate interests.
I have a friend who is a homesteader, and from talking to her I have learned that isn't necessarily true. It is getting nearly impossible for farmers themselves to grow non-GM food. The problem is that GM food often cross-breeds with non-GM crops in farms miles away. Which is a real problem, since often GM crops are not capable of producing viable offspring. Farmers' crops are failing to reproduce becasue a generation that comes after one that crossbreeds with GM plants cannot reproduce.
I won't deny that there are plenty of great things that can come from GM food, but we HAVE to take it slow. . we're playing with stuff we barely understand here, and companies such as Monsanto that produce GM foods aren't exactly known for being responsible.
I happen to live in a town where this is impossible. Most people don't even know what GM food is, let alone care whether or not they are buying it, so all the local markets, even the small ones, sell GM food. I am currently trying to find a farmer in the area who is willing to sell me food, but trying to find non-GM foods is a bit like trying to buy a computer without Windows preinstalled, if you know what I mean.
Motorola released a press release today stating they "think the whole issue of getting those Iridium satellites knocked out of the air just got resolved."
The people who are calling for this site to be taken down are the same people who call for the Green Bay Packers to change their name because it is cruel to animals.
and I think this site is fucking hilarious. In the 19 years on this earth I have grown enough to know when someone is making a joke for the sake of how ridiculous it is, and I can laugh.
Part of me hopes the site is a commentary on how pet lovers really do raise their pets. . . but the humor is a little to unsophisticated for that.
Scheme: Functional language, very stack based, makes heavy use of LISP-style lists, funky weak-ass typing scheme, extremely recursive syntax. . . essentially lambda calculus on steroids.
Pascal: Imperative language. Annoying typing scheme that the programmer is always tripping over, standard infix imperative language type syntax. . . Basically, C without all the things that make C C.
I'm failing to see the family resemblance here. . could someone help me out?
That would be damn cool, but also damn impossible to program. . . I think that there should also be something dealing with increasing levels of beauraucracy as your country grows, so that it starts to become socially unstable if the beuraucrats don't handle their wants efficiently enough. . . that seems to be a real limiting agent in many large civilizations. (hence why Switzerland can reach ZPG and the US doesn't have a chance in hell at it.)
True that businesses don't wanna just build the cluster themselves. . . I think it's more than just that they dont want to do it, though. From the eyes of a business, it's not an option. Businesses want security, and they want to know that if the system breaks, they can have an expert show up when they need them. Otherwise, they'd have to pay to have a staffer full-time who knows how to fix a down Cray Beowulf Cluster, which is fiscally stupid. Much wiser to pay the extra money in the first place to have a prepackaged system with a service plan so that you have the experties only when you need it.
I think you missed the point. Unlike most senseless violence, the Challenger explosion wasn't just a billion dollars down the tube and 7 dead astronauts. There is something more grisly horrible about a plane wreck, but seeing the Challenger blow up spoke to people on an entirely different level. We saw a symbol of a vital part of ourselves crash into the ocean that day.
Except that new versions of windows aren't distros any more than Slack 4 is a different distro from Slack 7.1. It's all Windows, and it's all Slack. Then again, with M$'s fscked up versioning system, where the number jumps from 3.11 to 95 when it should've been to 4.0, then to 98 when it should still be 4.1 or 4.2 (sorry, kids, but I just can't consider a driver update a new version.) It's hard to tell what's what in the Windows world anymore. . .
When does a town become a city?
When it wants to. Madrid is still registered as a villa.
but obfuscated code still doesn't seem as impressive to me as a good ol' 4k intro.
Maybe it's the pretty pictures. . .
If I were in charge of hire'nfire, I'd see winning the IOCCC as a definite plus. . . to write a well-obfuscated C program takes good knowledge of C and a love for programming, are both hopefully Good Things in the eyes of an employer.
and as for me, yes, I know. (score: -1, troll)
and how can you blame closed-source? So far it seems like all the great graphical systems are closed source software - it seems to be coming from compaies either trying to stay competitive (DirectX) or trying to get a foothold (Be, NeXTstep, etc)
No free TV can't be good for the US economy, given how strongly it depends on TV advertising. No channel surfing, certainly a lot fewer kids watching Saturday morning cartoons for hours on end, People will watch a lot less TV if they suddenly have to pay to watch a show they don't like a whole lot.
OTOH, I do wonder about some things in OpenGL. . admittedly it's the only set of graphics libraries I've ever used (Last time I did graphics programming it was pure DOS VGA programming), but a lot of stuff I do involves plotting the screen one pixel at a time. Hence, I find it annoying that it seems to take as many as 4 function calls to put a pixel.
I certainly haven't leveled a profiler on the X code, but I'm still pretty certain that the reason for it being so slow is that it is designed to run over a network. . . the client/server architecture is very versatile, but it does creat another abstraction layer.
Not to mention, if the company really is in a position where your presence means life or death, as you implied, your friends' jobs' days are numbered, anyway. Don't sacrifice a good carreer move on your part for the sake of a battle you cannot win.
Eh, unlike the point about mouse buttons, which is a troll, the one about linux's GUI is more or less true.
In truth, the interface part of the GUI is great. I live for using Gnome - I love the way I can put so much customization into the way I can have the stuff laid out on my screen. The only thing it compares to in my mind is some plugins for MacOS. And KDE ain't so bad, either.
But the krap that's running under it just pisses me off. OK, one thing I love X for is XDM. I can feel right at home even in a computer lab across campus. And I understand the need for a certain level of abstraction that creates issues when I'm working remotely like that. But why the hell do I have to deal with it when I'm sitting right in front of the damn box? Why can't stuff that is standard on other GUI's be standard on X too, rather than added features that are a pain to patch into the whole system?
and I'm not going to even start on getting an X server set up. . .
From what I can tell, I don't know about FreeBSD (it seems that many people just see it as a Linux with less hardware support), but OpenBSD seems to be doing well because of its repuptation for security, and NetBSD is the only option for people who want to be running a *nix (or a Free OS) on many machines that are simply ignored by most every other software project.
Hey, Rob, it's called the "preview" button.