You have not seen FOSS software with good interfaces. I have.
Do you have any meaningful figures to compare the volumes of software produced as proprietary software and as FOSS software? Without that you cannot even start to try to make sense of this `argument' of yours.
Everything that's replacated in labs is real, but not everything that is real can be replicated in labs, at least without an unbounded supply of luck, patience, time, and resources.
FOSS's key weakness is that it is totally useless when it comes to producing original work with a solid, intuitive user interface.
This statement makes no sense because not only there is absolutely nothing in the means of production of software and in the licensing schemes that FOSS uses (and notice that FOSS is these two things) that precludes the production of good UIs, but these two facets of any other possible organization for the production of software are not incompatible with making good UIs.
Now, you say that the observation behind your statement is that you think that FOSS apps are either either unoriginal or have a poor user interface. Well, I have to say that 99% of the non-FOSS apps that I have seen are both unoriginal and have poor interfaces, so the evidence would point mostly to the conclusion that most software sucks, independently of the way its production was organized.
Let's give a trivial example: the computer I'm typing this in is running XP SP2 and has the Start menu at the lower left corner of the screen, yet if I move the mouse to the lower left corner and click, the Start button is not activated, because there is an insensitive border around the button of a couple of pixels: one would say that whoever designed it has not heard of Fitts's Law... and this is the primary way to access everything in this interface. So what can I conclude from this, that proprietary software is inherently incapable of putting a button correctly in the corner of the screen or that some propietary software sucks?
This last claim of yours that there is no FOSS app with a good UI may be true or may be false. But it is different from the one I responded to, unless you are saying again that free/open source cannot have a good UI. If you are, then you are again making a statement which makes no sense.
In what other profession do people work for free? And don't mention law or medicine, because in those fields they volunteer services on an individual basis.
So... do you know of many cases of coders that were coerced into working on a FOSS project?
We all know, of course, that proprietary solutions always Just Work. They even read your mind to figure out your intentions to save you time. Because, as we know, proprietary is magic!
Personally, I think the ideal mix is closed source for the underlying essentials (for interoperability purposes) or where otherwise absolutely necessary and FOSS for everything else.
Where do you see a connection between closed source and interoperability? If there is any, it is negative...
anyone can contribute, barriers to entry, control and scarcity are close to NULL,
...and that sounds great until you remember someone is bound to come up with an implementation in which NULL is represented by the 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF word...
So who is going to pay for the new versions? And who will train users? And who will resurrect companies that dissapeared and did not have the nice touch of opening the source of their defunct product so that they write the updates? And who will pay for the hardware upgrades? And...
Of course, all that in order to upgrade an OS, which is the last thing the average user wants to do, because it is close to the least important thing for him. Because... you guessed... it is the apps which are important to the user.
Virii is just misguided and pretentious desire to appear knowledgeable by the use of a word which does not exist nor, according to all extant documents, never has existed. Vira is just plain silly;-)
But you HAVE seen/heard people use "America" to refer to countries other than the USA? I haven't. Who does that? No one. I never said any one did.
Well that ends the discussion as far as I'm concerned. You're claiming the term is ambiguous, yet you clearly recognize that it is not.
Oh dear. It is ambiguous because it refers both to the USA and to the continent called America. You'll surely appreciate the fact that these are not two countries, but a country and a continent. As I said before, I never claimed that anyone used the word America to refer to other countries apart from the USA: I did claim, though, that people use America to refer to the continent. This introduces an ambiguity. I have no idea where you got the idea that I do not recognize this as an ambiguity.
Anyways... I'll just carry on using whatever term I want, as you will yourself. I do not really mind your using America for the USA, not at all: I find it in line with other usages, as I mentioned before, like "World Series" and many others.
[Incidentally, the fact that the term `americano' is used to refer to nationals from the USA in Spanish is recorded in the dictionary of the REA http://rae.es/ but was added only in the last edition: the one from 1992 does not include that meaning, nor any of the other 30 or so going back to the first edition of 1770. `Estadounidense', on the other hand, has always only been recorded as meaning `natural from the US' (the word was included in 1952); `America' is not in the dictionary, which does not record proper nouns.]
Well, someone surely has seen some point in such an alliance in the past. And you will not be naive enough to believe that the motives on the part of the US have been to protect the poor weaklings that are the European countries...
One thing is to participate in strategic alliances and involve in cooperation against aggression. The other is to assume that you are somehow the baby sitter of the world.
Let me add: specially if the justification for doing so is that others are "a bunch of peacenik woosies"; you put it in a very colorful way, but as much was almost explicit in official US language during the process that lead to the Iraq invasion...
Even the British, who took a very important part in the last couple of US adventures (militarily and, probably more importantly, politically), have shown a most amazing behaviour and success in dealing with what's usually called terrorism, and have other `peacenik woosies'.
One thing is to participate in strategic alliances and involve in cooperation against aggression. The other is to assume that you are somehow the baby sitter of the world.
In particular, the option to going around the world `liberating' countries and what not is not to go back to your country and stop any connection with the outside world.
I'll be completely honest. What happened is that Americans were a bit shocked at how fast things unfolded in Afghanistan and it seemed like what had taken the Soviet Union a decade to fail at, the USA had achieved in a matter of weeks.
You make it sound like Afghanistan was a success. You should really look into the matter a bit deeper, as very soon after the fact it was very clear that things were at least as bad as before invasion. The political situation, the cohesion of the population, the preeminence of opium and heroin, and so on have not gotten better since the US intervened, and it is very debatable if the objectives laid out that justified the whole thing were achieved. Of course, the way it was handled was not as catastrophically bad as Iraq---there was an actual coalition and so on, and this is no a minor point in this context---but you seem to regard the Afghanistan exercise in a much rosier light than most.
So, there was still a lot of anger over 9/11, and Saddam had been a long time annoyance. So really, it was all about 9/11 rage at the arab world in general and the idea was to just go kick ass in as many arab countries as possible. I'm quite sure that if the USA had not been bogged down in Iraq, then, it would have no doubt moved on into Syria and Iran.
That is very debatable, as both Syria and Iran would have been considerably more problematic because of the consequences such an action would have brought in the context of the situation of the Middle East. Attacking Iraq was, in that respect, very simple as---apart from the inevitable turmoil in Arab countries due to collective pride being hurt---Iraq was not exactly favoured by the masses' love. Iraq, moreover, was in a very bad state, and this was very well known by those propounding the invasion (of course, it was not said publicly, for otherwise the whole idea of Iraq being a great danger would not have made any sense), while Iran, at least, is a completely different picture.
You are right about taking responsibility for Iraq. My wife, a long time liberal, was dead set against the war from the get go, but, to echo Colin Powell, we broke it, so now we have to fix it. The civil war in Iraq may have been decades, if not centuries in the making, but you honestly can't say that we were not warned - every European country with a deep experience in former colonial affairs in the Islamic world warned us that we were making a tremendous mistake. One has to wonder if the French saw Iraq as America's Algeria....
So, the USA -has- to stay in Iraq, and stay until the country is governed in a democracy, under the rule of law and with peace for all. If that takes 100 years and trillions of dollars, that sucks, but the USA made its decision when the bombing campaign opened so long ago in March 2003.
That is an absurd objective, as democracy does not happen that way. It has never happened that way, and I posit that a little thought about the matter will convince anyone that it cannot happen that way. Even the objective of `calming things down' is almost self defeating, as the calm is broken precisely because of the occupation.
Were the US to leave Iraq, the country would surely be a chaos for some time, but it will reorganize itself. The thing is, the US does not want to leave Iraq: there may be growing clamor on the part of the US population, but strategically the US does not want to leave.
Also, I have had to rethink on the way home my stance with Europe and NATO. I listened to a very moving discussion of the state of affairs about Russia, by a British broadcaster on American public radio. Now, I don't know you much you know about the BBC as presented in the USA, but its a pretty liberal institution, and generally against any sort of confrontation or militarism of any kind. In short, you would say that they are radically left wing.
I've yet to see anyone refer to any of the other `United States' as `United Staes' without the extra qualification. So, no, `US' is not ambiguous IME.
But you HAVE seen/heard people use "America" to refer to countries other than the USA? I haven't. Who does that?
No one. I never said any one did.
For that matter, I haven't ever heard the term used to refer to the continents, either. It's always "North America", "South America", "Central America" or "the Americas".
America is used to refer to the continent all over the world.
As I said to someone else, you need to get out more, in the general sense, if you have never heard this...
If you want to go by common usage, "America" is unambiguous and refers to the USA. If you want to be precise (which I have no objection to -- I'm a geek and a mathematician, I like precision), then "US" is ambiguous and requires clarification. Just like "America".
It's the common usage in the US to say America when referring to the USA, and it is increasingly common in Spanish-speaking countries which have a very strong linguistical influence from the US---the Latin American version of the CNN usually says `America', for example. In lots and lots of other countries it is not common usage.
As I said before, the ambiguity you see in "US" presupposes an usage of "US" (viz. to refer to `United States' other than the USA) which to the best of my knowledge is non-existent in practice. I'll be delighted to be shown real life instances of the usage, were they to exist.
I have no idea where you got the idea that I think calling something a theory is a negative thing. Surely not from my post.
My post was the expression of my annoyance at seeing yet another poster see a difference between `law' and `theory', where there is none, thereby adding even more noise to what might be a rational discussion.
The problem is that it doesn't always work out ideally as seen in Walmart.
Doesn't always? That's quite generous!
Quite a few things are necessary for the outcome to be ideal, like perfect information for all decision makers, having no one have control of the prices, and so on. In practice, these conditions are quite far from holding.
If that is all you hear, you probably need to get out more... in the general sense: talk to people in other countries, read their literature, their news, travel. There is a world out there, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
You have not seen FOSS software with good interfaces. I have.
Do you have any meaningful figures to compare the volumes of software produced as proprietary software and as FOSS software? Without that you cannot even start to try to make sense of this `argument' of yours.
I can only take from that that you had a pretty bad and unprecise math teacher...
Everything that's replacated in labs is real, but not everything that is real can be replicated in labs, at least without an unbounded supply of luck, patience, time, and resources.
You said:
FOSS's key weakness is that it is totally useless when it comes to producing original work with a solid, intuitive user interface.This statement makes no sense because not only there is absolutely nothing in the means of production of software and in the licensing schemes that FOSS uses (and notice that FOSS is these two things) that precludes the production of good UIs, but these two facets of any other possible organization for the production of software are not incompatible with making good UIs.
Now, you say that the observation behind your statement is that you think that FOSS apps are either either unoriginal or have a poor user interface. Well, I have to say that 99% of the non-FOSS apps that I have seen are both unoriginal and have poor interfaces, so the evidence would point mostly to the conclusion that most software sucks, independently of the way its production was organized.
Let's give a trivial example: the computer I'm typing this in is running XP SP2 and has the Start menu at the lower left corner of the screen, yet if I move the mouse to the lower left corner and click, the Start button is not activated, because there is an insensitive border around the button of a couple of pixels: one would say that whoever designed it has not heard of Fitts's Law... and this is the primary way to access everything in this interface. So what can I conclude from this, that proprietary software is inherently incapable of putting a button correctly in the corner of the screen or that some propietary software sucks?
This last claim of yours that there is no FOSS app with a good UI may be true or may be false. But it is different from the one I responded to, unless you are saying again that free/open source cannot have a good UI. If you are, then you are again making a statement which makes no sense.
So... do you know of many cases of coders that were coerced into working on a FOSS project?
This statement makes no sense.
You can pay someone to give you the solutions with an open sourced app.
We all know, of course, that proprietary solutions always Just Work. They even read your mind to figure out your intentions to save you time. Because, as we know, proprietary is magic!
Personally, I think the ideal mix is closed source for the underlying essentials (for interoperability purposes) or where otherwise absolutely necessary and FOSS for everything else.
Where do you see a connection between closed source and interoperability? If there is any, it is negative...
...and that sounds great until you remember someone is bound to come up with an implementation in which NULL is represented by the 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF word...
So who is going to pay for the new versions? And who will train users? And who will resurrect companies that dissapeared and did not have the nice touch of opening the source of their defunct product so that they write the updates? And who will pay for the hardware upgrades? And...
Of course, all that in order to upgrade an OS, which is the last thing the average user wants to do, because it is close to the least important thing for him. Because... you guessed... it is the apps which are important to the user.
Virii is just misguided and pretentious desire to appear knowledgeable by the use of a word which does not exist nor, according to all extant documents, never has existed. Vira is just plain silly ;-)
Well that ends the discussion as far as I'm concerned. You're claiming the term is ambiguous, yet you clearly recognize that it is not.
Oh dear. It is ambiguous because it refers both to the USA and to the continent called America. You'll surely appreciate the fact that these are not two countries, but a country and a continent. As I said before, I never claimed that anyone used the word America to refer to other countries apart from the USA: I did claim, though, that people use America to refer to the continent. This introduces an ambiguity. I have no idea where you got the idea that I do not recognize this as an ambiguity.
Anyways... I'll just carry on using whatever term I want, as you will yourself. I do not really mind your using America for the USA, not at all: I find it in line with other usages, as I mentioned before, like "World Series" and many others.
[Incidentally, the fact that the term `americano' is used to refer to nationals from the USA in Spanish is recorded in the dictionary of the REA http://rae.es/ but was added only in the last edition: the one from 1992 does not include that meaning, nor any of the other 30 or so going back to the first edition of 1770. `Estadounidense', on the other hand, has always only been recorded as meaning `natural from the US' (the word was included in 1952); `America' is not in the dictionary, which does not record proper nouns.]
Well, someone surely has seen some point in such an alliance in the past. And you will not be naive enough to believe that the motives on the part of the US have been to protect the poor weaklings that are the European countries...
One thing is to participate in strategic alliances and involve in cooperation against aggression. The other is to assume that you are somehow the baby sitter of the world.
Let me add: specially if the justification for doing so is that others are "a bunch of peacenik woosies"; you put it in a very colorful way, but as much was almost explicit in official US language during the process that lead to the Iraq invasion...
Even the British, who took a very important part in the last couple of US adventures (militarily and, probably more importantly, politically), have shown a most amazing behaviour and success in dealing with what's usually called terrorism, and have other `peacenik woosies'.
One thing is to participate in strategic alliances and involve in cooperation against aggression. The other is to assume that you are somehow the baby sitter of the world.
In particular, the option to going around the world `liberating' countries and what not is not to go back to your country and stop any connection with the outside world.
I'll be completely honest. What happened is that Americans were a bit shocked at how fast things unfolded in Afghanistan and it seemed like what had taken the Soviet Union a decade to fail at, the USA had achieved in a matter of weeks.
You make it sound like Afghanistan was a success. You should really look into the matter a bit deeper, as very soon after the fact it was very clear that things were at least as bad as before invasion. The political situation, the cohesion of the population, the preeminence of opium and heroin, and so on have not gotten better since the US intervened, and it is very debatable if the objectives laid out that justified the whole thing were achieved. Of course, the way it was handled was not as catastrophically bad as Iraq---there was an actual coalition and so on, and this is no a minor point in this context---but you seem to regard the Afghanistan exercise in a much rosier light than most.
So, there was still a lot of anger over 9/11, and Saddam had been a long time annoyance. So really, it was all about 9/11 rage at the arab world in general and the idea was to just go kick ass in as many arab countries as possible. I'm quite sure that if the USA had not been bogged down in Iraq, then, it would have no doubt moved on into Syria and Iran.
That is very debatable, as both Syria and Iran would have been considerably more problematic because of the consequences such an action would have brought in the context of the situation of the Middle East. Attacking Iraq was, in that respect, very simple as---apart from the inevitable turmoil in Arab countries due to collective pride being hurt---Iraq was not exactly favoured by the masses' love. Iraq, moreover, was in a very bad state, and this was very well known by those propounding the invasion (of course, it was not said publicly, for otherwise the whole idea of Iraq being a great danger would not have made any sense), while Iran, at least, is a completely different picture.
You are right about taking responsibility for Iraq. My wife, a long time liberal, was dead set against the war from the get go, but, to echo Colin Powell, we broke it, so now we have to fix it. The civil war in Iraq may have been decades, if not centuries in the making, but you honestly can't say that we were not warned - every European country with a deep experience in former colonial affairs in the Islamic world warned us that we were making a tremendous mistake. One has to wonder if the French saw Iraq as America's Algeria....
So, the USA -has- to stay in Iraq, and stay until the country is governed in a democracy, under the rule of law and with peace for all. If that takes 100 years and trillions of dollars, that sucks, but the USA made its decision when the bombing campaign opened so long ago in March 2003.
That is an absurd objective, as democracy does not happen that way. It has never happened that way, and I posit that a little thought about the matter will convince anyone that it cannot happen that way. Even the objective of `calming things down' is almost self defeating, as the calm is broken precisely because of the occupation.
Were the US to leave Iraq, the country would surely be a chaos for some time, but it will reorganize itself. The thing is, the US does not want to leave Iraq: there may be growing clamor on the part of the US population, but strategically the US does not want to leave.
Also, I have had to rethink on the way home my stance with Europe and NATO. I listened to a very moving discussion of the state of affairs about Russia, by a British broadcaster on American public radio. Now, I don't know you much you know about the BBC as presented in the USA, but its a pretty liberal institution, and generally against any sort of confrontation or militarism of any kind. In short, you would say that they are radically left wing.
That you see the BBC as radically left wing (I've
Oh well. In the end, I honestly do not care what's your view on the matter.
But you HAVE seen/heard people use "America" to refer to countries other than the USA? I haven't. Who does that?
No one. I never said any one did.
For that matter, I haven't ever heard the term used to refer to the continents, either. It's always "North America", "South America", "Central America" or "the Americas".
America is used to refer to the continent all over the world.
As I said to someone else, you need to get out more, in the general sense, if you have never heard this...
If you want to go by common usage, "America" is unambiguous and refers to the USA. If you want to be precise (which I have no objection to -- I'm a geek and a mathematician, I like precision), then "US" is ambiguous and requires clarification. Just like "America".
It's the common usage in the US to say America when referring to the USA, and it is increasingly common in Spanish-speaking countries which have a very strong linguistical influence from the US---the Latin American version of the CNN usually says `America', for example. In lots and lots of other countries it is not common usage.
As I said before, the ambiguity you see in "US" presupposes an usage of "US" (viz. to refer to `United States' other than the USA) which to the best of my knowledge is non-existent in practice. I'll be delighted to be shown real life instances of the usage, were they to exist.
`You guys'?
I, for one, think things will not be worse when he goes away.
I have no idea where you got the idea that I think calling something a theory is a negative thing. Surely not from my post.
My post was the expression of my annoyance at seeing yet another poster see a difference between `law' and `theory', where there is none, thereby adding even more noise to what might be a rational discussion.
Doesn't always? That's quite generous!
Quite a few things are necessary for the outcome to be ideal, like perfect information for all decision makers, having no one have control of the prices, and so on. In practice, these conditions are quite far from holding.
If that is all you hear, you probably need to get out more... in the general sense: talk to people in other countries, read their literature, their news, travel. There is a world out there, you know.
Well, that means exactly the same thing as American. Have you actually read the post you replied to?