...a particularly effective programmer (I just know a spot of C++) or well-to-do enough to hire one on a whim, freedoms 1 and 3 are not useful to me at their full potential -- but if I ever wanted to improve my programming, an obvious first step would be to browse some free source code -- and I like the indirect benefits of those two freedoms, such as just about everything on Fink being as available on my Macs as it is on my Linux box, thanks to people out there who know what they are doing.
But to me, freedoms zero and two save a lot of headaches. I do not at all like being restricted in terms of how the software can be used, and if I am truly to love my neighbor as myself, I need to be able to legally share software. What really gets under my skin about a lot of free-beer software that isn't free software is limited redistribution; you can't distribute the Flash plugin with an operating system, even though Macromedia always has and barring going out of business likely always will allow anyone to download it.
That being said, as noted earlier I have compromised and mostly use Mac OS X. It's not free in either definition, and neither is Microsoft Office, but OS X has more free components in its base levels than does Windows, at least. Obviously a GNU-based Linux distro or some free version of BSD would be better in some ways, but on the other hand I like the ease of just being able to turn the bloody computer on and have a working Unix-like OS that can run the best office suite in the world (in terms of file compatibility and reliability).
Barring a piece of nonfree software like CrossOver Office (based on Wine much as OS X is based on *BSD) you can't run Office or QuickTime on a Linux system -- these are nigh essential in the modern world, so I might as well use OS X which has native versions of the above.
There is various other nonfree Windows and Mac software I use as well, but I try to use free software when it fills my needs -- but when it does not, ideology takes a back seat to praticality, and in comes proprietary software.
Well, for what it's worth there's a picture of President Bush (Dubya 43, not Poppy 41) with a PowerBook G3 (the Pismo model, I think), so we can imagine what he probably uses personally. I imagine that the executive office is primarily Windows and likely part Mac.
And for you blue folk, there's a picture that was in Time of John Kerry with a PowerBook G4, and Al Gore was evidently a Final Cut Pro enthusaist even before getting on the Apple board.
I've noticed that myself.
And also note how often there isn't an explicit price tag on a "solution" -- that's what makes it different from a product, which is when you can see what you're considering getting and for how much money without promising your firstborn and getting on a mailing list.
Well, they gave one to Bill Gates -- who can become addressable as Sir William upon emigration to Britain. He doesn't give to British politicians as far as I know, only to the Republicans.
As Stallman (Free Software, Free Society; pp. 190-191) said, calling it piracy implies that unauthorized copying is tantamount to armed robbery, kidnap, and murder on the high seas.
They both involve theft of a sort -- but are vastly different. Copyright infringement generally involves cheating someone out of their rightful royalties; piracy involves depriving sailors and their employers of life, liberty, or property (maybe all three!) without due process of law.
I'd say that copyright infringement is not morally tantamount to this.
It depends on whether the destination is a NANP-compliant system (e.g. Canada) -- if so I just dial long distance, else I dial zero and get an operator.
If it's any comfort he's not alone. I'd wager that most congressmen never read a constituent letter or write a reply. That's what the interns and autopen are for -- giving the appearance of caring about the constituents so you can pass laws contrary to their interests and they still won't give a damn.
Note the icon for this story -- an analog land-line telephone (Western or ITT 500, ca. 1961). No risk because the part you stick up to your head is just a speaker and a microphone in a piece of hollow plastic, and even the desk unit is pretty simple.
Same holds true for more modern landline phones, such as 2500 and Trimline, and even the fancier digital landline sets you sometimes see in offices.
While I use cellular occasionally -- I keep the phone in a fanny pack, at great risk to my reproductive health -- I by and large stick to the land lines, not only for safety and convenience, but also for clarity.
Exactly why the common man's Unix laptop is still the $1000 iBook. This thing is junk compared to (from highest price down):
*The aforementioned iBook, if you don't care about Windows. Still very cheap for portable, $1000 with pro OS and WiFi, and enough battery to make it a viable low-cost laptop. *Cheap Dell laptops, starting at $699 for a name-brand computer that'd be slightly better than this. *Desktops in the same price range, the best choice for the economically challenged; this thing doesn't even have a CD-RW and is probably as slow as molasses -- 128 MB RAM isn't probably enough for a modern Linux GUI and any large software.
Yeah, iBooks are pretty good (the new ones don't have the logic board problem that was sort of like the Thinkpad issues), though like any laptop, if you rely on the battery you should have a spare in the drawer at home to minimize downtime if the battery dies.
Two-button issues? That's where a Mac tablet would come in -- the OS is designed such that you can do pretty much anything with one button only -- that's why the second button, when it exists, just sends control+click on a Mac. Microsoft needs to take a cue from Apple and redesign Windows in general to be clean enough to use with one button -- it'd make tablet and accessibility a lot easier.
It's not as bad as it sounds -- he's just saying that Red Hat is one of the three remaining systems in the OS Wars, as he sees it. Red Hat probably is the most popular Linux distribution, but on the other hand there are probably other Linux distros that are as popular as Solaris. Speaking of which, as has already been said, there are more than 12 million installations of Mac OS X, and I understand it's starting to pick up a bit of speed in the server and high-performace markets, especially servers, due to the low cost of Xserve G5s.
Well, there's SCO et al (all sorts of third-party copyrights and patents probably apply to Tru64), and there's the fact that if Tru64 were out there open-source nobody would want HP-UX anyway.
How documented is Alpha? A third-party emulator might be possible -- depending on how Alpha is compared to Itanium (and how long Itanium survives) it could be relatively speedy for running legacy software.
That's not Power -- that's PowerPC 970. I seem to recall they send the developers a Power Mac G5 and a specialized OS (probably a modified PPC NT4). PPC, while a step in the right direction, is a different processor; New World Mac or PowerPC Reference Platform is not the same architecture as Cell.
In fact far better -- these are no doubt harder to forge, and facility security can always stand an upgrade (as long as authorized individuals can still get in without too much trouble)
Thanks for saying that -- I was just about to point that out. I liked Clinton a lot, and supported both Gore and Kerry, so I think I am within my right to say that anyone who is going to take this one out on George Bush is barking up the wrong tree -- Tenet is a private citizen who is famous enough to get in the paper; this is like Steve Ballmer saying something except that Ballmer is at least the CEO of an important company. This is a Clinton appointee replaced earlier this year by Porter Goss, about whom we really do not know much yet.
is to refuse to claim membership in a "race" when you are dealing with colleges -- on anything but the census you have the option of a "Prefer not to respond" or "other." No sense dabbling in 19th century protoanthropological (or perhaps even pseudoanthropological, depending on whom you ask) misinterpretation of ethnicity anyhow, is there? The only thing that racialism helps is racism, and the only people who benefit from it are racists. It has no biological significance, and class (Is Bill Cosby really intrinsically worse off than the white guy under the bridge downtown, or otherwise different in any way that class won't explain?) and occasionally ethnicity (a very dynamic variable) seem to be perfectly fine explanations for behavioral patterns.
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...a particularly effective programmer (I just know a spot of C++) or well-to-do enough to hire one on a whim, freedoms 1 and 3 are not useful to me at their full potential -- but if I ever wanted to improve my programming, an obvious first step would be to browse some free source code -- and I like the indirect benefits of those two freedoms, such as just about everything on Fink being as available on my Macs as it is on my Linux box, thanks to people out there who know what they are doing.
But to me, freedoms zero and two save a lot of headaches. I do not at all like being restricted in terms of how the software can be used, and if I am truly to love my neighbor as myself, I need to be able to legally share software. What really gets under my skin about a lot of free-beer software that isn't free software is limited redistribution; you can't distribute the Flash plugin with an operating system, even though Macromedia always has and barring going out of business likely always will allow anyone to download it.
That being said, as noted earlier I have compromised and mostly use Mac OS X. It's not free in either definition, and neither is Microsoft Office, but OS X has more free components in its base levels than does Windows, at least. Obviously a GNU-based Linux distro or some free version of BSD would be better in some ways, but on the other hand I like the ease of just being able to turn the bloody computer on and have a working Unix-like OS that can run the best office suite in the world (in terms of file compatibility and reliability).
Barring a piece of nonfree software like CrossOver Office (based on Wine much as OS X is based on *BSD) you can't run Office or QuickTime on a Linux system -- these are nigh essential in the modern world, so I might as well use OS X which has native versions of the above.
There is various other nonfree Windows and Mac software I use as well, but I try to use free software when it fills my needs -- but when it does not, ideology takes a back seat to praticality, and in comes proprietary software.
Disproving the existence of God is impossible.
I believe that proof of existence has been rendered at various times throughout human history, just that some people don't believe it.
Well, for what it's worth there's a picture of President Bush (Dubya 43, not Poppy 41) with a PowerBook G3 (the Pismo model, I think), so we can imagine what he probably uses personally. I imagine that the executive office is primarily Windows and likely part Mac.
And for you blue folk, there's a picture that was in Time of John Kerry with a PowerBook G4, and Al Gore was evidently a Final Cut Pro enthusaist even before getting on the Apple board.
I've noticed that myself. And also note how often there isn't an explicit price tag on a "solution" -- that's what makes it different from a product, which is when you can see what you're considering getting and for how much money without promising your firstborn and getting on a mailing list.
Well, they gave one to Bill Gates -- who can become addressable as Sir William upon emigration to Britain. He doesn't give to British politicians as far as I know, only to the Republicans.
Sneaking and printing are hardly armed robbery.
As Stallman (Free Software, Free Society; pp. 190-191) said, calling it piracy implies that unauthorized copying is tantamount to armed robbery, kidnap, and murder on the high seas. They both involve theft of a sort -- but are vastly different. Copyright infringement generally involves cheating someone out of their rightful royalties; piracy involves depriving sailors and their employers of life, liberty, or property (maybe all three!) without due process of law. I'd say that copyright infringement is not morally tantamount to this.
It depends on whether the destination is a NANP-compliant system (e.g. Canada) -- if so I just dial long distance, else I dial zero and get an operator.
If it's any comfort he's not alone. I'd wager that most congressmen never read a constituent letter or write a reply. That's what the interns and autopen are for -- giving the appearance of caring about the constituents so you can pass laws contrary to their interests and they still won't give a damn.
Note the icon for this story -- an analog land-line telephone (Western or ITT 500, ca. 1961). No risk because the part you stick up to your head is just a speaker and a microphone in a piece of hollow plastic, and even the desk unit is pretty simple.
Same holds true for more modern landline phones, such as 2500 and Trimline, and even the fancier digital landline sets you sometimes see in offices.
While I use cellular occasionally -- I keep the phone in a fanny pack, at great risk to my reproductive health -- I by and large stick to the land lines, not only for safety and convenience, but also for clarity.
You don't hold your 802.11 equipment up to the side of your head.
Exactly why the common man's Unix laptop is still the $1000 iBook. This thing is junk compared to (from highest price down):
*The aforementioned iBook, if you don't care about Windows. Still very cheap for portable, $1000 with pro OS and WiFi, and enough battery to make it a viable low-cost laptop.
*Cheap Dell laptops, starting at $699 for a name-brand computer that'd be slightly better than this.
*Desktops in the same price range, the best choice for the economically challenged; this thing doesn't even have a CD-RW and is probably as slow as molasses -- 128 MB RAM isn't probably enough for a modern Linux GUI and any large software.
Yeah, iBooks are pretty good (the new ones don't have the logic board problem that was sort of like the Thinkpad issues), though like any laptop, if you rely on the battery you should have a spare in the drawer at home to minimize downtime if the battery dies.
Better to have the inconvenience of neither keyboard nor second button, but the ability to carry out the actions, than no ability at all.
Exactly what I meant. You shouldn't need the second button if the interface is correct.
Two-button issues? That's where a Mac tablet would come in -- the OS is designed such that you can do pretty much anything with one button only -- that's why the second button, when it exists, just sends control+click on a Mac. Microsoft needs to take a cue from Apple and redesign Windows in general to be clean enough to use with one button -- it'd make tablet and accessibility a lot easier.
It's not as bad as it sounds -- he's just saying that Red Hat is one of the three remaining systems in the OS Wars, as he sees it. Red Hat probably is the most popular Linux distribution, but on the other hand there are probably other Linux distros that are as popular as Solaris. Speaking of which, as has already been said, there are more than 12 million installations of Mac OS X, and I understand it's starting to pick up a bit of speed in the server and high-performace markets, especially servers, due to the low cost of Xserve G5s.
The US has software patents. So, tell me about various rights holders (possibly, but not necessarily, including and not limited to SCO) again?
Well, there's SCO et al (all sorts of third-party copyrights and patents probably apply to Tru64), and there's the fact that if Tru64 were out there open-source nobody would want HP-UX anyway.
How documented is Alpha? A third-party emulator might be possible -- depending on how Alpha is compared to Itanium (and how long Itanium survives) it could be relatively speedy for running legacy software.
That's not Power -- that's PowerPC 970. I seem to recall they send the developers a Power Mac G5 and a specialized OS (probably a modified PPC NT4). PPC, while a step in the right direction, is a different processor; New World Mac or PowerPC Reference Platform is not the same architecture as Cell.
The difference is that AbiWord is truly a non-profit effort -- the purpose is to produce a nice word processor, not provide a base for StarOffice.
In fact far better -- these are no doubt harder to forge, and facility security can always stand an upgrade (as long as authorized individuals can still get in without too much trouble)
Thanks for saying that -- I was just about to point that out. I liked Clinton a lot, and supported both Gore and Kerry, so I think I am within my right to say that anyone who is going to take this one out on George Bush is barking up the wrong tree -- Tenet is a private citizen who is famous enough to get in the paper; this is like Steve Ballmer saying something except that Ballmer is at least the CEO of an important company. This is a Clinton appointee replaced earlier this year by Porter Goss, about whom we really do not know much yet.
is to refuse to claim membership in a "race" when you are dealing with colleges -- on anything but the census you have the option of a "Prefer not to respond" or "other." No sense dabbling in 19th century protoanthropological (or perhaps even pseudoanthropological, depending on whom you ask) misinterpretation of ethnicity anyhow, is there? The only thing that racialism helps is racism, and the only people who benefit from it are racists. It has no biological significance, and class (Is Bill Cosby really intrinsically worse off than the white guy under the bridge downtown, or otherwise different in any way that class won't explain?) and occasionally ethnicity (a very dynamic variable) seem to be perfectly fine explanations for behavioral patterns.