I tried to download a cow last week, but my connection wasn't fast enough. I ended up with the cow, but after all the time outs, she was missing pieces, and couldn't moo properly. Next time, I'll just order the cow on CD, it takes longer that way, but I probably won't have to put her to sleep.
It really amazes me how seriously people take everything on Slashdot, and why my silly seemingly insignifigant posts keep getting modded up. Guess that's the breaks. Lots of smug sys admins out there I guess.
That doesn't change the fact that I enjoy using linux based systems, and happen to prefer it to Windows. It's an opinion. If it were based on anything more than my personal experience, and needed to be quantified, it would be a fact, although opinions can be factual, and we try our best to make them so, sometimes an opinion for whatever reason is just that.
Personally, I think Linux makes a great desktop. It's stable usable, and not all that hard to manage on multiple and varied systems once you get the hang of it. But that's not based on an infinite number of years in the Unix support field.
Must have been five years ago, a friend of mine aquired some old hard drives from systems that once belonged to adobe. He was able to recover some interesting historical data. One of the drives even had what appeared to be the first PDF file ever generated. He sold copies of the drive's contents on Zip disk. Never did get around to getting one.
In defense of the beast, they've been getting hit with bad patent law suits worse than anyone.
To name a few from the last couple years:
There was the incredibly broad Eolas patent. There was the burst patent. There was the down right stupid DRM patent. There were a couple hand held device patents. There was the supposed "relational database" patent, which really offended me.
And others.
If I were getting sued anywhere near as much as they are, you better believe I would patent every stupid feature I came up with.
Yet, in most of these stupid patent cases that actually make it to court, they lose. And they keep losing.
Not that they can't afford it. It's the principle, I guess.
Now that you've mentally masturbated all over me, I feel dirty.
Jesus Christ man... So you're telling me that I'm not entitled to my opinion because I don't present you with enough irrefutable evidence?
Really?
Burdon of proof? Refute my "information?" What information? This isn't exactly Lincoln v Douglas here, buddy.
If any web site is that important to you that you can spend enough time to write such a long useless response like that or even the last one, to my comparatively short stupid initial post, I'm a little scared of you. Okay, maybe more than a little scared.
Please don't come to my house and beat me up.
I know the job market's been tough lately, but there are a million better things you can do with your time than try to start a fight with the first idiot you find because it makes you feel like more of a man on Slashdot.
You fucking clod.
Fine. You win. You're so wonderful.
I will ask you before forming any opinion on anything.
Man that was sloppy post.
I understand why you don't want to attribute it to yourself.
No one ever said anything about OS religion.
Unlike when your RPM database gets corrupted or when RedHat inadvertantly puts the wrong information on glibc and everyone upgrades and is left with a machine that you can only reinstall the OS on (the shortest path).
Look, if you cared that much about my stupid post, you would have pointed out that Linux isn't an operating system or platform. It's a kernel. Nothing more.
Further you shouldn't assume that redhat is the only distribution, or that I even use red hat. I don't think I even mentioned red hat in the post, come to think of it. Odd...
Something goes wrong enough to where this is a feature?
Have you used Windows lately?
As opposed to the 1000s of games on the Windows box that all their friends are playing. Could be that you have only the default 5 games installed on the Windows box and they are tired of them and that's why they don't want to use those?
Yes, to put it back into context from left field "Games that come with Linux" was the operative term. Darnit, I called it Linux again, you should have corrected me. What kind of old timey know nothing snob are you?
Proof of that which exists today? or are you still living in 1995?
Yep, it's no secret.
Don't believe me?
Buy any third party firewall with application level blocking. Norton internet security catches most of them.
Heh, yeah... those wonderful 'man' pages. When there is documentation, it is completely dry when having simply one example of a very common use would answer 90% of all questions about it. Linux documentation (and even Unix documentation for the most part) is seriously lacking. It's written by engineers for engineers. No examples, just lists of the 200+ command line options for every program with almost no direction of which ones are useful together.
Ouch. Sounds like fun.
Actually, I've only really needed to resort to man pages a couple of times. There's this great thing here in the 21st century called the internet.
Who cares, neither of them kill babies and eat them raw. I don't idolize either of them, they are just humans like me, not a god, and not worthy of religion.
Babies? Raw? You're right. It was a joke, specifically engineered for a single brief chuckle, for those inclined to think it was funny. If you need help this definition comes in handy.
I like KDE better than Windows XP. It's a better desktop with more features that are easier to tweak and fix if something goes wrong.
I'm starting to play with XFCE. I like that too.
The command line actually has real unadulterated power under Linux!
I like the fact that there isn't a central monolithic registry that can take the entire system down.
I prefer Mozilla to IE. Always have.
My kids like the games that come with KDE and GNOME. They're colorful and fun, and they whine when I tell them they have to use the XP box in the other room for homework.
I like the fact that my nine year old can't break it... no matter how hard she tries...
I like the fact that my wife can't install software on my desktop when she's not logged in as me.
I like Linux because I never have to worry about the status of my license, or installing it on multiple machines.
I like the fact that I can set up a grid or a series of thin clients throughout my house without much real work.
I like the fact that my internet connection is faster under Linux than it was under Windows XP. It's a real kick. If you have both running side by side, try comparing them sometime.
It's nice that Linux will run (granted with a little work) on my prehistoric 486dx2.
It's nice that Linux doesn't have 19 system processes that report to the Microsoft mother-ship for no good reason at all, that can't be turned off.
It's nice that there's so much useful documentation on Linux out there. No matter what problem I'm having, the Linux community has documented just about everything incredibly well. And they never ask how helpful they were when they were no help at all. That's nice too.
Linus is slightly less evil than Gates.
And the fact that it's free, or at least mostly free doesn't hurt either.
My initial post is what happens when you take someone like me who likes to play devil's advocate on every issue, equip them with a keyboard and about a gallon of coffee at three in the morning. It amazes me that people here on Slashdot keep modding these crazed rants up.
First off, huge amounts of radiation coming off of a consumer device like a microwave or phone is begging for a class action suit, in addition to criminal charges. We've been handling that sort of thing in non-electromagnetic forces for a long time.
Yeah, but how would you prove it? Could you even prove it within a feasible time frame to get anything done? I doubt it. It could be thirty to fifty years before we really understand the long term damage caused by things like companies deciding how much radiation is safe to their profit margin. And if half the country gets slowly lobotomized, it's really of little consequence to their bottom line. Especially if it becomes standard practice for companies to start doing things like this. My point (I think there was one in there) is that getting rid of regulation in this area could potentially be a very bad idea.
As for broadcasting "fuck" a whole bunch via a huge antenna...no problem, if you own the spectrum you're using. If not...well, try renovating a few other people's houses with a steamshovel and see what happens.
It's no problem at all. You're absolutely right. But if it's unregulated, nobody really owns it. If I were to set up a giant 36000 watt broadcast antenna in my backyard today, I would get arrested. But if the FCC wasn't there to clamp down on things like this, anyone could do it. Do you see where I'm going here?
As for the DRM issue, the issue at hand is fair use, which still has not been settled. If the restrictions are found to be in violation of fair use, or if we can pass laws clarifying what fair use should be, then those restrictions would be illegal. If they're not illegal, then what's the problem?
The problem of DRM and fair use has already been settled. Just a couple of years ago, they ruled that a content owner can create any control mechanism that they want to. Fair use becomes moot when there are conditions of the sale, and the content owner is allowed to set any conditions they want to. Obviously, you don't have to buy it if you don't agree with the politics behind it, but these draconian measures to prevent piracy are beginning to show up in all sorts of places. It's a matter of being able to do what you want to do with the technology you own. Wait a minute... you don't really own it anymore, do you?
Perhaps I don't understand the argument behind your statements. The few I can think of that sound good would be: large corporations would arrange the sale of the FCC spectra to their advantage, unequal enforcement of interference restrictions, and that the gov't would just hand over large areas of the spectrum and leave the small stuff for sale.
Or is there a better argument?
Nope. That's the best analysis of an incoherent rant I think I've ever seen here on the dot. Thanks.
I think it's time we started putting pussy on TV. Lots of it. In fact, we could even have a whole channel devoted to nothing but big fat sloppy wet pussies. Or better yet, ten of them...
Spectrum regulations? Yes, I don't mind being radiated by both my monitor and my microwave, not to mention a dozen or so other devices that the FCC regulates.
I wonder if it radiation whitens teeth...
C'mon, did you really want to watch TV on your TV anyway? I would personally much rather mod my TV to listen to people's cell phones, which is the first place all that handy new unregulated bandwidth is going to go.
We didn't need AM or FM to be regulated anyway, and I'm sure there are several interesting kinds of broadcasting we can do over FM is the FCC is abolished.
I could record a tape of myself saying "fuck fuck fuck" for about ten minutes, loop, and broadcast to california. Okay, maybe not from my car, but if there's no regulation on the band, what's to stop me from building an antenna on my roof? I'd call it, the fuck channel. One word, all the time!
Getting rid of the FCC would force everyone to buy new technology and get rid of their old shit which only half works anyway! Besides, all that old stuff is missing important DRM technology anyway. It's really in our best interests that we buy the new stuff that's locked down for our own protection.
It will be great!
It would be a boom the economy... in India!
Think of it like all that trickle down economics. It's like a tax break for the super rich, but better!
Just as the tax breaks have arguable benefit for the working American, this idea would have no tangible benefit at all!
Just think of it, we would automatically hand over billions of dollars to giant transnational companies, which will turn around and pay no taxes, ship more jobs over seas, and all that fun stuff.
I hope they abolish the FCC. And while we're at it, let's abolish the FDA (arsenic anyone?). And any other useless thee letter government agency.
Maybe we just need to accept that maybe, atlantis was never actually a real place. Otherwise, we're going to keep finding it... every year. This is what... atlantis #6 in the last decade? Come on.
We live in a free country. You can be as stuffy as you want to be. You can even get a gun and move to the hills if you have the resources and inclination to do so. That's the beauty of it really.
But when you run a web site, especially a community supported one that does not produce that does not produce a tangible product that can be sold, resold, or otherwise generate recurrent revenue, there are certain financial and mathematical realities that come into play.
When you're talking about money, real tangible money that you earn by providing valuable ad space on your tangible web sites to tangible sponsors, you are receiving something you find valuable in exchange for that space, which otherwise would not generate any revenue.
That is the key. If you do a cost benefit analysis on a site like this based on real world factors and common sense taken into account; you will find that the time spent developing and maintaining such a site is directly proportional to success and usefulness the site. No one, is going to run a web site like this or Linux Today full time, if it doesn't make financial sense to do so. We all need to make a living, unless of course we're too good to work.
Sure, it would be nice if people who had the resources chose to do a neat little out of the kindness of their hearts, and some do, I'm not knocking that either. So you can reign in that high horse a little.
Ideally, you want to refrain from offending your user base through pop up ads or spam, which aren't very useful to begin with considering that most of us block that anyway. So what does that leave you with?
Banner ads. Lots and lots of neat little banner ads, and those odd shaped rich media ads.
Now Microsoft may be a convicted felon. I'll concede that.
You may be interested to know that convicted felons are everywhere. There are literally millions of them. They usually work lower paying jobs or start businesses for themselves. Many of them live perfectly honest life styles after paying their debt to society. That's how it works.
There's no ethical way around that, nor should there be. And there's nothing ethically wrong or illegal about dealing with said person or entity if you choose to do so. And if they're not posting anything illegal, profane, or obscene on your web site, there really shouldn't be any ethical problem at all.
You need to lump Google and Microsoft together, because they are both asking you to do the very same thing in this case. They are asking for that tangible ad space that you need to make money with. It's that same space that they would like to use to sell their product on. It's not your fault that Microsoft's marketing department has a sense of irony, and can afford to throw money out the window on advertising that is not properly targeted at a useful client base.
I would personally take ads from Microsoft or Google, or anyone who wanted ads on any of my web sites. The more the better. It's not really an issue of integrity. It's an issue of getting paid. I like getting paid. It supports things like my smoking habit, and my patch habit, and my food and shelter habit. These things might not sound important if you're living with mom, but trust me. These are the things that matter.
Hey wouldn't it be funny if/. or Linux Today posted the Microsoft ads, but allowed comments on them? That would be a riot. In fact, you might even be able to work out a deal with the beast where their own people can post anti Linux comments to go along with the ads. It would be funny to shoot them down, and it would support the open source community.
I agree, but let's be practical. Microsoft is one of the biggest advertisers on the internet today. They have real money. If you're going to boycott LinuxToday, you're also going to need to boycott the OSDN which runs many of the same ads.
Not a bad point. But I don't see how you can compare the economic times we're in now to the economic times that existed in the 1930's. First off, the economy of the 1930's was not very diverse.
There were a few big industries, but they were all pretty well self contained within the united states. Multi national corporations, and global economies were simply not a factor.
The current economic setup we have is a lot more stable. We could have easily had a depression in the 1970's, the 1980's and now on the same scale as we did in the 1930's if our economic system was comparable. But it's not.
The current setup we have now is three times the size it was then, even taking inflation into account. We're global, Transnational corporations might not be nice to think about, but they are a serious factor in how we do things in this country. We're no longer completely self sufficient. We depend on the other economies of the world as much as they depend on ours. Many countries even base their currency on the dollar, which has a direct effect on our economy. Now, we have thousands of industries, all with special interest groups. We have imports, we have exports, and we have a guy in the Whitehouse who doesn't know where China is.
Is the world going the hell? Yes. The world has always been going to hell. They've been saying that since Nero burned Rome. Probably even before that. But look how much progress we've made since then.
We can either shriek in terror and post long articles on Slashdot about how we fear change and trust no one, or we could be enterprising and look for the new opportunities that come with the territory. Like everything in life, it's a choice you make. I prefer to make the latter.
A friend of mine tried to start an IT union here in town. It was like herding cats. Problem with unions is that they don't work when there are broad ranges of people that all fall under the same umbrella. IT is a very large label.
Under the banner of IT you have, hardware techs, IT managers, Database administrators, Windows Administrators, Unix administrators, Web designers, 20 kinds of programmers that are currently marketable, 10 kinds of programmers that aren't, and anyone else who considers themselves to be "knowledge worker." To borrow a term from Gates.
And the best part... each one of them has their own cyber religion that conflicts with the next. It's never a good idea to get that many kinds of IT people in a room, let alone working together for their common interests.
Might cause the Universe to implode.
The closest thing we have to a general techies union is/. and I'm sure you're aware of the kind of love fest this place is.
The Wine Mono combonation is really a blurring of the platforms. Does anyone know if GTK# and the other linux only libs will be ported to run on the Windows version of Mono?
Slashdot Mirror
I like XFCE. It took awhile to get used to on my slackware box, but it's nice. Very fast.
I recently revived a pentium 166mhz system, and XFCE was the only Window manager that didn't have a problem running on 32 mbs of RAM.
Anyone know of any others?
I tried to download a cow last week, but my connection wasn't fast enough. I ended up with the cow, but after all the time outs, she was missing pieces, and couldn't moo properly. Next time, I'll just order the cow on CD, it takes longer that way, but I probably won't have to put her to sleep.
Didn't microsoft just patent the process they're using to do this?
You're absolutely right. Windows 2000 and 98 do it as well to a lesser extent. The latest versions of office does it as well.
It really amazes me how seriously people take everything on Slashdot, and why my silly seemingly insignifigant posts keep getting modded up. Guess that's the breaks. Lots of smug sys admins out there I guess.
That doesn't change the fact that I enjoy using linux based systems, and happen to prefer it to Windows. It's an opinion. If it were based on anything more than my personal experience, and needed to be quantified, it would be a fact, although opinions can be factual, and we try our best to make them so, sometimes an opinion for whatever reason is just that.
Personally, I think Linux makes a great desktop. It's stable usable, and not all that hard to manage on multiple and varied systems once you get the hang of it. But that's not based on an infinite number of years in the Unix support field.
Must have been five years ago, a friend of mine aquired some old hard drives from systems that once belonged to adobe. He was able to recover some interesting historical data. One of the drives even had what appeared to be the first PDF file ever generated. He sold copies of the drive's contents on Zip disk. Never did get around to getting one.
Yes, but it was in caps. heh.
In defense of the beast, they've been getting hit with bad patent law suits worse than anyone.
To name a few from the last couple years:
There was the incredibly broad Eolas patent.
There was the burst patent.
There was the down right stupid DRM patent.
There were a couple hand held device patents.
There was the supposed "relational database" patent, which really offended me.
And others.
If I were getting sued anywhere near as much as they are, you better believe I would patent every stupid feature I came up with.
Yet, in most of these stupid patent cases that actually make it to court, they lose. And they keep losing.
Not that they can't afford it.
It's the principle, I guess.
Now that you've mentally masturbated all over me, I feel dirty.
Jesus Christ man...
So you're telling me that I'm not entitled to my opinion because I don't present you with enough irrefutable evidence?
Really?
Burdon of proof? Refute my "information?" What information? This isn't exactly Lincoln v Douglas here, buddy.
If any web site is that important to you that you can spend enough time to write such a long useless response like that or even the last one, to my comparatively short stupid initial post, I'm a little scared of you. Okay, maybe more than a little scared.
Please don't come to my house and beat me up.
I know the job market's been tough lately, but there are a million better things you can do with your time than try to start a fight with the first idiot you find because it makes you feel like more of a man on Slashdot.
You fucking clod.
Fine. You win. You're so wonderful.
I will ask you before forming any opinion on anything.
But first, get some help. No seriously.
Interesting.
That's actually pretty helpful.
Thanks.
Unlike when your RPM database gets corrupted or when RedHat inadvertantly puts the wrong information on glibc and everyone upgrades and is left with a machine that you can only reinstall the OS on (the shortest path).
Look, if you cared that much about my stupid post, you would have pointed out that Linux isn't an operating system or platform. It's a kernel. Nothing more.Further you shouldn't assume that redhat is the only distribution, or that I even use red hat. I don't think I even mentioned red hat in the post, come to think of it. Odd...
Something goes wrong enough to where this is a feature?
Have you used Windows lately?As opposed to the 1000s of games on the Windows box that all their friends are playing. Could be that you have only the default 5 games installed on the Windows box and they are tired of them and that's why they don't want to use those?
Yes, to put it back into context from left field "Games that come with Linux" was the operative term. Darnit, I called it Linux again, you should have corrected me. What kind of old timey know nothing snob are you?Proof of that which exists today? or are you still living in 1995?
Yep, it's no secret. Don't believe me? Buy any third party firewall with application level blocking. Norton internet security catches most of them.Heh, yeah... those wonderful 'man' pages. When there is documentation, it is completely dry when having simply one example of a very common use would answer 90% of all questions about it. Linux documentation (and even Unix documentation for the most part) is seriously lacking. It's written by engineers for engineers. No examples, just lists of the 200+ command line options for every program with almost no direction of which ones are useful together.
Ouch. Sounds like fun. Actually, I've only really needed to resort to man pages a couple of times. There's this great thing here in the 21st century called the internet.Who cares, neither of them kill babies and eat them raw. I don't idolize either of them, they are just humans like me, not a god, and not worthy of religion.
Babies? Raw? You're right. It was a joke, specifically engineered for a single brief chuckle, for those inclined to think it was funny. If you need help this definition comes in handy.I prefer Linux because I can do more with it.
I like KDE better than Windows XP. It's a better desktop with more features that are easier to tweak and fix if something goes wrong.
I'm starting to play with XFCE. I like that too.
The command line actually has real unadulterated power under Linux!
I like the fact that there isn't a central monolithic registry that can take the entire system down.
I prefer Mozilla to IE. Always have.
My kids like the games that come with KDE and GNOME. They're colorful and fun, and they whine when I tell them they have to use the XP box in the other room for homework.
I like the fact that my nine year old can't break it... no matter how hard she tries...
I like the fact that my wife can't install software on my desktop when she's not logged in as me.
I like Linux because I never have to worry about the status of my license, or installing it on multiple machines.
I like the fact that I can set up a grid or a series of thin clients throughout my house without much real work.
I like the fact that my internet connection is faster under Linux than it was under Windows XP. It's a real kick. If you have both running side by side, try comparing them sometime.
It's nice that Linux will run (granted with a little work) on my prehistoric 486dx2.
It's nice that Linux doesn't have 19 system processes that report to the Microsoft mother-ship for no good reason at all, that can't be turned off.
It's nice that there's so much useful documentation on Linux out there. No matter what problem I'm having, the Linux community has documented just about everything incredibly well. And they never ask how helpful they were when they were no help at all. That's nice too.
Linus is slightly less evil than Gates.
And the fact that it's free, or at least mostly free doesn't hurt either.
First off, huge amounts of radiation coming off of a consumer device like a microwave or phone is begging for a class action suit, in addition to criminal charges. We've been handling that sort of thing in non-electromagnetic forces for a long time.
Yeah, but how would you prove it? Could you even prove it within a feasible time frame to get anything done? I doubt it. It could be thirty to fifty years before we really understand the long term damage caused by things like companies deciding how much radiation is safe to their profit margin. And if half the country gets slowly lobotomized, it's really of little consequence to their bottom line. Especially if it becomes standard practice for companies to start doing things like this. My point (I think there was one in there) is that getting rid of regulation in this area could potentially be a very bad idea.As for broadcasting "fuck" a whole bunch via a huge antenna...no problem, if you own the spectrum you're using. If not...well, try renovating a few other people's houses with a steamshovel and see what happens.
It's no problem at all. You're absolutely right. But if it's unregulated, nobody really owns it. If I were to set up a giant 36000 watt broadcast antenna in my backyard today, I would get arrested. But if the FCC wasn't there to clamp down on things like this, anyone could do it. Do you see where I'm going here?As for the DRM issue, the issue at hand is fair use, which still has not been settled. If the restrictions are found to be in violation of fair use, or if we can pass laws clarifying what fair use should be, then those restrictions would be illegal. If they're not illegal, then what's the problem?
The problem of DRM and fair use has already been settled. Just a couple of years ago, they ruled that a content owner can create any control mechanism that they want to. Fair use becomes moot when there are conditions of the sale, and the content owner is allowed to set any conditions they want to. Obviously, you don't have to buy it if you don't agree with the politics behind it, but these draconian measures to prevent piracy are beginning to show up in all sorts of places. It's a matter of being able to do what you want to do with the technology you own. Wait a minute... you don't really own it anymore, do you?Perhaps I don't understand the argument behind your statements. The few I can think of that sound good would be: large corporations would arrange the sale of the FCC spectra to their advantage, unequal enforcement of interference restrictions, and that the gov't would just hand over large areas of the spectrum and leave the small stuff for sale. Or is there a better argument?
Nope. That's the best analysis of an incoherent rant I think I've ever seen here on the dot. Thanks.I'm all for disbanding the FCC.
Decency regulations are shit.
Don't want them don't need them.
I think it's time we started putting pussy on TV. Lots of it. In fact, we could even have a whole channel devoted to nothing but big fat sloppy wet pussies. Or better yet, ten of them...
Spectrum regulations?
Yes, I don't mind being radiated by both my monitor and my microwave, not to mention a dozen or so other devices that the FCC regulates.
I wonder if it radiation whitens teeth...
C'mon, did you really want to watch TV on your TV anyway? I would personally much rather mod my TV to listen to people's cell phones, which is the first place all that handy new unregulated bandwidth is going to go.
We didn't need AM or FM to be regulated anyway, and I'm sure there are several interesting kinds of broadcasting we can do over FM is the FCC is abolished.
I could record a tape of myself saying "fuck fuck fuck" for about ten minutes, loop, and broadcast to california. Okay, maybe not from my car, but if there's no regulation on the band, what's to stop me from building an antenna on my roof? I'd call it, the fuck channel. One word, all the time!
Getting rid of the FCC would force everyone to buy new technology and get rid of their old shit which only half works anyway! Besides, all that old stuff is missing important DRM technology anyway. It's really in our best interests that we buy the new stuff that's locked down for our own protection.
It will be great!
It would be a boom the economy... in India!
Think of it like all that trickle down economics. It's like a tax break for the super rich, but better!
Just as the tax breaks have arguable benefit for the working American, this idea would have no tangible benefit at all!
Just think of it, we would automatically hand over billions of dollars to giant transnational companies, which will turn around and pay no taxes, ship more jobs over seas, and all that fun stuff.
I hope they abolish the FCC.
And while we're at it, let's abolish the FDA (arsenic anyone?). And any other useless thee letter government agency.
Maybe we just need to accept that maybe, atlantis was never actually a real place. Otherwise, we're going to keep finding it... every year. This is what... atlantis #6 in the last decade? Come on.
I'm not dumping on you or the moral elite Phil,
We live in a free country. You can be as stuffy as you want to be. You can even get a gun and move to the hills if you have the resources and inclination to do so. That's the beauty of it really.
But when you run a web site, especially a community supported one that does not produce that does not produce a tangible product that can be sold, resold, or otherwise generate recurrent revenue, there are certain financial and mathematical realities that come into play.
When you're talking about money, real tangible money that you earn by providing valuable ad space on your tangible web sites to tangible sponsors, you are receiving something you find valuable in exchange for that space, which otherwise would not generate any revenue.
That is the key. If you do a cost benefit analysis on a site like this based on real world factors and common sense taken into account; you will find that the time spent developing and maintaining such a site is directly proportional to success and usefulness the site. No one, is going to run a web site like this or Linux Today full time, if it doesn't make financial sense to do so. We all need to make a living, unless of course we're too good to work.
Sure, it would be nice if people who had the resources chose to do a neat little out of the kindness of their hearts, and some do, I'm not knocking that either. So you can reign in that high horse a little.
Ideally, you want to refrain from offending your user base through pop up ads or spam, which aren't very useful to begin with considering that most of us block that anyway. So what does that leave you with?
Banner ads. Lots and lots of neat little banner ads, and those odd shaped rich media ads.
Now Microsoft may be a convicted felon. I'll concede that.
You may be interested to know that convicted felons are everywhere. There are literally millions of them. They usually work lower paying jobs or start businesses for themselves. Many of them live perfectly honest life styles after paying their debt to society. That's how it works.
There's no ethical way around that, nor should there be. And there's nothing ethically wrong or illegal about dealing with said person or entity if you choose to do so. And if they're not posting anything illegal, profane, or obscene on your web site, there really shouldn't be any ethical problem at all.
You need to lump Google and Microsoft together, because they are both asking you to do the very same thing in this case. They are asking for that tangible ad space that you need to make money with. It's that same space that they would like to use to sell their product on. It's not your fault that Microsoft's marketing department has a sense of irony, and can afford to throw money out the window on advertising that is not properly targeted at a useful client base.
I'll take your judges and throw in a Congressmen, double or nothing!
It's funny isn't it?
/. or Linux Today posted the Microsoft ads, but allowed comments on them? That would be a riot. In fact, you might even be able to work out a deal with the beast where their own people can post anti Linux comments to go along with the ads. It would be funny to shoot them down, and it would support the open source community.
I would personally take ads from Microsoft or Google, or anyone who wanted ads on any of my web sites. The more the better. It's not really an issue of integrity. It's an issue of getting paid. I like getting paid. It supports things like my smoking habit, and my patch habit, and my food and shelter habit. These things might not sound important if you're living with mom, but trust me. These are the things that matter.
Hey wouldn't it be funny if
It's all in good fun.
I agree, but let's be practical. Microsoft is one of the biggest advertisers on the internet today. They have real money. If you're going to boycott LinuxToday, you're also going to need to boycott the OSDN which runs many of the same ads.
Not a bad point.
But I don't see how you can compare the economic times we're in now to the economic times that existed in the 1930's. First off, the economy of the 1930's was not very diverse.
There were a few big industries, but they were all pretty well self contained within the united states. Multi national corporations, and global economies were simply not a factor.
The current economic setup we have is a lot more stable. We could have easily had a depression in the 1970's, the 1980's and now on the same scale as we did in the 1930's if our economic system was comparable. But it's not.
The current setup we have now is three times the size it was then, even taking inflation into account. We're global, Transnational corporations might not be nice to think about, but they are a serious factor in how we do things in this country. We're no longer completely self sufficient. We depend on the other economies of the world as much as they depend on ours. Many countries even base their currency on the dollar, which has a direct effect on our economy. Now, we have thousands of industries, all with special interest groups. We have imports, we have exports, and we have a guy in the Whitehouse who doesn't know where China is.
Is the world going the hell?
Yes.
The world has always been going to hell. They've been saying that since Nero burned Rome. Probably even before that. But look how much progress we've made since then.
We can either shriek in terror and post long articles on Slashdot about how we fear change and trust no one, or we could be enterprising and look for the new opportunities that come with the territory. Like everything in life, it's a choice you make. I prefer to make the latter.
Mozilla integration would be great. Maybe this could mean they're thinking of getting rid of Nautilus. I won't hold my breath, but it would be nice.
Actually, major league baseball is the highest pay ratio. And they have a union. Still, that's a very limited field.
A friend of mine tried to start an IT union here in town. It was like herding cats. Problem with unions is that they don't work when there are broad ranges of people that all fall under the same umbrella. IT is a very large label.
/. and I'm sure you're aware of the kind of love fest this place is.
Under the banner of IT you have, hardware techs, IT managers, Database administrators, Windows Administrators, Unix administrators, Web designers, 20 kinds of programmers that are currently marketable, 10 kinds of programmers that aren't, and anyone else who considers themselves to be "knowledge worker." To borrow a term from Gates.
And the best part... each one of them has their own cyber religion that conflicts with the next. It's never a good idea to get that many kinds of IT people in a room, let alone working together for their common interests.
Might cause the Universe to implode.
The closest thing we have to a general techies union is
Interesting.
Thanks for the info.
If I only had mod points...
The Wine Mono combonation is really a blurring of the platforms. Does anyone know if GTK# and the other linux only libs will be ported to run on the Windows version of Mono?