Would their own browser improve search results?
on
Google-branded Firefox?
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Think about it. If everyone's using a google-sactioned browser, the browser could tell google which pages were more popular than others. It'd be a massive violation of privacy but Google Desktop search didn't seem to take privacy that seriously...
If GBrowser updated google.com every time a page was read, google's main business could profit tremendously.
Here is your answer. They're half nonprofit and half for-profit. I don't think they can do an IPO, or at least only their for-profit half could. Even then, I'd say that (under the law) they have responsibility towards their nonprofit donors to ensure that any sort of IPO doesn't interfere with the nonprofit mission, though IANAL etc.
Frankly the article seems like hype.
Also, the offices of craigslist.org are just down the street from my apartment -- SO IF YOU'RE HIRING CRAIG HIT ME UP... I know Perl really well and I've worked on large websites before for the banking industry, you so totally want to hire me...;)
3) Get the Meteor a publishing deal. Have Wendy improve the Meteor's manuscript using the typewriter, and send it off. Get past Purple (with either Weird Ed or Green's help) and go into the Meteor's lair. Give the Meteor the contract, and he realises he doesn't have to be evil any more. This gets a really cool ending where the Meteor's on the sofa in some TV interview show.
This is my all time favorite ending of any video game ever. I love it so much it's my sig...
Ah, Maniac Mansion was such a great game...Now life would be perfect if only someone would make a freely available version of Zork--oh.
Proof? In the movie Troy, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles, we have Patroclus, who, in the original Illiad, is Achilles' lover... in the movie, he's Achilles' cousin.
But isn't Brad Pitt gay enough already? Yes. Yes he is...
But it was in a lot of cases structured as a mentor/tutor older man/younger man relationship - not just any two guys goin' at it.
Also, Greek men involved in these relationships often eventually married women and had children, too. You can't really compare ancient Greek homosexual practice with modern gay identity, they are two separate things; although I'd be interested to see if the current book discusses any historical links between the two.
Barebackers represent a small minority of gay men, not the majority.
Why anyone would deliberately infect himself with HIV is beyond me.
There are a number of reasons. They aren't rational, but you're usually not dealing with rational people here.
All of their friends have died from AIDS, and they want to join their friends.
In certain urban areas there are huge social programs available to those living with HIV or AIDS, programs that provide housing and other benefits. People try to infect themselves because they need or want the benefits. Presumably they never think about the drawbacks. Or, perhaps, they have seen the successes of antiretroviral drugs and think (wrongly) HIV isn't a big deal anymore.
They don't believe HIV exists. Unfortunately there are a number of medical doctors and PhD's in the world who have written papers to this effect, and some people take them as religion.
They are addicted to powerful drugs (crystal meth) and don't think about consequences at all, they just know what they want and go after it.
Of course there are also the just plain crazy. But there have been studies done on people who hang out in bareback chat rooms etc trying to figure out how they think and why they do what they do.
To get back on-topic, I really think that a sexually transmitted "cure" for HIV will just add further motivation to people who try to infect themselves. In fact the mere news may trigger some people.:(
I can just imagine all the articles. Joe Schmoe, a straight white man with brown hair, accomplished much in his life blah blah.
Actually this happens all the time: "Joe Schmoe invented the gnordyfnort and helped humanity survive WWII. In his latter days, he suffered from Alzeihmer's, but died peacefully in his country house surrounded by his wife and four children."
Mention of a man's family happens all the time in brief biographies, unless he was living with another man. Although that is starting to change.
And anyway the current article really does mention that Turing was persecuted later in life, and I'd even say the article adopts a moral tone about the persecution.
So I wouldn't use this article as an example of anti-gay bias, however I will assert that famous/important people's heterosexuality really is flaunted left in right in media. You just don't notice it because you're so used to it.
Actually there is all kinds of incentive for doctors to choose an open source medical/billing database.
The number one is cost and ease of integration with other systems. Not all doctors are rich. Some doctors run their own private practices -- and frankly I think we need more of those doctors, and less of the "How many patients can I see in fifteen minutes?" kind.
The cost of running your own private practice is huge, and any way to cut the administrative costs would be a great boon. FreeB would cut the costs in two ways, one because it's free-as-in-beer and two because it's open source and therefore easier to integrate with other systems.
Seriously, I used to date a guy (IANAW) who ran his own private practice. It's great, he gets about a half hour with every patient, he handles all his own emergency calls and he leaves a few timeslots open each day for emergency visits. It's everything you want in your doctor, but he really did bitch about the absurd costs of running Microsoft everything, as well as the absurd costs of the medical database he had to run on top of it.
An Active Directory server plus a SQL Server plus Office plus two desktops, that's a ton of bullshit for a sole proprietor to be paying for. There wasn't an open source alternative for me to recommend at the time, but I'm glad there is now, it might encourage more like him to go solo.
This project can really fill a need for low-cost, small medical practices.
When I was a kid there was some ridiculous superhero cartoon on which Batman and Robin would ask their computer something, and the computer would just magically know the answer...
And mother always said "No, pjack76, you can't have a Bat computer, there's no such thing as an all-knowning machine..."
Well, also there's apparently a "hidden" flavor of Debian called experimental, where you can go to get things that haven't made it into unstable yet.
I *needed* XFree86 4.3, because it's the first version to support my video card--after digging through Debian's bug reports, I found out how to apt-get from the experimental pool, where XFree86 4.3 happily lives. Installed without a problem for me (I mean, I manually edit my XF86Config anyway.)
Yes! This was the one missing feature I was waiting for! Finally, I can switch to KDE!
Actually this feature is the number one reason why people install spyware onto the Windows NT workstations I administer. There are programs like "webshots" that everyone just loves for some reason, PITA.
So even though you think it's silly, obviously Joe User needs to have pretty pictures.
Now if it could go pull someone else's photos from an FTP server somewhere, that would be perfect.
In the past year I've installed Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Gentoo and Debian on my desktop and laptop. My friends think I'm crazy, but I was mostly going through the distributions to evaluate them for work.
None of the commercial vendors impressed me with their technical support, which is funny since I paid them for it. Red Hat of course dropped support for their desktop distribution altogether.
Both gentoo and Debian, in my experience, have extremely friendly communities who are willing to answer even my worst inane questions ("How can I get video1394 to load automatically on boot?")
I ran gentoo for probably six months, but the cost of compiling everything once a week to keep up-to-date just wore me down, especially on the laptop. I know it has binary packages, but not for everything, and anyway I was all proud of myself for having optimized binaries for AMD...
Well, no more. Now I'm on Debian and I'll probably stay there. It has the best "everything just works" rating out of all of them, even the commercial distros. Well, it has the best rating after you've installed discover. (And why doesn't discover load video1394 when it sees my firewire cable? It seems to know to load raw1394...)
My only complaint is that there needs to be kernel-image packages that have ACPI compiled in.
I'm impressed enough with Debian that I intend to install it on 50 desktops at work, if only I can convince management of the benefits of doing so. (Especially with Fully Automated Installation, woo hoo.)
I think this is a gross exaggeration. In particular, this is exactly what the situation was 10-15 years ago, and there were no fears of oppression then.
Well, I disagree. Yes, corporations have always wanted complete and total control over information, but I can still, 15 years later, produce my own television show and have it broadcast on my local cable access station. People will even watch it. I'm serious here -- I really do produce my own television show, and I there are ~300 viewers who give me feedback at my website. There's enough interest that I purchased a DVD writer so I can give DVD copies to the people who want them. I can afford to do this because software (GNU/Linux/X/GNOME/Kino) lets me edit half hour shows on my relatively inexpensive hardware, plus there is DVD software (haven't set it up yet, don't know what I want to use). Once DRM dominates the market, this sort of thing can become impossible, and will be impossible if the Disney gets its way.
Furthermore, the best DRM schemes involve hardware. In this case the source can be as open as you like, and you still have the effects of DRM.
But the source can be ported to non-DRM hardware, providing consumer choice. I think RMS is right -- we need free alternatives to common software products, and we need them quickly. If there is a sufficient body of software availalble for free systems, and Joe Sixpack can't afford $1500 in DRM/Trusted Computing software, there will be economic incentive for non-Intel vendors to produce Trusted-Computing-Free PCs. But if Joe Sixpack doesn't have a choice, we are in trouble.
Having said that, I will concede that the doom and gloom scenario will probably not come to pass, due partly to the efforts of say Lindows, but mostly due to Apple. I believe that Apple has no particular Trusted Computing plans -- I'm sure the market research blew up in their faces.:)
So yes, RMS is a little over the line when he says nonfree software is inherently evil. But only a little -- absolute power corrupts, and nonfree software makes it trivial to lock somebody in, so that, over decades, you can corner them into giving up their rights. Faced with that ability, most corporations would choose to exercise the power irresponsibly. That doesn't make the software itself evil, it just makes it really, really easy to abuse. Free software provides a defense against such abuse.
Finally, let me reiterate that I like the GPL. What I don't like is the shrill ideology surrounding it, which is so silly that it's almost a parody of itself.
I dunno, when you can compare someone's ideology to a Simpsons episode I think he's on the right track. </joke>
Yes, mindless flames are always tiresome.
These merely seem like a lot of inconveniences, blown way out of proportion using the overused (and fear-mongering) slippery slope argument.
I disagree with your characterization of my arguments as a slippery slope; I don't think the slope is slippery when you have Microsoft officially stating that they want DRM enabled software in everybody's toaster and so on. These corporations/organizations have officially stated in internal memos and external public statements that they want complete control over certain aspects of our lives; they want to abuse our rights, and they have the technology to do it. Fear is a valid response, as is a certain level of righteous anger. But constructive thinking would be more appropriate -- and I would say that RMS's call today for community building is a constructive thought, one that has potentially benefitial results. Although perhaps his single-mindedness on the matter is counter-productive, if/. reaction is any indicator.
Nobody is being oppressed or having their human rights violated by using proprietary software.
Not yet. Give it time. DRM + Trusted Computing can very easily equal No More Free Speech.
When you can only view content that's been approved by corporate America, when the barriers to producing your own content are so high that ordinary people cannot possibly afford to -- then human rights are being violated, and proprietary software is helping.
I agree with you that, right now, in our (mostly) DRM-free and Trusted Computing-free world, no one's getting hurt. But that can very easily change, and Microsoft, Disney and others want it to.
Long-term, I think RMS is right. And even for the moment, he still has a point. My Treo 300 just informed me that I have to license something at a website in order to continue the privilege of sending SMS messages using the service I'm already paying $50/month for on the $400 device. I'm just saying. gcc for Palm OS is looking nice right now.
What's the point of a form of communication that has no well defined meaning? If people can debate for years over the meaning of your writing, you're not communicating very effectively. If you have something to say, just say it and don't make me hunt for hidden meanings.
It can be helpful or even useful to communicate something that has no well defined meaning. Human emotions tend to fall into that category. Love means different things to different people; my love poem is going to seem vague and abstract to you, but to me it makes perfect sense. And hopefully it will make sense to the person I give it to.
Haven't you ever done something without knowing why you did it? That's the sort of thing that poetry can capture in a way ordinary language can't.
Definitely coders are not poets ; in that case, they *would* be poets.
Some of us are poets, in the literary sense, even. I write both code and poems, and there really are similarities.
First and foremost, all computer programs require metaphor and imagery. We call them "files" -- the word now has a new meaning because of decades of our usage, but somebody, somewhere, originally sat down and thought "How should I organize all of these bits?" and the answer came as a metaphor -- "Oh I'll store them in files, and store the files in directories..."
I can't speak for everyone, but for me, certainly, when I'm messing around with, say, a dictionary object, there is something visual going on in my mind. The word dictionary implies a whole host of associations that make it easier to grasp what the thing does. This is especially true at higher levels of abstraction (especially when get to the "Desktop" level, where visual cues become important goals in themselves).
Moreover, finding the right balance of reuse vs readability, deciding where to put the comments to clarify what's going on, deciding how to indent that long line -- these are all skills the poet uses as well.
Both code and poetry are ways to express things. It's just that the things you're expressing are obviously going to be different in the two mediums.
The major difference IMHO is that a computer programmer doesn't worry about the way the code sounds. Poets have to bother with the aural element too.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it. If everyone's using a google-sactioned browser, the browser could tell google which pages were more popular than others. It'd be a massive violation of privacy but Google Desktop search didn't seem to take privacy that seriously...
If GBrowser updated google.com every time a page was read, google's main business could profit tremendously.
Frankly the article seems like hype.
Also, the offices of craigslist.org are just down the street from my apartment -- SO IF YOU'RE HIRING CRAIG HIT ME UP... I know Perl really well and I've worked on large websites before for the banking industry, you so totally want to hire me... ;)
They've got an IBM model there that comes with IBM support...
Seriously, get GIMP 2.0 in there. With Mozilla 1.6 and OpenOffice 1.1, I'll have everything I want in a desktop, with security patches even...
This is my all time favorite ending of any video game ever. I love it so much it's my sig...
Ah, Maniac Mansion was such a great game...Now life would be perfect if only someone would make a freely available version of Zork--oh.
But isn't Brad Pitt gay enough already? Yes. Yes he is...
Also, Greek men involved in these relationships often eventually married women and had children, too. You can't really compare ancient Greek homosexual practice with modern gay identity, they are two separate things; although I'd be interested to see if the current book discusses any historical links between the two.
Barebackers represent a small minority of gay men, not the majority.
Why anyone would deliberately infect himself with HIV is beyond me.
There are a number of reasons. They aren't rational, but you're usually not dealing with rational people here.
Of course there are also the just plain crazy. But there have been studies done on people who hang out in bareback chat rooms etc trying to figure out how they think and why they do what they do.
To get back on-topic, I really think that a sexually transmitted "cure" for HIV will just add further motivation to people who try to infect themselves. In fact the mere news may trigger some people. :(
Actually this happens all the time: "Joe Schmoe invented the gnordyfnort and helped humanity survive WWII. In his latter days, he suffered from Alzeihmer's, but died peacefully in his country house surrounded by his wife and four children."
Mention of a man's family happens all the time in brief biographies, unless he was living with another man. Although that is starting to change.
And anyway the current article really does mention that Turing was persecuted later in life, and I'd even say the article adopts a moral tone about the persecution.
So I wouldn't use this article as an example of anti-gay bias, however I will assert that famous/important people's heterosexuality really is flaunted left in right in media. You just don't notice it because you're so used to it.
Because it makes it harder to copy a Windows system from one hard drive to another.
Actually there is all kinds of incentive for doctors to choose an open source medical/billing database.
The number one is cost and ease of integration with other systems. Not all doctors are rich. Some doctors run their own private practices -- and frankly I think we need more of those doctors, and less of the "How many patients can I see in fifteen minutes?" kind.
The cost of running your own private practice is huge, and any way to cut the administrative costs would be a great boon. FreeB would cut the costs in two ways, one because it's free-as-in-beer and two because it's open source and therefore easier to integrate with other systems.
Seriously, I used to date a guy (IANAW) who ran his own private practice. It's great, he gets about a half hour with every patient, he handles all his own emergency calls and he leaves a few timeslots open each day for emergency visits. It's everything you want in your doctor, but he really did bitch about the absurd costs of running Microsoft everything, as well as the absurd costs of the medical database he had to run on top of it.
An Active Directory server plus a SQL Server plus Office plus two desktops, that's a ton of bullshit for a sole proprietor to be paying for. There wasn't an open source alternative for me to recommend at the time, but I'm glad there is now, it might encourage more like him to go solo.
This project can really fill a need for low-cost, small medical practices.
And mother always said "No, pjack76, you can't have a Bat computer, there's no such thing as an all-knowning machine..."
It's not /., it's just me. :)
Two boys or two girls? Or three of one gender? DETAILS. I NEED DETAILS.
Well, also there's apparently a "hidden" flavor of Debian called experimental, where you can go to get things that haven't made it into unstable yet.
I *needed* XFree86 4.3, because it's the first version to support my video card--after digging through Debian's bug reports, I found out how to apt-get from the experimental pool, where XFree86 4.3 happily lives. Installed without a problem for me (I mean, I manually edit my XF86Config anyway.)
Actually this feature is the number one reason why people install spyware onto the Windows NT workstations I administer. There are programs like "webshots" that everyone just loves for some reason, PITA.
So even though you think it's silly, obviously Joe User needs to have pretty pictures.
Now if it could go pull someone else's photos from an FTP server somewhere, that would be perfect.
Check out www.groklaw.net when it isn't being /., go through their archives, this topic was brought up at least once.
You might also want to hang out on #groklaw on irc.fefnet.net and ask the people there.
Or, you can email PJ at groklaw directly (her email is on her site) and ask if she can quickly point you to specifics.
None of the commercial vendors impressed me with their technical support, which is funny since I paid them for it. Red Hat of course dropped support for their desktop distribution altogether.
Both gentoo and Debian, in my experience, have extremely friendly communities who are willing to answer even my worst inane questions ("How can I get video1394 to load automatically on boot?")
I ran gentoo for probably six months, but the cost of compiling everything once a week to keep up-to-date just wore me down, especially on the laptop. I know it has binary packages, but not for everything, and anyway I was all proud of myself for having optimized binaries for AMD...
Well, no more. Now I'm on Debian and I'll probably stay there. It has the best "everything just works" rating out of all of them, even the commercial distros. Well, it has the best rating after you've installed discover. (And why doesn't discover load video1394 when it sees my firewire cable? It seems to know to load raw1394...)
My only complaint is that there needs to be kernel-image packages that have ACPI compiled in.
I'm impressed enough with Debian that I intend to install it on 50 desktops at work, if only I can convince management of the benefits of doing so. (Especially with Fully Automated Installation, woo hoo.)
I wonder who constitutes "Congress" for SCO -- remember that a SCO lawyer is the son of Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah...
My new desktop wallpaper!!! *swoon*
I FEEL YOUR PAIN MY BROTHER!
Well, I disagree. Yes, corporations have always wanted complete and total control over information, but I can still, 15 years later, produce my own television show and have it broadcast on my local cable access station. People will even watch it. I'm serious here -- I really do produce my own television show, and I there are ~300 viewers who give me feedback at my website. There's enough interest that I purchased a DVD writer so I can give DVD copies to the people who want them. I can afford to do this because software (GNU/Linux/X/GNOME/Kino) lets me edit half hour shows on my relatively inexpensive hardware, plus there is DVD software (haven't set it up yet, don't know what I want to use). Once DRM dominates the market, this sort of thing can become impossible, and will be impossible if the Disney gets its way.
Furthermore, the best DRM schemes involve hardware. In this case the source can be as open as you like, and you still have the effects of DRM.
But the source can be ported to non-DRM hardware, providing consumer choice. I think RMS is right -- we need free alternatives to common software products, and we need them quickly. If there is a sufficient body of software availalble for free systems, and Joe Sixpack can't afford $1500 in DRM/Trusted Computing software, there will be economic incentive for non-Intel vendors to produce Trusted-Computing-Free PCs. But if Joe Sixpack doesn't have a choice, we are in trouble.
Having said that, I will concede that the doom and gloom scenario will probably not come to pass, due partly to the efforts of say Lindows, but mostly due to Apple. I believe that Apple has no particular Trusted Computing plans -- I'm sure the market research blew up in their faces. :)
So yes, RMS is a little over the line when he says nonfree software is inherently evil. But only a little -- absolute power corrupts, and nonfree software makes it trivial to lock somebody in, so that, over decades, you can corner them into giving up their rights. Faced with that ability, most corporations would choose to exercise the power irresponsibly. That doesn't make the software itself evil, it just makes it really, really easy to abuse. Free software provides a defense against such abuse.
Finally, let me reiterate that I like the GPL. What I don't like is the shrill ideology surrounding it, which is so silly that it's almost a parody of itself.
I dunno, when you can compare someone's ideology to a Simpsons episode I think he's on the right track. </joke>
Yes, mindless flames are always tiresome.
These merely seem like a lot of inconveniences, blown way out of proportion using the overused (and fear-mongering) slippery slope argument.
I disagree with your characterization of my arguments as a slippery slope; I don't think the slope is slippery when you have Microsoft officially stating that they want DRM enabled software in everybody's toaster and so on. These corporations/organizations have officially stated in internal memos and external public statements that they want complete control over certain aspects of our lives; they want to abuse our rights, and they have the technology to do it. Fear is a valid response, as is a certain level of righteous anger. But constructive thinking would be more appropriate -- and I would say that RMS's call today for community building is a constructive thought, one that has potentially benefitial results. Although perhaps his single-mindedness on the matter is counter-productive, if /. reaction is any indicator.
But thank you for not flaming. :)
Not yet. Give it time. DRM + Trusted Computing can very easily equal No More Free Speech.
When you can only view content that's been approved by corporate America, when the barriers to producing your own content are so high that ordinary people cannot possibly afford to -- then human rights are being violated, and proprietary software is helping.
I agree with you that, right now, in our (mostly) DRM-free and Trusted Computing-free world, no one's getting hurt. But that can very easily change, and Microsoft, Disney and others want it to.
Long-term, I think RMS is right. And even for the moment, he still has a point. My Treo 300 just informed me that I have to license something at a website in order to continue the privilege of sending SMS messages using the service I'm already paying $50/month for on the $400 device. I'm just saying. gcc for Palm OS is looking nice right now.
It can be helpful or even useful to communicate something that has no well defined meaning. Human emotions tend to fall into that category. Love means different things to different people; my love poem is going to seem vague and abstract to you, but to me it makes perfect sense. And hopefully it will make sense to the person I give it to.
Haven't you ever done something without knowing why you did it? That's the sort of thing that poetry can capture in a way ordinary language can't.
Some of us are poets, in the literary sense, even. I write both code and poems, and there really are similarities.
First and foremost, all computer programs require metaphor and imagery. We call them "files" -- the word now has a new meaning because of decades of our usage, but somebody, somewhere, originally sat down and thought "How should I organize all of these bits?" and the answer came as a metaphor -- "Oh I'll store them in files, and store the files in directories..."
I can't speak for everyone, but for me, certainly, when I'm messing around with, say, a dictionary object, there is something visual going on in my mind. The word dictionary implies a whole host of associations that make it easier to grasp what the thing does. This is especially true at higher levels of abstraction (especially when get to the "Desktop" level, where visual cues become important goals in themselves).
Moreover, finding the right balance of reuse vs readability, deciding where to put the comments to clarify what's going on, deciding how to indent that long line -- these are all skills the poet uses as well.
Both code and poetry are ways to express things. It's just that the things you're expressing are obviously going to be different in the two mediums.
The major difference IMHO is that a computer programmer doesn't worry about the way the code sounds. Poets have to bother with the aural element too.