however the fact that both exist and compete for resources is in my mind one of the main causes behind the failure of Linux on the desktop.
This might (and I say might) be true if they were competing for resources. But they aren't: the reason there are two projects, and both are actively developed, is that there are some programmers who just fundamentally don't like how KDE/Qt works while there are other programmers who don't like how Gnome/GTK work (and then there's the ones who prefer lesstif/bare X, but they're just weird and can be ignored as a statistical fluke;)). They wouldn't work on the other if they had any choice in the matter, and since this is FOSS, they do have a choice. They aren't competing for resources because if you took away one project most of the programmers wouldn't migrate to the other, they'd just start again.
Enough with the "Kill all but one desktops" please.
As noted above, software licensed or leased by the developer will not be taxed,
Software licensed or leased by the developer is currently not taxed, canned software and custom software are currently taxed under different mechanisms. If you read the rest of the article you'll see that
The Governor's proposal would either repeal the... regulation that distinguishes between a sale and a license of software
ie: canned software and software licensed by the developer would be treated equally and therefore subject to sales tax.
or create an entirely new tax on revenues from software licensing.
ie: or he will just create a new tax specifically for software licensed or leased by the developer.
In either event, software licensed or leased by the developer will be taxed in some way.
I'd agree, except that people just don't care about space. Back in the cold war the space race captivated people's minds because it was "us against them" - America showing it was better than the USSR (or vice versa, depending on which side you were on). It was something people could take pride in.
Now?
The only Big Enemy is "terrorism", and there's no single country you can hold up for that, no place likely to take part in dick-measuring games. Yeah, there's China, and that might help a bit, but essentially now space exploration has to be done for the science and maybe, one day, for the profits. Science means nothing to the vast majority of people, they just aren't interested, aren't even curious about the universe. This annoys me more than you can believe, but it is true: the general population don't care about space, they don't care about a ball of rock millions of miles away, they don't see why we should be trying to get our backsides off this damp lump of rock.
We can send probes up until we are blue in the face, we can probably send men up too, and people will be asking why we are spending money on it rather than throwing it at <insert some short-term and impossible to truely solve problem here>
the general public likes to damage other people's things.
Yet you recommend using a mechanical method for starting playback? At least if an electrical method is used - a red button switch as opposed to a rod pusher - some kid hammering on the button isn't likely to break the player.
IME there's a golden rule that needs to be followed with any piece of hardware: make sure any important parts of it are as isolated and protected from the general public as possible and anything they can see should be cheap and easy to replace.
Amazing as it may seem, not everyone who is out to do damage is part of a terrorist group. No, seriously! Probably only 0.5% of your average doing-bad-things person is a member of a terrorist organisation. I was as shocked as you are, it's incredible! All these people running around causing trouble without having the decency to live in a country you can bomb. I've found that you can actually travel around huge areas of Europe without even running into a terrorist, even in France!</sarcasm>
Why exactly do they need to be funded? Ever thought that they might be doing it because they get some deranged kick out of it, or so thay can brag about it or simply because they're sodding mental?
Given that some satellite broadband services have downlink speeds of 2Mbps (which means even higher uplink speeds to the satellite acting as a relay), I see no reason why devices on the IIS shouldn't have similar bandwidth available.
I tend to be significantly more productive at home, even though one of the machines I use is also the one with all my games on it (so I don't even need to turn on a ps2) and it has a DSL connection.
The reason is simple - my home boxes are set up exactly how I want them: I have all the software I need set up exactly how I want it, I have my shelves of books (which tend to be more up to date than the ones in the office), I have local mirrors of any online documentation I use, I built my desk myself to have everything in the right place and there's a 5 foot by 5 foot window to the left of me looking out over trees and grass. At the office my view is through a couple of 1 foot wide windows onto an open concrete-paved area with more offices on the far side. I'm just far more productive when I have everything at my fingertips and I'm comfortable..
The problem with patching Windows systems is that a responsible admin will not simply roll out the patches across all the systems. Microsoft is very good at giving you two problems for the price of fixing one so a lot of Windows admins do extensive testing of patches before applying them across all their systems. In another situation, I would give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were hit while testing the patch.
However, this isn't another situation and, if their machines had been properly firewalled (can someone please explain to me why any ports other than those for servers running in a DMZ should be visible over the net, because I'll be damned if I can think of any) they wouldn't have been infected. Hell, if they had zonealarm running on all the boxes they'd be safe even if they don't have a decent firewalls between their LANs and the net.
Yes, Microsoft isn't without blame (maybe if they made patches that didn't crap all over your machines life would be better) but in this case sloppy admins have struck again.
as few companies and individuals will see the need to pay for 'Windows' (the OS).
Don't forget that one of the things that puts those very people off FOSS is the fact that it is free: free means no support, nobody to sue when something goes wrong, no way to show your shareholders that you're spending money wisely.
ReactOS will only be a sucess as a "drop in Windows replacement" in industry if it manages to do everything in the same way as windows, look the same as windows and have a company sat there offering support and a target for blame.
Erm, space is mostly large areas of emptiness sprinkled with very large fusion reactors and a few balls of gas and rock. Any radiation mankind could pump out wouldn't even be noticed against the normal amounts kicked out by a star,
More or less, and you'll note that the rovers they have sent are slow, clumbersome and completely unsuited for complex detailed work - they crawl over the surface at a rate that would shame an arthritic snail so that mission control can direct them, they can't do anything as complex as lift a rock up and look underneath it (or even manipulate any small object). They are cameras on wheels with a boom with some instrumentation on it - very large, very expensive, very fragile remote control cars. They can't be any more than that because the software to allow them to operate autonomously safely and effectively just isn't there, and without that AI everything is restricted by the ping times.
Or another reason to use squid and something like squirm or one of the other filters you can plug into squid. That way you not only get a caching proxy (more bandwidth spare for other stuff) you get ad blocking and can even do other tricks (I use it to rewrite the theme information for several phpBB2 forums that use gastly themes with no other options)
Sooner or later these morons will learn that any technology they try to set up, we can get around just as easily..
Most likely, consciousness is a sense, like sight or sound.
Or, even more likely, an emergent byproduct of highly complex strange loops and pattern matching that, unlike any sense, does not have an explicit biological presence.
Agreed. It has been over 6 years since I last went into a public library in the UK: the books they had on the subjects I was interested in were so far out of date it was painful (books on electronics from the 70s for example!) After waiting for months for them to get a book I wanted I just gave up on them completely and had to resort to the far more expensive but infinitely faster option of buying the reference books I needed.
Since then everything I know about them has been second-hand, but that alone is bad enough. How are people who aren't lucky enough to be able to buy books (especially the ludicrously expensive technical ones) supposed to learn this stuff? It's depressing.
Even the library at the university I work at is behind and has very restricted numbers on some of the most complex tomes:/
If the OS blocked the user from installing other software that would be one thing, but they don't and you can install whatever you want to.
And just how many people do that? If you want a clue, look at the adoption of Opera, and especially Mozilla (which doesn't have the cost barrier Opera hase) against IE. Despite the fact that IE is a security-hole-ridden pile of outdated junk and Opera and Mozilla beat it hands-down on features and standards compliance, huge numbers of people still use IE. Why? Because it came with the computer and they either don't know there are alternatives, don't want to know or aren't allowed to use them because they "aren't supported".
Mine are Helios, Daedalus, Icarus, and Morpheus - and given that some of the people I know name their washing machines, naming computers doesn't get me any funny looks at all.....
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if they'll do a webcast of the TV signal for those of us out of range/without HAM equipment.
however the fact that both exist and compete for resources is in my mind one of the main causes behind the failure of Linux on the desktop.
;)). They wouldn't work on the other if they had any choice in the matter, and since this is FOSS, they do have a choice. They aren't competing for resources because if you took away one project most of the programmers wouldn't migrate to the other, they'd just start again.
This might (and I say might) be true if they were competing for resources. But they aren't: the reason there are two projects, and both are actively developed, is that there are some programmers who just fundamentally don't like how KDE/Qt works while there are other programmers who don't like how Gnome/GTK work (and then there's the ones who prefer lesstif/bare X, but they're just weird and can be ignored as a statistical fluke
Enough with the "Kill all but one desktops" please.
As noted above, software licensed or leased by the developer will not be taxed,
... regulation that distinguishes between a sale and a license of software
Software licensed or leased by the developer is currently not taxed, canned software and custom software are currently taxed under different mechanisms. If you read the rest of the article you'll see that
The Governor's proposal would either repeal the
ie: canned software and software licensed by the developer would be treated equally and therefore subject to sales tax.
or create an entirely new tax on revenues from software licensing.
ie: or he will just create a new tax specifically for software licensed or leased by the developer.
In either event, software licensed or leased by the developer will be taxed in some way.
Mhhh... watercraft float on water, witches float on water. Therefore watercraft must be witches!
Can we burn them?
I would say quite a few, if it was proven massively unpopular, especially when the government is democratically elected.
Very true. When we actually get one, I'll be sure to remember that.
I'd agree, except that people just don't care about space. Back in the cold war the space race captivated people's minds because it was "us against them" - America showing it was better than the USSR (or vice versa, depending on which side you were on). It was something people could take pride in.
Now?
The only Big Enemy is "terrorism", and there's no single country you can hold up for that, no place likely to take part in dick-measuring games. Yeah, there's China, and that might help a bit, but essentially now space exploration has to be done for the science and maybe, one day, for the profits. Science means nothing to the vast majority of people, they just aren't interested, aren't even curious about the universe. This annoys me more than you can believe, but it is true: the general population don't care about space, they don't care about a ball of rock millions of miles away, they don't see why we should be trying to get our backsides off this damp lump of rock.
We can send probes up until we are blue in the face, we can probably send men up too, and people will be asking why we are spending money on it rather than throwing it at <insert some short-term and impossible to truely solve problem here>
Bah.
the general public likes to damage other people's things.
Yet you recommend using a mechanical method for starting playback? At least if an electrical method is used - a red button switch as opposed to a rod pusher - some kid hammering on the button isn't likely to break the player.
IME there's a golden rule that needs to be followed with any piece of hardware: make sure any important parts of it are as isolated and protected from the general public as possible and anything they can see should be cheap and easy to replace.
Amazing as it may seem, not everyone who is out to do damage is part of a terrorist group. No, seriously! Probably only 0.5% of your average doing-bad-things person is a member of a terrorist organisation. I was as shocked as you are, it's incredible! All these people running around causing trouble without having the decency to live in a country you can bomb. I've found that you can actually travel around huge areas of Europe without even running into a terrorist, even in France!</sarcasm>
Why exactly do they need to be funded? Ever thought that they might be doing it because they get some deranged kick out of it, or so thay can brag about it or simply because they're sodding mental?
Given that some satellite broadband services have downlink speeds of 2Mbps (which means even higher uplink speeds to the satellite acting as a relay), I see no reason why devices on the IIS shouldn't have similar bandwidth available.
I tend to be significantly more productive at home, even though one of the machines I use is also the one with all my games on it (so I don't even need to turn on a ps2) and it has a DSL connection.
The reason is simple - my home boxes are set up exactly how I want them: I have all the software I need set up exactly how I want it, I have my shelves of books (which tend to be more up to date than the ones in the office), I have local mirrors of any online documentation I use, I built my desk myself to have everything in the right place and there's a 5 foot by 5 foot window to the left of me looking out over trees and grass. At the office my view is through a couple of 1 foot wide windows onto an open concrete-paved area with more offices on the far side. I'm just far more productive when I have everything at my fingertips and I'm comfortable..
The problem with patching Windows systems is that a responsible admin will not simply roll out the patches across all the systems. Microsoft is very good at giving you two problems for the price of fixing one so a lot of Windows admins do extensive testing of patches before applying them across all their systems. In another situation, I would give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were hit while testing the patch.
However, this isn't another situation and, if their machines had been properly firewalled (can someone please explain to me why any ports other than those for servers running in a DMZ should be visible over the net, because I'll be damned if I can think of any) they wouldn't have been infected. Hell, if they had zonealarm running on all the boxes they'd be safe even if they don't have a decent firewalls between their LANs and the net.
Yes, Microsoft isn't without blame (maybe if they made patches that didn't crap all over your machines life would be better) but in this case sloppy admins have struck again.
Computers aren't inherantly insecure, people are. I propose the Bender Security Solution!
as few companies and individuals will see the need to pay for 'Windows' (the OS).
Don't forget that one of the things that puts those very people off FOSS is the fact that it is free: free means no support, nobody to sue when something goes wrong, no way to show your shareholders that you're spending money wisely.
ReactOS will only be a sucess as a "drop in Windows replacement" in industry if it manages to do everything in the same way as windows, look the same as windows and have a company sat there offering support and a target for blame.
For goodness sake, don't give them ideas...
Or am I just being paranoid?
Yes. I'd recommend a higher quality tinfoil in your hat, or double layer it.
Erm, space is mostly large areas of emptiness sprinkled with very large fusion reactors and a few balls of gas and rock. Any radiation mankind could pump out wouldn't even be noticed against the normal amounts kicked out by a star,
More or less, and you'll note that the rovers they have sent are slow, clumbersome and completely unsuited for complex detailed work - they crawl over the surface at a rate that would shame an arthritic snail so that mission control can direct them, they can't do anything as complex as lift a rock up and look underneath it (or even manipulate any small object). They are cameras on wheels with a boom with some instrumentation on it - very large, very expensive, very fragile remote control cars. They can't be any more than that because the software to allow them to operate autonomously safely and effectively just isn't there, and without that AI everything is restricted by the ping times.
Or another reason to use squid and something like squirm or one of the other filters you can plug into squid. That way you not only get a caching proxy (more bandwidth spare for other stuff) you get ad blocking and can even do other tricks (I use it to rewrite the theme information for several phpBB2 forums that use gastly themes with no other options)
Sooner or later these morons will learn that any technology they try to set up, we can get around just as easily..
Most likely, consciousness is a sense, like sight or sound.
Or, even more likely, an emergent byproduct of highly complex strange loops and pattern matching that, unlike any sense, does not have an explicit biological presence.
You mean this isn't normal?
Uh oh...
Agreed. It has been over 6 years since I last went into a public library in the UK: the books they had on the subjects I was interested in were so far out of date it was painful (books on electronics from the 70s for example!) After waiting for months for them to get a book I wanted I just gave up on them completely and had to resort to the far more expensive but infinitely faster option of buying the reference books I needed.
:/
Since then everything I know about them has been second-hand, but that alone is bad enough. How are people who aren't lucky enough to be able to buy books (especially the ludicrously expensive technical ones) supposed to learn this stuff? It's depressing.
Even the library at the university I work at is behind and has very restricted numbers on some of the most complex tomes
If the OS blocked the user from installing other software that would be one thing, but they don't and you can install whatever you want to.
And just how many people do that? If you want a clue, look at the adoption of Opera, and especially Mozilla (which doesn't have the cost barrier Opera hase) against IE. Despite the fact that IE is a security-hole-ridden pile of outdated junk and Opera and Mozilla beat it hands-down on features and standards compliance, huge numbers of people still use IE. Why? Because it came with the computer and they either don't know there are alternatives, don't want to know or aren't allowed to use them because they "aren't supported".
Correct :)
Mine are Helios, Daedalus, Icarus, and Morpheus - and given that some of the people I know name their washing machines, naming computers doesn't get me any funny looks at all.....
Why can't there be a +1 Bloody Scary mod?