Firefox, while a competent browser, is nothing more than a shining example of the lack of innovation in the open source community.
Silly me. And here I was, thinking that Firefox is a shining example of a brilliant policy in software making: offer users an extensible platform and let them do the rest.
Are you sure you're blaming the right folks? Did the Mozilla team copy all those features? Or did users feel the need to have them and implemented them as extensions? How exactly is it a bad thing to be able to bring any feature you want in your favorite browser?
Firefox has many benefits for nerds, but it isn't as functional out of the box.
Can we stop saying this already? Firefox is lean and mean by default on purpose. It's a well known fact that users are put off by too much customization options. Default Firefox offers a very well balanced combination of few options and intuitive functionality. Add extensions if you need them. Have a simple browser otherwise. It's the best of both worlds from my humble point of view.
I quite agree. Last time I tried Wine it didn't run any of my favourite Windows applications. I'm not talking crappy shareware utilities that I can learn to live without - I'm talking showstoppers like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Cygwin, all the really critical tools I use every day.
Why on Earth are you putting emphasys on Wine not being to run things which already have Linux native ports?
In short; you wouldn't be able to do anything more than you would have already been allowed to do if the tax didn't exist.
This is not about the rights per-se. It's about offering the fucking **AA alternative means of income so they'll ease up on their whole campaign against "piracy".
Yeah, antivirus programs are like paying the protection tax. "Keep the signatures up to date or you get it." It's catch-up protection not real prevention.
First, Linux users are used to free (beer) software. There are a few money-makers running on Linux, but for the most part the software doesn't cost anything except maybe the occasional Paypal donation. Secondly, Linux users are used to Free (speech) software. If the software is not licensed under the GPL (or a GPL-compatible license) there will be hell to pay.
Stop right there. You're basically saying that there's no money in the Linux desktop market and there never will be. Which is simply wrong and a harmful way to think.
Open source is a software development tool, not a religion or a marketing strategy.
Are Windows or Mac users really used to buying every last separate piece of software? Do they really do that? Do they never pay for anything and pirate everything (like some corporate drones already say they do)? Aren't these just extremes?
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. People will use free (beer) applications if they're Good Enough (well, duh, who wouldn't) but will pay sensible amounts for their own copy of a piece of quality software, with support and love put into it.
As long as a state of balance is kept -- ie. the free stuff is of decent quality, and the payed-for stuff doesn't try to screw you with spyware or claiming you don't really own your copy -- everything's cool and everybody's happy.
On a personal note, I wish Microsoft wasn't a world-wide monopoly. They omnipresence blurs and distorts everything. They superimpose their double-standards and medium quality software over everything. Imagine a world where platforms like Mac, Linux, Solaris, OS/2, BeOS and whatnot occupied fairly equal market shares. There would be a lot less misguided passion and hate, IMHO, and more quality and consumers getting their work done on the platform of their choice.
Or, we'll turn most of Russia into a big ethanol farm... oh, wait...
It strikes me that the big old field owners, users and industries won't go down without a fight anwyay.
As for "environmental friendly"... You know, lack of energy is not "the dilemma". The main problem is that we have and consume too much energy. It all turns to heat eventually, hence the steady global warming. Burning oil byproducts are just part of the problem.
The main concern should be limiting energy consumption. Finding new energy sources should come in second place.
Its time we all stand up to thi... what is that?... Brittany? Brittany, is that you holding out an ice cold Pepsi? And you are telling me that NATO, NATO IS THE ONLY WAY TO WIN YOUR LOVE!?!?!?! BRITTANY!!! I WILL DO ANYTHING!!! JUST GIVE ME THAT McBURGER AND YOUR LOVE BRITTANY!!! BRITTANY!!!!!!!!!! BRITTANY?!?!?!?!
Is this "Brittany" you speak of the United Kingdom? 'Cause that would make sense too, in a disturbing kind of way.
I think you were speaking completely out of your ass.
Not completely. Gotta give him credit. Equating desire for democracy and freedom with losing their own culture, and saying that conservatives and pro-russians should decide because it's more akin to their "roots", that is as fine propaganda as I've ever seen. Kudos.
The real threat comes from actual LOST data. With portable storage media getting bigger and bigger, more and more data can be put on it. Including massive amounts of spread sheets and even databases. (I worked for one company that insisted on keeping a sensitive database on USB keys, to be sneaker-netted around to whoever needed it).
Was it their ONLY copy? Because if it was, they were dumber than a ton of bricks, end of story. And it was no fault of the media itself (flash or otherwise), it was human stupidity. Always make a backup. I think it's in the Bible too (well it ought to be). Digital information goes both ways: it's very easy to duplicate, but it's equally easy to lose. Not taking advantage of the first to cover the second is just plain moronic.
They couldn't have been designed from the ground up to be immune viruses because they were designed before they were even around.
Which goes to prove what good security design should be about. Think it right from the planning stage, in the right frame of mind, and you won't have to worry patching it later.
The article was suggesting that Mac users need to be every bit as cautious as the "rest of us" on our Windows boxes. It was railing against the same type of thinking that causes parents to decide not to get their children vaccinated against things like measles because you never hear of measles cases anymore. Of course not! It's because we've been vaccinated! So Mac users: go get your booster shots.
The way I see it, it's like the recent bird flu hype. It's been around for years now and yet we're not running scared of it. Sure, theoretically you could have bad luck and catch it and die for sure, but we still laugh at the chances. That's viruses on Mac. [b]The odds are so small that Mac users can afford to be smug.[/b]
It's happened before but the question is how long Microsoft can continue along that route. Discounting is all very well but once more governments get in on the game it's going to start costing.
Costing what!? It's not like they didn't cover the cost of producing Windows hundreds of times over by now. If you mean "lower profits" then yeah, but to Microsoft it's probably worth it. Lower profits is better than nothing.
No, I'd be more worried about other governments starting to get pissed. It's not nice to pay premium price for Windows and see that others get it for much less.
The way Microsoft affords to juggle with the pricing on their products is unique to both software and selling in general. They practically have a special price for any market, as long as it sells for something, anything. Kinda reminds me of certain illegal substances...
Then you should really look up the Tachikoma specials series. It's a series of very short bits (under one minute per episode), and I have no idea how long it runs. I found about 30 episodes in fansub circles.
Each episode is basically an amusing skit featuring Tachikomas exclusively, often inside their own virtual network. They are chock-full of everything you probably love about them, ranging from existential debates to a humorous instance of a too-curious-for-its-own-good Tachikoma infecting the others with a computer virus.
And I'm glad they got rid of the ridiculous outfit, for the most part, the Major had in the original series as I felt it detracted from the overall effect.
Kusanagi has had quite a different personality in all instances she'd showed up so far. In the manga she is good looking (cute face, great body, big tits) and has a spunky, playful personality. This is going to appear quite strange, I suspect, to people who only ever saw the movie or the series. But it falls in line with many of Masamune Shirow's female characters. Think of Leona in New Dominion Tank Police.
In the first Ghost in the Shell movie the guys that made it went with a very serious Kusanagi, and they made her not quite a beautiful, she has a much more common face and features compared to what you usually see in anime. It was great, IMO, because it matches the mood of the movie much better.
Finally, in both series Kusanagi is once again a bombshell, but she keeps the serious personality. This production had yet another different bunch of makers (director, screenwriters, character design).
To each their own, I say, I consider they succeeded in giving each production their own life. It's hard to imagine the Major in the movie or the series laughing or saying "neeeh!", but then I wouldn't want to even if I liked the manga imensely.
That we are even having this debate is quite surreal and fills me with optimism that by the logic of natural law our children will look back at the 'intellectual property' debacle at the start of the 21st century, and piss their pants laughing.
Like we're looking back at religion now and laugh about it? Both religion and IP may take a while longer to overgrow, I'm afraid. Arthur Clarke placed the moment in 3001 (Final Odissey) as I recall.
(I mean religion as in "I'm right and you're wrong", of course.)
Screw your cat. Lemme ask you something. Why the hell is Apple going for the x86 platform? Don't we all agree it would be a mistake in more ways than one? They tried to compete on the software only a while back and the clones kicked their ass. The hardware is Apple's edge. So why's Jobs doing it? He's not a stupid man. What's the catch?
30 minutes after Galileo goes live, the Russians will be demonstrating them to the Iranians, who will then give them to any Islamist group that asks for them.
To do what? What's accurate GPS tracking gonna do for them that they can't already do? Crash planes or send rockets to important landmarks? They already know where those are, don't need GPS for it. And you don't need GPS to put a bomb in a subway.
But why is it such an issue? Plagiarism from Wikipedia, that is. Surely, from a moral standpoint it's not "right", but legally? Who owns Wikipedia copyright? Wikimedia Foundation? All the contributors, collectively? Just the ones that produced the current version? Why?
Who decided this? Who's to tell us the contents in Wikipedia right now doesn't breach copyright elsewhere? (And statistically thinking, chances are that it does, which is why we're never gonna see a printed version unless the publisher wants to take his own life in his hands).
I, for one, consider the Wikipedia copy rights a VERY complicated issue that I wouldn't want to touch with a 6 foot stick.
Not necessarily all Linux software comes from trusted package repositories. There are plenty of commercial apps which produce their own packages. I can name a few right now, off the top of my head: Win4Lin, MActor. They issue their own.rpm's.
I'm NOT saying they do, they are wonderful applications. BUT, if they were to bundle "spyware" ie. stuff that phones home or does other ugly things, how would you react? Would you even know? We'd find out, eventually, but would you stop using it if you really need it? Would the distro's refuse to carry them? On what grounds? Hell, if SuSE or other commercial distro's offered their free versions with spyware, what would you do?
The whole "do no evil" policy is VERY relative and fragile when you come to think of it. MS Windows is living proof of a platform which has undergone a decade or more of moral decadence. Give Linux enough time and assholes and commercial interests will start having their way there too.
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Firefox, while a competent browser, is nothing more than a shining example of the lack of innovation in the open source community.
Silly me. And here I was, thinking that Firefox is a shining example of a brilliant policy in software making: offer users an extensible platform and let them do the rest.
Are you sure you're blaming the right folks? Did the Mozilla team copy all those features? Or did users feel the need to have them and implemented them as extensions? How exactly is it a bad thing to be able to bring any feature you want in your favorite browser?
Firefox has many benefits for nerds, but it isn't as functional out of the box.
Can we stop saying this already? Firefox is lean and mean by default on purpose. It's a well known fact that users are put off by too much customization options. Default Firefox offers a very well balanced combination of few options and intuitive functionality. Add extensions if you need them. Have a simple browser otherwise. It's the best of both worlds from my humble point of view.
I quite agree. Last time I tried Wine it didn't run any of my favourite Windows applications. I'm not talking crappy shareware utilities that I can learn to live without - I'm talking showstoppers like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Cygwin, all the really critical tools I use every day.
Why on Earth are you putting emphasys on Wine not being to run things which already have Linux native ports?
In short; you wouldn't be able to do anything more than you would have already been allowed to do if the tax didn't exist.
This is not about the rights per-se. It's about offering the fucking **AA alternative means of income so they'll ease up on their whole campaign against "piracy".
Yeah, antivirus programs are like paying the protection tax. "Keep the signatures up to date or you get it." It's catch-up protection not real prevention.
[...]memories[...] are irrelevant if you have the facts.
Not so sure about this part. Look where the cold hard "facts" got Guy Pearce, in the movie.
First, Linux users are used to free (beer) software. There are a few money-makers running on Linux, but for the most part the software doesn't cost anything except maybe the occasional Paypal donation. Secondly, Linux users are used to Free (speech) software. If the software is not licensed under the GPL (or a GPL-compatible license) there will be hell to pay.
Stop right there. You're basically saying that there's no money in the Linux desktop market and there never will be. Which is simply wrong and a harmful way to think.
Open source is a software development tool, not a religion or a marketing strategy.
Are Windows or Mac users really used to buying every last separate piece of software? Do they really do that? Do they never pay for anything and pirate everything (like some corporate drones already say they do)? Aren't these just extremes?
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. People will use free (beer) applications if they're Good Enough (well, duh, who wouldn't) but will pay sensible amounts for their own copy of a piece of quality software, with support and love put into it.
As long as a state of balance is kept -- ie. the free stuff is of decent quality, and the payed-for stuff doesn't try to screw you with spyware or claiming you don't really own your copy -- everything's cool and everybody's happy.
On a personal note, I wish Microsoft wasn't a world-wide monopoly. They omnipresence blurs and distorts everything. They superimpose their double-standards and medium quality software over everything. Imagine a world where platforms like Mac, Linux, Solaris, OS/2, BeOS and whatnot occupied fairly equal market shares. There would be a lot less misguided passion and hate, IMHO, and more quality and consumers getting their work done on the platform of their choice.
Who cares. Enumerating badness = dumb by design.
Or, we'll turn most of Russia into a big ethanol farm... oh, wait...
It strikes me that the big old field owners, users and industries won't go down without a fight anwyay.
As for "environmental friendly"... You know, lack of energy is not "the dilemma". The main problem is that we have and consume too much energy. It all turns to heat eventually, hence the steady global warming. Burning oil byproducts are just part of the problem.
The main concern should be limiting energy consumption. Finding new energy sources should come in second place.
Its time we all stand up to thi... what is that?... Brittany? Brittany, is that you holding out an ice cold Pepsi? And you are telling me that NATO, NATO IS THE ONLY WAY TO WIN YOUR LOVE!?!?!?! BRITTANY!!! I WILL DO ANYTHING!!! JUST GIVE ME THAT McBURGER AND YOUR LOVE BRITTANY!!! BRITTANY!!!!!!!!!! BRITTANY?!?!?!?!
Is this "Brittany" you speak of the United Kingdom? 'Cause that would make sense too, in a disturbing kind of way.
I think you were speaking completely out of your ass.
Not completely. Gotta give him credit. Equating desire for democracy and freedom with losing their own culture, and saying that conservatives and pro-russians should decide because it's more akin to their "roots", that is as fine propaganda as I've ever seen. Kudos.
"History" is terrible, and still the cause of our largest problems. Morality and common decency demands that we discard the past.
I hope that by "discard" you meant "forgive", not "forget". Because forgetting old mistakes makes you repeat them, as the old quote goes.
The real threat comes from actual LOST data. With portable storage media getting bigger and bigger, more and more data can be put on it. Including massive amounts of spread sheets and even databases. (I worked for one company that insisted on keeping a sensitive database on USB keys, to be sneaker-netted around to whoever needed it).
Was it their ONLY copy? Because if it was, they were dumber than a ton of bricks, end of story. And it was no fault of the media itself (flash or otherwise), it was human stupidity. Always make a backup. I think it's in the Bible too (well it ought to be). Digital information goes both ways: it's very easy to duplicate, but it's equally easy to lose. Not taking advantage of the first to cover the second is just plain moronic.
They couldn't have been designed from the ground up to be immune viruses because they were designed before they were even around.
Which goes to prove what good security design should be about. Think it right from the planning stage, in the right frame of mind, and you won't have to worry patching it later.
The article was suggesting that Mac users need to be every bit as cautious as the "rest of us" on our Windows boxes. It was railing against the same type of thinking that causes parents to decide not to get their children vaccinated against things like measles because you never hear of measles cases anymore. Of course not! It's because we've been vaccinated! So Mac users: go get your booster shots.
The way I see it, it's like the recent bird flu hype. It's been around for years now and yet we're not running scared of it. Sure, theoretically you could have bad luck and catch it and die for sure, but we still laugh at the chances. That's viruses on Mac. [b]The odds are so small that Mac users can afford to be smug.[/b]
Now let's talk about how we recognize ad banners in 50ms and shut them out of our vision.
It's happened before but the question is how long Microsoft can continue along that route. Discounting is all very well but once more governments get in on the game it's going to start costing.
Costing what!? It's not like they didn't cover the cost of producing Windows hundreds of times over by now. If you mean "lower profits" then yeah, but to Microsoft it's probably worth it. Lower profits is better than nothing.
No, I'd be more worried about other governments starting to get pissed. It's not nice to pay premium price for Windows and see that others get it for much less.
The way Microsoft affords to juggle with the pricing on their products is unique to both software and selling in general. They practically have a special price for any market, as long as it sells for something, anything. Kinda reminds me of certain illegal substances...
I'm a real sucker for the Tachikoma.
Then you should really look up the Tachikoma specials series. It's a series of very short bits (under one minute per episode), and I have no idea how long it runs. I found about 30 episodes in fansub circles.
Each episode is basically an amusing skit featuring Tachikomas exclusively, often inside their own virtual network. They are chock-full of everything you probably love about them, ranging from existential debates to a humorous instance of a too-curious-for-its-own-good Tachikoma infecting the others with a computer virus.
And I'm glad they got rid of the ridiculous outfit, for the most part, the Major had in the original series as I felt it detracted from the overall effect.
Kusanagi has had quite a different personality in all instances she'd showed up so far. In the manga she is good looking (cute face, great body, big tits) and has a spunky, playful personality. This is going to appear quite strange, I suspect, to people who only ever saw the movie or the series. But it falls in line with many of Masamune Shirow's female characters. Think of Leona in New Dominion Tank Police.
In the first Ghost in the Shell movie the guys that made it went with a very serious Kusanagi, and they made her not quite a beautiful, she has a much more common face and features compared to what you usually see in anime. It was great, IMO, because it matches the mood of the movie much better.
Finally, in both series Kusanagi is once again a bombshell, but she keeps the serious personality. This production had yet another different bunch of makers (director, screenwriters, character design).
To each their own, I say, I consider they succeeded in giving each production their own life. It's hard to imagine the Major in the movie or the series laughing or saying "neeeh!", but then I wouldn't want to even if I liked the manga imensely.
That we are even having this debate is quite surreal and fills me with optimism that by the logic of natural law our children will look back at the 'intellectual property' debacle at the start of the 21st century, and piss their pants laughing.
Like we're looking back at religion now and laugh about it? Both religion and IP may take a while longer to overgrow, I'm afraid. Arthur Clarke placed the moment in 3001 (Final Odissey) as I recall.
(I mean religion as in "I'm right and you're wrong", of course.)
Screw your cat. Lemme ask you something. Why the hell is Apple going for the x86 platform? Don't we all agree it would be a mistake in more ways than one? They tried to compete on the software only a while back and the clones kicked their ass. The hardware is Apple's edge. So why's Jobs doing it? He's not a stupid man. What's the catch?
Fixing bugs in a pre-beta OS under development is indicative of this? Then a changelog of Linux or OS/X beta will scare you good.
I'm more scared of the Windows security track record.
30 minutes after Galileo goes live, the Russians will be demonstrating them to the Iranians, who will then give them to any Islamist group that asks for them.
To do what? What's accurate GPS tracking gonna do for them that they can't already do? Crash planes or send rockets to important landmarks? They already know where those are, don't need GPS for it. And you don't need GPS to put a bomb in a subway.
But why is it such an issue? Plagiarism from Wikipedia, that is. Surely, from a moral standpoint it's not "right", but legally? Who owns Wikipedia copyright? Wikimedia Foundation? All the contributors, collectively? Just the ones that produced the current version? Why?
Who decided this? Who's to tell us the contents in Wikipedia right now doesn't breach copyright elsewhere? (And statistically thinking, chances are that it does, which is why we're never gonna see a printed version unless the publisher wants to take his own life in his hands).
I, for one, consider the Wikipedia copy rights a VERY complicated issue that I wouldn't want to touch with a 6 foot stick.
Not necessarily all Linux software comes from trusted package repositories. There are plenty of commercial apps which produce their own packages. I can name a few right now, off the top of my head: Win4Lin, MActor. They issue their own .rpm's.
I'm NOT saying they do, they are wonderful applications. BUT, if they were to bundle "spyware" ie. stuff that phones home or does other ugly things, how would you react? Would you even know? We'd find out, eventually, but would you stop using it if you really need it? Would the distro's refuse to carry them? On what grounds? Hell, if SuSE or other commercial distro's offered their free versions with spyware, what would you do?
The whole "do no evil" policy is VERY relative and fragile when you come to think of it. MS Windows is living proof of a platform which has undergone a decade or more of moral decadence. Give Linux enough time and assholes and commercial interests will start having their way there too.