I guess my point is, sometimes you don't have a choice. You're stuck paying the MS tax.
Actually you had several choices. But you decided to ignore them in favor of victimhood.
1) Buy a Macintosh laptop. While Mac desktops are more than PC desktops, Mac laptops aren't that much more. And the price is irrelevant anyway. If you don't like Kia, buy a more expensive Ford and stop complaining.
2) Buy a PC laptop with Windows, then return the unopened packet of CDs for a refund. You'll get the runaround, but it can be done. It's not as fun as whining though.
3) Don't buy a laptop at all. There's no law that says you have to have one. The only thing a laptop gives you that a desktop doesn't is convenience. If you're so bent out of shape over that Microsoft "tax", then grow a backbone and do without. It's good for the soul.
Re:Maybe that's what the justice dept missed
on
Is Windows Worth $45?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
uncouple PC's from the operating system. Maybe that's the remedy the justice department missed. When people go into Best Buy they have to buy the PC and OS separately, then BB installs it for them.
That won't do anything to punish Microsoft, but it will do a lot to hurt the computer manufacturers. Microsoft is NOT the ones preinstalling Windows on these systems. It's the manufacturers at the request of the consumers.
But it would still make a great government solution to the problem: harm the people you're trying to help. Dell isn't at fault, but the new regulation is going to hurt Dell. And your small mom and pop down the street isn't at fault, but they're the ones who are going to catch holy heck when they're not allowed to install Windows for grandma.
Or what about Apple? Why should they be forbidden from installing their own OS on their own hardware, when they're not even involved in this petty dispute?
I wish to purchase 10,000 Optiplex computers for my Fortune 500 company. I don't want Windows on these systems. I want them to be shipped with blank hard drives. Thank you.
News of Nerds, Stuff that only matters if you live in Ohio...
Hey editors! I just stumbled on a great way to keep your headline queue full. Just report on every local Linux event around the world. You could get two or three Linux articles for every day of the year!
p.s. My apologies to all you fine people in Ohio, and very fine people you are. But is this really newsworthy to those of us outside of your regional nexus of midwest geeks?
The other major difference is the genericity of commodities. Bottled water is bottled water is bottled water, in much the same way that white sugar is white sugar is white sugar. Or as Bob Young would say, catsup is ketchup is catsup.
Unless you're a brand fanatic, replacing this diner's premium coffe with New Folgers Crystals isn't going to make any difference to anyone. But go recreate that classic television commercial by replacing someone's Mac OSX with a Dell running Linux and you'll hear quite a lot of outraged squawking. Heck, even secretly replacing the Korn shell with bash is liable to get you challenged to a duel with pistols at fifty paces.
But when the peer review is done by amateur ideologues(*) then the peer review is pretty much useless. It works for Open Source software because the peers are by and large experts. But when an encyclopedia covers all possible fields, but the peers are a self selected set of narrowly focused hackers and geeks, the quality suffers.
With the Encyclopedia Britanica, as an example, I get articles on gannets written by the world's leading ornithologists. With wackypedia, I get articles on gannets written by geeks complaining about nest wetting. Okay, an exaggeration, but you should be able to get the point. Who wrote the article on gannets in wikipedia? I don't know, and I'll probably never know. But with the EB, I know it was written by Professor Somebody of Edinburgh.
(*) "Ideologue" as in "this encyclopedia is a political 'cause'"
Which is the ONLY reason I continue to use GPL software. Otherwise I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. If RMS ever gets his way and convinces governments to enact a software tax to support the Free Software Foundation, I'll drop every piece of software with a 'g' prefix like it was a poisonous snake.
The GPL is as libertarian as any other contract freely entered into by informed sentient beings.
The analogy I like to use is: BSD == anarcho-capitalist; GPL == anarcho-socialist. The FSF wants Marx-style socialism/communism, but only through purely voluntary means. (that is until RMS gets his way with the software tax...)
Its like claiming we'd be more free if the government could take away our right to free speech or public assembly at will.
As opposed to the opposite analogy, where the FSF claims we are more free if one person making a speech at a public ssembly can prevent other people from speaking at the same assembly if they don't agree to let the first guy prevent the other speakers. "Put it's absolutely necessary for freedom," he claims, "otherwise someone could record your speech to the public assembly and publish it in his proprietary for-pay newspaper!"
I use FreeBSD, and I never have had that problem. I've burned data CDs at max speed while downloading the second ISO image with a compile going on in the background, with no hickups. And no realtime extensions anywhere in sight...
I'm running KDE on FreeBSD, and as far as I can tell, there's no difference between it and a KDE under Linux (expect for one silly penguin icon). I've also used it under Solaris and it feels exactly the same.
I personally prefer Konqueror/Explorer type navigation, but I've used this type of navigation before...on OS/2. It's not that annoying, but it does require you to reorganize your workplace to compensate. You need a "wide" directory hierarchy, rather than "deep". If you have to drill down more than two levels, start reorganizing stuff.
Glad you asked. I have it on good authority (a friend of a friend of the nanny of some "cute Hobbit children") that there will be only five endings:
1) Saying goodbye to Thorin. A bittersweet moment, after which the screen goes dark.
2) Saying goodbye to Bard and the Lakemen. A bittersweet moment, after which the screen goes dark.
3) Saying goodbye to the Mirkwood elves. A bittersweet moment, after which the screen goes dark.
4) Saying goodbye to Beorn. A bittersweet moment, after which the screen goes dark.
5) Saying goodbye to Elrond. A bittersweet moment, after which the screen goes dark.
Fans of the Hobbit will, of course, be outraged that Peter Jackson didn't film the auction of Bagend. "It's totally changes the whole theme of the story," one fan protests.
I'll have to disagree. For most of the book there is no epic stuff. But where it is, the LOTR would work well. Consider the Battle of Five Armies. One on a PJ-Epic scale, Bilbo is going to feel quite small and insignificant.
Of course, a forty minute Helm's Deep style battle will ruin it. But five minutes of Bilbo stumbling about in confusion would be great.
The guy who is in charge of our Solaris NFS network and UNIX development tools goes over to Bangalore this week to set up our "replacement" facility. I get an email on Monday:
"I keep getting a 'portmap' error when I try to mount an NFS drive. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong."
I am *NOT* in support. I am *NOT* in IT systems administration. I am a systems programmer. I am his client. Why is he asking me, a user, how to do what he gets paid to do?
Actually you wouldn't expect any of the Linux distros to have a problem either, since the XFree86 libraries are NOT under this new license. But I guess it's just too much fun waging holy wars...
While it's not "stealing", neither is it "sharing". It's closer to mass un-think than anything else. In my opinion, it's truly scary how conformant these bloggers are to each other. Individiualism is dead.
Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail.
I say we go back to the days of stocks, pillories and public humiliation in an effort to stop spam. You get caught buying something via spam, you get hauled to the city square, shackeled to a post, and the rest of us get to throw rotten tomatoes at you. For example, buy Cialis and you get to spend your "special weekend" in the stocks.
They just have to sound impressive to Bush-voters types.
I wish you children would just grow up and get a life. You don't have to make every uuterance of yours be an attack against Bush.
If you put your silly CNN thinking points aside for just a second, you'll realize that most of the anti-consumer IP crap that has come down the pike this decade has been from the D-for-Disney side of the aisle.
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I guess my point is, sometimes you don't have a choice. You're stuck paying the MS tax.
Actually you had several choices. But you decided to ignore them in favor of victimhood.
1) Buy a Macintosh laptop. While Mac desktops are more than PC desktops, Mac laptops aren't that much more. And the price is irrelevant anyway. If you don't like Kia, buy a more expensive Ford and stop complaining.
2) Buy a PC laptop with Windows, then return the unopened packet of CDs for a refund. You'll get the runaround, but it can be done. It's not as fun as whining though.
3) Don't buy a laptop at all. There's no law that says you have to have one. The only thing a laptop gives you that a desktop doesn't is convenience. If you're so bent out of shape over that Microsoft "tax", then grow a backbone and do without. It's good for the soul.
uncouple PC's from the operating system. Maybe that's the remedy the justice department missed. When people go into Best Buy they have to buy the PC and OS separately, then BB installs it for them.
That won't do anything to punish Microsoft, but it will do a lot to hurt the computer manufacturers. Microsoft is NOT the ones preinstalling Windows on these systems. It's the manufacturers at the request of the consumers.
But it would still make a great government solution to the problem: harm the people you're trying to help. Dell isn't at fault, but the new regulation is going to hurt Dell. And your small mom and pop down the street isn't at fault, but they're the ones who are going to catch holy heck when they're not allowed to install Windows for grandma.
Or what about Apple? Why should they be forbidden from installing their own OS on their own hardware, when they're not even involved in this petty dispute?
Dear Dell,
I wish to purchase 10,000 Optiplex computers for my Fortune 500 company. I don't want Windows on these systems. I want them to be shipped with blank hard drives. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Julius Dithers
Oooh look! I can make my front doorbell ring by pulling on the LA-Z-Boy lever...
News of Nerds, Stuff that only matters if you live in Ohio...
Hey editors! I just stumbled on a great way to keep your headline queue full. Just report on every local Linux event around the world. You could get two or three Linux articles for every day of the year!
p.s. My apologies to all you fine people in Ohio, and very fine people you are. But is this really newsworthy to those of us outside of your regional nexus of midwest geeks?
The other major difference is the genericity of commodities. Bottled water is bottled water is bottled water, in much the same way that white sugar is white sugar is white sugar. Or as Bob Young would say, catsup is ketchup is catsup.
Unless you're a brand fanatic, replacing this diner's premium coffe with New Folgers Crystals isn't going to make any difference to anyone. But go recreate that classic television commercial by replacing someone's Mac OSX with a Dell running Linux and you'll hear quite a lot of outraged squawking. Heck, even secretly replacing the Korn shell with bash is liable to get you challenged to a duel with pistols at fifty paces.
But when the peer review is done by amateur ideologues(*) then the peer review is pretty much useless. It works for Open Source software because the peers are by and large experts. But when an encyclopedia covers all possible fields, but the peers are a self selected set of narrowly focused hackers and geeks, the quality suffers.
With the Encyclopedia Britanica, as an example, I get articles on gannets written by the world's leading ornithologists. With wackypedia, I get articles on gannets written by geeks complaining about nest wetting. Okay, an exaggeration, but you should be able to get the point. Who wrote the article on gannets in wikipedia? I don't know, and I'll probably never know. But with the EB, I know it was written by Professor Somebody of Edinburgh.
(*) "Ideologue" as in "this encyclopedia is a political 'cause'"
The GPL doesn't force anyone to do anything.
Which is the ONLY reason I continue to use GPL software. Otherwise I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. If RMS ever gets his way and convinces governments to enact a software tax to support the Free Software Foundation, I'll drop every piece of software with a 'g' prefix like it was a poisonous snake.
The GPL is as libertarian as any other contract freely entered into by informed sentient beings.
The analogy I like to use is: BSD == anarcho-capitalist; GPL == anarcho-socialist. The FSF wants Marx-style socialism/communism, but only through purely voluntary means. (that is until RMS gets his way with the software tax...)
Its like claiming we'd be more free if the government could take away our right to free speech or public assembly at will.
As opposed to the opposite analogy, where the FSF claims we are more free if one person making a speech at a public ssembly can prevent other people from speaking at the same assembly if they don't agree to let the first guy prevent the other speakers. "Put it's absolutely necessary for freedom," he claims, "otherwise someone could record your speech to the public assembly and publish it in his proprietary for-pay newspaper!"
It's a members only meeting. XFree86 is not a member of the Free Software Foundation (otherwise known as GNU).
And that's just people I know.
You need to get out more...
I use FreeBSD, and I never have had that problem. I've burned data CDs at max speed while downloading the second ISO image with a compile going on in the background, with no hickups. And no realtime extensions anywhere in sight...
I'm running KDE on FreeBSD, and as far as I can tell, there's no difference between it and a KDE under Linux (expect for one silly penguin icon). I've also used it under Solaris and it feels exactly the same.
I personally prefer Konqueror/Explorer type navigation, but I've used this type of navigation before...on OS/2. It's not that annoying, but it does require you to reorganize your workplace to compensate. You need a "wide" directory hierarchy, rather than "deep". If you have to drill down more than two levels, start reorganizing stuff.
Glad you asked. I have it on good authority (a friend of a friend of the nanny of some "cute Hobbit children") that there will be only five endings:
1) Saying goodbye to Thorin. A bittersweet moment, after which the screen goes dark.
2) Saying goodbye to Bard and the Lakemen. A bittersweet moment, after which the screen goes dark.
3) Saying goodbye to the Mirkwood elves. A bittersweet moment, after which the screen goes dark.
4) Saying goodbye to Beorn. A bittersweet moment, after which the screen goes dark.
5) Saying goodbye to Elrond. A bittersweet moment, after which the screen goes dark.
Fans of the Hobbit will, of course, be outraged that Peter Jackson didn't film the auction of Bagend. "It's totally changes the whole theme of the story," one fan protests.
I'll have to disagree. For most of the book there is no epic stuff. But where it is, the LOTR would work well. Consider the Battle of Five Armies. One on a PJ-Epic scale, Bilbo is going to feel quite small and insignificant.
Of course, a forty minute Helm's Deep style battle will ruin it. But five minutes of Bilbo stumbling about in confusion would be great.
The guy who is in charge of our Solaris NFS network and UNIX development tools goes over to Bangalore this week to set up our "replacement" facility. I get an email on Monday:
"I keep getting a 'portmap' error when I try to mount an NFS drive. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong."
I am *NOT* in support. I am *NOT* in IT systems administration. I am a systems programmer. I am his client. Why is he asking me, a user, how to do what he gets paid to do?
This is one of our lead programmers by the way.
A dot.NET shop I gather...
I have no idea what the technical problem was, but I heard this snippet of conversation as I was leaving work today...
"So the IT guy says he can't backup my work. But he can replace the filesystem with one that can be backed up in the future..."
Sometimes I think sysadmins can be as stupid as users.
Gee, I guess you don't remember that whole aspirin factory thing, do you?
Actually you wouldn't expect any of the Linux distros to have a problem either, since the XFree86 libraries are NOT under this new license. But I guess it's just too much fun waging holy wars...
While it's not "stealing", neither is it "sharing". It's closer to mass un-think than anything else. In my opinion, it's truly scary how conformant these bloggers are to each other. Individiualism is dead.
Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail.
I say we go back to the days of stocks, pillories and public humiliation in an effort to stop spam. You get caught buying something via spam, you get hauled to the city square, shackeled to a post, and the rest of us get to throw rotten tomatoes at you. For example, buy Cialis and you get to spend your "special weekend" in the stocks.
I thought about this for five seconds in pseudo assembler, then my brain started leaking...
register cx public inherit register ax
push bx
push dx
ax::pop cx
bx.mov ax
shl bx->shr
They just have to sound impressive to Bush-voters types.
I wish you children would just grow up and get a life. You don't have to make every uuterance of yours be an attack against Bush.
If you put your silly CNN thinking points aside for just a second, you'll realize that most of the anti-consumer IP crap that has come down the pike this decade has been from the D-for-Disney side of the aisle.