The GOP at least uses libertarian rhetoric. They talk about free trade, small government, right to bear arms, local control, etc. They may not act libertarian, but they do talk like libertarians.
A Republican from Texas (Ron Paul) even once ran as the Libertarian Party presidential candidate!
My new CEO has that philosophy. Unfortunately, our product is advanced medical imaging. We found one critical showstopper bug one day before handoff to manufacturing. After handoff we're still finding more.
I'm not talking about normal everyday bugs that always sneak out the door, but about bugs that would definitely have been found if we had a full baseline and regression cycle instead of merely testing the new features. The showstopper bug was found by accident. What was it? The inability to install the software! We didn't change the installation mechanism, so why bother testing it? It's mindboggling that a bug this huge almost made it out the door, but that's the result of thinking you only have to test what's changed.
But hey! We've accelerated our release cycle, so the customers will love us despite the bugs!
But porting Linux to the XBox is news, because it's Linux. Duh! I don't know why Slashdot keeps posting BSD stories, because all that does is draw attention away from Linux. This isn't about freedom dammit, it's about world domination, and BSD is just getting in the way of that!
Where are you contributions in this area? I used to be a part of the KDE documentation team, so I know the work involved. It's not fun work. It's dreary. But it's something ANYONE can do. You don't even need to know a markup language, because the team will convert your plain text for you.
1) Everyone knows what they mean. Unless you're deliberately messing with the user by using bad grammar, OK/Cancel and Yes/No are so absurdly simple it's amazing this issue got the mileage it did. In fact, the only rational explanation for verb pairs that I've seen is "but what if there's bad grammar!" Wouldn't it be easier all around to fix the bad grammar.
2) OK/Cancel and Yes/No allows for *common* dialogs. The developer doesn't need to come up with a dozen different accept/reject verb pairs for his application. Just subclass KDialog and you're done.
3) As a follow up, the effort to translate just OK/Cancel and Yes/No into fifty different languages is significantly less than translating several hundred strings pairs.
4) No one has yet presented any studies saying that verb pairs are more intuitive than yes/no pairs. "But Apple does it!" or "but Havoc said so!" just isn't good enough. I want something more demonstrative than back patting before I go change several hundred dialogs. In everyday speech we answer questions with yes and no all the time. We all do it and we're all used to it.
Re:I think KDE needs a new default icon set
on
Preview of KDE 3.5
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· Score: 1
That horribly bright WinXP-clone icon theme needs to go...
People keep saying this, but I have no idea what they're talking about. Maybe I just don't have that theme, because the Crystal icon theme on my KDE desktop looks nothing at all like Windows.
Those guys don't care about the rest of us, they have jobs, they're being paid by the government to design their half ass compilers and shitty OS.
Not true! Anything Richard Stallman needs he gets from donations (or anything he managed to save from his MacArthur award). He doesn't work for his food like the rest of us! I don't think he's ever had to earn a wage or salary from productive position.
To be fair, he's hardly alone in this. Like my university professor friend who thinks money grows on the government grant tree, or my charity president friend, who makes her living crying during PBS pledge breaks.
No, property is a natural monopoly because it isn't predicated on government grants to create it. Even in the complete absence of a government police force, I can still erect fences, lock doors, keep Rottweilers, and have a loaded gun handy.
It may be harder to protect without the government but it can still exist. We know this because property has historically existed in lawless and anarchic periods and regions, such as ancient Iceland. The concept of the a particular piece of land being the property of a specific family/clan predates the concept of all land belonging to the king/state.
Freeman focuses on what is perhaps the more important long-term indicator of a nation's prosperity - its re-investment in science and technology education.
Translation: "I want my gravy train federal funding back."
There should be atleast a couple of actors more on the OS market if it wore healthy.
There are! Solaris, QNX, vxWorks, etc, etc.
Oh, you meant desktop market. Okay then.
There is! It's called Macintosh OS X!
Oh, you meant something that runs on PC hardware. Geez, why don't you qualify your statements in the first place?
The answer though, is easy. Macs are just as cheap as PCs now. You used to have the excuse that Macs were too expensive and thus PC^H^HWindows was a monopoly. But that's no longer the case.
What's that, you're still whining? You claim that you would still need to buy all new software if you switched to Mac? That all your current software only runs on Windows?
Well WTF do you want then? Someone to come hold your hand?!?! You can't ditch Windows while holding on to Windows! That's your real problem, isn't it? You want Windows, but you just don't want it to be Microsoft Windows. You won't be happy until someone comes along with an EXACT Windows clone that will run on your old computer with all of your old software with no configuration changes necessary, but which isn't branded by Microsoft.
It ain't going to happen. Even if you throw Bush out of office an elect Kerry, it ain't going to happen. Even if the EU spanks Bill Gates and fines Steve Ballmer it ain't going to happen. Even if the U.N. gives Asia a free ride to pirate all they want, it ain't going to happen.
Please return to reality. Either suck it up and stop complaining, or suck it up and switch.
If you want a conviction, elect somebody who actually believes in the Constitution.
Why? Is the Sherman Anti-Trust act enshrined in the Bill of Rights somewhere? Please cite where in the Constitution the government is given the responsibility and/or right to regulate the market shares of businesses?
In fact they would like to eliminate Sherman Anti-Trust.
Of course. Despite the complete lack of enforcement of the anti-trust laws, we STILL got Linux and BSD during the time Microsoft was a monopoly. Not before, but during. And we also saw the resurgence of Apple. Not before Microsoft's monopoly, but during.
Microsoft has no power over the market. At any time the marketplace could decide to go with Macintosh instead. Corporations and larger businesses with IT departments or systems administrators could switch to a free or commercial Unix on the desktop.
The only thing that would hinder them is inertia: they would either need new hardware, lots of training, or rewriting all their software. Microsoft could DISAPPEAR tomorrow and people would still be using Windows. A Constitutional Anti-Trust Ammendment could fix this how?
The reason Microsoft has a monopoly isn't because the government sat back and did nothing, it's precisely because the government stepped in and allowed copyrights on software! Copyrights aren't natural market entities. They are artificial monopolies on information. Microsoft is a monopoly because the government granted to Microsoft a legal and exclusive monopoly to Windows and Office! Expecting the government to solve the Microsoft problem is like expecting the Mafia to clean up the extortion racket.
It happens in many other industries. You just don't know it because you're a geek and only care about computers and software.
To take one example outside your range of concern, consider carpet. Shaw Industries, Inc is not technically a carpet monopoly, but they are so dominant they rule the industry. OEMs (your local carpet store) have to *compete* with their own supplier, since Shaw has set up its own retail stores. Exclusive contracts are common. You don't need an exclusive contract, but if you want to be competitive it would be wise to get one. And the consumer doesn't know this, because Shaw has hundreds of labels so it looks like the industry is diverse when it's not.
I'm running FreeBSD and I don't use any swap with 1Gb RAM (or my work system with 256Mb RAM).
There's another point in favor of this drive with Unix-like operating systems. Because so much of the OS is process oriented, you end up with more numerous but smaller executables (under/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin, etc). Disk seeks are probably more numerous under a Unix than under Windows. So putting your base OS in RAM will do wonders for the system.
Even under Windows you'll get a huge benefit. Even if you're worried about swap, just put your swap file on RAM.
What OS are you using that needs a "special driver" to support SATA?
Windows XP (without SP1) or a slightly older Linux will not have built in SATA drivers. Even today it's a pain in the butt installing Linux on my SATA-only system, and would be for Windows as well if I didn't have SP1 on the install CD. For FreeBSD "it just works" with the standard ATA driver.
Because of evil capitalism there are hordes of illegal Mexican immigrants living out of sleeping bags in the woods and eating dog food! Won't something think of the children?
</sarcasm>
Seriously, one tiny anecdote doesn't disprove the trend. Utopia is not an option. Let me repeat that for those who read too fast: Utopia is not an option. I know that homeless people exist. I know that illegal immigrants sometimes reach destitution level. But the existance of imperfections does not invalidate the rule. Before you toss out a capitalist economy because it isn't perfect, you need to provide evidence of the perfection of its replacement. The world isn't a giant test tube where you can just experiment willy nilly on the poor to see what works best. We know that works very very well, so don't destroy it just because it isn't perfect!
Most homeless people are homeless because they're substance dependent or mentally ill. Many immigrants are destitute because they're *illegal* immigrants. These aren't economic problems, they're social and legal problems.
My dictionary has eighteen definitions of "free" in it. Only one of them is pertains to "free as in speech". That happens to be the EXACT same number as those that refer to "free as in beer."
Does this cause confusion among intelligent people? Of course it does! Think of all the murderous Latin American dictators that have ascended to power by using the words "free" and "freedom". Think of the Nazi slogan "arbeit macht frei". The point is, "free" is a nebulous word, even when you translate it as "libre".
"Free as in speech" refers to one kind of freedom possessed by human beings. But we're talking about software. Does the "free" in "Free Software" (notice how it's always capitalized) then pertain to the user or to the software?
When the FSF has spent two decades trying to teach people the right meaning of the word "free", I begin to suspect that it's the FSF with the problem.
The poor in the US are getting richer. They may not be getting richer as fast as the rich are gettng richer, but they are getting richer. We have WON the war on poverty, which is why the bureaucracies dependent on its existance keep defining poverty upwards.
I remember growing up with barrios in California made of cast off plywood. They don't exist anymore. We still have "poor" in that we still have 10% of the population that is the lower 10% (duh), but they are no longer destitute.
If you want to see poverty, drive south to Tijuana Mexico. It's sobering. The reason the US has an illegal imigrant problem is because the poor in Mexico would much rather be poor in the US. We pay illegals so much here that there's a thriving money-order industry just to send their excess wages back to their family in Mexico.
Except that now their confused because they are not enslaved, imprisoned or restrained, so they don't understand why they have to switch.
The underground railroad didn't need a marketing plan to educate the slaves about why it's good to be free. Nor did they publish rants on why other approaches to freeing slaves weren't truly free. They also didn't scream at reporters for not using the term "GNU/underground railroad."
Besides being a dupe, this story is a dupe of a what is essentially a lie.
This isn't the "world's first open source beer." That claim is so ridiculous it's amazing that this story got submitted twice. I myself have had "open source" beer recipes publicly available since 1995! And since 1999 under an FSF and OSI approved license! Take any of my recipes and copy, distribute, modify, commercialize, fold, spindle and mutilate my recipes. You have my permission.
Hell, if anyone has a claim to be first in this regard, it might be me! That's because to the best of my knowledge (I could be wrong) I came out with the first Open Source homebrewing software.It predates Vores Øl, and came with several recipes under the Free and Open Source BSD license. My CVS logs will attest that I was earlier than they.
Besides, recipes are quite unlike software. Hardly anyone copyrights a recipe, unless you're writing a cook book. You don't have to be exact with recipes, and the beer (cake, bread, chili, fruit salad) will still turn out fine. And they're trivial to reverse engineer. "Cloning" beers is done all the time, to the point that there's even a popular homebrewing book out there with recipes to duplicate your favorite commercial beer. Claiming to be the first open source beer is as silly as claiming to be the first open source peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Their claim that they were first is not only a lie, it's stupid.
I built my own home computer, and wanted it to be quiet. So I bought the Sonata case and got myself a quiet PC. I can still hear it, but it's so quiet you just don't notice it. But it's still nowhere near as quiet as the Dell Optiplex at work. This thing is amazing. Granted, it's only got a 1.5Ghz Pentium and not fusion-temperature GPU, but that in no way discounts the fact that the system is SILENT.
Opening it up to put in a second harddrive, I figured out why. It's similar to the Sonata case, but squared. Rubber mountings for the drives, large fans, and an air duct for the CPU fan to direct the hot air (and noise) out and to the back. I don't really like the clamshell style acess to the case, but I love everything else about it. If Dell sold just the case, I would buy one for home.
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The GOP at least uses libertarian rhetoric. They talk about free trade, small government, right to bear arms, local control, etc. They may not act libertarian, but they do talk like libertarians.
A Republican from Texas (Ron Paul) even once ran as the Libertarian Party presidential candidate!
Where the even-handedness here?
You must be new to Slashdot. The quickest why to get your post modded insightful here, is to call anyone with an (R) after his name an asshole.
My new CEO has that philosophy. Unfortunately, our product is advanced medical imaging. We found one critical showstopper bug one day before handoff to manufacturing. After handoff we're still finding more.
I'm not talking about normal everyday bugs that always sneak out the door, but about bugs that would definitely have been found if we had a full baseline and regression cycle instead of merely testing the new features. The showstopper bug was found by accident. What was it? The inability to install the software! We didn't change the installation mechanism, so why bother testing it? It's mindboggling that a bug this huge almost made it out the door, but that's the result of thinking you only have to test what's changed.
But hey! We've accelerated our release cycle, so the customers will love us despite the bugs!
But porting Linux to the XBox is news, because it's Linux. Duh! I don't know why Slashdot keeps posting BSD stories, because all that does is draw attention away from Linux. This isn't about freedom dammit, it's about world domination, and BSD is just getting in the way of that!
</sarcasm>
Where are you contributions in this area? I used to be a part of the KDE documentation team, so I know the work involved. It's not fun work. It's dreary. But it's something ANYONE can do. You don't even need to know a markup language, because the team will convert your plain text for you.
The benefits of OK/Cancel are many:
1) Everyone knows what they mean. Unless you're deliberately messing with the user by using bad grammar, OK/Cancel and Yes/No are so absurdly simple it's amazing this issue got the mileage it did. In fact, the only rational explanation for verb pairs that I've seen is "but what if there's bad grammar!" Wouldn't it be easier all around to fix the bad grammar.
2) OK/Cancel and Yes/No allows for *common* dialogs. The developer doesn't need to come up with a dozen different accept/reject verb pairs for his application. Just subclass KDialog and you're done.
3) As a follow up, the effort to translate just OK/Cancel and Yes/No into fifty different languages is significantly less than translating several hundred strings pairs.
4) No one has yet presented any studies saying that verb pairs are more intuitive than yes/no pairs. "But Apple does it!" or "but Havoc said so!" just isn't good enough. I want something more demonstrative than back patting before I go change several hundred dialogs. In everyday speech we answer questions with yes and no all the time. We all do it and we're all used to it.
That horribly bright WinXP-clone icon theme needs to go...
People keep saying this, but I have no idea what they're talking about. Maybe I just don't have that theme, because the Crystal icon theme on my KDE desktop looks nothing at all like Windows.
Please give us a link to your creative contribution, and we'll try it out and get back to you...
Those guys don't care about the rest of us, they have jobs, they're being paid by the government to design their half ass compilers and shitty OS.
Not true! Anything Richard Stallman needs he gets from donations (or anything he managed to save from his MacArthur award). He doesn't work for his food like the rest of us! I don't think he's ever had to earn a wage or salary from productive position.
To be fair, he's hardly alone in this. Like my university professor friend who thinks money grows on the government grant tree, or my charity president friend, who makes her living crying during PBS pledge breaks.
Are you paranoid, perhaps?
:-)
It's kept me alive this long, so don't knock it!
No, property is a natural monopoly because it isn't predicated on government grants to create it. Even in the complete absence of a government police force, I can still erect fences, lock doors, keep Rottweilers, and have a loaded gun handy.
It may be harder to protect without the government but it can still exist. We know this because property has historically existed in lawless and anarchic periods and regions, such as ancient Iceland. The concept of the a particular piece of land being the property of a specific family/clan predates the concept of all land belonging to the king/state.
Freeman focuses on what is perhaps the more important long-term indicator of a nation's prosperity - its re-investment in science and technology education.
Translation: "I want my gravy train federal funding back."
There should be atleast a couple of actors more on the OS market if it wore healthy.
There are! Solaris, QNX, vxWorks, etc, etc.
Oh, you meant desktop market. Okay then.
There is! It's called Macintosh OS X!
Oh, you meant something that runs on PC hardware. Geez, why don't you qualify your statements in the first place?
The answer though, is easy. Macs are just as cheap as PCs now. You used to have the excuse that Macs were too expensive and thus PC^H^HWindows was a monopoly. But that's no longer the case.
What's that, you're still whining? You claim that you would still need to buy all new software if you switched to Mac? That all your current software only runs on Windows?
Well WTF do you want then? Someone to come hold your hand?!?! You can't ditch Windows while holding on to Windows! That's your real problem, isn't it? You want Windows, but you just don't want it to be Microsoft Windows. You won't be happy until someone comes along with an EXACT Windows clone that will run on your old computer with all of your old software with no configuration changes necessary, but which isn't branded by Microsoft.
It ain't going to happen. Even if you throw Bush out of office an elect Kerry, it ain't going to happen. Even if the EU spanks Bill Gates and fines Steve Ballmer it ain't going to happen. Even if the U.N. gives Asia a free ride to pirate all they want, it ain't going to happen.
Please return to reality. Either suck it up and stop complaining, or suck it up and switch.
If you want a conviction, elect somebody who actually believes in the Constitution.
Why? Is the Sherman Anti-Trust act enshrined in the Bill of Rights somewhere? Please cite where in the Constitution the government is given the responsibility and/or right to regulate the market shares of businesses?
In fact they would like to eliminate Sherman Anti-Trust.
Of course. Despite the complete lack of enforcement of the anti-trust laws, we STILL got Linux and BSD during the time Microsoft was a monopoly. Not before, but during. And we also saw the resurgence of Apple. Not before Microsoft's monopoly, but during.
Microsoft has no power over the market. At any time the marketplace could decide to go with Macintosh instead. Corporations and larger businesses with IT departments or systems administrators could switch to a free or commercial Unix on the desktop.
The only thing that would hinder them is inertia: they would either need new hardware, lots of training, or rewriting all their software. Microsoft could DISAPPEAR tomorrow and people would still be using Windows. A Constitutional Anti-Trust Ammendment could fix this how?
The reason Microsoft has a monopoly isn't because the government sat back and did nothing, it's precisely because the government stepped in and allowed copyrights on software! Copyrights aren't natural market entities. They are artificial monopolies on information. Microsoft is a monopoly because the government granted to Microsoft a legal and exclusive monopoly to Windows and Office! Expecting the government to solve the Microsoft problem is like expecting the Mafia to clean up the extortion racket.
It happens in many other industries. You just don't know it because you're a geek and only care about computers and software.
To take one example outside your range of concern, consider carpet. Shaw Industries, Inc is not technically a carpet monopoly, but they are so dominant they rule the industry. OEMs (your local carpet store) have to *compete* with their own supplier, since Shaw has set up its own retail stores. Exclusive contracts are common. You don't need an exclusive contract, but if you want to be competitive it would be wise to get one. And the consumer doesn't know this, because Shaw has hundreds of labels so it looks like the industry is diverse when it's not.
I'm running FreeBSD and I don't use any swap with 1Gb RAM (or my work system with 256Mb RAM).
/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, etc). Disk seeks are probably more numerous under a Unix than under Windows. So putting your base OS in RAM will do wonders for the system.
There's another point in favor of this drive with Unix-like operating systems. Because so much of the OS is process oriented, you end up with more numerous but smaller executables (under
Even under Windows you'll get a huge benefit. Even if you're worried about swap, just put your swap file on RAM.
What OS are you using that needs a "special driver" to support SATA?
Windows XP (without SP1) or a slightly older Linux will not have built in SATA drivers. Even today it's a pain in the butt installing Linux on my SATA-only system, and would be for Windows as well if I didn't have SP1 on the install CD. For FreeBSD "it just works" with the standard ATA driver.
It made me pause and consider why.
Because of evil capitalism there are hordes of illegal Mexican immigrants living out of sleeping bags in the woods and eating dog food! Won't something think of the children?
</sarcasm>
Seriously, one tiny anecdote doesn't disprove the trend. Utopia is not an option. Let me repeat that for those who read too fast: Utopia is not an option. I know that homeless people exist. I know that illegal immigrants sometimes reach destitution level. But the existance of imperfections does not invalidate the rule. Before you toss out a capitalist economy because it isn't perfect, you need to provide evidence of the perfection of its replacement. The world isn't a giant test tube where you can just experiment willy nilly on the poor to see what works best. We know that works very very well, so don't destroy it just because it isn't perfect!
Most homeless people are homeless because they're substance dependent or mentally ill. Many immigrants are destitute because they're *illegal* immigrants. These aren't economic problems, they're social and legal problems.
My dictionary has eighteen definitions of "free" in it. Only one of them is pertains to "free as in speech". That happens to be the EXACT same number as those that refer to "free as in beer."
Does this cause confusion among intelligent people? Of course it does! Think of all the murderous Latin American dictators that have ascended to power by using the words "free" and "freedom". Think of the Nazi slogan "arbeit macht frei". The point is, "free" is a nebulous word, even when you translate it as "libre".
"Free as in speech" refers to one kind of freedom possessed by human beings. But we're talking about software. Does the "free" in "Free Software" (notice how it's always capitalized) then pertain to the user or to the software?
When the FSF has spent two decades trying to teach people the right meaning of the word "free", I begin to suspect that it's the FSF with the problem.
And people laugh at me for not owning a cell phone...
The poor in the US are getting richer. They may not be getting richer as fast as the rich are gettng richer, but they are getting richer. We have WON the war on poverty, which is why the bureaucracies dependent on its existance keep defining poverty upwards.
I remember growing up with barrios in California made of cast off plywood. They don't exist anymore. We still have "poor" in that we still have 10% of the population that is the lower 10% (duh), but they are no longer destitute.
If you want to see poverty, drive south to Tijuana Mexico. It's sobering. The reason the US has an illegal imigrant problem is because the poor in Mexico would much rather be poor in the US. We pay illegals so much here that there's a thriving money-order industry just to send their excess wages back to their family in Mexico.
Actually, lager yeast is a more recent innovation.
:-)
And don't forget *glassware*! The reason we have clear beers is because glassware enabled people to SEE what they were drinking
I myself have beer recipes published under an FSF and OSI approved license that predate this guy's joke.
Except that now their confused because they are not enslaved, imprisoned or restrained, so they don't understand why they have to switch.
The underground railroad didn't need a marketing plan to educate the slaves about why it's good to be free. Nor did they publish rants on why other approaches to freeing slaves weren't truly free. They also didn't scream at reporters for not using the term "GNU/underground railroad."
Besides being a dupe, this story is a dupe of a what is essentially a lie.
This isn't the "world's first open source beer." That claim is so ridiculous it's amazing that this story got submitted twice. I myself have had "open source" beer recipes publicly available since 1995! And since 1999 under an FSF and OSI approved license! Take any of my recipes and copy, distribute, modify, commercialize, fold, spindle and mutilate my recipes. You have my permission.
Hell, if anyone has a claim to be first in this regard, it might be me! That's because to the best of my knowledge (I could be wrong) I came out with the first Open Source homebrewing software.It predates Vores Øl, and came with several recipes under the Free and Open Source BSD license. My CVS logs will attest that I was earlier than they.
Besides, recipes are quite unlike software. Hardly anyone copyrights a recipe, unless you're writing a cook book. You don't have to be exact with recipes, and the beer (cake, bread, chili, fruit salad) will still turn out fine. And they're trivial to reverse engineer. "Cloning" beers is done all the time, to the point that there's even a popular homebrewing book out there with recipes to duplicate your favorite commercial beer. Claiming to be the first open source beer is as silly as claiming to be the first open source peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Their claim that they were first is not only a lie, it's stupid.
I built my own home computer, and wanted it to be quiet. So I bought the Sonata case and got myself a quiet PC. I can still hear it, but it's so quiet you just don't notice it. But it's still nowhere near as quiet as the Dell Optiplex at work. This thing is amazing. Granted, it's only got a 1.5Ghz Pentium and not fusion-temperature GPU, but that in no way discounts the fact that the system is SILENT.
Opening it up to put in a second harddrive, I figured out why. It's similar to the Sonata case, but squared. Rubber mountings for the drives, large fans, and an air duct for the CPU fan to direct the hot air (and noise) out and to the back. I don't really like the clamshell style acess to the case, but I love everything else about it. If Dell sold just the case, I would buy one for home.