[MS] relies on a government granted monopoly called copyrights.
So does open-source software.
The GPL would be meaningless if not for the copyright restrictions that apply to "free" code. And the terms of the GPL are all that prevents Microsoft from swiping the Linux source and creating an "MS Linux" loaded with trade-secret/closed-source "enhancements" (e.g. support for the full Windows API). How much embrace-extend-extinguish do you want?
Heck, without copyright protection, the incentive to keep source code under wraps would be much stronger, because it would be the only way for a developer to apply what he considered appropriate licensing terms (GPL, BSD, Artistic, proprietary, etc.) to his work.
Copyright isn't the enemy, and it's not the reason that markets don't remain "free". Ironically, it's more the lack of government intervention that's enabled Microsoft to cripple the free market in software.
I'd rate that essay about about 20% fact, 30% insight, and 50% wishful thinking.
For example, the author says that Microsoft refuses to change, but they have a history of doing just that. They followed Apple's lead on GUIs. They went from poo-poo-ing the internet to become one of its chief exploiters. One of their key corporate virtues is a distinct lack of NIH (not invented here) Syndrome; many of their key products were originally developed elsewhere (DOS, IE, PowerPoint, WebTV, FrontPage, VisualBasic, SQL Server), or are direct copies of other companies' products (Pocket PC, Ultimate TV, Windows).
Granted, they've shown a certain unwillingness to overhaul their systems at the cost of backward compatibility (like Apple has peridoically done, with the transition from ][ to Mac, from 68K to PPC, from MacOS to OSX), but don't mistake that for obstinance.
Several years ago (pre-War On Terror[TM]), one of the wires supplying battery power in my PDA (Psion Series3) came loose while I was travelling. I was waiting at the gate in O'Hare for a flight to London when it happened, and I would have been quite lost on my trip without the data in the device. The button cell that maintains memory when the main battery is dead had a limited life, and wouldn't last the flight. And what if someone demanded that I turn it on for them? So I spent my layover attempting repairs using my Swiss Army knife and a travel sewing kit from an airport newsstand... all the while thinking of the scene in a then-recent movie in which the bad guy uses a Psion Series3 as the detonator for a bomb on the plane. I half-expected to be hustled away by airport security (heck, I would've detained me, if I were them), but no one questioned me, and I managed to restore power to my PDA before they announced boarding for my flight.
Along with a nice assortment of new shirts and an iTunes gift certificate (coming by snail mail because Dad couldn't remember my e-mail address), I got a nifty picnic backpack, with an insulated interior and sleeve for a bottle of wine, and two place settings complete with cloth napkins, cutlery, and non-breakable wine glasses and plates. Which would be a lot cooler if I still had someone to go on picnics with. {shrug}
My local newspaper publishes a special section on Thanksgiving Day in which people (mostly from social service organizations and charities, but also friends and neighbors) describe "Christmas wishes" for certain needy people they know. There are invariably several requests for functional computers of various kinds (e.g. "capable of doing e-mail"), which is a good use for "obsolete" gear, and great for your offline karma. (Suggest this to your local paper if they don't already do anything like it.)
I'll echo another poster's suggestion of the "curb sale" approach. It may not work in homogenous suburbs where everyone keeps up with the Joneses, but in a mixed-income area, there are always people who can use the cast-offs of the middle class. Over the years I've gained and disposed of some great stuff on the local curbs.
But to directly answer the original question: CompRenew in Belding, Michigan is a good, not-too-expensive option for the recycling/salvage of computer gear in this area.
You splurged on the 800? All I could afford was the Atari 400, with the membrane keyboard. Horrible to type on, but it seemed more futuristic to me, so I didn't mind. Until I went to college and bought a Commodore 64 that I could actually type papers on. I sneered at the IBM PC when it came out, with its lousy (i.e. it didn't have any) graphics and sound.
And yeah, Star Raiders was bitchen.
I use a mixture of OSes for various things. I use Linux for cheap servers and at my desk for day-to-day web/mail use. I use Windows for things where I need compatibility with Joe Sixpack, such as web site testing or running niche products only available for Windows. But I'm about to buy a G5 running OS X, to put in my studio for all my image manipulation and 3D rendering work.
Revenge? you want revenge? Just sit back and watch as the security for that company gets pummeled.
That's what I did. My former employer of five years spent several times my salary-to-date on consultants from Gartner, who convinced management that everything I'd built was wrong and they should spend my salary for the next five years on Microsoft products. I helped them roll it all out, they showed me the door... and now (from what I hear from a few friends there) they are hurting. {shrug}
There were plenty of crappy movies I didn't see, but my pal Nathan talked me into seeing Anger Management, and it turned out to be the most tediously un-funny thing I've seen in ages. Even Nathan, who usually likes adolescent and deliberately obnoxious comedy like Sandler's, hated it. I've never been so relieved to see the closing credits of a movie.
"we might see less people going into IT just because they think it will pay well."
Not if the job counseling professionals have anything to say about it. Every time a manufacturer shuts down a plant around here, you hear them advising laid off workers to get training in "high tech", because that's where the jobs are today and in the future. <sarcasm>That must be why it only took me (ex-analyst, 15 years experience) almost a year to land an entry-level tech support job that pays what I made 10 years ago.</sarcasm> A friend who works for a local tech training outfit moans about all the people in her classes lately who can't even find their way around a keyboard.
A licence grants rights in only one direction; a contract grants rights (and obligations) in both directions. Because the GPL is merely a licence, those using GPL code cannot be required to give up the rights to their own code.
I can understand the motivation to redefine the length of a "second", as a convenience for the researchers on this mission who expect to find the sun directly overhead their instruments at noon. But it's just a fundamentally bad idea as a precedent for interplanetary time-keeping.
Why not just reprogram their clocks to stop for 39.5 minutes in the middle of the night, and let these hard-working people get some extra shut-eye?
Redefining the smaller units to compensate for a difference in the length of the longer ones is just so arbitrary. What about the difference in the length of the Martian year? Are they going to redefine the "week" to 13 days so that there are still (roughly) 52 of them in each year?
And then there's back-porting the length of a "month"... {pulls hair out}
I'm not arguing with its apparent importance, but at the risk of being overly literal... no it's not!
Not only was Time incorrect in referring to it as an "invention" (which would be a novel piece of technology), it's not really a "product" (which would be a tangible piece of merchandise), either.
It's a service, people. Repeat after me: "New Service of the Year". {smile}
My own personal opposition to cloning comes not from moral reasons, but because we have a population problem, and the last thing we need to do is make it worse.
Are you are aware that cloning does not create people out of thin air like the transporter device on the Enterprise? To produce another living person, it would require a woman to carry a fetus for nine months... just like normal reproduction. The only difference is where exactly the genes would come from. It would not add in any signficant way to population growth, and certainly not in the poorer parts of the world where this is the greatest problem.
If population growth is your concern (and it's a legitimate one), people fucking is a a far greater problem.
I actually used to use that... but there was no Slashdot then to talk about it on.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure SlashDot bumped packets with a fair amount of Kermit traffic in its early years. I was a sysadmin at Hope College back when CmdrTaco was an underclassman there in the mid-90's, and we used Kermit for DOS (I created a KERMIT.ICO to use for it with Windows) as our standard tool for transfering files between Vaxen and PCs, across the campus ethernet. Heck, young Rob probably used it himself.
it was kind of annoying as it made constant noise because of logging.
Solution: Switch to a package that doesn't use a hard drive. Coyote Linux only needs a 1.44MB drive, a couple old NICs, 386, and 12MB RAM. (You can send logs to another machine if you actually want them.)
With a good webcam, the thrill comes from not knowing what's about to happen until it does. You have to be careful about what your "audience" is ready for, but sticking to a predictable pattern gets mechanical pretty quick. Mix it up.
Going to another woman for advice on how to give good head is like the blind leading the blind. Ask a gay man for tips, ladies. We actually know of what we speak.:)
So what this survey tells us is that large corporations tend to buy Microsoft. Is this news?
IANAL either, but...
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"It doesn't mention commercial, or for money, or to the public; it just says 'as part of a package of services offered to consumers.'"
Why should it make that distinction? A university providing access to its students, or a "free" (i.e. advertiser-supported) dial-up provider differs fundamentally from AOL or Earthlink or MSN or your local independent ISP only in its economic model.
"it seems narrowly tailored to include AOL ("proprietary content") and exclude DSL-providing Baby Bells and possibly cable companies ("not... telecommunications services")"
Broadband services usually provide e-mail service to residential accounts and assorted other services (e.g. DNS) to business accounts. I think this phrase is intended to single out the backbone operators, folks whose customers are all other ISPs.
...next SCO will claim ownership of the internet, because it's all running on Internet Protocol packets (an implementation of which can be found in AT&T Unix). "IP is our IP!" Darl will declare.
Slashdot Mirror
So does open-source software.
The GPL would be meaningless if not for the copyright restrictions that apply to "free" code. And the terms of the GPL are all that prevents Microsoft from swiping the Linux source and creating an "MS Linux" loaded with trade-secret/closed-source "enhancements" (e.g. support for the full Windows API). How much embrace-extend-extinguish do you want?
Heck, without copyright protection, the incentive to keep source code under wraps would be much stronger, because it would be the only way for a developer to apply what he considered appropriate licensing terms (GPL, BSD, Artistic, proprietary, etc.) to his work.
Copyright isn't the enemy, and it's not the reason that markets don't remain "free". Ironically, it's more the lack of government intervention that's enabled Microsoft to cripple the free market in software.
For example, the author says that Microsoft refuses to change, but they have a history of doing just that. They followed Apple's lead on GUIs. They went from poo-poo-ing the internet to become one of its chief exploiters. One of their key corporate virtues is a distinct lack of NIH (not invented here) Syndrome; many of their key products were originally developed elsewhere (DOS, IE, PowerPoint, WebTV, FrontPage, VisualBasic, SQL Server), or are direct copies of other companies' products (Pocket PC, Ultimate TV, Windows).
Granted, they've shown a certain unwillingness to overhaul their systems at the cost of backward compatibility (like Apple has peridoically done, with the transition from ][ to Mac, from 68K to PPC, from MacOS to OSX), but don't mistake that for obstinance.
Several years ago (pre-War On Terror[TM]), one of the wires supplying battery power in my PDA (Psion Series3) came loose while I was travelling. I was waiting at the gate in O'Hare for a flight to London when it happened, and I would have been quite lost on my trip without the data in the device. The button cell that maintains memory when the main battery is dead had a limited life, and wouldn't last the flight. And what if someone demanded that I turn it on for them? So I spent my layover attempting repairs using my Swiss Army knife and a travel sewing kit from an airport newsstand... all the while thinking of the scene in a then-recent movie in which the bad guy uses a Psion Series3 as the detonator for a bomb on the plane. I half-expected to be hustled away by airport security (heck, I would've detained me, if I were them), but no one questioned me, and I managed to restore power to my PDA before they announced boarding for my flight.
Along with a nice assortment of new shirts and an iTunes gift certificate (coming by snail mail because Dad couldn't remember my e-mail address), I got a nifty picnic backpack, with an insulated interior and sleeve for a bottle of wine, and two place settings complete with cloth napkins, cutlery, and non-breakable wine glasses and plates. Which would be a lot cooler if I still had someone to go on picnics with. {shrug}
I'll echo another poster's suggestion of the "curb sale" approach. It may not work in homogenous suburbs where everyone keeps up with the Joneses, but in a mixed-income area, there are always people who can use the cast-offs of the middle class. Over the years I've gained and disposed of some great stuff on the local curbs.
But to directly answer the original question: CompRenew in Belding, Michigan is a good, not-too-expensive option for the recycling/salvage of computer gear in this area.
You splurged on the 800? All I could afford was the Atari 400, with the membrane keyboard. Horrible to type on, but it seemed more futuristic to me, so I didn't mind. Until I went to college and bought a Commodore 64 that I could actually type papers on. I sneered at the IBM PC when it came out, with its lousy (i.e. it didn't have any) graphics and sound. And yeah, Star Raiders was bitchen.
I use a mixture of OSes for various things. I use Linux for cheap servers and at my desk for day-to-day web/mail use. I use Windows for things where I need compatibility with Joe Sixpack, such as web site testing or running niche products only available for Windows. But I'm about to buy a G5 running OS X, to put in my studio for all my image manipulation and 3D rendering work.
That's what I did. My former employer of five years spent several times my salary-to-date on consultants from Gartner, who convinced management that everything I'd built was wrong and they should spend my salary for the next five years on Microsoft products. I helped them roll it all out, they showed me the door... and now (from what I hear from a few friends there) they are hurting. {shrug}
There were plenty of crappy movies I didn't see, but my pal Nathan talked me into seeing Anger Management, and it turned out to be the most tediously un-funny thing I've seen in ages. Even Nathan, who usually likes adolescent and deliberately obnoxious comedy like Sandler's, hated it. I've never been so relieved to see the closing credits of a movie.
Not if the job counseling professionals have anything to say about it. Every time a manufacturer shuts down a plant around here, you hear them advising laid off workers to get training in "high tech", because that's where the jobs are today and in the future. <sarcasm>That must be why it only took me (ex-analyst, 15 years experience) almost a year to land an entry-level tech support job that pays what I made 10 years ago.</sarcasm> A friend who works for a local tech training outfit moans about all the people in her classes lately who can't even find their way around a keyboard.
All those OSes kludgeported, but OpenDarwin - an OS specifically designed and coded for that hardware - is still on his "to do" list.
- Offer
- Acceptance
- Consideration (i.e. a mutual exchange of something of value)
The use of code under the GPL lacks consideration.A licence grants rights in only one direction; a contract grants rights (and obligations) in both directions. Because the GPL is merely a licence, those using GPL code cannot be required to give up the rights to their own code.
Why not just reprogram their clocks to stop for 39.5 minutes in the middle of the night, and let these hard-working people get some extra shut-eye?
Redefining the smaller units to compensate for a difference in the length of the longer ones is just so arbitrary. What about the difference in the length of the Martian year? Are they going to redefine the "week" to 13 days so that there are still (roughly) 52 of them in each year?
And then there's back-porting the length of a "month"... {pulls hair out}
Not only was Time incorrect in referring to it as an "invention" (which would be a novel piece of technology), it's not really a "product" (which would be a tangible piece of merchandise), either.
It's a service, people. Repeat after me: "New Service of the Year". {smile}
Thewe's one pwobwem howevew, and that's that "Winux" sounds wike its the opewating system that Ewmew Fudd's hackew bwothew uses.
Are you are aware that cloning does not create people out of thin air like the transporter device on the Enterprise? To produce another living person, it would require a woman to carry a fetus for nine months... just like normal reproduction. The only difference is where exactly the genes would come from. It would not add in any signficant way to population growth, and certainly not in the poorer parts of the world where this is the greatest problem.
If population growth is your concern (and it's a legitimate one), people fucking is a a far greater problem.
In fact, look what I found! kermit.ico
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure SlashDot bumped packets with a fair amount of Kermit traffic in its early years. I was a sysadmin at Hope College back when CmdrTaco was an underclassman there in the mid-90's, and we used Kermit for DOS (I created a KERMIT.ICO to use for it with Windows) as our standard tool for transfering files between Vaxen and PCs, across the campus ethernet. Heck, young Rob probably used it himself.
Solution: Switch to a package that doesn't use a hard drive. Coyote Linux only needs a 1.44MB drive, a couple old NICs, 386, and 12MB RAM. (You can send logs to another machine if you actually want them.)
With a good webcam, the thrill comes from not knowing what's about to happen until it does. You have to be careful about what your "audience" is ready for, but sticking to a predictable pattern gets mechanical pretty quick. Mix it up.
Blow jobs are the same.
"Don't vary your speed"?!? {shakes head sadly}
Going to another woman for advice on how to give good head is like the blind leading the blind. Ask a gay man for tips, ladies. We actually know of what we speak. :)
So what this survey tells us is that large corporations tend to buy Microsoft. Is this news?
Why should it make that distinction? A university providing access to its students, or a "free" (i.e. advertiser-supported) dial-up provider differs fundamentally from AOL or Earthlink or MSN or your local independent ISP only in its economic model.
"it seems narrowly tailored to include AOL ("proprietary content") and exclude DSL-providing Baby Bells and possibly cable companies ("not... telecommunications services")"
Broadband services usually provide e-mail service to residential accounts and assorted other services (e.g. DNS) to business accounts. I think this phrase is intended to single out the backbone operators, folks whose customers are all other ISPs.
...next SCO will claim ownership of the internet, because it's all running on Internet Protocol packets (an implementation of which can be found in AT&T Unix). "IP is our IP!" Darl will declare.