"Linux initiatives have enabled foreign-based information technology firms with zero IP costs and cheap labor to easily compete with U.S. software companies."
How the fuck is this a BAD THING? Hearing people like this talk, you'd think that if anyone besides a US company ever does well, it's some kind of threat to humanity.
Free Software is leveling the playing field. Geniuses like this guy are too used to subjugating the outside world. "Foreigners" are human beings too, jackass.
Also, an American dictionary didn't really exist when Webster went around collecting words. Journalists then were butchering English just as much as they do now. Why do you think the USA obnoxiously spells things differently from the UK and Canada? He was collecting misspelled words!
Except, according to the home page, the Open Patents website was last updated back in 2002.
Looks abandoned.
Maybe presenting the topic to some folks at Groklaw will bring the idea back into action.
In the quote by Russel McOrmond, the writer quotes him as saying "This isn't hobbiest stuff."
Now, if "hobby" were an adjective (even in a term like "hobby market," "hobby" is still not an adjective--it's a modifying noun), then "hobbiest" would mean the object you're describing is hobbier than anything else. But hobby is not an adjective. It is a noun. The word the author was looking for is a word for a person who engages in a hobby: "hobbyist."
Second, even if the quoted party (Mr. McOrmond) spelled it that way, it's important for the quoter to put a [sic] after the word to signify that yes, it's spelled wrong but it's not a typo. You do this instead of correcting the spelling in the name of journalistic integrity. Leaving it the way it is tells me either 1: the author doesn't know how to spell "hobbyist" or 2: the author is a sloppy typist.
It was SCO that kept begging for more time, SCO that kept offering cumbersome, insufficient responses, SCO that kept showing up at deadlines empty-handed, SCO that came up with every excuse it possibly could to never actually be in a court room. IBM has quietly bided its time, patiently giving SCO all the rope it ever wanted. And now, precisely as expected, they hang themselves.
It shouldn't be difficult to counter the spin when the facts are on your side.
I got the reference (I'm also nearly 22--watched it all the time on N@N--seemed like nobody knew about it but me), but it made me disappointed when I realized that it was just a self-adjusting shoe, and didn't double as a phone.
The other thing I'm wondering about is why you should have to change a battery. Shouldn't the constant impact from walking around be enough of a source of energy? Seiko makes a watch that's powered by you just moving around.
According to Apple's site, you can download X11 and then you're able to run X apps like OpenOffice. Is this not the case? Or are you specifically demanding a *real* native app? In which case--I dunno.
Mandrake is highly different from, say, Slackware. One has to take a very different approach to configuring the thing. Mandrake has a vast array of centralized GUI tools for configuring almost everything about your system. I've been using Slack for a few days and haven't noticed any such tool. SWareT makes it a bit like Debian (yet my preferred method so far is finding my own tarballs), but it appears that if you're going to configure much in Slackware that can't be done in the KDE or GNOME control centers, you're rooting around in text files. By now I'm fine with that and for someone like me it's almost better. I try new, more "difficult" distros in order to learn.
My point is this: Distros are NOT all the same. A distro is made because the maker has an idea about how his could be better or different from the others. He has a philosophy about how to do things, what should run automatically, what defaults should be, and where to put configuration tools and what kind to use or whether or not to use them at all. Mandrake wants to cater to the desktop. As does Xandros and Linspire. And trust me, if you were using one of those and tried to pick up, say, Gentoo, barring the install process, you would immediately notice a difference if you tried to do anything more complex than launching Mozilla.
Yet I also agree a little with you--at least in regard to looks. The same X server and the same desktop environments are bundled, as are most standard applications. To a passerby, Xandros is no different from Mandrake is no different from Slackware is no different from LFS. I guess the real differences lie in the mode of configuration and the underlying organization.
What about people like my father, who avoid WindowsUpdate at all costs because of a memorable history of it breaking things? He's no techie. Far from it. He wants his computer to run and not do anything unexpected. He gets irritated if anything deeper than the wallpaper gets changed. Whenever I mention it might be a good idea to run WindowsUpdate he rolls his eyes and intimates again how effective THAT has been in the past. It always makes something go goofy or changes a trivial setting to something obnoxious that he doesn't know how to set right again. To him, WindowsUpdate is just a headache for little or no benefit. They've got McAffee Firewall and VirusShield--and I make sure he uses Mozilla/Firefox (which he loves). THOSE get updated. Updating Windows just breaks stuff.
Some earlier poster mentioned how it broke his video driver. Heck, I've tried to install *Word* on my Win98SE box only to find out the registry has been completely fucked and Windows needs to be reinstalled. It takes too long to reinstall UT200(3/4) again when that happens, so I just use OpenOffice.org.
In my experience, the following has always been true: The less Microsoft software you use, the less unpredictable your computing experience. When I can throw out the Microsoft OS completely--that's where the real fun begins. Slackware has been a JOY.
The T-1000 was that liquid metal guy in Terminator 2. Arnold played a T-9something or whatever. And the other poster is right. It's an ENDOskeleton! Exo-skeletons are what crustaceans and insects have.
Jeeze, man, get your terminator facts straight! Just for an added showoff of my knowledge of useless facts, the actual line mentioning the processor was: "My CPU is a neural net processah: a learning computer."
What if the FBI came knocking on the door with printouts and said we know the guy that was here 2 nights ago at this IP and computer name is planning a bombing we need all the info. you have on him, now! It would be useful if you could provide a Name and Address.
That's the very thing we should be wary of. It would be best if you COULDN'T supply a name and address. It would be best if the FBI didn't come by to harass you to begin with. The more our civil liberties are infringed and as our ability to privately communicate is extinguished, the more necessary dissent will become. If the dissent doesn't work, or is actively suppressed by the government, a violent revolution may be necessary in order to reclaim justice in the USA. How easy will such a revolution be when the government--which by then would be clearly corrupt and drunk with power--has such inescapable power over information?
Certainly, it will make the task of tracking that "real terrorist" more difficult, but I also don't believe that arresting and killing people has EVER been the way to solve this kind of problem.
Our right to bear arms, our right to free speech, the brief terms for congresspeople and presidents--all of it stems from the belief that if the government gets out of hand, the people can influence or overtake it. The United States Federal Government was NEVER meant to have anything even slightly resembling the amount of power it now has. If we sacrifice our freedom of the press and our freedom to bear arms just because one administration likes to give us the willies about "terrorists," then we've already started down the totalitarian path. The Orwellian prophecy will slowly but surely come true if we don't do anything about it. The success of evil requires only that good men do nothing.
New Hampshire residents won't have to {ASSASSINATE BUSH} worry about the Feds going after them for {ANTHRAX} setting off {A BOMB} certain designated keywords in IRC.
Sun is strange. They've always been that one company of whom I've never been quite certain what to think, but always desired to root for (if only on behalf of Java). And now Sun appears (to me) to have been seduced by Microsoft and then willfully gutted....And I would've bought a SPARC when the time came...
If this isn't a kind of decline for Sun, I certainly hope they have one hell of a plan up their sleeves.
I guess he based that on the fact that the transition from Half-Life to Unreal Tournament was a transition from OpenGL to D3D. Whatever. DirectX can bite me. OpenGL has fucking PIXAR working on it.
Straight from the mouth of the Executive Producer, David Kemper in an address to the fans via IRC.
Farscape fans, when they're not taping or watching on TiVo, they're watching in groups.
And that plays hell with Nielsen ratings.
Long story short: the show was too popular to be accurately measured via the current rating system(s). Thus, the execs nixed it a season early. Dammit they could've waited ONE MORE season to allow the story to finish. Then Farscape woulda been over for good, without needing to damage-control a huge negative fan reaction.
The blog sounds as though this is at least one individual within MSFT who gets it. Why not encourage him?
Yet, regardless of his intentions, I believe his project will die as a public OSS project. Most FLOSS people won't allow themselves within ten parsecs of Microsoft code--and with good reason. Part of me wants to think MSFT is just looking for something--anything--they can get inside the OSS communities as some sort of trojan horse so they can pull a SCO later if necessary.
I'd rather just be able to use my computer how I wish without getting all political. I don't want to perceive MSFT vs. FLOSS as a war. I don't want to feel indignation every time billg opens his mouth, but he leaves me no choice.
This man represents at least one miniscule demographic within the Beast of Redmond that doesn't see through Ballmer's intolerant eyes. There's a chance (albeit slim) for Microsoft yet.
Next, the American citizens just need to implant these RFID tags into their civil servants in the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative offices to make sure the little Republicrats don't get out of hand again. To be honest, they just can't be trusted anymore. While we're at it, it would be useful to implant one into the CEO of every multinational corporation.
We could keep track of both of them like little blips on a radar. If the governmental dots and the corporate dots spent too much time together, well, we know which ones need to be put to sleep!
The Gentoo installation method IS finished! It is exactly the way it is supposed to be.
To introduce some push-a-button-and-go installer would cause Gentoo to cease to be Gentoo. Gentoo is [for/by] people who WANT to be the one to do all those things to construct the system and install manually. It's for people who want total, explicit, unfettered top-to-bottom control of every cotton-picking thing in their box. I think if you really want to learn Linux, install Gentoo (or Slackware). If you want an easier/faster install process, there's always Mandrake or Fedora.
With even more positive press, I hope more people decide Mandrake is worth a subscription or two. I used to be a SUSE guy, but Mandrake was my first taste of Linux, and I've at last returned to Mandrake, for a few very important reasons.
It's a great distro because you can get your hands as dirty as you could with Debian, and yet its glossy and friendly enough for a newbie. And that's good for me, because I don't ALWAYS want to pretend I'm running Gentoo. That, and Mandrake doesn't seem to lean so heavily on one desktop environment that they ignore the other. I can use GNOME or KDE (or install XFCE4) and not feel like I'm running in some secondary mode. SUSE was like this with GNOME and RedHat & Debian seems to treat KDE that way.
Mandrake has always been concentrating on desktop use, and has been doing it for years, so I think it's a lot more mature than Lindows (can't speak on Xandros). As soon as I can afford it, I'm purchasing 10.0 Final on DVD. God knows I've been using their distro for long enough.
I believe a stronger truth-in-advertising law is in order in the US. There are a disturbing number of adverts that tell you shockingly little about the product they're advertising. There is far too much emphasis on image.
We should disallow companies from advertising based on knowingly bogus research (read: research sponsored by THAT company), and force them to stick to the facts. There should be penalties for lying to people in order to sell a product. I also think political campaigns should be held most strictly to this policy.
Too many advertisements simply say "use X, and the Y in your life will become that much better!" or "X is the BEST Z product--EVER!" with absolutely no evidence. It's ridiculous.
And yet Americans don't have a problem with it. They're either too used to being lied to or just don't care. It has to stop. If the G5 isn't the first/fastest 64 bit CPU, well, Apple shouldn't be allowed to say that it is. Isn't there a law against lying to people for money? Don't they call that a SCAM?
Slashdot Mirror
"Linux initiatives have enabled foreign-based information technology firms with zero IP costs and cheap labor to easily compete with U.S. software companies."
How the fuck is this a BAD THING? Hearing people like this talk, you'd think that if anyone besides a US company ever does well, it's some kind of threat to humanity.
Free Software is leveling the playing field. Geniuses like this guy are too used to subjugating the outside world. "Foreigners" are human beings too, jackass.
Obsolescence is a bitch, ain't it?
well then why doesn't somebody take the facts and then yell really fscking loud? bah! ;)
To be honest I agree witcha. I had second thoughts about that sentence the moment I hit Submit.
Also, an American dictionary didn't really exist when Webster went around collecting words. Journalists then were butchering English just as much as they do now. Why do you think the USA obnoxiously spells things differently from the UK and Canada? He was collecting misspelled words!
You can have your Halo2. Link fucking owns. =P
Except, according to the home page, the Open Patents website was last updated back in 2002. Looks abandoned. Maybe presenting the topic to some folks at Groklaw will bring the idea back into action.
In the quote by Russel McOrmond, the writer quotes him as saying "This isn't hobbiest stuff."
Now, if "hobby" were an adjective (even in a term like "hobby market," "hobby" is still not an adjective--it's a modifying noun), then "hobbiest" would mean the object you're describing is hobbier than anything else. But hobby is not an adjective. It is a noun. The word the author was looking for is a word for a person who engages in a hobby: "hobbyist."
Second, even if the quoted party (Mr. McOrmond) spelled it that way, it's important for the quoter to put a [sic] after the word to signify that yes, it's spelled wrong but it's not a typo. You do this instead of correcting the spelling in the name of journalistic integrity. Leaving it the way it is tells me either 1: the author doesn't know how to spell "hobbyist" or 2: the author is a sloppy typist.
It was SCO that kept begging for more time, SCO that kept offering cumbersome, insufficient responses, SCO that kept showing up at deadlines empty-handed, SCO that came up with every excuse it possibly could to never actually be in a court room. IBM has quietly bided its time, patiently giving SCO all the rope it ever wanted. And now, precisely as expected, they hang themselves.
It shouldn't be difficult to counter the spin when the facts are on your side.
I got the reference (I'm also nearly 22--watched it all the time on N@N--seemed like nobody knew about it but me), but it made me disappointed when I realized that it was just a self-adjusting shoe, and didn't double as a phone. The other thing I'm wondering about is why you should have to change a battery. Shouldn't the constant impact from walking around be enough of a source of energy? Seiko makes a watch that's powered by you just moving around.
According to Apple's site, you can download X11 and then you're able to run X apps like OpenOffice. Is this not the case? Or are you specifically demanding a *real* native app? In which case--I dunno.
Mandrake is highly different from, say, Slackware. One has to take a very different approach to configuring the thing. Mandrake has a vast array of centralized GUI tools for configuring almost everything about your system. I've been using Slack for a few days and haven't noticed any such tool. SWareT makes it a bit like Debian (yet my preferred method so far is finding my own tarballs), but it appears that if you're going to configure much in Slackware that can't be done in the KDE or GNOME control centers, you're rooting around in text files. By now I'm fine with that and for someone like me it's almost better. I try new, more "difficult" distros in order to learn.
My point is this: Distros are NOT all the same. A distro is made because the maker has an idea about how his could be better or different from the others. He has a philosophy about how to do things, what should run automatically, what defaults should be, and where to put configuration tools and what kind to use or whether or not to use them at all. Mandrake wants to cater to the desktop. As does Xandros and Linspire. And trust me, if you were using one of those and tried to pick up, say, Gentoo, barring the install process, you would immediately notice a difference if you tried to do anything more complex than launching Mozilla.
Yet I also agree a little with you--at least in regard to looks. The same X server and the same desktop environments are bundled, as are most standard applications. To a passerby, Xandros is no different from Mandrake is no different from Slackware is no different from LFS. I guess the real differences lie in the mode of configuration and the underlying organization.
What about people like my father, who avoid WindowsUpdate at all costs because of a memorable history of it breaking things? He's no techie. Far from it. He wants his computer to run and not do anything unexpected. He gets irritated if anything deeper than the wallpaper gets changed. Whenever I mention it might be a good idea to run WindowsUpdate he rolls his eyes and intimates again how effective THAT has been in the past. It always makes something go goofy or changes a trivial setting to something obnoxious that he doesn't know how to set right again. To him, WindowsUpdate is just a headache for little or no benefit. They've got McAffee Firewall and VirusShield--and I make sure he uses Mozilla/Firefox (which he loves). THOSE get updated. Updating Windows just breaks stuff.
Some earlier poster mentioned how it broke his video driver. Heck, I've tried to install *Word* on my Win98SE box only to find out the registry has been completely fucked and Windows needs to be reinstalled. It takes too long to reinstall UT200(3/4) again when that happens, so I just use OpenOffice.org.
In my experience, the following has always been true: The less Microsoft software you use, the less unpredictable your computing experience. When I can throw out the Microsoft OS completely--that's where the real fun begins. Slackware has been a JOY.
The T-1000 was that liquid metal guy in Terminator 2. Arnold played a T-9something or whatever. And the other poster is right. It's an ENDOskeleton! Exo-skeletons are what crustaceans and insects have.
Jeeze, man, get your terminator facts straight!
Just for an added showoff of my knowledge of useless facts, the actual line mentioning the processor was: "My CPU is a neural net processah: a learning computer."
That's the very thing we should be wary of. It would be best if you COULDN'T supply a name and address. It would be best if the FBI didn't come by to harass you to begin with. The more our civil liberties are infringed and as our ability to privately communicate is extinguished, the more necessary dissent will become. If the dissent doesn't work, or is actively suppressed by the government, a violent revolution may be necessary in order to reclaim justice in the USA. How easy will such a revolution be when the government--which by then would be clearly corrupt and drunk with power--has such inescapable power over information?
Certainly, it will make the task of tracking that "real terrorist" more difficult, but I also don't believe that arresting and killing people has EVER been the way to solve this kind of problem.
Our right to bear arms, our right to free speech, the brief terms for congresspeople and presidents--all of it stems from the belief that if the government gets out of hand, the people can influence or overtake it. The United States Federal Government was NEVER meant to have anything even slightly resembling the amount of power it now has. If we sacrifice our freedom of the press and our freedom to bear arms just because one administration likes to give us the willies about "terrorists," then we've already started down the totalitarian path. The Orwellian prophecy will slowly but surely come true if we don't do anything about it. The success of evil requires only that good men do nothing.
New Hampshire residents won't have to {ASSASSINATE BUSH} worry about the Feds going after them for {ANTHRAX} setting off {A BOMB} certain designated keywords in IRC.
52.8 - 2.0 - 0.5 = 50.3
Just a little heads up, there, math whiz. =P Have a nice day!
welcome our new web-app overlords!
Sun is strange. They've always been that one company of whom I've never been quite certain what to think, but always desired to root for (if only on behalf of Java). And now Sun appears (to me) to have been seduced by Microsoft and then willfully gutted. ...And I would've bought a SPARC when the time came...
If this isn't a kind of decline for Sun, I certainly hope they have one hell of a plan up their sleeves.
OpenGL was dying.
I guess he based that on the fact that the transition from Half-Life to Unreal Tournament was a transition from OpenGL to D3D. Whatever. DirectX can bite me. OpenGL has fucking PIXAR working on it.
Straight from the mouth of the Executive Producer, David Kemper in an address to the fans via IRC.
Farscape fans, when they're not taping or watching on TiVo, they're watching in groups.
And that plays hell with Nielsen ratings.
Long story short: the show was too popular to be accurately measured via the current rating system(s). Thus, the execs nixed it a season early. Dammit they could've waited ONE MORE season to allow the story to finish. Then Farscape woulda been over for good, without needing to damage-control a huge negative fan reaction.
Yet, regardless of his intentions, I believe his project will die as a public OSS project. Most FLOSS people won't allow themselves within ten parsecs of Microsoft code--and with good reason. Part of me wants to think MSFT is just looking for something--anything--they can get inside the OSS communities as some sort of trojan horse so they can pull a SCO later if necessary.
I'd rather just be able to use my computer how I wish without getting all political. I don't want to perceive MSFT vs. FLOSS as a war. I don't want to feel indignation every time billg opens his mouth, but he leaves me no choice.
This man represents at least one miniscule demographic within the Beast of Redmond that doesn't see through Ballmer's intolerant eyes. There's a chance (albeit slim) for Microsoft yet.
I say wait and see.
You can't see stuff like this happen and NOT acknowledge that innovation occurs in the open-source world.
To claim OSS is just a process of copying and idea theft (like that guy who wrote against ESR the other day) is stupid and arrogant.
I hope this method gets more popular. Its pure simplicity reminds me of DOS.
Next, the American citizens just need to implant these RFID tags into their civil servants in the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative offices to make sure the little Republicrats don't get out of hand again. To be honest, they just can't be trusted anymore. While we're at it, it would be useful to implant one into the CEO of every multinational corporation.
We could keep track of both of them like little blips on a radar. If the governmental dots and the corporate dots spent too much time together, well, we know which ones need to be put to sleep!
The Gentoo installation method IS finished! It is exactly the way it is supposed to be.
To introduce some push-a-button-and-go installer would cause Gentoo to cease to be Gentoo. Gentoo is [for/by] people who WANT to be the one to do all those things to construct the system and install manually. It's for people who want total, explicit, unfettered top-to-bottom control of every cotton-picking thing in their box. I think if you really want to learn Linux, install Gentoo (or Slackware). If you want an easier/faster install process, there's always Mandrake or Fedora.
Dif'rent strokes for dif'rent folks.
With even more positive press, I hope more people decide Mandrake is worth a subscription or two. I used to be a SUSE guy, but Mandrake was my first taste of Linux, and I've at last returned to Mandrake, for a few very important reasons.
It's a great distro because you can get your hands as dirty as you could with Debian, and yet its glossy and friendly enough for a newbie. And that's good for me, because I don't ALWAYS want to pretend I'm running Gentoo. That, and Mandrake doesn't seem to lean so heavily on one desktop environment that they ignore the other. I can use GNOME or KDE (or install XFCE4) and not feel like I'm running in some secondary mode. SUSE was like this with GNOME and RedHat & Debian seems to treat KDE that way.
Mandrake has always been concentrating on desktop use, and has been doing it for years, so I think it's a lot more mature than Lindows (can't speak on Xandros). As soon as I can afford it, I'm purchasing 10.0 Final on DVD. God knows I've been using their distro for long enough.
I believe a stronger truth-in-advertising law is in order in the US. There are a disturbing number of adverts that tell you shockingly little about the product they're advertising. There is far too much emphasis on image.
We should disallow companies from advertising based on knowingly bogus research (read: research sponsored by THAT company), and force them to stick to the facts. There should be penalties for lying to people in order to sell a product. I also think political campaigns should be held most strictly to this policy.
Too many advertisements simply say "use X, and the Y in your life will become that much better!" or "X is the BEST Z product--EVER!" with absolutely no evidence. It's ridiculous.
And yet Americans don't have a problem with it. They're either too used to being lied to or just don't care. It has to stop. If the G5 isn't the first/fastest 64 bit CPU, well, Apple shouldn't be allowed to say that it is. Isn't there a law against lying to people for money? Don't they call that a SCAM?