Begging? The tone of the article doesn't show any "begging". But it's nice the poster wants to give us some drama here on Slashdot while painting Real as weak and pitiful and Apple as mighty and in control of the whole game. "Oooh! DRAMA!!! Watch out Redmond Bill! Cupertino Steve and the Glaser might make an Alliance to vote you off!"
Not very realistic or honest wording. Not that I like Real, I don't care. But why the insults?
Once you're in power, it's much easier to stay in power.
I think you've just figured out the Slashdot Karma secret. Once you get that karma bonus on all your posts, you're a GOD, I tell you, a GOD!!!
Of course, watch this one get modded down...
Re:Depends on your philosophy, doesn't it
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Apple Revises eMac
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· Score: 1
I found a bug in the NFS automounter in OS X... I downloaded the Darwin source, pinpointed the cause of the bug, fixed it, recompiled my own automounter, and reported the bug to Apple with the fix provided to them. How cool is that?
Welcome to open source. I'm sure Apple's happy you fixed it for them.
I have to laugh every time I see someone ranting about how Apple "stole" the BSD source without opening up everything they ever wrote. What a bunch of nonsense!
You're responding to me? Strange. I never said they did. And that's exactly why Apple chose BSD instead of GNU/Linux. They need to maintain control and they don't *want* to give anything back. And with BSD, they don't have to.
They didn't do anything dirty or underhanded.
I agree. But they didn't do anything *Saintly*, either, which is what I gather from the salesdroids raving about Apple giving away Darwin like it's the Fountain of Youth. Read this thread at +5. Everybody who gets modded up sounds like a one-sided unrealistic shill. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If BOTH sides would agree on that, we'd all be better off. That's why I find myself forced to respond to zealots so often instead of engaging in intelligent conversation. But it's hard telling the Apple Zealots that Apple is a good company, but is not especially worthy of all-out worship -- especially when they've already tattooed themselves with Apple's corporate logo and have a collection of Apple posters, brochures, mousepads, and advertisements, and they think that every word that comes from Steve Jobs' mouth is straight from the mouth of God himself.
Read the RMS/Java thread from yesterday. You'll find that the Linux people, famous for their zealotry, are FAR more balanced in their opinions than the Mac people. Are the Apple Zealots on Slashdot paid shills or a religious cult? I can't explain their fanatical-to-the-point-of-utter-stupidity devotion any other way. Because when my Mac crashes, I'm pissed off for a minute as I reboot. When their Mac crashes, it's like Steve is telling them he loves them. They smile and reboot in tearful adoration, basking in the blue glory of blessed Aqua, pledging their undying love for their chosen Savior.
In short: All this undeserved zealotry makes me sick. I liked it better when nobody else used Macs. Because all these newbie idiots are f*cking nuts and are wrecking Apple's culture.
Missing line that fills in the details, deleted for length reasons:
I look at packets for a living. I generate them, I capture them and dissect them, and I try and make sense of them as quickly as possible....... and they turn into boobies and peepee bums on my screen when I've done it right. And if my mom finds out I'm dead meat, which is why I also like crypto.
By this measure, I look at packets for a living too... well, I don't get paid for it, but it takes more time than my day job at Twinkles Bar and Grill.
Thanks for the tip. Your tip worked on my guitar wire which had been doing the same thing. But I don't have any screaming fans.:-(
In the future, *don't pull your wire so much* and it will be okay.
Ba-dum-ching!
Re:Depends on your philosophy, doesn't it
on
Apple Revises eMac
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· Score: 2, Informative
Exactly. Apple made Aqua by themselves *for themselves*. They're not giving it back, and I don't expect them to. If they did, they'd be stupid (they'd quickly have to compete strictly on hardware specs, which, historically speaking, they've shown they can't do) and, at the same time, heroes of the FOSS movement, much as IBM became when they made a serious (to us, anyway) investment and commitment to free software.
Giving back Darwin is fine. I'm sure it's helped half a dozen people who've made the choice to run that as their system. I don't know why anyone would want to, since it's technically inferior to the Linux kernel, and has a lot less people working on it, but I'll assume it's benefitted somebody. So that's good. Apple's testing the waters. I like it. I hope they continue down the road towards openness, rather than closed-ness. It's better for the consumer, and that's *me*. Knowing Apple extremely well, I highly doubt they will continue towards freedom, however. Darwin really *is* a token gesture, designed to get them PR and increased conversions from the FOSS camps. Remember "Come on in, it's open!" on their OS X website? Hell, *I* thought they were putting out a BSD-licensed OS until I read the fine print.
So basically, what irritates me is the salesman-type spin people here put on Darwin, like it's the greatest gift to the FOSS community that ever existed. I've tried it, and it *sucks*. I don't have any problem at all with Apple themselves, but their overzealous little followers on here are making it out like Apple is an open-source company, like they're a charitable organization. They're not, but the amount of noise made by shills claiming that they *are* an uber-ethical corporation is overwhelming. I am the anti-shill. People I can only assume are paid shills (they're often so far from reality they have to *know* they're lying) try to convert Linux users to Mac OSX by pointing out the technical similarities and the fact that Apple has left Darwin open instead of opting to close their version, causing a fork. They conveniently make it sound like moving from Linux to Apple results in no vendor lockin and no loss of freedoms. This is incorrect, and should be clarified. There are a lot of good things about OS X, but its "openness" isn't one of them.
Re:Depends on your philosophy, doesn't it
on
Apple Revises eMac
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· Score: 1
Darwin had like 50 downloads last year. It's a token giveback. I've tried it, it's *crap*. The Linux kernel, esp. 2.6, kicks Darwin's ass all over the place.
Darwin is *useless* without Aqua. Aqua is what "makes" OS X. 99 out of 100 Mac users don't know what kernel OS X's on and don't care. They just want Aqua. Darwin by itself won't run anything I can't run faster elsewhere, and it's slow, crashy, badly designed, and is basically out there in the open due to a licensing agreement and so that the Apple Zealots will fix it for free for Apple.
I know the paid shills are going to mod me down for this, but what the hell, it's the truth. Darwin *does* suck. It's not *nearly* best of breed. And every time you mod down a true post, you prove your own bias and dedication to promoting Apple, not promoting the truth.
Sun sells out to Microsoft; a few days later a famous Sun celebrity issues a statement that they *haven't* sold out. Typical spin and damage control. I can almost see Ballmer's hand up Gosling's ass and moving his mouth for him like he was Oscar the Grouch.
Let their actions, and the result of those actions, speak for themselves -- NOT this MS-Approved sermon on the mount. Basic Fact: Sun and Microsoft are in bed together... just looking at history, Microsoft and ANYBODY in bed together is bad for Open Source and Free Software. And this is probably bad for Apple, too.
But overall, nice work from Keep-It-Closed-Gosling in trying to turn the FOSS community against itself again.
It's obvious that the FSF would be the Pro-Choice side, not the Pro-Lifers. The corporate software people are the ones giving the little man restrictions on what they can and can't do with software. The FSF are the ones saying "do whatever you want, as long as you don't restrict other people's freedoms".
RMS is the king. Nobody else is looking out for me. The moderates sure aren't. You seem to be advocating the middle ground; a little DRM, a little spyware, a little loss of fair use rights, a little invasion of privacy... Ethics don't work like that. Ethics are immovable signposts. If they compromise, they will eventually disappear. Sure, you're being realistic, and if we could "theoretically" find a mid-point of control vs. freedom AND STAY THERE, that would be okay. But it won't happen. Take TODAY's example, the RIAA Easter Egg: once iTMS becomes successful, the RIAA starts planning to raise the prices. If you don't see the similarity and the anti-consumer trend with these events, you're not looking. There is NO safe way to make peace with these guys. Just like there is no safe way to make peace with Microsoft and rely on HOPE that they won't find a way to get their way entirely and destroy you. Because that's what they want -- their own way ENTIRELY. Whatever we surrender, we will NEVER get back. And they surrender nothing save what we FORCE them to surrender. They view any compromise as a FAILURE; we must as well if we are to succeed in keeping our freedoms intact. Because I guarantee you, if the big companies were able to take them all away and get away with it, they would.
And the "cult-of-personality" stuff hasn't really hurt Steve Jobs with the artsy Hollywood crew, or Bill Gates with the Suits, has it? I hear fame is just KILLING Donald Trump. As far as I can tell, the personal insults hurled at RMS are to PREVENT him from becoming a "cult-of-personality" icon, whereby he would become much more influential, and thus much more threatening to the status quo.
Good point. Even the biggest troll on Slashdot occasionally has something good to say... however, I find it pretty disgusting that people I can only consider worthless lazyass losers (that's the Republican in me speaking here) try to character assassinate RMS in every thread. True, they do it to Bill Gates regularly, Steve Jobs often, but RMS *ALWAYS*. Masses of AC's belittle his accomplishments, insult his appearance and attack his insistence that the GNU (freedom aspect) of Linux distros be mentioned lest it be forgotten.
What I'm saying is that the posts are not usually arguments against his principles of freedom, but at best are instructions telling him how to do his job and what he needs to change to be acceptable to the moderate masses (as if he was a servant of ACs everywhere), and at worst, personal attacks that try to destroy his reputation or mock him and his ethics.
North America is f**ked. We need all the ethics we can get, and all the ethical people we can get. With the massive quantities of (what I consider to be) lies coming from the media, corporate PR firms, and politicians recently, I am forced to check my sources as well as the information they present. So if Miguel de Icaza talks about the GPL's effects on his work, I am more likely to believe him than a judgemental AC who begins by calling RMS a dirty Gnu-hippie. And if Miguel DOES write a post about the GPL, he is far more likely to post logical reasons or facts. The quality of the AC posts is just that -- AC quality.
As this thread progresses, I'm certain we'll find that a lot of people whine about and take cheap shots at RMS. Coincidentally, these are typically people who haven't accomplished anything useful in their entire lives except post witty one-liners and flames of others here on Slashdot. RMS' legacy is the GPL and a fast-growing freedom movement, mine is having Excellent Karma on a News for Nerds site.
RMS actually tries to protect our freedoms, which is more than I can say for 99% of us, including myself. We mostly seem to care about what's the best DRM or how easily we can adapt to the corporations' new demands on us. We act like a slave nation. I remember reading a book about slavery in the Old South, and the amazing thing was that many slaves believed that slavery was ethical because they had been taught that they were an inferior people, and that the white overlords were justified in beating wayward slaves because it was their plantations and their profitability that would suffer from lazy slaves. The masters managed to get the slaves to see it from their perspective, and in the process, to forget the reality that was their own perspective. We are the same. This is fast becoming our way of thinking. We're not looking out to protect ourselves, but to be "fair" to the companies we have to deal with. The RIAA cries about lost sales. Software companies cry about free alternatives or piracy. Pretty much everyone cries about people making products similar to what they've already released, even though their design was just common sense. And we hear their cries, and often feel bad for the poor Multinationals whose sales are down 7%, leaving them with a meagre profit of about 5 billion dollars (after hiding some with crooked accounting, of course). Needless to say, the companies don't have this self-doubt and ethical dilemma. If they can get us to cave in and start down that "slippery slope of compromise" at all, they can continually and slowly take our consumer rights from us. Look at fair use, already on its deathbed. Timeshifting, which will soon be legislated to death. Copying, sharing, tinkering; all dying. Public domain vs. copyright.There's even crazy talk about the US outlawing free software. The balances are shifting hard and fast in favor of the corporations and against consumer rights. We the people generally have no ethical problem with proprietary software, spyware, or restrictions on our freedom as long as it is inobtrusive. Because we have bought the line that we don't OWN anything. We're only LICENSING our possessions AT THE SAME PRICE AS WE USED TO BUY THEM FOR. Pretty soon, we'll only be able to license our computer hardware. Since we won't own it, we will have NO legal right to privacy on it. And you know what? Give us a better media player or smoother GUI and we'll line up for it like lemmings.
We tend to begin from the assumption that the corporations are right and ethical in their thinking. They spend massive advertising dollars to promote their claim that they occupy the moral high ground. This is often incorrect. We should always begin by doubting every position, but especially the status quo. I got a chance to talk to a few fairly famous musicians at Juno afterparties a few years ago, and yes, they were all thankful that the record companies supported them, but at the same time agreed that they were taking too big of a cut, had too much artistic control, and that the RIAA-type organizations were all crooked and greedy as hell. Some of the artists WANTED to put free songs online to get their names out or to reward faithful fans, but they were forbidden by their corporate masters. They aren't even allowed to play guitar and sing around a campfire without the Company's permission. So whose ethical viewpoint should we be listening to -- the artists themselves, or the middleman who packages the artists music? In a digital age, why are these middlemen even still around? If we keep them around and move to the digital download model, we've just added another layer of middlemen (Apple, Nap
Text-to-speech has its uses... Political Speeches for example. I just LOVE imagining our leaders are actually humanoid robotic enslavers and that we're living in a world where corporations reign supreme and the smelly masses have no rights and a rapidly declining standard of living. I find our android leaders have much more personality and human decency than our real ones.
I once ran Orwell's 1984 through text-to-speech; the flat coldness of the artificial voice made it pretty damn bleak. COOL! Just what I was going for! Next up, William Gibson's Idoru. I need to get a list of cyberpunk futuristic thrillers to sterilize with TTS.
Look at it this way: I'm just ahead of the curve -- give it twenty years, and hopefully all our new wives will sound like that.. heh heh.
That's a good tip, but the whole reason we chose Macs in the first place was so we'd have "Everything Just Work" and we wouldn't HAVE to "pull a Linux" and solder stuff ourselves.
Plus I burn myself easy and my brother says he can't cover for me anymore, he's got his own life and doesn't have time to wire up all my broken stuff for me anymore.
I had that with one of my electric guitars -- after years of smashing it into the heads of drooling hot chicks in the audience screaming lustily of BFG9000 the Rock God, the guitar cable would do the exact same thing. If I didn't sit perfectly still, I'd fizz in and out if I was lucky, and then usually completely lose it.
I opened up my guitar and pushed the prong that makes the connection at the end of the cable plug inward toward the centre in order to "tighten" the connection when it was plugged in. That fixed it.
I was back to using it as a pre-emptive birth control device in no time.
I don't remember for sure, but I own that CD and I believe it has some Bonus Features on the actual CD -- you know, a music video and some online special stuff if you play it in your PC and connect to the net.... so just for the record, even at $80 you haven't managed to duplicate the full CD experience yet.
Looking at your post, I thought: Damn! CD's actually ARE cheap after all!
Don't be too hard on them, it looks like we've nearly Slashdotted the Google Cache as well. Now THAT'S scary. Give Slashdot a hundred thousand more users and the Dept of Homeland Security will have to shut us down for reasons of.. uh.. homeland... security.
I don't care about their marketshare, I care about their forced lock-in -- their restriction of MY freedom to choose. MS Office is used by my customers, and since nobody else can read the proprietary Office files[1], *I* have to buy Office to communicate. When my client upgrades, *I* have to upgrade or I'm locked out from the new file format he'll be sending me files in. I was perfectly happy with the old MSOffice, but I was FORCED AGAINST MY WILL to upgrade. It's either that, or GO OUT OF BUSINESS. That's the choice. Everyone else uses it, so you have to use it. *That* is anti-competitive pressure. Until there are OPEN, NON-PROPRIETARY STANDARDS that everyone can access and read, which are freely available so everyone can make their software 100% compatible with each other, Microsoft is unfairly using their size advantage to stop competition in the office market. Microsoft refuses to compete on features and quality (making their software better), instead choosing the more nefarious route of making it hard for others to survive by shutting them out with engineered incompatibility.
When I buy something from Wal-Mart, there is NO WAY they can force me to continue to buy there in the future unless they buy up the entire market and every store becomes a Wal-Mart. Because if I buy a pair of socks from Wal-Mart, they still work with pants from somewhere else and a shirt from a third store. Windows programs are the exact opposite. With every product I buy, I am COMMITTING to future purchases on that platform, because to switch would be to lose everything I've bought up to that point. 90% of my Windows software doesn't come with Mac versions on the disk. 99% of my Windows software doesn't come with Linux versions on the disk. When I buy Windows software, I am pledging support to Windows, at the risk of losing my investment. And I have a friend who wanted to buy a Mac, but he'd spent so much money on Windows games, joysticks, etc. that he could NEVER leave.
[1] Open Office.org can read them to a point NOW, but that didn't help us for the last 5 years while MS steamrolled the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Real Begs Apple for Alliance
Begging? The tone of the article doesn't show any "begging". But it's nice the poster wants to give us some drama here on Slashdot while painting Real as weak and pitiful and Apple as mighty and in control of the whole game. "Oooh! DRAMA!!! Watch out Redmond Bill! Cupertino Steve and the Glaser might make an Alliance to vote you off!"
Not very realistic or honest wording. Not that I like Real, I don't care. But why the insults?
Once you're in power, it's much easier to stay in power.
I think you've just figured out the Slashdot Karma secret. Once you get that karma bonus on all your posts, you're a GOD, I tell you, a GOD!!!
Of course, watch this one get modded down...
I found a bug in the NFS automounter in OS X... I downloaded the Darwin source, pinpointed the cause of the bug, fixed it, recompiled my own automounter, and reported the bug to Apple with the fix provided to them. How cool is that?
Welcome to open source. I'm sure Apple's happy you fixed it for them.
I have to laugh every time I see someone ranting about how Apple "stole" the BSD source without opening up everything they ever wrote. What a bunch of nonsense!
You're responding to me? Strange. I never said they did. And that's exactly why Apple chose BSD instead of GNU/Linux. They need to maintain control and they don't *want* to give anything back. And with BSD, they don't have to.
They didn't do anything dirty or underhanded.
I agree. But they didn't do anything *Saintly*, either, which is what I gather from the salesdroids raving about Apple giving away Darwin like it's the Fountain of Youth. Read this thread at +5. Everybody who gets modded up sounds like a one-sided unrealistic shill. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If BOTH sides would agree on that, we'd all be better off. That's why I find myself forced to respond to zealots so often instead of engaging in intelligent conversation. But it's hard telling the Apple Zealots that Apple is a good company, but is not especially worthy of all-out worship -- especially when they've already tattooed themselves with Apple's corporate logo and have a collection of Apple posters, brochures, mousepads, and advertisements, and they think that every word that comes from Steve Jobs' mouth is straight from the mouth of God himself.
Read the RMS/Java thread from yesterday. You'll find that the Linux people, famous for their zealotry, are FAR more balanced in their opinions than the Mac people. Are the Apple Zealots on Slashdot paid shills or a religious cult? I can't explain their fanatical-to-the-point-of-utter-stupidity devotion any other way. Because when my Mac crashes, I'm pissed off for a minute as I reboot. When their Mac crashes, it's like Steve is telling them he loves them. They smile and reboot in tearful adoration, basking in the blue glory of blessed Aqua, pledging their undying love for their chosen Savior.
In short: All this undeserved zealotry makes me sick. I liked it better when nobody else used Macs. Because all these newbie idiots are f*cking nuts and are wrecking Apple's culture.
LOL! Nasty. Mod up!
Missing line that fills in the details, deleted for length reasons:
... and they turn into boobies and peepee bums on my screen when I've done it right. And if my mom finds out I'm dead meat, which is why I also like crypto.
I look at packets for a living. I generate them, I capture them and dissect them, and I try and make sense of them as quickly as possible....
By this measure, I look at packets for a living too... well, I don't get paid for it, but it takes more time than my day job at Twinkles Bar and Grill.
L'inspire? What is that, French? Aren't they the enemies or something now?
They might as well have saved us a step and just named it "Freedom Linux" before we do it for them.
Thanks for the tip. Your tip worked on my guitar wire which had been doing the same thing. But I don't have any screaming fans. :-(
In the future, *don't pull your wire so much* and it will be okay.
Ba-dum-ching!
Exactly. Apple made Aqua by themselves *for themselves*. They're not giving it back, and I don't expect them to. If they did, they'd be stupid (they'd quickly have to compete strictly on hardware specs, which, historically speaking, they've shown they can't do) and, at the same time, heroes of the FOSS movement, much as IBM became when they made a serious (to us, anyway) investment and commitment to free software.
Giving back Darwin is fine. I'm sure it's helped half a dozen people who've made the choice to run that as their system. I don't know why anyone would want to, since it's technically inferior to the Linux kernel, and has a lot less people working on it, but I'll assume it's benefitted somebody. So that's good. Apple's testing the waters. I like it. I hope they continue down the road towards openness, rather than closed-ness. It's better for the consumer, and that's *me*. Knowing Apple extremely well, I highly doubt they will continue towards freedom, however. Darwin really *is* a token gesture, designed to get them PR and increased conversions from the FOSS camps. Remember "Come on in, it's open!" on their OS X website? Hell, *I* thought they were putting out a BSD-licensed OS until I read the fine print.
So basically, what irritates me is the salesman-type spin people here put on Darwin, like it's the greatest gift to the FOSS community that ever existed. I've tried it, and it *sucks*. I don't have any problem at all with Apple themselves, but their overzealous little followers on here are making it out like Apple is an open-source company, like they're a charitable organization. They're not, but the amount of noise made by shills claiming that they *are* an uber-ethical corporation is overwhelming. I am the anti-shill. People I can only assume are paid shills (they're often so far from reality they have to *know* they're lying) try to convert Linux users to Mac OSX by pointing out the technical similarities and the fact that Apple has left Darwin open instead of opting to close their version, causing a fork. They conveniently make it sound like moving from Linux to Apple results in no vendor lockin and no loss of freedoms. This is incorrect, and should be clarified. There are a lot of good things about OS X, but its "openness" isn't one of them.
Darwin had like 50 downloads last year. It's a token giveback. I've tried it, it's *crap*. The Linux kernel, esp. 2.6, kicks Darwin's ass all over the place.
Darwin is *useless* without Aqua. Aqua is what "makes" OS X. 99 out of 100 Mac users don't know what kernel OS X's on and don't care. They just want Aqua. Darwin by itself won't run anything I can't run faster elsewhere, and it's slow, crashy, badly designed, and is basically out there in the open due to a licensing agreement and so that the Apple Zealots will fix it for free for Apple.
I know the paid shills are going to mod me down for this, but what the hell, it's the truth. Darwin *does* suck. It's not *nearly* best of breed. And every time you mod down a true post, you prove your own bias and dedication to promoting Apple, not promoting the truth.
Sun sells out to Microsoft; a few days later a famous Sun celebrity issues a statement that they *haven't* sold out. Typical spin and damage control. I can almost see Ballmer's hand up Gosling's ass and moving his mouth for him like he was Oscar the Grouch.
Let their actions, and the result of those actions, speak for themselves -- NOT this MS-Approved sermon on the mount. Basic Fact: Sun and Microsoft are in bed together... just looking at history, Microsoft and ANYBODY in bed together is bad for Open Source and Free Software. And this is probably bad for Apple, too.
But overall, nice work from Keep-It-Closed-Gosling in trying to turn the FOSS community against itself again.
To me, Linux under Windows sounds a lot like divorcing your wife but continuing to live in her house.
Windows will go down on you much more often than any woman will.
Seems Like what apple has done with Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X
But with Apple, the crappy system runs inside the good system; with this it's the reverse.
Well, Akuzi, I'm afraid I must disagree.
It's obvious that the FSF would be the Pro-Choice side, not the Pro-Lifers. The corporate software people are the ones giving the little man restrictions on what they can and can't do with software. The FSF are the ones saying "do whatever you want, as long as you don't restrict other people's freedoms".
RMS is the king. Nobody else is looking out for me. The moderates sure aren't. You seem to be advocating the middle ground; a little DRM, a little spyware, a little loss of fair use rights, a little invasion of privacy... Ethics don't work like that. Ethics are immovable signposts. If they compromise, they will eventually disappear. Sure, you're being realistic, and if we could "theoretically" find a mid-point of control vs. freedom AND STAY THERE, that would be okay. But it won't happen. Take TODAY's example, the RIAA Easter Egg: once iTMS becomes successful, the RIAA starts planning to raise the prices. If you don't see the similarity and the anti-consumer trend with these events, you're not looking. There is NO safe way to make peace with these guys. Just like there is no safe way to make peace with Microsoft and rely on HOPE that they won't find a way to get their way entirely and destroy you. Because that's what they want -- their own way ENTIRELY. Whatever we surrender, we will NEVER get back. And they surrender nothing save what we FORCE them to surrender. They view any compromise as a FAILURE; we must as well if we are to succeed in keeping our freedoms intact. Because I guarantee you, if the big companies were able to take them all away and get away with it, they would.
And the "cult-of-personality" stuff hasn't really hurt Steve Jobs with the artsy Hollywood crew, or Bill Gates with the Suits, has it? I hear fame is just KILLING Donald Trump. As far as I can tell, the personal insults hurled at RMS are to PREVENT him from becoming a "cult-of-personality" icon, whereby he would become much more influential, and thus much more threatening to the status quo.
Let the arguments stand on their own.
Good point. Even the biggest troll on Slashdot occasionally has something good to say... however, I find it pretty disgusting that people I can only consider worthless lazyass losers (that's the Republican in me speaking here) try to character assassinate RMS in every thread. True, they do it to Bill Gates regularly, Steve Jobs often, but RMS *ALWAYS*. Masses of AC's belittle his accomplishments, insult his appearance and attack his insistence that the GNU (freedom aspect) of Linux distros be mentioned lest it be forgotten.
What I'm saying is that the posts are not usually arguments against his principles of freedom, but at best are instructions telling him how to do his job and what he needs to change to be acceptable to the moderate masses (as if he was a servant of ACs everywhere), and at worst, personal attacks that try to destroy his reputation or mock him and his ethics.
North America is f**ked. We need all the ethics we can get, and all the ethical people we can get. With the massive quantities of (what I consider to be) lies coming from the media, corporate PR firms, and politicians recently, I am forced to check my sources as well as the information they present. So if Miguel de Icaza talks about the GPL's effects on his work, I am more likely to believe him than a judgemental AC who begins by calling RMS a dirty Gnu-hippie. And if Miguel DOES write a post about the GPL, he is far more likely to post logical reasons or facts. The quality of the AC posts is just that -- AC quality.
As this thread progresses, I'm certain we'll find that a lot of people whine about and take cheap shots at RMS. Coincidentally, these are typically people who haven't accomplished anything useful in their entire lives except post witty one-liners and flames of others here on Slashdot. RMS' legacy is the GPL and a fast-growing freedom movement, mine is having Excellent Karma on a News for Nerds site.
RMS actually tries to protect our freedoms, which is more than I can say for 99% of us, including myself. We mostly seem to care about what's the best DRM or how easily we can adapt to the corporations' new demands on us. We act like a slave nation. I remember reading a book about slavery in the Old South, and the amazing thing was that many slaves believed that slavery was ethical because they had been taught that they were an inferior people, and that the white overlords were justified in beating wayward slaves because it was their plantations and their profitability that would suffer from lazy slaves. The masters managed to get the slaves to see it from their perspective, and in the process, to forget the reality that was their own perspective. We are the same. This is fast becoming our way of thinking. We're not looking out to protect ourselves, but to be "fair" to the companies we have to deal with. The RIAA cries about lost sales. Software companies cry about free alternatives or piracy. Pretty much everyone cries about people making products similar to what they've already released, even though their design was just common sense. And we hear their cries, and often feel bad for the poor Multinationals whose sales are down 7%, leaving them with a meagre profit of about 5 billion dollars (after hiding some with crooked accounting, of course). Needless to say, the companies don't have this self-doubt and ethical dilemma. If they can get us to cave in and start down that "slippery slope of compromise" at all, they can continually and slowly take our consumer rights from us. Look at fair use, already on its deathbed. Timeshifting, which will soon be legislated to death. Copying, sharing, tinkering; all dying. Public domain vs. copyright.There's even crazy talk about the US outlawing free software. The balances are shifting hard and fast in favor of the corporations and against consumer rights. We the people generally have no ethical problem with proprietary software, spyware, or restrictions on our freedom as long as it is inobtrusive. Because we have bought the line that we don't OWN anything. We're only LICENSING our possessions AT THE SAME PRICE AS WE USED TO BUY THEM FOR. Pretty soon, we'll only be able to license our computer hardware. Since we won't own it, we will have NO legal right to privacy on it. And you know what? Give us a better media player or smoother GUI and we'll line up for it like lemmings.
We tend to begin from the assumption that the corporations are right and ethical in their thinking. They spend massive advertising dollars to promote their claim that they occupy the moral high ground. This is often incorrect. We should always begin by doubting every position, but especially the status quo. I got a chance to talk to a few fairly famous musicians at Juno afterparties a few years ago, and yes, they were all thankful that the record companies supported them, but at the same time agreed that they were taking too big of a cut, had too much artistic control, and that the RIAA-type organizations were all crooked and greedy as hell. Some of the artists WANTED to put free songs online to get their names out or to reward faithful fans, but they were forbidden by their corporate masters. They aren't even allowed to play guitar and sing around a campfire without the Company's permission. So whose ethical viewpoint should we be listening to -- the artists themselves, or the middleman who packages the artists music? In a digital age, why are these middlemen even still around? If we keep them around and move to the digital download model, we've just added another layer of middlemen (Apple, Nap
Text-to-speech has its uses... Political Speeches for example. I just LOVE imagining our leaders are actually humanoid robotic enslavers and that we're living in a world where corporations reign supreme and the smelly masses have no rights and a rapidly declining standard of living. I find our android leaders have much more personality and human decency than our real ones.
I once ran Orwell's 1984 through text-to-speech; the flat coldness of the artificial voice made it pretty damn bleak. COOL! Just what I was going for! Next up, William Gibson's Idoru. I need to get a list of cyberpunk futuristic thrillers to sterilize with TTS.
Look at it this way: I'm just ahead of the curve -- give it twenty years, and hopefully all our new wives will sound like that.. heh heh.
That's a good tip, but the whole reason we chose Macs in the first place was so we'd have "Everything Just Work" and we wouldn't HAVE to "pull a Linux" and solder stuff ourselves.
Plus I burn myself easy and my brother says he can't cover for me anymore, he's got his own life and doesn't have time to wire up all my broken stuff for me anymore.
I had that with one of my electric guitars -- after years of smashing it into the heads of drooling hot chicks in the audience screaming lustily of BFG9000 the Rock God, the guitar cable would do the exact same thing. If I didn't sit perfectly still, I'd fizz in and out if I was lucky, and then usually completely lose it.
I opened up my guitar and pushed the prong that makes the connection at the end of the cable plug inward toward the centre in order to "tighten" the connection when it was plugged in. That fixed it.
I was back to using it as a pre-emptive birth control device in no time.
I don't remember for sure, but I own that CD and I believe it has some Bonus Features on the actual CD -- you know, a music video and some online special stuff if you play it in your PC and connect to the net.... so just for the record, even at $80 you haven't managed to duplicate the full CD experience yet.
Looking at your post, I thought: Damn! CD's actually ARE cheap after all!
Don't be too hard on them, it looks like we've nearly Slashdotted the Google Cache as well. Now THAT'S scary. Give Slashdot a hundred thousand more users and the Dept of Homeland Security will have to shut us down for reasons of .. uh .. homeland ... security.
I know there's a joke in there somewhere....
What are these guys, the Microsoft of hardware?
I don't care about their marketshare, I care about their forced lock-in -- their restriction of MY freedom to choose. MS Office is used by my customers, and since nobody else can read the proprietary Office files[1], *I* have to buy Office to communicate. When my client upgrades, *I* have to upgrade or I'm locked out from the new file format he'll be sending me files in. I was perfectly happy with the old MSOffice, but I was FORCED AGAINST MY WILL to upgrade. It's either that, or GO OUT OF BUSINESS. That's the choice. Everyone else uses it, so you have to use it. *That* is anti-competitive pressure. Until there are OPEN, NON-PROPRIETARY STANDARDS that everyone can access and read, which are freely available so everyone can make their software 100% compatible with each other, Microsoft is unfairly using their size advantage to stop competition in the office market. Microsoft refuses to compete on features and quality (making their software better), instead choosing the more nefarious route of making it hard for others to survive by shutting them out with engineered incompatibility.
When I buy something from Wal-Mart, there is NO WAY they can force me to continue to buy there in the future unless they buy up the entire market and every store becomes a Wal-Mart. Because if I buy a pair of socks from Wal-Mart, they still work with pants from somewhere else and a shirt from a third store. Windows programs are the exact opposite. With every product I buy, I am COMMITTING to future purchases on that platform, because to switch would be to lose everything I've bought up to that point. 90% of my Windows software doesn't come with Mac versions on the disk. 99% of my Windows software doesn't come with Linux versions on the disk. When I buy Windows software, I am pledging support to Windows, at the risk of losing my investment. And I have a friend who wanted to buy a Mac, but he'd spent so much money on Windows games, joysticks, etc. that he could NEVER leave.
[1] Open Office.org can read them to a point NOW, but that didn't help us for the last 5 years while MS steamrolled the market.
Whatever it is, here's a hidden video
I live in Bermuda, you INSENSITIVE CLOD!!