it's because only Americans are stupid enough to pay money for frozen water?
Thats nothing, Americans are also stupid enough to pay a lot for bottled liquid water too, the same stuff they can get from their kitchen tap real cheap.:O
(yes I'm joking, and American.)
No, I'm *not* joking, unfortunately, because its true, and I'm an American too.... one who is often embarrassed by his fellow citizens' irrational behavior.:)
Sincere question: Have I had a complete misunderstanding about GCC ever since EGCS? My understanding was that EGCS started as a fork of GCC because of differences with the GNU people, but eventually they agreed/relented and allowed EGCS to merge with and/or replace the old GCC, and in the process opening up GCC development to new people (the ones responsible for EGCS). Are you saying that despite that, RMS still has dictatorial power over GCC and its "steering committee"? If this is true, why hasn't another fork occurred (or is this C++ issue the first time RMS has used his unlimited veto power)?
It's a great shame that Mono and DotGNU won't be working together.
You're right, it is a shame. What really annoys me about that "argument" is that I never did get a good understanding of the technical differences between them from reading it, and why they can't cooperate on some of the common infrastructure. It seemed to veer personal/political from the beginning.
Why does Mono need to reimplement Windows.Forms again for example? DotGNU has already done that, and I would think a lot of the infrastructure could be used by both groups since they are both coding in C#.
I'm a great fan of choice, its because of choice that I don't mind their being both Gnome and KDE, when it comes to desktops, as far as I'm concerned the more the better. However, these guys are not only going against the current within the FOSS community (witness the cynicism and suspicion of those against using any technology that comes from Redmond), they are also going up against Microsoft, the proverbial 800 pound gorilla. MS isn't the kind of innovator that they make themselves out to be (a lot of.NET really isn't terribly innovative), but
.NET's technology is actually pretty decent, a better Java than Java so to speak.
.NET's potential, with MS's monopoly behind it, will *far* exceed Java, and really has the real potential of killing Java off.(*)
If MS does things correctly (a lot depends on Longhorn),.NET will almost certainly succeed in solidifying MS's hold on the PC industry.
All of this means the FOSS community needs to provide an alternative, not necessarily a clone, not even a compatible alternative, but at least another option besides the one offered by the Devil himself.
What is frustrating to me is there is enormous potential in Mono/DotGNU to dramatically improve the FOSS community, yes, I said *FOSS*, not MS. One standardized "managed code" platform to which all/most languages could be ported to would drastically improve productivity and portability for *us*, never mind what it may or may not do for MS.
Unfortunately, Mono has chosen to follow so closely in the footsteps of the 800 pound gorilla, they risk being stepped on if that gorilla bothers to look back and see who's following him. Meanwhile, DotGNU is practically unheard of to most, because Mono gets all the press, and DotGNU, won't or can't use any part of Mono's code in order to catch up. So while our community fragments between 2 standards, MS is leaving us in the dust as it accelerates its.NET plan.
Unlike desktop environments, where personal opinions are as numerous as the stars, the Mono/DotGNU concept can only succeed when it becomes an accepted standard (on Windows MS can accomplish this easily as they control the OS), but 2 different competing standards doesn't help anyone but MS, because the FOSS community simply isn't big enough to support 2 standards in this particular category of software.
I really wish these people realized that in this case, choice is *not* a good thing, to get where they want to go, they have to join under one banner, so that the entire FOSS community can rally to it. Only when all of FOSS has come under one banner, do we have any chance of getting the attentions of those outside our community, otherwise those folk will all end up going to.NET. Is this really hard to see? Am I wrong? Why can't they see this?
(*) Yes, I know.NET isn't going after Java directly *now*, but Java fans shouldn't have any illusions as to what MS intends to do with.NET, they are just starting from the opposite end that Java started from. They're conquering the desktop first, which Java failed to do, and *then* they'll head for the servers with a vengence. When that happens, once.NET is already entrenched on the PCs, then, IMHO, its goodbye Java, Perl, Python, PHP, et. al. We, the FOSS community, will end up being the only ones still using these languages.
Besides the other poster who provided links showing Perl and Python are byte-compiled, you could have found out that Parrot is byte-compiled right from the front page on its website if you had bothered to do a simple google. Please try to be knowledgeable on a subject before pontificating on it in the future.
Mono started out using Wine to support W.F, while.GNU wrote portable emulatation for it (allegedly pretty good too), so they never tried to work together on this. After the arguments between them, I don't know if they'll ever work together on anything now.
Anyway, I don't care much about Mono because I enjoy Java & GCJ, but my point is that it's useless to refute political statements with technical reasons
Funny, I don't use Java for political reasons either. IMO, they both have problems right now. Mono is under the gun until MS comes out in writing that it won't pursue patent litigation or license terms that would kill Free Software (the later will *never* happen), while Sun won't loosen up its control of Java enough for it to even be distributed with Debian, since it fails to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). So, if the politics are important to you, you should be using wxWidgets, or ".GNU", or whatever.
They're also compiled to an intermediate language, so they're faster than scripting languages (yes, Python and Ruby have various different compilers to build C code, java bytecode,.NET IL code, etc, but in their vanilla forms they're interpreted scripting languages)
WRONG.
Jeez, how many times am I going to see this claim repeated over and over? Perl and Python ARE NOT INTERPRETED LANGUAGES! They both compile to a bytecode (intermediate) language which is then interpreted, just like Java/C#, and thus share the same advantages you mentioned. Python I know was a bytecode compiled language from its very beginning, it was never an interpreted language, and Python at least has Psycho, which is a kind of just-in-time compiler for Python bytecode, which can convert a lot of Python code (but not all) into native x86 instructions.
FYI, Parrot is a reimplementation of Perl's bytecode language and interpreter for Perl 6, not an initial introduction to Perl of a bytecode system, Perl may have had a bytecode system from the very beginning too, I just don't know for sure.
Why do you think Python has been ported to both Java (Jython) and Mono (IronPython)? Its happened because its not terribly hard to port Python's frontend (Python language interpreter) to Java or Mono's backend (the underlying bytecode language and interpreter and/or jit compiler).
Re:Restricting Free (as in speech) Software
on
P2P vs. The Clones
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In short, you cannot have freedom -- true freedom -- unless you allow what you see as abuse.
We aren't talking about government here, no one is forcing you to use the GPL.
If you want to allow others to abuse you, thats fine, but not everyone agrees with you on that score.
The GPL's extra restrictions are there solely to insure the code *stays* free. Some see that as a restriction of the code's "liberty", as you do, others however see it as added protection for the code's "liberty", as I and others do.
As much as you hate this, this isn't going to change, and it certainly won't change with yet another GPL/FSF bashing rant on/. Use which license you want to, and stop annoying the ones who choose differently than you.
Of course if you had spent 5 minutes at their website you would know their lawsuits have nothing to do with DjVu, rather they are related to other technologies (that LizardTech has *not* opened up) for geospatial imaging and streaming video. For that matter, you should have suspected something, since that long news article you linked to NEVER MENTIONS DjVu either. Here, you'll find DjVu mentioned only under their section on Document Imaging, and DjVu is the only technology of theirs that they have made an open standard, AFAICT. Please RTFW (Read The Fine Website) first, before you start making assumptions.
As to how DjVu compares to JPEG tecnically, I'll have to leave that issue to others.
Sorry for being obtuse, I'm actually agreeing with you, and would've modded you *up* if I could.
but like all technologies, it is often leveraged in a less than responsible way. These sub-optimal paths should be moderated/legislated.
In effect, you're saying we should somehow moderate innate human behavior?:)
Humans have been using tools in irresponsible ways from the beginning of time, I really don't know how to change that, short of changing humanity itself.
I hope that FOSS programmers are up to the challenge of keeping true to principles of security and technical excellence and we don't start seeing kernel modules and browser plug-ins that sacrifice principles for WhizBang features that marketing advocates.
[Before y'all flame me, keep in mind that I'm a Linux user and fan...]
Technical excellence won't be the problem for the FOSS people, that seems to be a point of pride with them. FOSS's achilles heel is a lack of concern of ease-of-use issues. FOSS developers are programmers writing programs for themselves first and to a lesser degree other programmers, non-programming end-users simply are not a big concern for most of them. Yes, you can find some FOSS projects that are exceptions, and there are "FOSS" projects that are really being supported by a commercial company which is specifically seeking that end-user market, so they do concern themselves with UI and ease-of-use issues, but I simply don't see this in the rest of the FOSS community, nor do I see this changing any. The casual, home computer user is still out of reach for Linux, and frankly, may always be.
More importantly, it's easier to be on the offensive, in this kind of thing... IBM is the one trying to defend things here.
IBM was on the defensive with the DOJ too, back when they were the monopoly, and just about everyone agrees that they *were* guilty at the time, however AFAICT, IBM has the much stronger position in this fight, no matter that they are defending. For SCO to win big, they have to show massive wrong-doing on IBM's part, yet everyone is still waiting for SCO to indicate the "millions of lines" of code in Linux that belongs to them. Getting IBM on a few minor violations won't help SCO, any fine or penalty less than, say, $300M won't effect IBM at all, and it won't hurt Linux either. So if they can't show flagrant and willfull wrong-doing on a grand scale by IBM, they're history.
People are paid according to how hard they work, how smart they are, and perhaps most of all, how well they play the game/system.
No, no, and no. The correct answer is "how rich your parents are".
I do not feel that it is "just" that an hourly manual laborer should earn more than a fraction of what I earn.
If you want to keep earning those big bucks then you should be concerned how much the majority of Americans are making. Those of us who are worried about this aren't comparing salaries relatively, we are looking at whether the low and middle salaries, received by a vast majority of Americans are enough to sustain our economy, to allow you to continue earning 300% of their earnings or whatever it is. If to big of a portion of our population is not making enough money to have some discretionary money to spend to drive the economy, then we're in for a long, slow decline (or a short, fast one depending on who you ask). Our economy can't survive on just the folks buying the necessities, and it can't survive just on the spending of the richest 3% of the population, our economy depends on a middle class with a reasonable amount of discretionary income, and that is EXACTLY what has been steadily eroding, at an accelerating pace, since the early seventies: the middle class, and their discretionary income. Unless we reverse the trend of the poor getting dramatically poorer, the middle class getting a little poorer, with only the top 2% or 3% of the population getting richer, it is inevitable at some point that this train WILL derail.
The United States is not Canada, or Europe, or whatever other nation you proudly call home (though if you are "European," proudly claiming a nation as a home is a dangerous thing, eh?)
Ahh, the obligatory snub by the Right towards the rest of the world, because just once they didn't agree with Washington's interpretation of reality. Where is the "compassionate conservatism" here? And where in Heaven's name did you get this astounding idea that only Americans can be proud of their country? This is an example of the ignorant and arrogant Right the scares me to death so much. It scares me because I am a patriot too. Honestly, right-wingers write garbage like this and then wonder why 1/2 the world is so ticked off with us now. It boogles the mind.
We are not the home of national (rationed) health care
Yes, we are, the Right just doesn't want to admit it. Our hospitals' emergency rooms have become our nation's health care system. They help the sick whether they can pay or not, and if they can't pay, the hospital passes the cost to the other customers who have insurance companies that can pay. If the hospital can't pass the cost to someone else, they shut their ERs down, which means *everyone* in the region loses, whether they pay for their health care or not. You *are* paying for other people's health care whether you believe it or not. The difference is, we are currently running our "national health care system" in *the* most inefficient way possible, which is a large part of the reason why even *basic* health care here is so expensive that the majority of Americans need insurance to pay for it, and why 1/4+ of Americans can't even afford the insurance.
national pensions (bankrupting the future),
Two words: Social Security (yes, its still ticking, and no one has figured out how to defuse it yet)
You have been living under a rock, haven't you. Where to begin.... a) Some states *are* offering free college tuition, b) what do you think scholarships are?, c) a lot o
The Internet, and global satellite communications, are rendering geography, distance, and borders irrelevent, and the IT and related industries, due to them being involved in the production of digital, virtual widgets rather than physical ones, are being hit the worst, because digital widgets can be cloned and transported anywhere in the world nearly instantaneously and for essentally no cost. For now, the Internet is the best, maybe the ultimate, example of a "disruptive technology", despite, ironically, being seen by nearly everyone (Sen. Hollings and the RIAA excepted) as a "good thing", a positive development for humanity.
I'd imagine that the crew of a sister boat would have a little more of an idea than someone who was just in Vietnam at the same time.
And I would imagine that the crew of Kerry's boat itself would have an even better idea of what happened. Now, versus the one who said Kerry saved his life and the others who generally support Kerry, how many of the rest of Kerry's own crew are calling him a liar?
Most every American is both a purchaser and worker, are they not?
Over half of Americans own stock, which is why the left's class warfare is becoming less and less effective.
And the vast majority of those Americans are small time stock owners. We all know that most stocks are held by other corporations, and the 1-3% of the richest people in the country, everyone else is a bit player, allowed to exist to make the whole system appear legit.
As long as the middle class continues to shrink and the country's wealth continues to be concentrated in a smaller and smaller percentage of the whole population, which has been happening (.pdf) continuously since the early 70's, the class warfare will never end. The right has simply been very good at diverting attention from this so far, usually by playing up the religious and racial differences, to keep all those people from realizing they're all in the same boat.
The question is how much we have to spend, and I believe it's a lot more now than it was 10 years ago.
....
Or to defend against attacks. What would be the economic damage of a nuke going off in NYC? It's worth spending quite a bit to reduce the probability of that by a few percent.
Except that the dangers we face now are low-tech, human ones. We don't need B2 bombers to deal with terrorists, we need a smart foreign policy, international cooperation, some solution to the Isreali-Palestinian conflict, a few thousand more Police, Coast Guard, and Border Patrol agents, and a few well-trained Green Berets. These things do not require the kind of money we spent during the Cold War, a war we won by out-spending the USSR, the one thing (creating wealth) it couldn't do anywhere close to the level we could. Now imagine if a big chunk of that wealth were given back to the civilians for their purposes and needs, and not for the desires of the military-industrial complex?
Bascially, little 1-3 person software shops, writing little utilities, are now expected to give their software away for free!
If I choose to write "little utilities" that compete directly with Free utilities that do the same thing, then I wouldn't expect to make a lot of money, I would write something that hasn't been addressed (or addressed badly) by the FOSS community. There is no money to be made in "little utilities" anymore.
All "Free Software" has done is made a few companies, very very big, and put all the little guys out of business
Its given me and thousands of others more freedom and control over their own computing environment than ever before, and that was and is the purpose of Free Software and why those who created it, did so, and continue to do so. It is the proprietary software market that created FOSS, because they were unwilling to give their customers/users/slaves a level of control and freedom that many individuals in open democratic societies expect. They created the desire for open source, and have only themselves to blame for its existence.
Yes, some people won't make as much money in programming as in the past because they have to compete with FOSS in some categories, but insisting that people should be paid a lot of money to write software is kinda like the RIAA insisting they should be paid a lot of money for the mass reproduction of music content. The industry and technology has shifted under their feet, and their business model is now practically obsolete, but I don't remember any law that says "Thou shalt be paid well for making copies of songs" anywhere on the books. Times change, technology races on, its time for them to find other ways of making money.
Similarly, I don't remember a commandmant like "Thou salt make mucho dinero writing computer code" being on the books anywhere, either. Times change, technology races on, the Internet revolution contines to change how we humans interact and work (making FOSS possible in the first place, to begin with), its time for us to adapt to the new reality, and fill the categories, gaps, and niches that FOSS will have difficulty making inroads in, rather than fight a hopeless, doomed battle as the RIAA is.
Debian (stable) is geared towards server, the whole Gentoo thing is geared towards desktop or experimental.
....
Gentoo has bleeding edge stuffs, that's why I don't want it.
To add to the parent:
In contrast, those wanting to use Debian on a desktop and use the bleeding edge stuff can do that too, using Sid (unstable).
What Debian calls "stable" more accurately should be called "static", because the Debian folk assure non-breakage and long-term stability by literally not allowing anything to change (except security fixes). To Debian, "unstable" is called unstable merely because it is constantly changing. However, "changing" doesn't always imply "broken", or even "constantly breaking", since Debian's package system and the QA makes updating stuff moderately painless for most folks, and the possibily of major problems only occur with a small number of critical packages (which for the most part are managed by the smartest and most responsible of the Debian folk).
Hundreds, probably thousands, of others, myself included, routinely update their systems against Debian's "unstable" tree on a monthly, weekly, or even daily(!) basis, in order to get the latest stuff, and a large majority do so without problems. I myself have had one major breakage and maybe 2 or 3 dozen small breakages in the last ~2.5 years, while updating 2 to 3 times per week to Sid. With almost all of these problems, the solution was simply to put the broken packages on hold in aptitude, wait a few days for the packages to be fixed, and uploaded to Debian, then install/reinstall/upgrade them. No sweat on my part, the Debian Developers do all the work for me (thanks guys). For something really important, you can revert to the old version immediately if you really need that package to continue working, but since we are talking about desktop systems, this shouldn't be as much of an issue as it is with servers.
To be fair, that one major breakage, involving glibc, was fairly nasty, but frankly, a) I don't see it as all that different with other distros that are regularly (more than once every 3 months) updating their systems (Debian Sid is being upgraded continously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), and b) when you want to live on the bleeding edge, you have to be willing to pay the price, and the occasional minor problem, and the relatively rare major problem is the price that must be payed.
I've seen the complaints about "unstable", but you have to keep in mind the sheer number of people using Debian, the fact they are using it for different reasons and purposes, and are therefore using different packages or different combinations of packages that may create problems, but only for the people who have the exact same combination, and the fact that since unstable is in a constant state of flux, it might get broken for an hour or two, or four, until the DD (or someone else) hears about the problem and uploads a fix, which means a few unlucky people have some pain (maybe a lot of pain), but the majority of users who upgrade later never see that problem.
My suggestions:
Only upgrade the software you are interested in on significant version changes, not minor x.x.N changes, and not the (even more) minor x.x.x-N Debian updates (unless the package is broken for you).
If the software is not important to you (its there because of dependencies), then allow upgrades only when other packages' dependencies require it.
Never update a major component of the system, or any large component, soon after its been uploaded to Debian, wait a week...
Use aptitude, not apt-get, for fine-grained control of updates (so you can follow the above suggestions). This takes more time, but avoids the massive automatic updates of the entire world that apt-get always does (when its usually unnecessary and sometimes risky). This may be controversial to some beca
Which may be the reason why the old-timers don't like it. The other poster was right about the original BG not aging well, but IMO that has more to do with the original series having been a light, run-of-the-mill, "fluffy" show as opposed to something more serious and dark (think Dune or Bladerunner).
This last mini-series was more serious, dark, and up-to-date culturally. The scene of the nuclear bombs going off and the "mushroom clouds" in the distance in the mini-series is the kind of dark, surreal, gritty realism that you *never* saw in the first series.
I find the complaints about sexuality showing up in the story kind of humorious, too. The mini-series was just updating itself to reflect our current culture (with marketing droids using sex to sell everything). Besides, I'm not sure it was inappropiate either, because most of the sexual content revolved around the female cylon who seduced that scientist (a sucker for any knock-out blonde) and used him to further the cylon agenda. At first glance that seems to be relevant to the entire story and thus makes sense for it to be there. Perhaps the critics aren't aware that the sexuality part of the mini-series was almost exclusively found in that sub-plot involving the scientist. I saw the mini-series, and I honestly don't remember any sexual content that was obviously gratuitious and out-of-place.
As for the others calling it boring, well, different strokes, I guess... I wonder if this has something to do with sci-fi folks seemingly wanting more sohphisticated/complex stories than the typical TV junkie? It reminds me of the other poster's point about Farscape. To me Farscape seemed overly complicated, and because I couldn't ever get into the story (because I hadn't seen the previous 2 years of episodes to understand what was going on), I never pursued it. So maybe its the ones demanding complex plots that see it as boring, I didn't. Of course my opinion doesn't mean much, I seem to be the only/.'er who thinks SG1 is just "ok", and not the best thing since the arrival of James T. Kirk to the air waves way back when.
#!/usr/bin/perl my $opinion = 0.02; print "$opinion\n";
The thing is that the majority of the American people kind of wanted him to order that invasion
Not surprising since the Bush administration went out of its way to link Iraq to Al Qaeda, and thus psychologically imply to average Americans that attacking Iraq is retaliation for 9/11. While the belief in WMDs may have come from the CIA which got suckered into believing bad intel, this whole business of trying to link Iraq to Al Qaeda and thus justify attacking it, is where the deliberate lies and misleading statements of this administration are to be found.
to turn round and blame the leader of a democracy for following the wishes of the demos is kind of silly, don't you think?
No its not silly, if the leader in question *lies* to that democracy to convince them to let him do what he wants.
his job should be to represent the wishes of the American people to the world, not to push his own agenda
Which is *exactly* what George Junior did. Without the strong sell of WMDs and the like and the repeated implications that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11 and was in bed with Al Qaeda, I do not believe there would have been majority support for attacking Iraq *then*. He just cynically played on America's desire for revenge after 9/11 to get approval for his own empire-building ambitions.
Until a new comer underdog called Microsoft caused the PC revolution
IBM caused the PC revolution with their own "personal computer". With the weight and force of IBM's existing domination, their version of the "personal computer" became insantly popular among businesses (many of whom already relied on IBM for other things). Microsoft snuck in the back door because IBM, then as now, only groks the hardware. To them, software is just the lubricant that makes their hardware run, and many people use their cars without thinking much of the oil in it, which is why they never realized that the OS would come to define their product even more so than their own hardware. So they let MS keep ownership of DOS, MS became the "official" source for the PC-compatible market's OS. Clone makers, and IBM's own mistakes, eventually succeeded in removing IBM from the driver's seat, but by then MS was firmly in control due to it being the source of the OS, and through various questionable business, legal, and ethical practices, it made sure no one was able to challenge its position, and the rest is history.
I agree with your main point (IBM was indeed the Darth Vader of the IT world before MS showed up), except that I disagree MS was ever a "good" company that ever did anything "good" for the industry (besides bringing about standardization via a monopoly).:)
They started out, and remain so to this day, as nothing more than an opportunistic scavenger, that simply buys (or steals) more innovation than it has ever truly produced itself.
No one is saying they're going to keel over and expire tomorrow. What they *are* saying is that Sun has no business plan to prevent them from keeling over 6 or 7 years from now. They're hardware side is being eaten alive by the cheaper commodity PC hardware market, and their software side is being eaten alive by the cheaper Linux/Windows/BSDs OSes. How does buying Novell help them stop the hemorraging? AFAICT, it doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sekuefree..."
Thats nothing, Americans are also stupid enough to pay a lot for bottled liquid water too, the same stuff they can get from their kitchen tap real cheap.
No, I'm *not* joking, unfortunately, because its true, and I'm an American too.... one who is often embarrassed by his fellow citizens' irrational behavior.
Sincere question: Have I had a complete misunderstanding about GCC ever since EGCS? My understanding was that EGCS started as a fork of GCC because of differences with the GNU people, but eventually they agreed/relented and allowed EGCS to merge with and/or replace the old GCC, and in the process opening up GCC development to new people (the ones responsible for EGCS). Are you saying that despite that, RMS still has dictatorial power over GCC and its "steering committee"? If this is true, why hasn't another fork occurred (or is this C++ issue the first time RMS has used his unlimited veto power)?
You're right, it is a shame. What really annoys me about that "argument" is that I never did get a good understanding of the technical differences between them from reading it, and why they can't cooperate on some of the common infrastructure. It seemed to veer personal/political from the beginning.
Why does Mono need to reimplement Windows.Forms again for example? DotGNU has already done that, and I would think a lot of the infrastructure could be used by both groups since they are both coding in C#.
I'm a great fan of choice, its because of choice that I don't mind their being both Gnome and KDE, when it comes to desktops, as far as I'm concerned the more the better. However, these guys are not only going against the current within the FOSS community (witness the cynicism and suspicion of those against using any technology that comes from Redmond), they are also going up against Microsoft, the proverbial 800 pound gorilla. MS isn't the kind of innovator that they make themselves out to be (a lot of
All of this means the FOSS community needs to provide an alternative, not necessarily a clone, not even a compatible alternative, but at least another option besides the one offered by the Devil himself.
What is frustrating to me is there is enormous potential in Mono/DotGNU to dramatically improve the FOSS community, yes, I said *FOSS*, not MS. One standardized "managed code" platform to which all/most languages could be ported to would drastically improve productivity and portability for *us*, never mind what it may or may not do for MS.
Unfortunately, Mono has chosen to follow so closely in the footsteps of the 800 pound gorilla, they risk being stepped on if that gorilla bothers to look back and see who's following him. Meanwhile, DotGNU is practically unheard of to most, because Mono gets all the press, and DotGNU, won't or can't use any part of Mono's code in order to catch up. So while our community fragments between 2 standards, MS is leaving us in the dust as it accelerates its
Unlike desktop environments, where personal opinions are as numerous as the stars, the Mono/DotGNU concept can only succeed when it becomes an accepted standard (on Windows MS can accomplish this easily as they control the OS), but 2 different competing standards doesn't help anyone but MS, because the FOSS community simply isn't big enough to support 2 standards in this particular category of software.
I really wish these people realized that in this case, choice is *not* a good thing, to get where they want to go, they have to join under one banner, so that the entire FOSS community can rally to it. Only when all of FOSS has come under one banner, do we have any chance of getting the attentions of those outside our community, otherwise those folk will all end up going to
(*) Yes, I know
Signed,
Frustrated.
You need to do some googling yourself.
Besides the other poster who provided links showing Perl and Python are byte-compiled, you could have found out that Parrot is byte-compiled right from the front page on its website if you had bothered to do a simple google. Please try to be knowledgeable on a subject before pontificating on it in the future.
No, PNet is LGPL, like glibc.
Mono started out using Wine to support W.F, while
Funny, I don't use Java for political reasons either. IMO, they both have problems right now. Mono is under the gun until MS comes out in writing that it won't pursue patent litigation or license terms that would kill Free Software (the later will *never* happen), while Sun won't loosen up its control of Java enough for it to even be distributed with Debian, since it fails to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). So, if the politics are important to you, you should be using wxWidgets, or ".GNU", or whatever.
WRONG.
Jeez, how many times am I going to see this claim repeated over and over? Perl and Python ARE NOT INTERPRETED LANGUAGES! They both compile to a bytecode (intermediate) language which is then interpreted, just like Java/C#, and thus share the same advantages you mentioned. Python I know was a bytecode compiled language from its very beginning, it was never an interpreted language, and Python at least has Psycho, which is a kind of just-in-time compiler for Python bytecode, which can convert a lot of Python code (but not all) into native x86 instructions.
FYI, Parrot is a reimplementation of Perl's bytecode language and interpreter for Perl 6, not an initial introduction to Perl of a bytecode system, Perl may have had a bytecode system from the very beginning too, I just don't know for sure.
Why do you think Python has been ported to both Java (Jython) and Mono (IronPython)? Its happened because its not terribly hard to port Python's frontend (Python language interpreter) to Java or Mono's backend (the underlying bytecode language and interpreter and/or jit compiler).
Of course if you had spent 5 minutes at their website you would know their lawsuits have nothing to do with DjVu, rather they are related to other technologies (that LizardTech has *not* opened up) for geospatial imaging and streaming video. For that matter, you should have suspected something, since that long news article you linked to NEVER MENTIONS DjVu either. Here, you'll find DjVu mentioned only under their section on Document Imaging, and DjVu is the only technology of theirs that they have made an open standard, AFAICT. Please RTFW (Read The Fine Website) first, before you start making assumptions.
As to how DjVu compares to JPEG tecnically, I'll have to leave that issue to others.
In effect, you're saying we should somehow moderate innate human behavior?
Humans have been using tools in irresponsible ways from the beginning of time, I really don't know how to change that, short of changing humanity itself.
[Before y'all flame me, keep in mind that I'm a Linux user and fan...]
Technical excellence won't be the problem for the FOSS people, that seems to be a point of pride with them. FOSS's achilles heel is a lack of concern of ease-of-use issues. FOSS developers are programmers writing programs for themselves first and to a lesser degree other programmers, non-programming end-users simply are not a big concern for most of them. Yes, you can find some FOSS projects that are exceptions, and there are "FOSS" projects that are really being supported by a commercial company which is specifically seeking that end-user market, so they do concern themselves with UI and ease-of-use issues, but I simply don't see this in the rest of the FOSS community, nor do I see this changing any. The casual, home computer user is still out of reach for Linux, and frankly, may always be.
IBM was on the defensive with the DOJ too, back when they were the monopoly, and just about everyone agrees that they *were* guilty at the time, however AFAICT, IBM has the much stronger position in this fight, no matter that they are defending. For SCO to win big, they have to show massive wrong-doing on IBM's part, yet everyone is still waiting for SCO to indicate the "millions of lines" of code in Linux that belongs to them. Getting IBM on a few minor violations won't help SCO, any fine or penalty less than, say, $300M won't effect IBM at all, and it won't hurt Linux either. So if they can't show flagrant and willfull wrong-doing on a grand scale by IBM, they're history.
No, no, and no. The correct answer is "how rich your parents are".
If you want to keep earning those big bucks then you should be concerned how much the majority of Americans are making. Those of us who are worried about this aren't comparing salaries relatively, we are looking at whether the low and middle salaries, received by a vast majority of Americans are enough to sustain our economy, to allow you to continue earning 300% of their earnings or whatever it is. If to big of a portion of our population is not making enough money to have some discretionary money to spend to drive the economy, then we're in for a long, slow decline (or a short, fast one depending on who you ask). Our economy can't survive on just the folks buying the necessities, and it can't survive just on the spending of the richest 3% of the population, our economy depends on a middle class with a reasonable amount of discretionary income, and that is EXACTLY what has been steadily eroding, at an accelerating pace, since the early seventies: the middle class, and their discretionary income. Unless we reverse the trend of the poor getting dramatically poorer, the middle class getting a little poorer, with only the top 2% or 3% of the population getting richer, it is inevitable at some point that this train WILL derail.
Ahh, the obligatory snub by the Right towards the rest of the world, because just once they didn't agree with Washington's interpretation of reality. Where is the "compassionate conservatism" here? And where in Heaven's name did you get this astounding idea that only Americans can be proud of their country? This is an example of the ignorant and arrogant Right the scares me to death so much. It scares me because I am a patriot too. Honestly, right-wingers write garbage like this and then wonder why 1/2 the world is so ticked off with us now. It boogles the mind.
Yes, we are, the Right just doesn't want to admit it. Our hospitals' emergency rooms have become our nation's health care system. They help the sick whether they can pay or not, and if they can't pay, the hospital passes the cost to the other customers who have insurance companies that can pay. If the hospital can't pass the cost to someone else, they shut their ERs down, which means *everyone* in the region loses, whether they pay for their health care or not. You *are* paying for other people's health care whether you believe it or not. The difference is, we are currently running our "national health care system" in *the* most inefficient way possible, which is a large part of the reason why even *basic* health care here is so expensive that the majority of Americans need insurance to pay for it, and why 1/4+ of Americans can't even afford the insurance.
Two words: Social Security (yes, its still ticking, and no one has figured out how to defuse it yet)
What rock have you been living under?
You have been living under a rock, haven't you. Where to begin.... a) Some states *are* offering free college tuition, b) what do you think scholarships are?, c) a lot o
Alas, me with no mod points.
The Internet, and global satellite communications, are rendering geography, distance, and borders irrelevent, and the IT and related industries, due to them being involved in the production of digital, virtual widgets rather than physical ones, are being hit the worst, because digital widgets can be cloned and transported anywhere in the world nearly instantaneously and for essentally no cost. For now, the Internet is the best, maybe the ultimate, example of a "disruptive technology", despite, ironically, being seen by nearly everyone (Sen. Hollings and the RIAA excepted) as a "good thing", a positive development for humanity.
And I would imagine that the crew of Kerry's boat itself would have an even better idea of what happened. Now, versus the one who said Kerry saved his life and the others who generally support Kerry, how many of the rest of Kerry's own crew are calling him a liar?
Most every American is both a purchaser and worker, are they not?
And the vast majority of those Americans are small time stock owners. We all know that most stocks are held by other corporations, and the 1-3% of the richest people in the country, everyone else is a bit player, allowed to exist to make the whole system appear legit.
As long as the middle class continues to shrink and the country's wealth continues to be concentrated in a smaller and smaller percentage of the whole population, which has been happening (.pdf) continuously since the early 70's, the class warfare will never end. The right has simply been very good at diverting attention from this so far, usually by playing up the religious and racial differences, to keep all those people from realizing they're all in the same boat.
Except that the dangers we face now are low-tech, human ones. We don't need B2 bombers to deal with terrorists, we need a smart foreign policy, international cooperation, some solution to the Isreali-Palestinian conflict, a few thousand more Police, Coast Guard, and Border Patrol agents, and a few well-trained Green Berets. These things do not require the kind of money we spent during the Cold War, a war we won by out-spending the USSR, the one thing (creating wealth) it couldn't do anywhere close to the level we could. Now imagine if a big chunk of that wealth were given back to the civilians for their purposes and needs, and not for the desires of the military-industrial complex?
If I choose to write "little utilities" that compete directly with Free utilities that do the same thing, then I wouldn't expect to make a lot of money, I would write something that hasn't been addressed (or addressed badly) by the FOSS community. There is no money to be made in "little utilities" anymore.
Its given me and thousands of others more freedom and control over their own computing environment than ever before, and that was and is the purpose of Free Software and why those who created it, did so, and continue to do so. It is the proprietary software market that created FOSS, because they were unwilling to give their customers/users/slaves a level of control and freedom that many individuals in open democratic societies expect. They created the desire for open source, and have only themselves to blame for its existence.
Yes, some people won't make as much money in programming as in the past because they have to compete with FOSS in some categories, but insisting that people should be paid a lot of money to write software is kinda like the RIAA insisting they should be paid a lot of money for the mass reproduction of music content. The industry and technology has shifted under their feet, and their business model is now practically obsolete, but I don't remember any law that says "Thou shalt be paid well for making copies of songs" anywhere on the books. Times change, technology races on, its time for them to find other ways of making money.
Similarly, I don't remember a commandmant like "Thou salt make mucho dinero writing computer code" being on the books anywhere, either. Times change, technology races on, the Internet revolution contines to change how we humans interact and work (making FOSS possible in the first place, to begin with), its time for us to adapt to the new reality, and fill the categories, gaps, and niches that FOSS will have difficulty making inroads in, rather than fight a hopeless, doomed battle as the RIAA is.
To add to the parent:
In contrast, those wanting to use Debian on a desktop and use the bleeding edge stuff can do that too, using Sid (unstable).
What Debian calls "stable" more accurately should be called "static", because the Debian folk assure non-breakage and long-term stability by literally not allowing anything to change (except security fixes). To Debian, "unstable" is called unstable merely because it is constantly changing. However, "changing" doesn't always imply "broken", or even "constantly breaking", since Debian's package system and the QA makes updating stuff moderately painless for most folks, and the possibily of major problems only occur with a small number of critical packages (which for the most part are managed by the smartest and most responsible of the Debian folk).
Hundreds, probably thousands, of others, myself included, routinely update their systems against Debian's "unstable" tree on a monthly, weekly, or even daily(!) basis, in order to get the latest stuff, and a large majority do so without problems. I myself have had one major breakage and maybe 2 or 3 dozen small breakages in the last ~2.5 years, while updating 2 to 3 times per week to Sid. With almost all of these problems, the solution was simply to put the broken packages on hold in aptitude, wait a few days for the packages to be fixed, and uploaded to Debian, then install/reinstall/upgrade them. No sweat on my part, the Debian Developers do all the work for me (thanks guys). For something really important, you can revert to the old version immediately if you really need that package to continue working, but since we are talking about desktop systems, this shouldn't be as much of an issue as it is with servers.
To be fair, that one major breakage, involving glibc, was fairly nasty, but frankly, a) I don't see it as all that different with other distros that are regularly (more than once every 3 months) updating their systems (Debian Sid is being upgraded continously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), and b) when you want to live on the bleeding edge, you have to be willing to pay the price, and the occasional minor problem, and the relatively rare major problem is the price that must be payed.
I've seen the complaints about "unstable", but you have to keep in mind the sheer number of people using Debian, the fact they are using it for different reasons and purposes, and are therefore using different packages or different combinations of packages that may create problems, but only for the people who have the exact same combination, and the fact that since unstable is in a constant state of flux, it might get broken for an hour or two, or four, until the DD (or someone else) hears about the problem and uploads a fix, which means a few unlucky people have some pain (maybe a lot of pain), but the majority of users who upgrade later never see that problem.
My suggestions:
Which may be the reason why the old-timers don't like it. The other poster was right about the original BG not aging well, but IMO that has more to do with the original series having been a light, run-of-the-mill, "fluffy" show as opposed to something more serious and dark (think Dune or Bladerunner).
This last mini-series was more serious, dark, and up-to-date culturally. The scene of the nuclear bombs going off and the "mushroom clouds" in the distance in the mini-series is the kind of dark, surreal, gritty realism that you *never* saw in the first series.
I find the complaints about sexuality showing up in the story kind of humorious, too. The mini-series was just updating itself to reflect our current culture (with marketing droids using sex to sell everything). Besides, I'm not sure it was inappropiate either, because most of the sexual content revolved around the female cylon who seduced that scientist (a sucker for any knock-out blonde) and used him to further the cylon agenda. At first glance that seems to be relevant to the entire story and thus makes sense for it to be there. Perhaps the critics aren't aware that the sexuality part of the mini-series was almost exclusively found in that sub-plot involving the scientist. I saw the mini-series, and I honestly don't remember any sexual content that was obviously gratuitious and out-of-place.
As for the others calling it boring, well, different strokes, I guess... I wonder if this has something to do with sci-fi folks seemingly wanting more sohphisticated/complex stories than the typical TV junkie? It reminds me of the other poster's point about Farscape. To me Farscape seemed overly complicated, and because I couldn't ever get into the story (because I hadn't seen the previous 2 years of episodes to understand what was going on), I never pursued it. So maybe its the ones demanding complex plots that see it as boring, I didn't. Of course my opinion doesn't mean much, I seem to be the only
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $opinion = 0.02;
print "$opinion\n";
Not surprising since the Bush administration went out of its way to link Iraq to Al Qaeda, and thus psychologically imply to average Americans that attacking Iraq is retaliation for 9/11. While the belief in WMDs may have come from the CIA which got suckered into believing bad intel, this whole business of trying to link Iraq to Al Qaeda and thus justify attacking it, is where the deliberate lies and misleading statements of this administration are to be found.
No its not silly, if the leader in question *lies* to that democracy to convince them to let him do what he wants.
Which is *exactly* what George Junior did. Without the strong sell of WMDs and the like and the repeated implications that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11 and was in bed with Al Qaeda, I do not believe there would have been majority support for attacking Iraq *then*. He just cynically played on America's desire for revenge after 9/11 to get approval for his own empire-building ambitions.
IBM caused the PC revolution with their own "personal computer". With the weight and force of IBM's existing domination, their version of the "personal computer" became insantly popular among businesses (many of whom already relied on IBM for other things). Microsoft snuck in the back door because IBM, then as now, only groks the hardware. To them, software is just the lubricant that makes their hardware run, and many people use their cars without thinking much of the oil in it, which is why they never realized that the OS would come to define their product even more so than their own hardware. So they let MS keep ownership of DOS, MS became the "official" source for the PC-compatible market's OS. Clone makers, and IBM's own mistakes, eventually succeeded in removing IBM from the driver's seat, but by then MS was firmly in control due to it being the source of the OS, and through various questionable business, legal, and ethical practices, it made sure no one was able to challenge its position, and the rest is history.
I agree with your main point (IBM was indeed the Darth Vader of the IT world before MS showed up), except that I disagree MS was ever a "good" company that ever did anything "good" for the industry (besides bringing about standardization via a monopoly).
They started out, and remain so to this day, as nothing more than an opportunistic scavenger, that simply buys (or steals) more innovation than it has ever truly produced itself.
No one is saying they're going to keel over and expire tomorrow. What they *are* saying is that Sun has no business plan to prevent them from keeling over 6 or 7 years from now. They're hardware side is being eaten alive by the cheaper commodity PC hardware market, and their software side is being eaten alive by the cheaper Linux/Windows/BSDs OSes. How does buying Novell help them stop the hemorraging? AFAICT, it doesn't.