How much of these wonderdrugs are psychoactive mood enhancers, and how many of them are for a real problem?
Chronic Major Depression *is* a "real problem", just ask those who suffer from it, or the families of its victims. Without a "psychoactive mood enhancer" (known to those who need them as "anti-depressants"), many people *would* die (by their own hand). That some may abuse the drug doesn't change the fact it has a valid medical purpose. Prozac saves lives too, genius.
I put life over profit, no matter what, as any sane individual would.
By this definition, the entire Republican Party is insane....... hmmm...... you may have a valid point after all! [ducks and covers]
Well said. I would also add the point that a lot of people seem to be missing, and that is Sun controls the Java *trademark* as well, and no one is suggesting they give that up. They can use the trademark alone to prevent fragmentation, by being able to control who can and can't call their product "Java" or "Java compatible". No one is suggesting Sun give up their ability to certify products, what everyone is suggesting they do is open up their software license enough to allow Java to be used on (and distributable with) open platforms like the BSDs and Linux.
What the critics need to see is what to the rest of us see, and that is Java increasingly and inevitably becoming irrelevent in the face of Microsoft's steamroller. Java is not going away anytime soon, but it also is not becoming any more influential or relevent either. Now Sun can keep their baby close to their breast in an attempt to protect it, but that reaction we see in the long run as simply delaying the inevitable "fade into history". If Sun ever wants a piece of the desktop action for Java it *must* do something radical to make that even a possibility. Considering Microsoft's monopoly strength, there is really only one possibilty for success, and its obvious when you look at the only thing right now in existance which really scares Microsoft: Open Source. If Java goes open source, it will gain momentum, energy, new converts, and new hackers that will push it a lot further than it will ever get on its own now. Sun needs the energy and support of the FOSS community for the same reasons that IBM is tapping into that resource.
The real question is "Is Sun really competing against Microsoft anymore?" They've cozied up to their former enemy and now are saying spiteful things about Red Hat (and Open Source by implication), so it sounds to me like this open source thing is just talk from them, I don't believe they'll actually do it, because I suspect they consider FOSS their biggest enemy, not Microsoft. This means that as long as Java remains the overly protected child of Sun, and Sun never groks the value of FOSS the way IBM has, then it, Java, is destined to just fade away, and never become the force it could have been.
Finally, will all the critics who claim every time the Java issue comes up that we argue for open sourcing it because "we just want something for free" please shut up? Java is already free for use, and if I wanted to steal ideas or code (illegally), I could already do that since most of Java's source is already accessible. (There is not anything fundamentally new or unique in Java anyway; its just a well designed implementation of an old idea. P-code anyone?) Besides, I myself actually prefer Python over Java anyway, and since Java remains a non-starter on the desktop, it is not a great concern of mine. The problem is not that Java isn't free or that it has something the FOSS community wants, the problem is that its not *Free*, and as long as that is the case, a majority of the FOSS community is simply *not* *interested* in it.
Uhm, how exactly is the OP trolling here, moderators? I've got a buck that says the moderator calling this a troll is from the Windows world.
It makes perfect sense to me, and it goes hand in hand with those of us wanting to see less bloat and more functionality. For example, my (audio) media player? Its the ext2fs filesystem (how I organize my audio "libraries"), midnight commander (how I browse and select what I want to hear), and ogg123 (the codec). Works like a charm, and you certainly can't say its bloated.:)
I mean, just where exactly is it written (other than the Good Book of Microsoft) that the media player (audio or even video) *has* to be a bloated, glitzy, graphical app to be *functional*? Geez...
I spend every day designing proprietary hardware and writing the interface specs for that hardware. I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that giving away interface specs for your hardware, will not divulge any proprietary hardware secrets. We are talking about a bunch of register addresses, their size and their function. These are just facts, no secrets are revealed.
OTOH, opensourcing your already proprietary driver, is a bad idea. The driver does contain secrets (mainly optimization/algorithm tricks, but may contain secrets of the dirty kind too) and 3rd party licensed software that you don't want to/can't give away. So opening up the driver is not a choice.
The second paragraph kinda contradicts the first paragraph, and besides, I was thinking of the issues you mentioned in the second paragraph anyway. Yes, the registers themselves may not reveal much, and with some hardware knowing how the registers get used may not tell you anything at all, it all depends on how sophisticated the hardware/firmware is, and it is my understanding that these 3D accelerated video cards are *exceedingly* complex, and so is their drivers, meaning that a lot of "IP" (algorithms, optimizations, detailed knowledge which would help reverse engineer the hardware) is in the *driver* and not just the hardware/firmware. Thus my point.
This is especially true since no one is following an industry standard in making these cards, so they're splitting their "IP" between the hardware and its driver in their own arbitrary way. An industry standard interface on the other hand, typically moves most of the "IP" to the hardware/firmware, simplifying the interface and not forcing companies to reveal substantial details of their hardware, thus making an open specification possible in the first place.
Due to the nature of their knowledge of how the hardware works (they make it after all), a FOSS driver without their optimization magic is effectively worthless anyway. No one will use it if a better optimized, higher-performing alternative was available.
And I think a common reply to this is - how far do you take this? Until you have a kernel with a GPLed binary module loader, and all of the hardware drivers in binary? The system loses the value of being open source then.
The Python language people have a saying I see a lot, something like: "Practicality beats purity". Linux's value is that the OS's *core* is open-source, I don't see how forcing all hardware *drivers* to be open source will help Linux any. In fact, doing so is probably the quickest way to kill Linux's future on the home desktop if thats what you really want. For roughly the same reasons that the Debian folk recently voted to keep "non-free", Linux should allow binary-only drivers. It doesn't mean condoning or agreeing with the reasoning behind them, its just a recognition of the current reality with some computer hardware, and a willingness to work with the rest of the world rather than turn this really neat OS into the primary weapon of a Jihad *against* the rest of the world.
High-end video cards aren't a "commodity" yet, there is no industry "standard" for 3D graphics capabilities like there is a PCI, EISA, or SCSI, for mass storage peripherals, or even the early standards for 2D graphics like CGA, EGA, and VGA. Until they do become a commodity with a standardized interface to the system, we are simply not going to see the major card makers open source their drivers because too much of their proprietary hardware's inner workings are exposed by the driver.
I don't like it, neither do you, but the point is that is the current reality. Now we can decide to "live and let live" and demonstrate FOSS's superiority by *example*, rather than through hostility, or we can politicise the Linux kernel and end up ensuring that Linux doesn't work with any hardware that doesn't have an open standard interface method. In the long run the former will succeed much better than the latter, IMO, because unlike MS, we do not have dictatorial power over the market and can't force people to play by our rules. The latter will simply mean that high-end specialty hardware will simply not be available to Linux, resulting in many people having to stick with a proprietary OS because those are the only ones with drivers for their hardware. Working with the existing reality, and with its current limitations, at least means Linux can spread, along with the message about the advantages of open-source'd code. Lets save the Jihad for when Linux is in a much stronger position.
but I do say, that NVidia drivers suck bad, when compared to opensource ones for ATI
ATI doesn't have opensource drivers any more than Nvidia does. Yes, there is the unaccelerated version for Nvidia cards called "nv" which is part of XFree86, and ATI has DRI drivers for its older cards, but you CAN'T find an opensource driver implementing hardware-accelerated 3D from EITHER company for any of their RECENT cards.
That's actually the whole Unix philosphy, GNU Coreutils, piping commands from simple building blocks, from one stdout to another stdin, instead of having one single monolithic application that takes an hour to just fire up. Split it up.
While its a popular theory it isn't always followed however. Keep in mind the folks who give us the coreutils are also responsible for the operating system called Emacs.:)
the problem is, open source land has a MUCH higher than average population of socially stunted emotionally retarded assholes
And I suppose you have some survey results to back this claim up?
"i mean, who cares about those lusers anyway, right? whiny babies,
Maybe the problem is *where* you are asking for help, and *how* you are asking it. This complaint, and the other one, where they say everyone just says to use another distro, is not my experience from the Debian User's mailing list. Alas, it tends to have very heavy traffic now, and 20-30% is offtopic stuff, so I gave up on that a while back, and as with most other volunteer driven projects, there is no guarantee you will get a response, but they always tended to be helpful when the questioner seemed sincere, and wasn't just trolling.
ive given up on open source entirely until such a time as the developers start writing software for USERS and not just for themselves
Then you've given up on FOSS *permanently*.
I don't normally get involved in these Linux/UI/ease-of-use discussions as I think a lot of people on *both* sides are missing a fundamental distinction: FOSS developers are writing software for THEMSELVES because they ARE the users. So for the people waiting for the FOSS developers to write software *they* prefer, well, don't hold your breath. You're not paying the FOSS developers to write the software for you, so don't complain. If you can't stand it that they don't write their stuff for the lowest common denominator, whether thats hardware or user sophistication level, then there is always Windows.
Its unfortunate that there are zealots out there who try to make Linux out to be a silver bullet that will solve everyone's problems, but extremists are what you tend to have to deal with in any social movement, fortunately I believe they are a minority, but to get to the main point let me just say this: LINUX IS NOT A FREE RIDE! Don't come here expecting to get the same kind of service that you would get from a company you paid money to, this is a community driven effort, not one driven by profit, those who only *take* from the community and never give back, well frankly, we can do just fine without those folks anyway, since they don't help the community get better. If you want services and hand-holding, PAY A COMPANY TO PROVIDE YOU WITH THAT.
Yes, thats rough, I know, and I know what some of you went through, or are going through now, trying to learn Linux. I played with it off and on for more than a year, occasionally screwing up and starting over, sometimes giving up on it for days or weeks at a time, but I continued to learn, and by the time Debian had matured a little, I was ready for it. Now I only use Windows to play games that I can't get (yet) on Linux, and I find that with my hard earned knowledge I am more productive with it, and find it just as technically capable as Windows, but the situation I find myself in now was not gained FOR FREE! I spent time learning, and living with, and understanding, the UI shortcomings because I understand the motives of the developers apparently better than you.
FYI: I had very similar experience with CUPS that ESR had, so I wouldn't dismiss his rant completely, he just misses the point that I made above, and thats the problem I have with the folks on the other side of the fence: don't claim Linux is "equivalent" to Windows because it isn't! Right or wrong, MS has the advantage of being able to vertically integrate the OS with its "libraries" (which aren't in the MS world even considered libraries, they're thought of as parts of the OS itself), because they have dictatorial control over the OS and its user interface, and thus they can control not only the user's experience, but the application's experience as well. No dozens of duplicate, redundant support libraries, no conflicting, competing UI methods, there is only one way to do things and they get to
and it will run 10 times faster than the same Linux kernel running X
The reason is these DE's (desktop environments) aren't just a window manager. KDE and GNOME are both built on a foundation of extensive library code to handle things the user will never see or know about, right down to the basic widget libraries and addons to provide fundamental tools like glib in GNOME (providing an object infrastructure and unicode string handling).
The problem is no one sees the advantages of this monolithic approach unless they only use apps specifically designed for that DE. If you use only KDE apps on KDE, you'll notice how apps cooperate better with one another, and how some apps support drag and drop between them, etc. A lot of people however continue to use apps designed for *no* DE at all (and you can't say X by itself is a DE, its not even a window manager), and in those cases there is no benefit to the extra baggage brought in by the heavy DEs.
This is why I kinda see the argument between KDE and GNOME as being somewhat pointless, because what should really drive your consideration is what kind of *apps* you're going to use. If you're just using OO and Mozilla (or Firefox/Thunderbird) for most of your work, dump KDE AND GNOME and use something like Blackbox, XFCE, or Twm, which are relatively light, as they're nothing more than program launchers with the obligatory panel/task bar with clock, quick launch icons, etc, etc. If you're going to have the GTK libraries installed anyway for other apps, then XFCE is a good choice, as I've found that one to be the easiest to use of the alternative window manager / desktop environments that I've tried. Over the years I've basically experimented with every window manager thats in Debian's main distribution, and XFCE was the quickest and easiest to get set up, yet still light and relatively featureful. If you can get by without icons on the desktop, and can live with quick launch buttons from the panel/taskbar, then XFCE may all that you need.
When it comes to UIs, is anyone really originating? Little icons on a "desk top" and a pointing device moving a weird little hand to select them. Aren't we still using Xerox PARC's basic blueprint after all these years?
Besides, when it comes to a Linux UI, it is virtually a no-win situation. A third say we should clone Windows, A third say we should clone Apple, and a third say we should do something completely different. Its an endless argument with a majority agreement unlikely anytime soon.
I wasn't talking about charity or asking for things for free, you made all that up just as an excuse to start the name-calling. Another AC with nothing left to say but insults. Good-day.
Cable TV was built off of the community anntenae idea, literally a big ass antennae on top of a high point selling the better reception it gets. When greedy channels like ESPN showed up it was no longer a matter of selling access to your better ability to receive signals. Now that company has to pay greedy ESPN for their programming, and in turn resell it to the masses since after all it is a business not a charity.
So why can't I get *just* that from my CableCo? Just the stuff they pull off their big antenna that they don't have to charge me for (local stations plus whatever else they can get at no cost). For whatever reason, I can't. They are insisting on adding all this other junk that I'm paying for but don't want. Now whether its broken government regulation, or the CableCo lying about it, it seems pretty clear to me its not the fault of the consumer, who is simply being denied the service he/she wants, the *very* service that the CableCo's were created to provide.
I gave up on cable a couple of years ago when I realized things were only going to get worse, not better. The fundamental problem is that there is a middleman between me and the content provider, whatever the reason for his existance is, notwithstanding. Between the middleman and government regulation (whether necessary or not) I will never be able to get *what* I want, *when* I want it. There is no immediate solution to this problem, but in the long run, when content providers discover they can bypass the middleman and sell directly to the consumer, via the net, the problem goes away. The net is the ultimate equalizer when it comes to allowing content makers to *directly* reach their consumers, ultimately allowing the consumers to decide (by voting with their money) how the content provider "packages" the content.
Imagine the content provider, say the company responsible for the production of the show "CSI" for example, offering direct subscriptions to their show over the net, which can be streamed to you when you're ready to see it. No more missing episodes either, all previous episodes could be made available for some small fee as well. They can even provide advertising supported content, with the advertising "built-in" to the content as with broadcast TV today, which should mean a low cost for delivery, and the content provider could provide the same content without advertising for a premium. It would also mean the good stuff would stop disappearing after awhile, though everyone has a different idea of what "good stuff" is.:) For example, I probably won't see it my lifetime, but I dream of the day I can go online and watch the episodes of the sitcom, "MASH 4077th", which I haven't seen in years, and watch them in order, from the beginning, perhaps starting with the original movie, and maybe also the original pilot for the series if that still exists. The point being that the stuff can stay online indefinitely, and therefore stay "alive" indefinitely, instead of disappearing basically forever 15 or 20 years after it was made, when the middlemen decide to stop carrying it.
Of course, we need a bigger pipe, and the cost of that pipe will still be an issue. Considering how difficult it has been for broadband to gain a foothold here in the US (typically much more expensive here than in say Japan or S. Korea, and maybe Europe too, don't know for sure about the latter, this is also not going to happen anytime soon, but what is obvious to me is that internet has the potential to eliminate a *lot* of middlemen from a *lot* of industries, allowing the creator/producer of a product to directly deal with the consumers of the product on a global scale.
Believing that the human failures that resulted in Chernobyl are only present under communist governments, or that a capitalist system is somehow magically immune to such human failures of reasoning, is dangerous and quite frankly terrifying.
I never said this. A capitalist system is not immune, true, but our system did have something the communist system didn't: a legal system that allows the public to 1) sue someone, including the government, for monetary damages if they are injured by negligent action, and 2) try to block government actions due to the action violating existing law (in the US the basis is environmental law).
Because the public has a greater level of influence, in the West the standards for NPPs are dramatically more stringent than they were in the USSR. The risk of litigation also means that private companies involved in NPPs must be very careful in the design, construction, and operation of the plants, unlike the communist government that has no checks on its power, doesn't have to worry about lawsuits against it for negligent behavior, or a judicial system, that is essentially uncontrollable by the government, that can block the government's actions.
The fact still remains that the USSR built NPPs that would have been illegal in the West.
The mini reactor thing was about 6-8 months ago, the village hadn't started actually using the mini-reactor, they were just talking about it. A quick google shows this article, but I didn't see anything more recent about it (I didn't look very hard though, someone else may want to hunt around a little harder on this).
They actually want you to think he did something, other than give it lip service.
So the worst thing you can say therefore, is he did no more about the problem than either of the Bushes did.... so what's the point, besides being YATLCBR (Yet Another Tired, Lame, Clinton-Bashing Remark)?
As for trying to rewrite history, heck, both sides do that, the issue is how radical a change they try to make. Maybe you'd like to justify Ann Coulter's revisionist history of Joseph McCarthy?
You should actually read that resolution. Select 1441 from this list (its 1441, not 1440). Its a small pdf. It would be very enlightening for you, since you clearly don't know what it actually says.
This was a "final warning", yes, but the other members of the Security Council wanted the issue to come back to the Council to actually decide what to do if Iraq failed this last test. You can believe what you will about what they would have done if Iraq continued to defy them. Apparently I'm one of the few Americans who actually listend to what the other side was saying, and I think the SC would have eventually supported military action, if Bush had not acted like a spoiled brat. If you had actually listened to France and Germany, they weren't resisting war because they didn't see the necessity for it, privately they were saying that war was probably inevitable, and would have eventually supported it. In actuality, they were reacting to the obvious intent of Bush to attack no matter what the UN said, so it was Bush's arrogance that caused the resistance to the use of military force to flare up. Because of their concern over what the US appeared to be planning to do no matter what, they insisted on an additional paragraph in that resolution, which insisted the issue come back to the SC one last time, to decide on war.
Read section 12. The resolution would never have passed without this section. I'm still surprised by the number of Bush defenders who don't realize that this resolution never specified what the conseqences of Iraqi failure to cooperate would be, BECAUSE THE REST OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL DID NOT CONSIDER THIS RESOLUTION TO AUTHORIZE WAR. Bush's lawyers said war was authorized by previous resolutions, and this last one was Iraq's last opportunity to avoid war, and that may all be technically correct, but it does not change the fact that Bush knew the INTENT of the other SC members was for the decision for war to be decided by the SC, not unilaterally by him. Publically Bush agreed to this resolution with section 12, and then promptly ignored it and the intent of the rest of the SC. In other words, Bush lied to the whole damn world when he agreed to that resolution because he had no intention of honoring its spirit. He is certainly not the man his father was.
A lot of the hatred towards America is unjustified, I agree, but Bush's behavior is responsible for the creation of a substantial amount of the anger against us in the last 2 years. We've got an arrogant ass for a President, whose managed to genuinely tick off most of the world against us, and yet there are so many Americans still wondering "Why are they so mad at us?". This is what happens when Americans blindly accept the press releases from the White House at face value, and don't pay attention to what the other side is saying (which in this case was practically the rest of the world).
Saddam himself "manipulated" the embargo for his own political purposes far more than anyone else did. The Iraqis who suffered, did so because SH wanted them to for political gain, not because anyone outside Iraq actually wanted the Iraqi people to suffer.
The American news media never discusses the content of Bin Laden's or Al-Zawahiri's messages
Umm, not true.
That foreign policy discussion is one I would love this country to have...but it doesn't look like it's going to happen
We have had, and we continue to have it almost constantly. The problem the Jew-bashers here have is that a majority of Americans continue to fundamentally support Israel (not necessarily any given Israeli *government*, but the country's people). No amount of anti-semitism and Arab propaganda seems to change their minds... how strange.
This would have been a wonderful rant except for the fact that Bin Laden, and everyone who is actually trying to *kill* Americans, don't give a *damn* about air pollution.
Slashdot Mirror
That didn't stop them the first time did it?
Chronic Major Depression *is* a "real problem", just ask those who suffer from it, or the families of its victims. Without a "psychoactive mood enhancer" (known to those who need them as "anti-depressants"), many people *would* die (by their own hand). That some may abuse the drug doesn't change the fact it has a valid medical purpose. Prozac saves lives too, genius.
By this definition, the entire Republican Party is insane....... hmmm...... you may have a valid point after all! [ducks and covers]
Well said. I would also add the point that a lot of people seem to be missing, and that is Sun controls the Java *trademark* as well, and no one is suggesting they give that up. They can use the trademark alone to prevent fragmentation, by being able to control who can and can't call their product "Java" or "Java compatible". No one is suggesting Sun give up their ability to certify products, what everyone is suggesting they do is open up their software license enough to allow Java to be used on (and distributable with) open platforms like the BSDs and Linux.
What the critics need to see is what to the rest of us see, and that is Java increasingly and inevitably becoming irrelevent in the face of Microsoft's steamroller. Java is not going away anytime soon, but it also is not becoming any more influential or relevent either. Now Sun can keep their baby close to their breast in an attempt to protect it, but that reaction we see in the long run as simply delaying the inevitable "fade into history". If Sun ever wants a piece of the desktop action for Java it *must* do something radical to make that even a possibility. Considering Microsoft's monopoly strength, there is really only one possibilty for success, and its obvious when you look at the only thing right now in existance which really scares Microsoft: Open Source. If Java goes open source, it will gain momentum, energy, new converts, and new hackers that will push it a lot further than it will ever get on its own now. Sun needs the energy and support of the FOSS community for the same reasons that IBM is tapping into that resource.
The real question is "Is Sun really competing against Microsoft anymore?" They've cozied up to their former enemy and now are saying spiteful things about Red Hat (and Open Source by implication), so it sounds to me like this open source thing is just talk from them, I don't believe they'll actually do it, because I suspect they consider FOSS their biggest enemy, not Microsoft. This means that as long as Java remains the overly protected child of Sun, and Sun never groks the value of FOSS the way IBM has, then it, Java, is destined to just fade away, and never become the force it could have been.
Finally, will all the critics who claim every time the Java issue comes up that we argue for open sourcing it because "we just want something for free" please shut up? Java is already free for use, and if I wanted to steal ideas or code (illegally), I could already do that since most of Java's source is already accessible. (There is not anything fundamentally new or unique in Java anyway; its just a well designed implementation of an old idea. P-code anyone?) Besides, I myself actually prefer Python over Java anyway, and since Java remains a non-starter on the desktop, it is not a great concern of mine. The problem is not that Java isn't free or that it has something the FOSS community wants, the problem is that its not *Free*, and as long as that is the case, a majority of the FOSS community is simply *not* *interested* in it.
Very well put. And to think of all the flamewars that occur over this subtle, fundamentally minor, difference.
Uhm, how exactly is the OP trolling here, moderators? I've got a buck that says the moderator calling this a troll is from the Windows world.
:)
It makes perfect sense to me, and it goes hand in hand with those of us wanting to see less bloat and more functionality. For example, my (audio) media player? Its the ext2fs filesystem (how I organize my audio "libraries"), midnight commander (how I browse and select what I want to hear), and ogg123 (the codec). Works like a charm, and you certainly can't say its bloated.
I mean, just where exactly is it written (other than the Good Book of Microsoft) that the media player (audio or even video) *has* to be a bloated, glitzy, graphical app to be *functional*? Geez...
The second paragraph kinda contradicts the first paragraph, and besides, I was thinking of the issues you mentioned in the second paragraph anyway. Yes, the registers themselves may not reveal much, and with some hardware knowing how the registers get used may not tell you anything at all, it all depends on how sophisticated the hardware/firmware is, and it is my understanding that these 3D accelerated video cards are *exceedingly* complex, and so is their drivers, meaning that a lot of "IP" (algorithms, optimizations, detailed knowledge which would help reverse engineer the hardware) is in the *driver* and not just the hardware/firmware. Thus my point.
This is especially true since no one is following an industry standard in making these cards, so they're splitting their "IP" between the hardware and its driver in their own arbitrary way. An industry standard interface on the other hand, typically moves most of the "IP" to the hardware/firmware, simplifying the interface and not forcing companies to reveal substantial details of their hardware, thus making an open specification possible in the first place.
Due to the nature of their knowledge of how the hardware works (they make it after all), a FOSS driver without their optimization magic is effectively worthless anyway. No one will use it if a better optimized, higher-performing alternative was available.
The Python language people have a saying I see a lot, something like: "Practicality beats purity". Linux's value is that the OS's *core* is open-source, I don't see how forcing all hardware *drivers* to be open source will help Linux any. In fact, doing so is probably the quickest way to kill Linux's future on the home desktop if thats what you really want. For roughly the same reasons that the Debian folk recently voted to keep "non-free", Linux should allow binary-only drivers. It doesn't mean condoning or agreeing with the reasoning behind them, its just a recognition of the current reality with some computer hardware, and a willingness to work with the rest of the world rather than turn this really neat OS into the primary weapon of a Jihad *against* the rest of the world.
High-end video cards aren't a "commodity" yet, there is no industry "standard" for 3D graphics capabilities like there is a PCI, EISA, or SCSI, for mass storage peripherals, or even the early standards for 2D graphics like CGA, EGA, and VGA. Until they do become a commodity with a standardized interface to the system, we are simply not going to see the major card makers open source their drivers because too much of their proprietary hardware's inner workings are exposed by the driver.
I don't like it, neither do you, but the point is that is the current reality. Now we can decide to "live and let live" and demonstrate FOSS's superiority by *example*, rather than through hostility, or we can politicise the Linux kernel and end up ensuring that Linux doesn't work with any hardware that doesn't have an open standard interface method. In the long run the former will succeed much better than the latter, IMO, because unlike MS, we do not have dictatorial power over the market and can't force people to play by our rules. The latter will simply mean that high-end specialty hardware will simply not be available to Linux, resulting in many people having to stick with a proprietary OS because those are the only ones with drivers for their hardware. Working with the existing reality, and with its current limitations, at least means Linux can spread, along with the message about the advantages of open-source'd code. Lets save the Jihad for when Linux is in a much stronger position.
ATI doesn't have opensource drivers any more than Nvidia does. Yes, there is the unaccelerated version for Nvidia cards called "nv" which is part of XFree86, and ATI has DRI drivers for its older cards, but you CAN'T find an opensource driver implementing hardware-accelerated 3D from EITHER company for any of their RECENT cards.
While its a popular theory it isn't always followed however. Keep in mind the folks who give us the coreutils are also responsible for the operating system called Emacs.
And I suppose you have some survey results to back this claim up?
Maybe the problem is *where* you are asking for help, and *how* you are asking it. This complaint, and the other one, where they say everyone just says to use another distro, is not my experience from the Debian User's mailing list. Alas, it tends to have very heavy traffic now, and 20-30% is offtopic stuff, so I gave up on that a while back, and as with most other volunteer driven projects, there is no guarantee you will get a response, but they always tended to be helpful when the questioner seemed sincere, and wasn't just trolling.
Then you've given up on FOSS *permanently*.
I don't normally get involved in these Linux/UI/ease-of-use discussions as I think a lot of people on *both* sides are missing a fundamental distinction: FOSS developers are writing software for THEMSELVES because they ARE the users. So for the people waiting for the FOSS developers to write software *they* prefer, well, don't hold your breath. You're not paying the FOSS developers to write the software for you, so don't complain. If you can't stand it that they don't write their stuff for the lowest common denominator, whether thats hardware or user sophistication level, then there is always Windows.
Its unfortunate that there are zealots out there who try to make Linux out to be a silver bullet that will solve everyone's problems, but extremists are what you tend to have to deal with in any social movement, fortunately I believe they are a minority, but to get to the main point let me just say this: LINUX IS NOT A FREE RIDE! Don't come here expecting to get the same kind of service that you would get from a company you paid money to, this is a community driven effort, not one driven by profit, those who only *take* from the community and never give back, well frankly, we can do just fine without those folks anyway, since they don't help the community get better. If you want services and hand-holding, PAY A COMPANY TO PROVIDE YOU WITH THAT.
Yes, thats rough, I know, and I know what some of you went through, or are going through now, trying to learn Linux. I played with it off and on for more than a year, occasionally screwing up and starting over, sometimes giving up on it for days or weeks at a time, but I continued to learn, and by the time Debian had matured a little, I was ready for it. Now I only use Windows to play games that I can't get (yet) on Linux, and I find that with my hard earned knowledge I am more productive with it, and find it just as technically capable as Windows, but the situation I find myself in now was not gained FOR FREE! I spent time learning, and living with, and understanding, the UI shortcomings because I understand the motives of the developers apparently better than you.
FYI: I had very similar experience with CUPS that ESR had, so I wouldn't dismiss his rant completely, he just misses the point that I made above, and thats the problem I have with the folks on the other side of the fence: don't claim Linux is "equivalent" to Windows because it isn't! Right or wrong, MS has the advantage of being able to vertically integrate the OS with its "libraries" (which aren't in the MS world even considered libraries, they're thought of as parts of the OS itself), because they have dictatorial control over the OS and its user interface, and thus they can control not only the user's experience, but the application's experience as well. No dozens of duplicate, redundant support libraries, no conflicting, competing UI methods, there is only one way to do things and they get to
The reason is these DE's (desktop environments) aren't just a window manager. KDE and GNOME are both built on a foundation of extensive library code to handle things the user will never see or know about, right down to the basic widget libraries and addons to provide fundamental tools like glib in GNOME (providing an object infrastructure and unicode string handling).
The problem is no one sees the advantages of this monolithic approach unless they only use apps specifically designed for that DE. If you use only KDE apps on KDE, you'll notice how apps cooperate better with one another, and how some apps support drag and drop between them, etc. A lot of people however continue to use apps designed for *no* DE at all (and you can't say X by itself is a DE, its not even a window manager), and in those cases there is no benefit to the extra baggage brought in by the heavy DEs.
This is why I kinda see the argument between KDE and GNOME as being somewhat pointless, because what should really drive your consideration is what kind of *apps* you're going to use. If you're just using OO and Mozilla (or Firefox/Thunderbird) for most of your work, dump KDE AND GNOME and use something like Blackbox, XFCE, or Twm, which are relatively light, as they're nothing more than program launchers with the obligatory panel/task bar with clock, quick launch icons, etc, etc. If you're going to have the GTK libraries installed anyway for other apps, then XFCE is a good choice, as I've found that one to be the easiest to use of the alternative window manager / desktop environments that I've tried. Over the years I've basically experimented with every window manager thats in Debian's main distribution, and XFCE was the quickest and easiest to get set up, yet still light and relatively featureful. If you can get by without icons on the desktop, and can live with quick launch buttons from the panel/taskbar, then XFCE may all that you need.
When it comes to UIs, is anyone really originating? Little icons on a "desk top" and a pointing device moving a weird little hand to select them. Aren't we still using Xerox PARC's basic blueprint after all these years?
Besides, when it comes to a Linux UI, it is virtually a no-win situation. A third say we should clone Windows, A third say we should clone Apple, and a third say we should do something completely different. Its an endless argument with a majority agreement unlikely anytime soon.
I wasn't talking about charity or asking for things for free, you made all that up just as an excuse to start the name-calling. Another AC with nothing left to say but insults. Good-day.
Sure, they aren't the same as the Democrat's "big socialist friends", but they like to spend our money just the same, only on different things.
So why can't I get *just* that from my CableCo? Just the stuff they pull off their big antenna that they don't have to charge me for (local stations plus whatever else they can get at no cost). For whatever reason, I can't. They are insisting on adding all this other junk that I'm paying for but don't want. Now whether its broken government regulation, or the CableCo lying about it, it seems pretty clear to me its not the fault of the consumer, who is simply being denied the service he/she wants, the *very* service that the CableCo's were created to provide.
Somebody should mod the parent up.
:) For example, I probably won't see it my lifetime, but I dream of the day I can go online and watch the episodes of the sitcom, "MASH 4077th", which I haven't seen in years, and watch them in order, from the beginning, perhaps starting with the original movie, and maybe also the original pilot for the series if that still exists. The point being that the stuff can stay online indefinitely, and therefore stay "alive" indefinitely, instead of disappearing basically forever 15 or 20 years after it was made, when the middlemen decide to stop carrying it.
I gave up on cable a couple of years ago when I realized things were only going to get worse, not better. The fundamental problem is that there is a middleman between me and the content provider, whatever the reason for his existance is, notwithstanding. Between the middleman and government regulation (whether necessary or not) I will never be able to get *what* I want, *when* I want it. There is no immediate solution to this problem, but in the long run, when content providers discover they can bypass the middleman and sell directly to the consumer, via the net, the problem goes away. The net is the ultimate equalizer when it comes to allowing content makers to *directly* reach their consumers, ultimately allowing the consumers to decide (by voting with their money) how the content provider "packages" the content.
Imagine the content provider, say the company responsible for the production of the show "CSI" for example, offering direct subscriptions to their show over the net, which can be streamed to you when you're ready to see it. No more missing episodes either, all previous episodes could be made available for some small fee as well. They can even provide advertising supported content, with the advertising "built-in" to the content as with broadcast TV today, which should mean a low cost for delivery, and the content provider could provide the same content without advertising for a premium. It would also mean the good stuff would stop disappearing after awhile, though everyone has a different idea of what "good stuff" is.
Of course, we need a bigger pipe, and the cost of that pipe will still be an issue. Considering how difficult it has been for broadband to gain a foothold here in the US (typically much more expensive here than in say Japan or S. Korea, and maybe Europe too, don't know for sure about the latter, this is also not going to happen anytime soon, but what is obvious to me is that internet has the potential to eliminate a *lot* of middlemen from a *lot* of industries, allowing the creator/producer of a product to directly deal with the consumers of the product on a global scale.
I never said this. A capitalist system is not immune, true, but our system did have something the communist system didn't: a legal system that allows the public to 1) sue someone, including the government, for monetary damages if they are injured by negligent action, and 2) try to block government actions due to the action violating existing law (in the US the basis is environmental law).
Because the public has a greater level of influence, in the West the standards for NPPs are dramatically more stringent than they were in the USSR. The risk of litigation also means that private companies involved in NPPs must be very careful in the design, construction, and operation of the plants, unlike the communist government that has no checks on its power, doesn't have to worry about lawsuits against it for negligent behavior, or a judicial system, that is essentially uncontrollable by the government, that can block the government's actions.
The fact still remains that the USSR built NPPs that would have been illegal in the West.
Minor correction (responding to myself):
The mini reactor thing was about 6-8 months ago, the village hadn't started actually using the mini-reactor, they were just talking about it. A quick google shows this article, but I didn't see anything more recent about it (I didn't look very hard though, someone else may want to hunt around a little harder on this).
So the worst thing you can say therefore, is he did no more about the problem than either of the Bushes did.... so what's the point, besides being YATLCBR (Yet Another Tired, Lame, Clinton-Bashing Remark)?
As for trying to rewrite history, heck, both sides do that, the issue is how radical a change they try to make. Maybe you'd like to justify Ann Coulter's revisionist history of Joseph McCarthy?
The question is whether Bush has any sense of right and wrong. Read my other post on this.
It wasn't an "express order", but read my other post on this.
You should actually read that resolution. Select 1441 from this list (its 1441, not 1440). Its a small pdf. It would be very enlightening for you, since you clearly don't know what it actually says.
This was a "final warning", yes, but the other members of the Security Council wanted the issue to come back to the Council to actually decide what to do if Iraq failed this last test. You can believe what you will about what they would have done if Iraq continued to defy them. Apparently I'm one of the few Americans who actually listend to what the other side was saying, and I think the SC would have eventually supported military action, if Bush had not acted like a spoiled brat. If you had actually listened to France and Germany, they weren't resisting war because they didn't see the necessity for it, privately they were saying that war was probably inevitable, and would have eventually supported it. In actuality, they were reacting to the obvious intent of Bush to attack no matter what the UN said, so it was Bush's arrogance that caused the resistance to the use of military force to flare up. Because of their concern over what the US appeared to be planning to do no matter what, they insisted on an additional paragraph in that resolution, which insisted the issue come back to the SC one last time, to decide on war.
Read section 12. The resolution would never have passed without this section. I'm still surprised by the number of Bush defenders who don't realize that this resolution never specified what the conseqences of Iraqi failure to cooperate would be, BECAUSE THE REST OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL DID NOT CONSIDER THIS RESOLUTION TO AUTHORIZE WAR. Bush's lawyers said war was authorized by previous resolutions, and this last one was Iraq's last opportunity to avoid war, and that may all be technically correct, but it does not change the fact that Bush knew the INTENT of the other SC members was for the decision for war to be decided by the SC, not unilaterally by him. Publically Bush agreed to this resolution with section 12, and then promptly ignored it and the intent of the rest of the SC. In other words, Bush lied to the whole damn world when he agreed to that resolution because he had no intention of honoring its spirit. He is certainly not the man his father was.
A lot of the hatred towards America is unjustified, I agree, but Bush's behavior is responsible for the creation of a substantial amount of the anger against us in the last 2 years. We've got an arrogant ass for a President, whose managed to genuinely tick off most of the world against us, and yet there are so many Americans still wondering "Why are they so mad at us?". This is what happens when Americans blindly accept the press releases from the White House at face value, and don't pay attention to what the other side is saying (which in this case was practically the rest of the world).
Saddam himself "manipulated" the embargo for his own political purposes far more than anyone else did. The Iraqis who suffered, did so because SH wanted them to for political gain, not because anyone outside Iraq actually wanted the Iraqi people to suffer.
Umm, not true.
We have had, and we continue to have it almost constantly. The problem the Jew-bashers here have is that a majority of Americans continue to fundamentally support Israel (not necessarily any given Israeli *government*, but the country's people). No amount of anti-semitism and Arab propaganda seems to change their minds... how strange.
This would have been a wonderful rant except for the fact that Bin Laden, and everyone who is actually trying to *kill* Americans, don't give a *damn* about air pollution.