Products can and are packaged like that. Ever heard of Gentoo, for instance? True that you are left staring at that "Next" button for a long time,;-) but it does work, there's no dependency hell and when it doesn't work, it's usually a bug in the app, not missing kernel header files or some such inanity. Under the GPL, you are supposed to have the sources. Why not use them?
Also, soccer mom doesn't need kernel upgrades, or tweaked kernels, or upgrades to apps. She needs security patches, no more, no less. Apps can and should stay the way they are because Aoccer mom doesn't really want to "upgrade". She wants things to JustWork(tm), 'cause she's a luddite.
we live in a world of local surpluses and scarcities.
In a world of local surplus or scarcity, one still cannot be in two places at once, so everything is still stacked in favor of competition.
How does a completely selfish, competitive creature ever give rise to a descendant that can't breed?
Easy. In doing so and totally controlling and ruthlessly exploiting the resulting sterile offspring, it ensures food, shelter and a healthy supply of workers and soliders for those few of its descendents which it lets become sexed. New swarms spawn each spring, each swarm with a young fertilized queen bee in it to carry the species' genes forward. These swarms settle down eventually in new hives and then compete (sometimes violently) for resources between themselves and with the parent swarm. How about if we start co-operating like the little bees? You can be my worker bee if you like. I'll make sure you are composted properly when you cease being able to work.
You sound as if you are very attached to the idea of competition, and uncomfortable with the idea of cooperation.
Not so, but I do resent these smarmy "oh it's Nature's way, let's all get along together" attitudes, because a. Evolution and the whole history of living things is all about bloody competition b. The way things are is not the best and should not be construed as such; rather, it's a local optimum and c. Nature does not exist per se and even if it did, it should not be antropomorphized and said to have ways and intents.
"for the species, fairness and reciprocity are more successful strategies than competition". What an oversized load of fertilizer. All living beings compete for the resources available in their environment. Obviously, competition is harshest where the niches/chosen resource gathering strategies of various beings overlap and guess what? Your ecological niche is the same as every other human's. That is why you are competing with other humans for a job, not with wolves for caribou meat. Not even highly social species with complex (and arguably efficient) organisation, like gorillas or bees do away with competition between peers.
Well, IO schedulers do matter a lot, for any user, whether they know it or not. IO scheduling directly affects how "fast" (responsive) the system feels to the desktop user and also has a huge impact on the performance of any server-type apps which may be running. People still rave about how BeOS was so great with multitasking, years later...
And that, my friend, is good(tm). I, for one, look forward to a new generation of brits who know everything there is to know about Big Brother. This education will be dearly paid, unfortunately. Otoh, how ironic, that the descendants of the people who stood up to Hitler are supporting the introduction of a police state even more draconic than his.
Hmm. Whoever modded this flamebait is not what I'd call an intelligent person. However, if the number of copies distributed illegally cannot be determined, there is no way to compute damages, right? What if I sue you for "numerous incidents of toe-stepping, leading to loss of income in an undetermined amount due to inability to work brought about by physical and emotional damage suffered as a result of said incidents" and demand $1000k? Should you be forced by the courts to pay the requested amount, with no recourse? Also, remember that it's a person being sued here, not a company. The defendant did not benefit in any way, because she wasn't selling the copyrighted stuff.
Ahh... I'm not usually that kind of a person but this time I'll do a bit of fantasizing. This deal adds much strength to Novell's position. Remember that they only promised to not sue Microsoft customers. What if, come Vista release day, Novell does a double take and says "Ok, your customers are safe, we said so ourselves, but in doing this deal you admitted to having infringed on $patents, so would you be so nice as to pony up a $hitload of cash in damages and oh, please also start paying us royalties for every Vista copy you sell from now on, kthnx?"
Erm. No. Most people who want to buy stuff... well, guess what, they want to just buy the stuff they need and be gone and they never ever give a rat's arse if your site is sooperdooper Web 2.0 or XML-enabled or LAMP or SOAP ow whatever l'acronyme du jour is. User expectation is that everything should be instantaneous... and why the heck not?
Yup. There's something deeply wrong with latter-day Ubuntu releases: they suck badly and don't work out of the box. Check the forums, you don't have to take my word for it.
Ok, here's MY scathing critique: Editors should be able to distinguish between PUBIC nuisances and PUBLIC nuisances. Perhaps the years of scratching their collective PUBES in PUBLIC -and thus establishing themselves as PUBLIC PUBIC nuisances- have dulled that ability.
We are there right now. Those nice digital tv set-top boxes? They write home with usage ionformation. Cars? Your authorized $car_company dealer gets and stores logs from your car's onboard computer every time you come in for a tune-up (it's called a maintenance record). Your PC? Well, if you manage to turn off whatever bit of MS Windows is trying to phone home today, more power to you, but remeber that all the data you transmit is at the mercy of your ISP. As for the rights that "cannot be signed away"... Newsflash: You *can* sign away all (or substantially all) your rights (e.g. if you join the army, but also in less extreme cases) and guess what? Privacy isn't a "right" at all, so no issue there (not if you live in the US anyway).
Keep in mind that yours is but one data point in the context of this discussion. OTOH... film at eleven. The better the spam fiters, the more spam there will be, to help beat the odds. It's a social phenomenon, like drugs or racketeering so it won't go away or diminish significantly unless and until society changes.
Hell yes. It is, in exactly the same way in which America's atomic spies, who passed on the bobmb secrets to the russkies, did the safe and ethical thing, in retrospect. If EVERY party can hack the election, there's a much lower chance that one will actually succeed in doing so.
Beautiful astroturfing, but no cookie. Microsoft is not "fixing the fundamental security problems in Windows" here. They're just trying to monopolize the market for what are, essentially, band-aids to cover their crappy buggy insecure operating systems. As for the idea that Microsoft's killing of the big vendors will allow the smaller ones to thrive, well, look at where the browser market... no, look at where the office software market is right now - nowhere. There is no competition to Microsoft, no third-party solution worth a damn and no, AbiWord doesn't count as a full-featured office environment and no, OO.org isn't even in the market, it being free and all. To my mind, these security companies are a necessary evil and Microsoft cannot and should not be relied upon for security, simply because there is almost no economic incentive for them to make their systems more secure and with dominance in the security market, there will be even less.
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Products can and are packaged like that. Ever heard of Gentoo, for instance? True that you are left staring at that "Next" button for a long time, ;-) but it does work, there's no dependency hell and when it doesn't work, it's usually a bug in the app, not missing kernel header files or some such inanity. Under the GPL, you are supposed to have the sources. Why not use them?
Also, soccer mom doesn't need kernel upgrades, or tweaked kernels, or upgrades to apps. She needs security patches, no more, no less. Apps can and should stay the way they are because Aoccer mom doesn't really want to "upgrade". She wants things to JustWork(tm), 'cause she's a luddite.
In a world of local surplus or scarcity, one still cannot be in two places at once, so everything is still stacked in favor of competition.
Easy. In doing so and totally controlling and ruthlessly exploiting the resulting sterile offspring, it ensures food, shelter and a healthy supply of workers and soliders for those few of its descendents which it lets become sexed. New swarms spawn each spring, each swarm with a young fertilized queen bee in it to carry the species' genes forward. These swarms settle down eventually in new hives and then compete (sometimes violently) for resources between themselves and with the parent swarm. How about if we start co-operating like the little bees? You can be my worker bee if you like. I'll make sure you are composted properly when you cease being able to work.
Not so, but I do resent these smarmy "oh it's Nature's way, let's all get along together" attitudes, because
a. Evolution and the whole history of living things is all about bloody competition
b. The way things are is not the best and should not be construed as such; rather, it's a local optimum and
c. Nature does not exist per se and even if it did, it should not be antropomorphized and said to have ways and intents.
Eh. Compression.
Damn I wish I had a mod point...
"for the species, fairness and reciprocity are more successful strategies than competition".
What an oversized load of fertilizer. All living beings compete for the resources available in their environment. Obviously, competition is harshest where the niches/chosen resource gathering strategies of various beings overlap and guess what? Your ecological niche is the same as every other human's. That is why you are competing with other humans for a job, not with wolves for caribou meat. Not even highly social species with complex (and arguably efficient) organisation, like gorillas or bees do away with competition between peers.
Well, IO schedulers do matter a lot, for any user, whether they know it or not. IO scheduling directly affects how "fast" (responsive) the system feels to the desktop user and also has a huge impact on the performance of any server-type apps which may be running. People still rave about how BeOS was so great with multitasking, years later...
And that, my friend, is good(tm). I, for one, look forward to a new generation of brits who know everything there is to know about Big Brother. This education will be dearly paid, unfortunately.
Otoh, how ironic, that the descendants of the people who stood up to Hitler are supporting the introduction of a police state even more draconic than his.
Yast?
Troll. Wish I had mod points. Go watch the video. "Desperately"? Pah.
Hmm. Whoever modded this flamebait is not what I'd call an intelligent person.
However, if the number of copies distributed illegally cannot be determined, there is no way to compute damages, right? What if I sue you for "numerous incidents of toe-stepping, leading to loss of income in an undetermined amount due to inability to work brought about by physical and emotional damage suffered as a result of said incidents" and demand $1000k? Should you be forced by the courts to pay the requested amount, with no recourse?
Also, remember that it's a person being sued here, not a company. The defendant did not benefit in any way, because she wasn't selling the copyrighted stuff.
Ahh... I'm not usually that kind of a person but this time I'll do a bit of fantasizing. This deal adds much strength to Novell's position. Remember that they only promised to not sue Microsoft customers. What if, come Vista release day, Novell does a double take and says "Ok, your customers are safe, we said so ourselves, but in doing this deal you admitted to having infringed on $patents, so would you be so nice as to pony up a $hitload of cash in damages and oh, please also start paying us royalties for every Vista copy you sell from now on, kthnx?"
Content yes. Application/framework, no.
Erm. No. Most people who want to buy stuff... well, guess what, they want to just buy the stuff they need and be gone and they never ever give a rat's arse if your site is sooperdooper Web 2.0 or XML-enabled or LAMP or SOAP ow whatever l'acronyme du jour is. User expectation is that everything should be instantaneous... and why the heck not?
Let's all have a poll of our own now... how long does your fave shop's site take to load? Would you consider a switch?
Yup. There's something deeply wrong with latter-day Ubuntu releases: they suck badly and don't work out of the box. Check the forums, you don't have to take my word for it.
Ok, here's MY scathing critique: Editors should be able to distinguish between PUBIC nuisances and PUBLIC nuisances. Perhaps the years of scratching their collective PUBES in PUBLIC -and thus establishing themselves as PUBLIC PUBIC nuisances- have dulled that ability.
We are there right now. Those nice digital tv set-top boxes? They write home with usage ionformation. Cars? Your authorized $car_company dealer gets and stores logs from your car's onboard computer every time you come in for a tune-up (it's called a maintenance record). Your PC? Well, if you manage to turn off whatever bit of MS Windows is trying to phone home today, more power to you, but remeber that all the data you transmit is at the mercy of your ISP.
As for the rights that "cannot be signed away"... Newsflash: You *can* sign away all (or substantially all) your rights (e.g. if you join the army, but also in less extreme cases) and guess what? Privacy isn't a "right" at all, so no issue there (not if you live in the US anyway).
Keep in mind that yours is but one data point in the context of this discussion. OTOH... film at eleven. The better the spam fiters, the more spam there will be, to help beat the odds. It's a social phenomenon, like drugs or racketeering so it won't go away or diminish significantly unless and until society changes.
You've stumbled upon the Gematria.
My experiences with xinit on Gentoo have been less felicitous...
No, HE wouldn't. Go read the Bible. Genocide and mass murder are quite ok when done by lawful representatives of the Chosen People.
Hell yes. It is, in exactly the same way in which America's atomic spies, who passed on the bobmb secrets to the russkies, did the safe and ethical thing, in retrospect. If EVERY party can hack the election, there's a much lower chance that one will actually succeed in doing so.
It's a recipe used in latter-day western movies...
Weeell... that should tell you a bit about just how cumbersome the current modes of mathematical expression are. It's an interface problem, really.
Beautiful astroturfing, but no cookie. Microsoft is not "fixing the fundamental security problems in Windows" here. They're just trying to monopolize the market for what are, essentially, band-aids to cover their crappy buggy insecure operating systems.
As for the idea that Microsoft's killing of the big vendors will allow the smaller ones to thrive, well, look at where the browser market... no, look at where the office software market is right now - nowhere. There is no competition to Microsoft, no third-party solution worth a damn and no, AbiWord doesn't count as a full-featured office environment and no, OO.org isn't even in the market, it being free and all.
To my mind, these security companies are a necessary evil and Microsoft cannot and should not be relied upon for security, simply because there is almost no economic incentive for them to make their systems more secure and with dominance in the security market, there will be even less.