Bill Gates, on the other hand, has never innovat[ed], nor has his company innovat[ed].
This pattern was set right from the beginning: Copy, clone, buy -- BASIC, DOS, Windows itself. The products they decided to clone were rarely the best of the bunch, so they don't show taste (as Jobs himself famously remarked*); and the company has pursued that trail of mediocrity until today. I don't think there is any category where M$ actually has the best product. All they have is volume, and most of that achieved illegally.
* Triumph of the Nerds - "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product..."
when will you offer either a 'naked' Thinkpad, or one that comes preinstalled with Linux (or FreeBSD) for us who want a real workstation
Well, you can order IBM's servers with either SuSE Linux Enterprise Server or RHEL. Their workstations can be ordered with RHEL.
For ThinkPad you'd need to visit Lenovo, and sadly it seems you're right: So far Microcrud only. They've even sold their soul Dell-like to the extent of "recommending" it on the home page. Send them a complaint!:)
what are the new features that come out of a full version release
Since you have have only been testing the features that are in the beta, there would not normally be anything new in a final release (which would not include anything untested). It's just a labelling change to indicate that 'this has been heavily used and meets our criteria for a finished release'. Look for the next beta for testable new features:-)
Together with InDesign and Illustrator, this would round out a complete Linux publishing solution that any professional could sit down at and get productive. I have prayed for this for most of the years I was working in graphic arts.
But if they don't come to the party - that's OK: We'll just keep polishing GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape etc until they start seriously eating into Adobe's monopoly (same way M$ lost the server market). Your move, Adobe!
the cheapest way to fight it is to make it practically illegal
I remember now. Thanks. My brain just resists being made to work that way.
Apart from keeping sight of the interests of end users in all this (which are clearly not served by software patents), and wondering why it should only be legal to be paid to work on proprietary products and not on open source ones -- we should also try and not let them blur the distinction between:
threaten = 'might steal from'
threaten = 'we might lose sales'
But what would capitalism be, without the grand old tradition of lobbying, cajoling and hoodwinking legislators into protecting private interests? Let M$ et al compete on their merits. Any other basis would be an unacceptable distortion of the market. If they lose some sales to a better alternative, well, they certainly had it coming.
Let's accept, for the moment, the position that what should be protected (by copyright) is the expression or implementation of an idea/algorithm, and that an idea/algorithm -- like a mathematical theorem -- cannot sensibly be 'patented'.
Then how can it possibly follow that Open Source threatens proprietary software producers? By definition Open Source code is freely inspectable by anyone for copyright infringement against proprietary code (obtained in some unspecified way).
The SCO 'case' founders on the same rock: It's all there, published, and so false claims cannot be made against it.
On the other hand, proprietary products routinely infringe licenses to steal code -- justifiably and reasonably copyrighted expressions or implementations -- from Open Source projects. So who's threatening whom? This software patents farrago is insupportable lunacy from beginning to end.
Hubris and arrogance are diminishing Australia and our
reputation around the world,writes Richard Woolcott.
Richard Woolcott AC is a former senior Australian
diplomat, ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of the
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Australia today is not the country I represented with pride for
some 40 years. This country of such great potential risks becoming
a land of fading promise.
Australians can be proud of the generous and compassionate
response last year to the disastrous tsunami and the Indonesian and
Pakistani earthquakes. The economy finished 2005 on a strong note.
Importantly, we secured attendance at the first East Asian summit
in Kuala Lumpur after signing, belatedly and somewhat ungraciously,
the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Co-operation. Unlike the United
States and Britain, our armed forces have avoided serious
casualties in Iraq. But none of this should permit complacency as
this new year unfolds.
We have seen Australian democracy diminished by government
hubris and arrogance, opposition weakness and a curious public
detachment and apathy. Our national self-respect has also been
eroded by our excessively deferential attitude to the Bush
Administration's foreign and security policy, especially in Iraq.
The revelations about the Australian Wheat Board's dealings with
Iraq under Saddam and the Government's links with the Board, make
its proper opposition to corruption and its demands for good
governance, especially in the South Pacific, look hollow. Moreover,
truth in Government has yet to be restored.
"Our nation's standing abroad has never been higher," John
Howard said in his New Year message. Australia is quite widely
regarded overseas as a tolerant, generous and egalitarian society.
The strength of our economy lends some credibility to Howard's
boast. It is also true of the attitudes of the Bush Administration
and the Blair and Koizumi governments but those three leaders will
soon pass into history.
If, however, we are so well respected in the wider international
community, how is it that we have been unable to gain election to
the UN Security Council for more than 20 years now? I suspect it is
because there is a darker underside to our image.
I travelled extensively in 2005 and I observed how our standing
has been undermined in much of the international community and some
important countries in our own region. Our standing is suffering
because of a recrudescence of those atavistic currents of racism
and intolerance that we have inherited from our past. Given the
history of the White Australia policy and the colonial
dispossession of the Aboriginal population, opposition to racism
and intolerance requires strong and continuous political
leadership, rather than any hint of opportunistic, politically
motivated tolerance of such prejudices. Multiculturalism, which is
irreversible, should be promoted by the Coalition Government; not
simply tolerated.
The Iraq war that, leaving aside human casualties, is now
anticipated to cost as much as an obscene $US2 trillion ($A2.6
trillion), remains an albatross around the necks of the invaders.
The rationalisation for invading Iraq, which changed from removing
weapons of mass destruction that Iraq did not possess, to
liberating the people from Saddam's dictatorship and now to "stay
the course", has some ethical force but it is not justification for
such a destructive and costly conflict.
Even a benign outcome in Iraq - in the event it can be achieved
- will still need to be set by future historians against the
catastrophic consequences of the war for Iraq's civilian
population, its devastated infrastructure, the marked increase in
global terrorist activities and the increased opposition it has
generated globally towards our alliance partner. With our
participation
His last few films have been very much geared toward propping up the ideals of the state. --Painting the law to look like an immovable edifice we must all simply accept regardless of how fair or unfair the law really is. And that any defiance which happens, must do so within the boundaries set out by the law itself. --All the while, sending the message that deviating from those boundaries will inevitably lead to punishment, and that happiness and reward can only come when one gives up independence and chooses to align themselves with the state.
There is a startling irony in the fact that Spielberg has chosen to "adapt" so many Philip K. Dick works to film, as PKD himself -- like Orwell -- was only too aware of the power of language and literature to serve a malign state. In a 1978 speech, How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, in discussing his struggle to define 'reality', he stated:
But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups -- and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And -- cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Baretta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.
... The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep- learning.
His second preoccupation, after 'what is reality?', is the question of 'what is the authentic human?', and the definition he gives is eerily relevant today, as we face appalling evidence of state-sanctioned torture and endless murder, thievery and deception by governments we are indoctrinated to trust. As PKD imagines Nixon's fortune cookie might have read, "DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A WAY OF BEING FOUND OUT":
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnot
- I wish i was a major corparation so i could be above the law.
You're already above the dictionary.
Moderators: Before you mod this Offtopic, consider this - wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot had an "Offtopic" thread, like Groklaw does, so that people like me who have to get some irrelevant remark of their chests, can do so in a clean, well-lit place, without having their karma repossessed? Just an (offtopic:) thought.
Those who can't detect the pungent propagandist subtext of Spielberg: Well, it's too late for them, isn't it. It must have worked. Fuck the moderators. I don't have mod points for you so I post this instead:
I agree wholeheartedly with your readings of all the above -- except I have not seen Saving Private Ryan (and I regret seeing all the others, and will actively avoid poison like Munich).
However I would add, to your criticism of Terminal, that what was additionally offensive about the film's concept was that it took at least some of its premise from a real predicament suffered by a man in a Paris airport, while apparently suffering all the usual "Americans won't watch this unless we set it in an American city" cop-outs. So, something that might have had some factual merit is converted into fecal fiction as per formula. I don't know whether that was acknowledged, because frankly the combination of Hanks and Spielberg was too nauseating to watch (it was an in-flight movie, I'd never actually enter a theatre for Spielberg's dreck).
My qualms about War of the Worlds - which I saw moments of, again in-flight - are here.
Drive the share price down, down, down, so that his buddies can come in and snap up what's left of Telstra at a bargain price.
He's already gutted the senior management and installed his amigos.
The copper network is on the block to Ericsson (isn't that one bit of infrastructure that common sense would keep Australian owned??)
And in best crooked Republican style he's cutting brazen insider deals with his cronies such as the American Brightstar no-public-tender-process-for-us boondoggle, cutting out local supplier Australia Post but shipping his American pals huge profit margins.
I've been an iPrimus ADSL residential and business customer since their first ADSL product - which was 1.5Mbit, unlimited data, for something around A$120/month - an absolute bargain at the time (2001). They soon realised that unlimited data was an unsupportable offer and drastically restricted it (along with all other ISPs).
Anyway, the plans cited above are competitive with other major ISPs: Netspace's comparable plan is $69.95, though quotas rise to 50GB (split between peak and off-peak). Bigpond offers a 512kbps 'unlimited' (really 10GB, after that, it slows to 64kbps) also from $69.95. Their 20GB/1.5Mbps plan starts from $129.95, or more than 8 times the service in Toronto (and it's still not unlimited). Internode's 40GB/512kbps is exactly the same price.
As for 'ii', do you have that service installed? Is it generally available like the other ADSL providers? Are you trying to compare apples and oranges? I'm discussing products available today, not ADSL2 and other exotics that might be available in the future.
internet penetration simply wasn't as good as Canada
Well, nothing has changed there. In Toronto I have 5 Mbit/sec (can get faster if I want) for CAD$50/month, unlimited data. During recent weeks in Australia, depending on location, the fastest available was 19.2kbps (country Victoria), 128kbps over ISDN (Hobart commuting distance), and the fastest connection I used was Melbourne CBD at 512kbps.
The latter service is a 'business' plan at A$170/month, but 512kbps ADSL is now available for as little as $29.95 per month but includes only 400MB of data! A realistic plan (12GB) would be $59.95, or corrected for speed, about twelve times the price of ADSL in Toronto.
I'd say you're pretty much right. M$ and most other US companies treat "the rest of the world" (Australia part of it) as a dumping ground for their junk, from movies to cars to wars to junk food to book and coffee chains... (Why the heck would an Australian buy their morning coffee from an American company instead of from the corner café? Can't Australians make coffee?)
Australia has the unfortunate tendency to blindly accept these imports - software being a significant and costly example. The so-called "Free Trade Agreement" codifies and enforces this disastrous situation (thankyou Mr Howard), right down to "fixing" our patent system and making our continent safe for US multinationals. The inevitable, if unmentionable, corollary is that local interests (such as the independent developer you mentioned) are completely compromised, as everyone knew they would be (hence the widespread protests).
Yet there are many talented Australians doing great work in Open Source. Thanks perhaps to its proximity to high-tech government and defense users, Canberra has produced many of the best known names in Linux and other free software projects - including Andrew Tridgell, Nick Piggin, and many others - and remains a hotbed of hardcore kernel hackers. In Victoria there are active Open Source representative groups and many intelligent supporters. However none of this has influenced public policy as much as one might hope.
Yes, much more activism and lobbying is going to be required to eject Microjunk from the default purchasing roster, and from the IT mindset. But I am not sure things are so much better in the US - perhaps the mindless M$-centric view has simply been all-too-successfully exported. Just one more indignity ensuing from a decade of Conservative rule. The destruction wrought by the Howard Government was a major factor in my belief that the country was hopelessly regressing, and my decision to leave Australia for a more progressive and much less US-centric society. If they ever get rid of that government, and restore egalitarian policies, maybe I'll go back.
Slashdot Mirror
This pattern was set right from the beginning: Copy, clone, buy -- BASIC, DOS, Windows itself. The products they decided to clone were rarely the best of the bunch, so they don't show taste (as Jobs himself famously remarked*); and the company has pursued that trail of mediocrity until today. I don't think there is any category where M$ actually has the best product. All they have is volume, and most of that achieved illegally.
As gsfprez recently said: "You run Windows. I get things done."
* Triumph of the Nerds - "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product..."
Well, you can order IBM's servers with either SuSE Linux Enterprise Server or RHEL. Their workstations can be ordered with RHEL.
For ThinkPad you'd need to visit Lenovo, and sadly it seems you're right: So far Microcrud only. They've even sold their soul Dell-like to the extent of "recommending" it on the home page. Send them a complaint! :)
I've wanted this for Linux for years. Together with iTunes... it could be very good for Apple's media platforms.
never mind
Since you have have only been testing the features that are in the beta, there would not normally be anything new in a final release (which would not include anything untested). It's just a labelling change to indicate that 'this has been heavily used and meets our criteria for a finished release'. Look for the next beta for testable new features :-)
n/t
I don't really care how much it costs them to port, or whether it ever makes them a cent. That wasn't the question.
Omigod ... let's hope they never read my post then! I had no idea of the danger I was in!
n/t
Together with InDesign and Illustrator, this would round out a complete Linux publishing solution that any professional could sit down at and get productive. I have prayed for this for most of the years I was working in graphic arts.
But if they don't come to the party - that's OK: We'll just keep polishing GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape etc until they start seriously eating into Adobe's monopoly (same way M$ lost the server market). Your move, Adobe!
There's also Tridgell's Myths about Samba.
You're new around here, aren't you...
Not much better place to embarrass yourself than on the front page of /. ... :)
I remember now. Thanks. My brain just resists being made to work that way.
Apart from keeping sight of the interests of end users in all this (which are clearly not served by software patents), and wondering why it should only be legal to be paid to work on proprietary products and not on open source ones -- we should also try and not let them blur the distinction between:
threaten = 'might steal from'
threaten = 'we might lose sales'
But what would capitalism be, without the grand old tradition of lobbying, cajoling and hoodwinking legislators into protecting private interests? Let M$ et al compete on their merits. Any other basis would be an unacceptable distortion of the market. If they lose some sales to a better alternative, well, they certainly had it coming.
Then how can it possibly follow that Open Source threatens proprietary software producers? By definition Open Source code is freely inspectable by anyone for copyright infringement against proprietary code (obtained in some unspecified way).
The SCO 'case' founders on the same rock: It's all there, published, and so false claims cannot be made against it.
On the other hand, proprietary products routinely infringe licenses to steal code -- justifiably and reasonably copyrighted expressions or implementations -- from Open Source projects. So who's threatening whom? This software patents farrago is insupportable lunacy from beginning to end.
There is a startling irony in the fact that Spielberg has chosen to "adapt" so many Philip K. Dick works to film, as PKD himself -- like Orwell -- was only too aware of the power of language and literature to serve a malign state. In a 1978 speech, How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, in discussing his struggle to define 'reality', he stated:
His second preoccupation, after 'what is reality?', is the question of 'what is the authentic human?', and the definition he gives is eerily relevant today, as we face appalling evidence of state-sanctioned torture and endless murder, thievery and deception by governments we are indoctrinated to trust. As PKD imagines Nixon's fortune cookie might have read, "DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A WAY OF BEING FOUND OUT":
You're already above the dictionary.
Moderators: Before you mod this Offtopic, consider this - wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot had an "Offtopic" thread, like Groklaw does, so that people like me who have to get some irrelevant remark of their chests, can do so in a clean, well-lit place, without having their karma repossessed? Just an (offtopic:) thought.
I agree wholeheartedly with your readings of all the above -- except I have not seen Saving Private Ryan (and I regret seeing all the others, and will actively avoid poison like Munich).
However I would add, to your criticism of Terminal, that what was additionally offensive about the film's concept was that it took at least some of its premise from a real predicament suffered by a man in a Paris airport, while apparently suffering all the usual "Americans won't watch this unless we set it in an American city" cop-outs. So, something that might have had some factual merit is converted into fecal fiction as per formula. I don't know whether that was acknowledged, because frankly the combination of Hanks and Spielberg was too nauseating to watch (it was an in-flight movie, I'd never actually enter a theatre for Spielberg's dreck).
My qualms about War of the Worlds - which I saw moments of, again in-flight - are here.
Why does Hollywood still exist.
He's already gutted the senior management and installed his amigos.
The copper network is on the block to Ericsson (isn't that one bit of infrastructure that common sense would keep Australian owned??)
And in best crooked Republican style he's cutting brazen insider deals with his cronies such as the American Brightstar no-public-tender-process-for-us boondoggle, cutting out local supplier Australia Post but shipping his American pals huge profit margins.
Who's paying? You work it out.
I've been an iPrimus ADSL residential and business customer since their first ADSL product - which was 1.5Mbit, unlimited data, for something around A$120/month - an absolute bargain at the time (2001). They soon realised that unlimited data was an unsupportable offer and drastically restricted it (along with all other ISPs).
Anyway, the plans cited above are competitive with other major ISPs: Netspace's comparable plan is $69.95, though quotas rise to 50GB (split between peak and off-peak). Bigpond offers a 512kbps 'unlimited' (really 10GB, after that, it slows to 64kbps) also from $69.95. Their 20GB/1.5Mbps plan starts from $129.95, or more than 8 times the service in Toronto (and it's still not unlimited). Internode's 40GB/512kbps is exactly the same price.
As for 'ii', do you have that service installed? Is it generally available like the other ADSL providers? Are you trying to compare apples and oranges? I'm discussing products available today, not ADSL2 and other exotics that might be available in the future.
Well, nothing has changed there. In Toronto I have 5 Mbit/sec (can get faster if I want) for CAD$50/month, unlimited data. During recent weeks in Australia, depending on location, the fastest available was 19.2kbps (country Victoria), 128kbps over ISDN (Hobart commuting distance), and the fastest connection I used was Melbourne CBD at 512kbps.
The latter service is a 'business' plan at A$170/month, but 512kbps ADSL is now available for as little as $29.95 per month but includes only 400MB of data! A realistic plan (12GB) would be $59.95, or corrected for speed, about twelve times the price of ADSL in Toronto.
Australia has the unfortunate tendency to blindly accept these imports - software being a significant and costly example. The so-called "Free Trade Agreement" codifies and enforces this disastrous situation (thankyou Mr Howard), right down to "fixing" our patent system and making our continent safe for US multinationals. The inevitable, if unmentionable, corollary is that local interests (such as the independent developer you mentioned) are completely compromised, as everyone knew they would be (hence the widespread protests).
Yet there are many talented Australians doing great work in Open Source. Thanks perhaps to its proximity to high-tech government and defense users, Canberra has produced many of the best known names in Linux and other free software projects - including Andrew Tridgell, Nick Piggin, and many others - and remains a hotbed of hardcore kernel hackers. In Victoria there are active Open Source representative groups and many intelligent supporters. However none of this has influenced public policy as much as one might hope.
Yes, much more activism and lobbying is going to be required to eject Microjunk from the default purchasing roster, and from the IT mindset. But I am not sure things are so much better in the US - perhaps the mindless M$-centric view has simply been all-too-successfully exported. Just one more indignity ensuing from a decade of Conservative rule. The destruction wrought by the Howard Government was a major factor in my belief that the country was hopelessly regressing, and my decision to leave Australia for a more progressive and much less US-centric society. If they ever get rid of that government, and restore egalitarian policies, maybe I'll go back.
Can't believe I wasted a karma point posting about it though. :(