I guess the moral of the story is that it just depends on the luck of the draw.
DVDs aren't a good example because the primary barrier to making them work on Linux is legal rather than technical. The only reason you had to download the tools to do so seperately is because the laws in the US are evil - If your DVD playing software is closed and proprietary then it's legal in the US. If it's open sourced then it's not and you have to download it from some other country.
Linux is not hard to use. It's hard to LEARN. It's very easy to USE in comparasin to Windows (I can't speak about Mac, not knowing much about it.) There is a difference. If the application is one you don't use very often, ease of learning is more important, but if it's an application you use every day, ease of use is more important even if it costs extra learning time.
Consider: Which would you rather *learn*, Notepad or vi? Now, which would you rather *use* if you had several hours of text editing to do a day?
I've read it. It doesn't change the fact that in *practice* the Libertarians (notice the capital L. I'm talking about the party here) favor corporations in legal battles regardless of the facts. Take Microsoft for example. The party's stance is that MS never did anything wrong.
The actual position is that the private sector, since it doesn't have the power to violate other people's rights (by definition)
Bullcrap. If I walk up to you and knife you in the back, then I, though a member of the "private sector", have successfully employed my power to violate your rights. Perhaps what you meant was that the private sector doesn't have the LEGAL power to violate other people's rights. If so, then that's only true because the the laws are set up to enforce it, and THAT's what's currently changing, BECAUSE of the flawed attitude that corporations can't do anything wrong.
That depends on if you mean the PARTY that calls itself "libertarian" or the name for a fuzzy idea that calls itself "libertarian". The party is quite gung-ho on corporations. Some people who claim the name "libertarian" but aren't in the party do not.
Me, I don't know what to call myself, but I know that I don't like the idea of giving corporations the legal rights of personhood when it's not physically possible to also give them the responsibilities of personhood. (The only punishment you can give a corporation when it does wrong is to fine it money. You can't throw it in prison. If a corporation kills somebody, it can't get "20-to-life with a chance for parole in 15 years". In the Dimitri Skylarov case, the individual was detained in a jail awaiting trial. In the more recent Elcomsoft case, the corporation was not similarly punatively treated because it's not even physically possible. Thus legal battles between individuals and corporations are always lopsided against the individual.
I didn't say the Libertarians were responsible. I said a particular belief they hold was responsible. This belief also happens to be held by a lot of other people, people who are not Libertarians, and that's how it came to be implemented. But only the Libertarians make this particular belief the primary cornerstone of their platform.
The Libertarians (note the capital L) have about as much to do with liberty as the Democrats have to do with Democracy and the Republicans have to do with keeping the nation a republic.
I disagree. Generally they do put out some decent stuff. I think what is happening is that they do not want to suffer the same fate as the RIAA.
What fate would that be? The fate of having more people buy the recordings than would otherwise have because they had a chance to hear them first? Granted, that hasn't been enough to compensate for their lost sales due to lost quality of content, but that's not a copying issue - more of a "clearchannel sucks" issue.
Look at the typical cost of a DVD or VHS of a movie. Look at the typical cost of an audio CD. They aren't that different, yet the movie took a lot more work to produce. That's why the sales for the MPAA are doing well in comparasin to the RIAA. The RIAA has a more insanely inflated markup percentage and consumers can sense that. $20 for a movie with optional commentary, deleted scenes, wide and narrow screen formats, and choice of captions is worth it. $15 for 60 minutes of audio-only music is not.
For the first time you have a true alternative to the hierarchical file system at the OS level.
Cool. But how can you mash this into a filename string so it works with everything else in the OS?
Through the modification of the KDE shared libraries, newdocms currently works with all KDE apps! (I am looking for volunteers to add support for GNOME and OpenOffice.org!)
But wait, I thought you said it was at the OS level.
A tax on fuel does not translate one-to-one with road usage, due to variances in fuel efficiency, so there is no "proper level" you can set fuel taxes at.
I have no need to worship. Worship is subjugation. Admiration? Yes - I admire many things, like Open Source yes, but admiration isn't necessarily worship. It's frustrating that a great many poeple don't understand the difference. Despite the fact that a great many religious people feel an instictive need to worship, they are lying when they claim this is a universal trait everyone shares.
But wealth without smarts is pointless. If you have to give up mental pursuits in the short run (And, YES, these allegedly frivolous things you mention are mental pursuits) to get to the point where you can enjoy them later, you will find you've forgotten how. The problem is that there are two demands on your time, BOTH of which lead to better gratification later in exchange for working on stuff now: 1 - making money, and 2 - learning things. A lot of people spend all their time on #1, and none on #2.
Both roads and schools are equally useful to those who don't "use" them directly. Every time you buy a product in a store, you are making use of the roads that got that product to you. Every time you send a piece of mail, you are making use of the roads. And every time you fail to get mugged by gangs of punks roaming the streets with no education and no prospects for respectable work, you are using the public school system.
Okay, who's the moron out there that believes a post asserting a difference between GPLing of spec documents verses actual code is somehow "offtopic" under a post that's about GPLing specs infecting closed code, which in turn was under an article about GPLing spec documents? The only way to be more on-topic would be to be the person submitting the original article. But whether or not something is on-topic has nothing to do with whether or not you agree that it's true.
That would, to put it politely, suck. I don't want the browser to forget that I was on page 2 at one point. I might want to get back to it again.
I assume what you meant isn't that page 2 is GONE from the history, just that it isn't stored in the history multiple times, and is just there the first time. (So if you read pages 3,4,5 from page 2, you normally get a history of 1-2-3-2-4-2-5 and this thing would collapse the redundant 2's so you have instead 1-2-3-4-5. There would still be a '2' in there, but not each time you go back and revisit.)
Personally, I'd hate this. If I want to get back to '2' to see the next link on it (to page 6 perhaps), I want to just go back to the most recent step where I visited '2' in the history, not all the way back to the very first time I visited it ever, which if '2' has a lot of links on it I've been reading through, could be buried quite deep.)
The problem is that in reality you browse through the web as a tree of nested links, but the browser only remembers this as a one-dimensional list, not as a tree. It will always be ugly to try to mash what in the real world is a tree into a data structure that is only a list. The only real fix is a user interface that presents you with your browsing history as a tree rather than as a one-dimensional list. This might be implementable through cascading menus when you click-and-hold the back button rather than just a single list.
So you might see something like this:
Page 1
Page 1.1
Page 1.2
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
(Imagine the above done as a cascading pulldown menu. Slashdot filtered out my attempts to create ascii-art to show it the right way.)
What these guys propose is worse than what we have now, in my opinion.
That's usually not done with scripts. It's just a very simple HTTP header redirect. (You know those sites you visit where it says, "This site has moved, you will be redirected to the new site in 5 seconds." Well, that delay is settable, and can be set to zero seconds. What happens when your back button stays put is that the page preceeding the one you are looking at has a zero-second redirection to the page you are on, so you visit it and bounce to the same page again faster than your browser displays it. Yes, it's incredibly annoying. But you can work around it by using the pulldown back list instead of just the back button, and then going back two links into the history instead of just one - that will skip the redirecting page.
A spec isn't source code. When you apply the GPL to a DOCUMENT rather than to a piece of code, all it ends up meaning is that you can't make a closed extension to that document, not that you can't use the standard it describes in commercial closed software. (So let's say that hypothetically the document describing HTTP was GPL'ed. That wouldn't mean all software implementing HTTP would have to be GPL'ed, as you seem to be trying to imply. It would mean if someone takes that HTTP-describing document and decides to branch a new version of it that has additional proprietary commands in it, that that new document would have to be GPLed.)
GPL-ing the standards document doesn't "infect" software that implements what that document describes unless you cut & paste the text of the document verbatim into that software's source code. (And, NO, saying something like, "/* This next bit of code implements part 3 of the whatsihoosit compliance document */" doesn't count as "including" that document in the code.
You are entitled to your opinion about whether java's GUI is good or bad, and whether or not the J++ extensions made for a better interface. However, there's no technical reason MS had to implement those extensions in such a way that they destroy the compatability of Java for people who want to avoid those extensions. But they did anyway. So your arguments about whether the J++ extensions were better or not are irrelevant, since if MS was playing by the rules they could have implemented those very same extensions you like using, but in a way that adheres to the spec. After all, it's what EVERYONE ELSE WHO IS MAKING JAVA EXTENSIONS is doing and not getting into any legal trouble for.
3) MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers depending on their target market (HINT: Apple has Cocoa extensions in Java......samething......they are optional)
The key point you leave out is that MS's extensions were in the same namespace as the core language, which is in violation of the spec, whereas none of the other extensions to java (such as Cocoa) did that. Why was such a thing put into the spec? Because the spec was written with platform portability as a goal and one step toward that goal was to make it blatantly obvious to the programmer which parts are standard and which are extensions, by using a naming convention that shows it.
9) Sun cries fowl. Demands MS includes Sun's java because they limited MS's license to an old, obsolete version.
Liar. MS was free to produce any modern version of JAVA they liked. What Sun told them they couldn't do was produce a non-compliant Java and call it "Java". MS had two possible ways to solve it: 1 - Fix their naming conventions to make their newer versions compliant, or 2 - go back to the older version from when it was still in compliance. MS chose to do #2, and then went on a smear campaign designed to make idiots believe this was the only option Sun allowed them to do and that this makes Java a language you should avoid because Sun is vindictive. Unfortunately idiots outnumber thinking poeple, so the smear campaign worked and now their big lie is believed in the IT community.
The sort of literacy the grandparent post cited (the type given in literacy statitistics) was not the "well read, able to understand complex nuances" sort of literacy. It's the "Can you read or can't you" sort of boolean literacy. And that's nothing more than memorizing.
Nothing you said contradicted what I said in the post you were replying to. Yes, Slashdot says they aren't responsible for content in comments. That doesn't change the fact the since the site maintainers never review the comments before publication like a "real" newspaper does with letters to the editor, they aren't in the same category, legally.
Slashdot Mirror
DVDs aren't a good example because the primary barrier to making them work on Linux is legal rather than technical. The only reason you had to download the tools to do so seperately is because the laws in the US are evil - If your DVD playing software is closed and proprietary then it's legal in the US. If it's open sourced then it's not and you have to download it from some other country.
Linux is not hard to use.
It's hard to LEARN.
It's very easy to USE in comparasin to Windows (I can't speak about Mac, not knowing much about it.)
There is a difference. If the application is one you don't use very often, ease of learning is more important, but if it's an application you use every day, ease of use is more important even if it costs extra learning time.
Consider: Which would you rather *learn*, Notepad or vi? Now, which would you rather *use* if you had several hours of text editing to do a day?
What the subject line says.
Crossover is specificly a set of proprietary libraries to fill in those gaps where WINE doesn't quite work.
I've read it. It doesn't change the fact that in *practice* the Libertarians (notice the capital L. I'm talking about the party here) favor corporations in legal battles regardless of the facts. Take Microsoft for example. The party's stance is that MS never did anything wrong.
ha ha you're thinking they're two different things.
On paper they are. In practice they are not. Consider the Libertarian party's stance on whether or not Microsoft has done anything wrong.
Bullcrap. If I walk up to you and knife you in the back, then I, though a member of the "private sector", have successfully employed my power to violate your rights. Perhaps what you meant was that the private sector doesn't have the LEGAL power to violate other people's rights. If so, then that's only true because the the laws are set up to enforce it, and THAT's what's currently changing, BECAUSE of the flawed attitude that corporations can't do anything wrong.
That depends on if you mean the PARTY that calls itself "libertarian" or the name for a fuzzy idea that calls itself "libertarian". The party is quite gung-ho on corporations. Some people who claim the name "libertarian" but aren't in the party do not.
Me, I don't know what to call myself, but I know that I don't like the idea of giving corporations the legal rights of personhood when it's not physically possible to also give them the responsibilities of personhood. (The only punishment you can give a corporation when it does wrong is to fine it money. You can't throw it in prison. If a corporation kills somebody, it can't get "20-to-life with a chance for parole in 15 years". In the Dimitri Skylarov case, the individual was detained in a jail awaiting trial. In the more recent Elcomsoft case, the corporation was not similarly punatively treated because it's not even physically possible. Thus legal battles between individuals and corporations are always lopsided against the individual.
I didn't say the Libertarians were responsible. I said a particular belief they hold was responsible. This belief also happens to be held by a lot of other people, people who are not Libertarians, and that's how it came to be implemented. But only the Libertarians make this particular belief the primary cornerstone of their platform.
The Libertarians (note the capital L) have about as much to do with liberty as the Democrats have to do with Democracy and the Republicans have to do with keeping the nation a republic.
What fate would that be? The fate of having more people buy the recordings than would otherwise have because they had a chance to hear them first? Granted, that hasn't been enough to compensate for their lost sales due to lost quality of content, but that's not a copying issue - more of a "clearchannel sucks" issue.
Look at the typical cost of a DVD or VHS of a movie. Look at the typical cost of an audio CD. They aren't that different, yet the movie took a lot more work to produce. That's why the sales for the MPAA are doing well in comparasin to the RIAA. The RIAA has a more insanely inflated markup percentage and consumers can sense that.
$20 for a movie with optional commentary, deleted scenes, wide and narrow screen formats, and choice of captions is worth it. $15 for 60 minutes of audio-only music is not.
Cool. But how can you mash this into a filename string so it works with everything else in the OS?
But wait, I thought you said it was at the OS level.
The Libertarians' flawed belief that a Corporation Can Do No Wrong is what got us into this situation in the first place.
A tax on fuel does not translate one-to-one with road usage, due to variances in fuel efficiency, so there is no "proper level" you can set fuel taxes at.
I have no need to worship. Worship is subjugation. Admiration? Yes - I admire many things, like Open Source yes, but admiration isn't necessarily worship. It's frustrating that a great many poeple don't understand the difference. Despite the fact that a great many religious people feel an instictive need to worship, they are lying when they claim this is a universal trait everyone shares.
But wealth without smarts is pointless. If you have to give up mental pursuits in the short run (And, YES, these allegedly frivolous things you mention are mental pursuits) to get to the point where you can enjoy them later, you will find you've forgotten how. The problem is that there are two demands on your time, BOTH of which lead to better gratification later in exchange for working on stuff now: 1 - making money, and 2 - learning things. A lot of people spend all their time on #1, and none on #2.
Both roads and schools are equally useful to those who don't "use" them directly. Every time you buy a product in a store, you are making use of the roads that got that product to you. Every time you send a piece of mail, you are making use of the roads. And every time you fail to get mugged by gangs of punks roaming the streets with no education and no prospects for respectable work, you are using the public school system.
Okay, who's the moron out there that believes a post asserting a difference between GPLing of spec documents verses actual code is somehow "offtopic" under a post that's about GPLing specs infecting closed code, which in turn was under an article about GPLing spec documents? The only way to be more on-topic would be to be the person submitting the original article. But whether or not something is on-topic has nothing to do with whether or not you agree that it's true.
Is someone moderating posts at random here?
Personally, I'd hate this. If I want to get back to '2' to see the next link on it (to page 6 perhaps), I want to just go back to the most recent step where I visited '2' in the history, not all the way back to the very first time I visited it ever, which if '2' has a lot of links on it I've been reading through, could be buried quite deep.)
The problem is that in reality you browse through the web as a tree of nested links, but the browser only remembers this as a one-dimensional list, not as a tree. It will always be ugly to try to mash what in the real world is a tree into a data structure that is only a list. The only real fix is a user interface that presents you with your browsing history as a tree rather than as a one-dimensional list. This might be implementable through cascading menus when you click-and-hold the back button rather than just a single list.
So you might see something like this:
- Page 1
- Page 1.1
- Page 1.2
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
(Imagine the above done as a cascading pulldown menu. Slashdot filtered out my attempts to create ascii-art to show it the right way.)What these guys propose is worse than what we have now, in my opinion.
That's usually not done with scripts. It's just a very simple HTTP header redirect. (You know those sites you visit where it says, "This site has moved, you will be redirected to the new site in 5 seconds." Well, that delay is settable, and can be set to zero seconds. What happens when your back button stays put is that the page preceeding the one you are looking at has a zero-second redirection to the page you are on, so you visit it and bounce to the same page again faster than your browser displays it. Yes, it's incredibly annoying. But you can work around it by using the pulldown back list instead of just the back button, and then going back two links into the history instead of just one - that will skip the redirecting page.
A spec isn't source code. When you apply the GPL to a DOCUMENT rather than to a piece of code, all it ends up meaning is that you can't make a closed extension to that document, not that you can't use the standard it describes in commercial closed software. (So let's say that hypothetically the document describing HTTP was GPL'ed. That wouldn't mean all software implementing HTTP would have to be GPL'ed, as you seem to be trying to imply. It would mean if someone takes that HTTP-describing document and decides to branch a new version of it that has additional proprietary commands in it, that that new document would have to be GPLed.)
GPL-ing the standards document doesn't "infect" software that implements what that document describes unless you cut & paste the text of the document verbatim into that software's source code. (And, NO, saying something like, "/* This next bit of code implements part 3 of the whatsihoosit compliance document */" doesn't count as "including" that document in the code.
You are entitled to your opinion about whether java's GUI is good or bad, and whether or not the J++ extensions made for a better interface. However, there's no technical reason MS had to implement those extensions in such a way that they destroy the compatability of Java for people who want to avoid those extensions. But they did anyway. So your arguments about whether the J++ extensions were better or not are irrelevant, since if MS was playing by the rules they could have implemented those very same extensions you like using, but in a way that adheres to the spec. After all, it's what EVERYONE ELSE WHO IS MAKING JAVA EXTENSIONS is doing and not getting into any legal trouble for.
But at the end of the THIRD movie, they *are* back in 1985 together and ready to get married and have kids. I don't see the problem.
The key point you leave out is that MS's extensions were in the same namespace as the core language, which is in violation of the spec, whereas none of the other extensions to java (such as Cocoa) did that. Why was such a thing put into the spec? Because the spec was written with platform portability as a goal and one step toward that goal was to make it blatantly obvious to the programmer which parts are standard and which are extensions, by using a naming convention that shows it.
9) Sun cries fowl. Demands MS includes Sun's java because they limited MS's license to an old, obsolete version.
Liar. MS was free to produce any modern version of JAVA they liked. What Sun told them they couldn't do was produce a non-compliant Java and call it "Java". MS had two possible ways to solve it: 1 - Fix their naming conventions to make their newer versions compliant, or 2 - go back to the older version from when it was still in compliance. MS chose to do #2, and then went on a smear campaign designed to make idiots believe this was the only option Sun allowed them to do and that this makes Java a language you should avoid because Sun is vindictive. Unfortunately idiots outnumber thinking poeple, so the smear campaign worked and now their big lie is believed in the IT community.
The sort of literacy the grandparent post cited (the type given in literacy statitistics) was not the "well read, able to understand complex nuances" sort of literacy. It's the "Can you read or can't you" sort of boolean literacy. And that's nothing more than memorizing.
Nothing you said contradicted what I said in the post you were replying to. Yes, Slashdot says they aren't responsible for content in comments. That doesn't change the fact the since the site maintainers never review the comments before publication like a "real" newspaper does with letters to the editor, they aren't in the same category, legally.
Darn. I was going to say that very same thing, and then you went ant said it already.
When the answering machine first came out it didn't "change the world" until a few decades later when it became ubiquitous and consumer-ized.
Sneakers may have been invented in 1917, but how many people were wearing them in the 1920's and 1930's?