Your complaint about the gui is not the one the article was making. The article was making the complaint that the gui sucks purely because it isn't exactly like other windows programs. It described a product that *worked*, but not like the reviewer would have liked it to. You describe a product that doesn't even work at all, and that the gui sucks because it has bugs that make it non-functional. It sounds like you are using an older version than the reviewer, or that something else is broken about your installation of it. Your complaint is much more valid than the one raised in the article, but since it is entirely different from the one in the article, don't try to use it to support the one made in the article, (which was simply that it is a sin to be different than Windows).
I agree with the reviewer that it can be annoying when you have to adapt to different interfaces to use different products. So why then does he think it would be a good thing if Mozilla had different interfaces for different platforms? Making it work the same on all platforms *is* an instance of reducing the number of things to learn, for those people who use more than one platform. It's like this guy has never used anything other than Windows.
Carl Sagan screwed this one up. Absence of evidence is the ONLY kind of evidence of absence you can ever hope to find. Granted it's not conclusive, but if went through life with the mentality that you must have things disproven before you let go the hope that they exist, then you will end up believing in anything and everything ever proposed to you.
Re:Sounds like fun - shame about the name
on
Economy of Errors
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· Score: 2
While I don't find Woody Allen funny, apparently you do, which makes me wonder why you think American humor isn't funny. Last time I checked Woody Allen is American.
The Simpsons. Dilbert. The Onion. - we Americans "get" satire just fine.
I disagree with the notion that it will be easy to shoot down a missle with a laser. For one thing, the laser either needs to be immensely powerful so it can destroy the missile in one contact with it, or it needs to be aimed by a dynamic adaptive system so it can keep the missile bathed in its beam for long enough to actually do some damage to it.
Plus, no matter how the technology advances, a missile or ballistic bomb will be cheaper to make than one of these laser guns, so you can just send lots of them in a wave at the enemy, and laugh has his few lasers end up taking out only a couple of them. The "shoot down the missile" method depends on a few things to work:
There are a small number of missiles.
The missile is hit early enough in its flight path that it still needs further propulsion to get to the target. A missile can be programmed to do the last part of its flight purely on a ballistic arc that is running totally on momentum. If it is hit in that part of the flight, it will still head toward the same target, even if it does so as a melted slag. Also there's the question of bombs, and gun shells, that operate entirely on ballistics alone with no propulsion. Damaging them doesn't change their flightpath signifigantly.
Now, that being said, the notion of shooting down ICBMs by laser as in Star Wars Defense is actually workable, because that *is* a situation that fits the above two criteria. The chief problem is that lasers are not powerful enough yet to pull it of, and certainly not on the trickle of power available to a satellite in orbit. (The other problem is that that type of munition is easy to deliver via low-tech means, such as sticking it in a truck and driving it into
the target city, and thus SDI is a useless defense against the kind of fanatic nuclear threat that exists today. So the idea is workable, could be feasable in 15 years, but would have been more useful 15 years ago than today.
It isn't a free market when in order to sell a single item of work you have to build an entire vertical market from scratch with new products from the ground up (which is what you were recommending in your original post I replied to) because it's illegal to use the existing infrastructure without being a member of the cartel that paid for the laws.
I don't see how the free market has been prevented, unless you mean the market in pirating copyrighted works.
Choosing to play some music you *purchased* in a way the producers didn't anticipate (such as on a niche operating system they didn't choose to target with their official approved playing hardware) is not piracy. And, trying to get your own work out for sale in the public without paying a 'tax' to a cartel is also not piracy. If you believe this is actually about piracy like the cartel claims, you are gullable.
I'm not saying the cost doesn't exist. I'm saying it's not an inherent attribute of Linux, as is falsely being implied when people describe it as part of the TCO of Linux. It's part of the TCO of dropping what you already have and picking *anything* different, and would be there no matter what else you were switching to. It is an attribute of the activity of switching, not an attribute of the thing being switched to.
Let's say I'm wondering how fast I can drive through busy traffic in town. Let's say I perform that test while carrying several computer boxes to a LAN party. If I spend 15 minutes loading the the boxes into my car and then drive 15 miles in 30 minutes, then spend another 15 unloading the boxes at the other end, then the average speed of my driving was 15 miles in 30 minutes, or 30 miles per hour. If I counted it the way dishonest people count the TCO of linux, I'd count the whole hour and claim my driving sucks because I only made 15 miles per hour speed.
So now it's the job of the software companies to make players for you? If you don't like the players out there, make your own.
And in the alternate universe you live in, where consumers actually know what they are buying, that could work. But this is the real world, where people buy lock-in products without even knowing it or having the attention span to give a damn. You're attitude works wonderfully in a free market. The point of these laws, however, is to get rid of the free market by way of the "average joe" ignorant consumer who doesn't realize the consequences of what he's buying. Free market arguments are irrelevant in a world where the free market economy has been prevented via law.
Always remember one thing, in the end, we have all the control. If we don't like a cd, then we don't have to buy it.
"We", meaning those people that actually follow the development of DRM laws and give a damn about them, make up such a tiny percentage of the population that no, "we" do not have all the control. "We" are an irrelevant sliver of the cartel's sales figures.
While I agree that the real path to defeating DRM isn't through Congress, it's through educating the marketplace, I disagree that "we" can make that much of a difference, because the marketplace is composed mostly of "them", not "we". If Joe Average actually knew what was going on, he wouldn't want it to happen either, but the problem is nobody believes us geeks. In most people's minds we are the irrelevant crazies who actually prefer something other than Windows. We're the irrelevant crazies who get a thrill from piracy. We're the irrelevant crazies that can't explain our point in sound bites of less than three sentences so we are boring and unimportant.
So long as that perception remains, NO "we" can't make a difference through our purchasing decisions.
The solution is simple. If you don't like the player, don't buy it.
Bull. It's the player owned by the CUSTOMER you want to distribute TO that matters here, not the one YOU bought. If *I* am saavy enough not to buy into the bullshit the RIAA is throwing my way, that in no way implies that the rest of the marketplace will be the same way, so the cartel will have effectively prevented me from having my own large audience for any independant work I put out, by duping the average customer into buying something that prevents ME from distributing MY work to them.
The strategy here is to pass one law at a time, each one of which seems reasonable to Joe Average, but taken in combination leads to the situation where you lose the ability to be your own content provider on the cheap.
First they make it a crime to tell anyone how to break DRM measures or distribute software source code that can be read by a programmer to figure it out, even if that source code was written entirely by you, and you figured out how it works all by yorself without any help from non-disclosure-agreement sealed documents. This step has already been done, it's the DMCA.
Second, they make it a crime with a gigantic fine to bypass DRM and distribute the 'cracked' version. That's this rider to a Bill that's up right now.
Third, they'll put pressure on hardware manufacturers to make it mandatory to have DRM encoded in the hardware, so that choosing to distribute *your own* non-DRM material doesn't work anymore because people's hardware out there will refuse to make use of it. Steps in this have already been taken. Thankfully they aren't done yet.
Simultaneously to that, they'll set up DRM signature-giving groups that are the only ones to be trusted by the hardware, and these groups will give out the keys for a cartel tax, err - I mean reasonable registration fee.
Fourth - the end of open source and competition to the media industry.
You did, just there, and that was the first time it was ever mentioned. I have no clue how you got the impression I was talking about ships. I was thinking about ground installations, actually. Using the laser as a coastal bombardment method never even occurred to me.
But regardless, the point was that the laser cannot make conventional weapons obsolete, because there are still instances where the conventional parabolic arc is a handy flight path to use. It doesn't matter whether those instances are on ship or land or whatever. So long as those situations exist in some form, the laser will not completly replace conventional weapons as a previous post implied. It might someday, however, replace those conventional weapons that are currently used to simulate straight-line bullet paths with a very shallow parabolic curve, such as rifles and machine guns.
That's not a hidden cost to Linux. That's The cost to switch, while it should be accounted for, is NOT PART of the cost of an OS. It's the cost due to external circumstances. Imagine if I owned an old dilapidated truck with terrible performance and was going to use it to move some furniture to a new house 10 miles away, but it would take 30 minutes to get there because my truck is in bad shape. Then you come along and say, "I have a faster truck, let's use mine." So then I unload the furniture from my truck and load it onto yours, which takes 30 minutes, and then drive across town in 15 minutes. Would it be correct for me to say, "You liar, your truck is really slow! You said it would be fast but it took 45 minutes when my old truck could have got me there in 30!" Of course not. The 30 minutes spent switching had nothing to do with the relative qualities of the two trucks and everything to do with the fact that I had already loaded everything into one of them beforehand.
Now, in the example above, it still would be true that I would have been better off continuing in my own truck, given the circumstances, but if I were to try to make the claim that this means the truck you had was slow I would be lying.
You're whole argument boils down to this: "Change is expensive because people need training, so keep whatever you happen to have right now." But the thing is that argument, as you apply it, simply means, 'Whatever you have right now, whether it's any good or not, just keep it because making a change is expensive." It would be just as much the case if this was some alternate reality where Linux was popular and you were exploring the possibility of changing to Windows. You cite a generic concept as if it was a flaw of Linux when it is a "flaw" of anything that isn't the status quo. If everyone kept to that mentality, I'd still be typing this on a terminal attached to a mainframe because those newfangled PC things wouldn't be worth the training.
A straight-line weapon can't bend it's path to hit someone behind a wall. A projectile launched in an arc can. So for hitting people behind cover, there are still useful reasons to use old-fashioned weapons made of mass that fall in gravity.
Yes, but the place where the post went wrong was in the implication that *all* bombs are designed to deliberately throw lots of schrapnel. Not true. SOME bombs, specificly the ones that are explicitly meant to be used on groups of people out in the open, are designed with extra schrapnel bits packed inside (beyond the incidental schrapnel you get from the metal shell of the bomb being shredded in the explosion). But that isn't the way all bombs in general are designed, and certainly not the kind that would be used on an armored target as in the example given implied.
But, wait, I thought they were trying to sell the gullable on the notion that.NET isn't going to stick you into a Windows-specific situation. Now they claim.NET is a way to fight Linux - but that would only be true if.NET and Linux won't be able to play nice together. Do they mean.NET won't actually be so cross-platform after all? Okay raise your hands everyone who didn't se *that* coming.
The repo man has proof you are the one who bought the car, and can show that the payments are missing. Therefore he can gather appropriate evidence ahead of time to prove he's in the right. The MPAA has worded this bill so that all they need is suspicion, whatever the hell that means, without really needing to back up their claims.
Well, I don't know the graphic model they use, but if it's the one I've seen in textbooks, a 180 degree angle of vision fails because you can't really do it mathematicly. Mathematically, you draw a line segment from the camera eye to some point in the 3-d world. Calculate where that line intersects the plane of the viewscreen and you have the coordinates of where to put that point on the 2-D screen. The problem is that to use that matehmatical model with a 180 degree field of vision, you need the camera to be on the plane of the viewscreen, which then means there isn't a single point where the line segment passes through the viewscreen. I imagine that this ends up being a divide-by-zero in the mathematical model.
But the point is that they are two opposite ends of the extreme - I can have something ultra-stable if I don't mind it being ultra-out-of-date (which is really important because it means I have to buy my hardware tailored to the list of what was supported by the old kernel it uses. If I pick some random new PC it probably won't be fully supported. Or, on the opposite end, I can have something ultra-new where things break really easily. What I need is something of a compramise between the two. The next time I'm up for an upgrade, I'll check into this "testing" release you talk about. It might be what I need.
So you cite an example of "geektavists" being denied access to the panel (the EFF) as an example of why geeks weren't denied access to the panel??? Huh? The EFF was specificly what I had in mind, by the way, when I implied the geeks didn't have access to speak in the normal ways.
I would imagine that putting a 180 degree image up on a screen in front of the viewer would never look right to a human. If the screen is flat, it would need to be infinitely wide in order to make a 180 degree angle of vision image look "right".
I'd be more willing to consider Debian if it wasn't for the fact that the last distro they were willing to call "stable" is getting quite old now. I have to pick between "recent" and "stable" - I can't have both. And that is the main reason I've been staying away from Debian.
Be polite - let the other side have their say, no matter how BS it may be. Then, when you get a chance to speak, shred them, point by point, politely.
In the alternate parallel universe where the geeks were actually given official time to speak, that advice would have been applicable. But in the real world peanut-gallery heckling was the only avenue open to them.
Where the reviewer went wrong was his faulty premise that Orwell was making a prediction that was fatalistic, and that Orwell actually thought the events in 1984 were inevitable. It's pretty obvious from reading the book that it was meant as a scare of what *might* come if people weren't careful, not a determinisitic prediction. It was obviously a work meant to stir action in its readers to *avoid* the situation depicted in the book. That it didn't come to pass (yet?) does not prove Orwell wrong, since Orwell wasn't claiming it was inevitable.
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Your complaint about the gui is not the one the article was making. The article was making the complaint that the gui sucks purely because it isn't exactly like other windows programs. It described a product that *worked*, but not like the reviewer would have liked it to. You describe a product that doesn't even work at all, and that the gui sucks because it has bugs that make it non-functional. It sounds like you are using an older version than the reviewer, or that something else is broken about your installation of it. Your complaint is much more valid than the one raised in the article, but since it is entirely different from the one in the article, don't try to use it to support the one made in the article, (which was simply that it is a sin to be different than Windows).
I agree with the reviewer that it can be annoying when you have to adapt to different interfaces to use different products. So why then does he think it would be a good thing if Mozilla had different interfaces for different platforms? Making it work the same on all platforms *is* an instance of reducing the number of things to learn, for those people who use more than one platform. It's like this guy has never used anything other than Windows.
Carl Sagan screwed this one up. Absence of evidence is the ONLY kind of evidence of absence you can ever hope to find. Granted it's not conclusive, but if went through life with the mentality that you must have things disproven before you let go the hope that they exist, then you will end up believing in anything and everything ever proposed to you.
The Simpsons. Dilbert. The Onion. - we Americans "get" satire just fine.
It isn't a free market when in order to sell a single item of work you have to build an entire vertical market from scratch with new products from the ground up (which is what you were recommending in your original post I replied to) because it's illegal to use the existing infrastructure without being a member of the cartel that paid for the laws.
I don't see how the free market has been prevented, unless you mean the market in pirating copyrighted works.
Choosing to play some music you *purchased* in a way the producers didn't anticipate (such as on a niche operating system they didn't choose to target with their official approved playing hardware) is not piracy. And, trying to get your own work out for sale in the public without paying a 'tax' to a cartel is also not piracy. If you believe this is actually about piracy like the cartel claims, you are gullable.
Let's say I'm wondering how fast I can drive through busy traffic in town. Let's say I perform that test while carrying several computer boxes to a LAN party. If I spend 15 minutes loading the the boxes into my car and then drive 15 miles in 30 minutes, then spend another 15 unloading the boxes at the other end, then the average speed of my driving was 15 miles in 30 minutes, or 30 miles per hour. If I counted it the way dishonest people count the TCO of linux, I'd count the whole hour and claim my driving sucks because I only made 15 miles per hour speed.
So now it's the job of the software companies to make players for you? If you don't like the players out there, make your own.
And in the alternate universe you live in, where consumers actually know what they are buying, that could work. But this is the real world, where people buy lock-in products without even knowing it or having the attention span to give a damn. You're attitude works wonderfully in a free market. The point of these laws, however, is to get rid of the free market by way of the "average joe" ignorant consumer who doesn't realize the consequences of what he's buying. Free market arguments are irrelevant in a world where the free market economy has been prevented via law.
"We", meaning those people that actually follow the development of DRM laws and give a damn about them, make up such a tiny percentage of the population that no, "we" do not have all the control. "We" are an irrelevant sliver of the cartel's sales figures.
While I agree that the real path to defeating DRM isn't through Congress, it's through educating the marketplace, I disagree that "we" can make that much of a difference, because the marketplace is composed mostly of "them", not "we". If Joe Average actually knew what was going on, he wouldn't want it to happen either, but the problem is nobody believes us geeks. In most people's minds we are the irrelevant crazies who actually prefer something other than Windows. We're the irrelevant crazies who get a thrill from piracy. We're the irrelevant crazies that can't explain our point in sound bites of less than three sentences so we are boring and unimportant.
So long as that perception remains, NO "we" can't make a difference through our purchasing decisions.
The solution is simple. If you don't like the player, don't buy it.
Bull. It's the player owned by the CUSTOMER you want to distribute TO that matters here, not the one YOU bought. If *I* am saavy enough not to buy into the bullshit the RIAA is throwing my way, that in no way implies that the rest of the marketplace will be the same way, so the cartel will have effectively prevented me from having my own large audience for any independant work I put out, by duping the average customer into buying something that prevents ME from distributing MY work to them.
First they make it a crime to tell anyone how to break DRM measures or distribute software source code that can be read by a programmer to figure it out, even if that source code was written entirely by you, and you figured out how it works all by yorself without any help from non-disclosure-agreement sealed documents. This step has already been done, it's the DMCA.
Second, they make it a crime with a gigantic fine to bypass DRM and distribute the 'cracked' version. That's this rider to a Bill that's up right now.
Third, they'll put pressure on hardware manufacturers to make it mandatory to have DRM encoded in the hardware, so that choosing to distribute *your own* non-DRM material doesn't work anymore because people's hardware out there will refuse to make use of it. Steps in this have already been taken. Thankfully they aren't done yet.
Simultaneously to that, they'll set up DRM signature-giving groups that are the only ones to be trusted by the hardware, and these groups will give out the keys for a cartel tax, err - I mean reasonable registration fee.
Fourth - the end of open source and competition to the media industry.
Who said the lasers would be fixed to a ship?
You did, just there, and that was the first time it was ever mentioned. I have no clue how you got the impression I was talking about ships. I was thinking about ground installations, actually. Using the laser as a coastal bombardment method never even occurred to me.
But regardless, the point was that the laser cannot make conventional weapons obsolete, because there are still instances where the conventional parabolic arc is a handy flight path to use. It doesn't matter whether those instances are on ship or land or whatever. So long as those situations exist in some form, the laser will not completly replace conventional weapons as a previous post implied. It might someday, however, replace those conventional weapons that are currently used to simulate straight-line bullet paths with a very shallow parabolic curve, such as rifles and machine guns.
That's not a hidden cost to Linux. That's The cost to switch, while it should be accounted for, is NOT PART of the cost of an OS. It's the cost due to external circumstances. Imagine if I owned an old dilapidated truck with terrible performance and was going to use it to move some furniture to a new house 10 miles away, but it would take 30 minutes to get there because my truck is in bad shape. Then you come along and say, "I have a faster truck, let's use mine." So then I unload the furniture from my truck and load it onto yours, which takes 30 minutes, and then drive across town in 15 minutes. Would it be correct for me to say, "You liar, your truck is really slow! You said it would be fast but it took 45 minutes when my old truck could have got me there in 30!" Of course not. The 30 minutes spent switching had nothing to do with the relative qualities of the two trucks and everything to do with the fact that I had already loaded everything into one of them beforehand.
Now, in the example above, it still would be true that I would have been better off continuing in my own truck, given the circumstances, but if I were to try to make the claim that this means the truck you had was slow I would be lying.
You're whole argument boils down to this: "Change is expensive because people need training, so keep whatever you happen to have right now." But the thing is that argument, as you apply it, simply means, 'Whatever you have right now, whether it's any good or not, just keep it because making a change is expensive." It would be just as much the case if this was some alternate reality where Linux was popular and you were exploring the possibility of changing to Windows. You cite a generic concept as if it was a flaw of Linux when it is a "flaw" of anything that isn't the status quo. If everyone kept to that mentality, I'd still be typing this on a terminal attached to a mainframe because those newfangled PC things wouldn't be worth the training.
A straight-line weapon can't bend it's path to hit someone behind a wall. A projectile launched in an arc can. So for hitting people behind cover, there are still useful reasons to use old-fashioned weapons made of mass that fall in gravity.
Yes, but the place where the post went wrong was in the implication that *all* bombs are designed to deliberately throw lots of schrapnel. Not true. SOME bombs, specificly the ones that are explicitly meant to be used on groups of people out in the open, are designed with extra schrapnel bits packed inside (beyond the incidental schrapnel you get from the metal shell of the bomb being shredded in the explosion).
But that isn't the way all bombs in general are designed, and certainly not the kind that would be used on an armored target as in the example given implied.
But, wait, I thought they were trying to sell the gullable on the notion that .NET isn't going to stick you into a Windows-specific situation. Now they claim .NET is a way to fight Linux - but that would only be true if .NET and Linux won't be able to play nice together. Do they mean .NET won't actually be so cross-platform after all? Okay raise your hands everyone who didn't se *that* coming.
The repo man has proof you are the one who bought the car, and can show that the payments are missing. Therefore he can gather appropriate evidence ahead of time to prove he's in the right. The MPAA has worded this bill so that all they need is suspicion, whatever the hell that means, without really needing to back up their claims.
Well, I don't know the graphic model they use, but if it's the one I've seen in textbooks, a 180 degree angle of vision fails because you can't really do it mathematicly. Mathematically, you draw a line segment from the camera eye to some point in the 3-d world. Calculate where that line intersects the plane of the viewscreen and you have the coordinates of where to put that point on the 2-D screen. The problem is that to use that matehmatical model with a 180 degree field of vision, you need the camera to be on the plane of the viewscreen, which then means there isn't a single point where the line segment passes through the viewscreen. I imagine that this ends up being a divide-by-zero in the mathematical model.
But the point is that they are two opposite ends of the extreme - I can have something ultra-stable if I don't mind it being ultra-out-of-date (which is really important because it means I have to buy my hardware tailored to the list of what was supported by the old kernel it uses. If I pick some random new PC it probably won't be fully supported. Or, on the opposite end, I can have something ultra-new where things break really easily. What I need is something of a compramise between the two. The next time I'm up for an upgrade, I'll check into this "testing" release you talk about. It might be what I need.
So you cite an example of "geektavists" being denied access to the panel (the EFF) as an example of why geeks weren't denied access to the panel??? Huh? The EFF was specificly what I had in mind, by the way, when I implied the geeks didn't have access to speak in the normal ways.
I would imagine that putting a 180 degree image up on a screen in front of the viewer would never look right to a human. If the screen is flat, it would need to be infinitely wide in order to make a 180 degree angle of vision image look "right".
I'd be more willing to consider Debian if it wasn't for the fact that the last distro they were willing to call "stable" is getting quite old now. I have to pick between "recent" and "stable" - I can't have both. And that is the main reason I've been staying away from Debian.
Where the reviewer went wrong was his faulty premise that Orwell was making a prediction that was fatalistic, and that Orwell actually thought the events in 1984 were inevitable. It's pretty obvious from reading the book that it was meant as a scare of what *might* come if people weren't careful, not a determinisitic prediction. It was obviously a work meant to stir action in its readers to *avoid* the situation depicted in the book. That it didn't come to pass (yet?) does not prove Orwell wrong, since Orwell wasn't claiming it was inevitable.