I think the quickest way to get this format onto non-nerd computers would be for some webmasters to build a nice ogg only collection of free beer porn.
People will download just about anything if they might get some porn out of it.
One could argue that BSD isn't true open-source... RMS and other FSF/GNU proponents certainly would.
I don't think RMS would say anything of the sort. According to him, GPL'ed software is "more" free than BSD, but he wouldn't say BSD is not free (and good luck getting him to use the phrase "open source").
Actually, Public Domain is not a license at all. It is the voluntary relinquishment of ones copyright rights for a body of work, so nobody else needs to enter into an agreement with you (license) to use that body of work.
However, it's pretty inaccurate to describe Chomsky as liberal (in the political sense of the word). He describes himself as a social anarchist, and he usually doesn't get involved in the liberal/conservative aspects of the US political debate. He is more concerned with the power structures (government, media, military-industry, corporations) of the US. And Liberalism is just as much a part of the power structure in the US as Conservatism is (well, almost as much:>).
I think your characterization of Chomsky as Liberal though, is a good example of how well the Conservative propaganda that labels liberals as anti-american/unpatriotic, has succeeded.
Don't you think you're embellishing a tad with this whole 'good vs. evil' thing?
This looks to me more like one of those videos on "When Animals Attack" where a retarded guy provokes a polar bear by poking it in the ass with a stick.
Sadam and Usama used to be our freinds. Times change. All we can do is make the alliances that most benefit us, but know that sooner or later they all end.
And thinking like this can only justify the reasoning of those who empathize with terrorism against the West.
You took what I said totally out of context. I did not just say "They broke PNG.", I said that they "broke PNG... as an Internet standard." See the difference when it's in context? A standard is when everyone agrees to do something a certain way. And as I pointed out in my original reply to you, Microsoft's PNG support not only diverges but from this standard by not implementing full PNG alpha transparency on the Web (like every other major browser), but large parts of it are still broken by their own admission.
Your contention in your original reply that their implementation is somehow acceptable because the PNG spec allows what they do is ludicrous. It's like saying that it's OK to make an XML office document format all one big binary blob surrounded by brackets, because the XML specification allows for it.
I said breaking standards, not breaking PNG. Please don't misquote me.
First of all, take a look at http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html#msie-wi n-unix, and then look at the PNG support by every other major browser on that list. Every major browser there currently supports full alpha transparency, except IE (even in current 6.0 versions). When everyone except MS implements a standard uniformly, you'd have to be very naive to think that is just Microsoft "choosing not to support alpha transparency".
Full alpha transparency is hugely important so that anti-aliased text can appear smoothly on a transparent background.
This transparency feature is far more important for the small web graphics that are typically used on web pages, such as colored (circular) bullets and fancy text. Alpha blending allows one to use anti-aliasing--creating the illusion of smooth curves on a grid of rectangular pixels by smoothly varying the pixels' colors--to make rounded and curved images that look good against any background, not just against a white background (for example).
You may not care about using Free software, fine. That doesn't mean Fedora "sucks ass". Quite the contrary. You should give such distributions and their users (Debian, Fedora) some respect, since they're sacrificing their own short-term convenience for everybody's (including your own) long-term prosperity.
Now maybe the Mozilla Foundation, the World Web Consortium, and an us Web Developers can collectively sue Microsoft for deliberately breaking PNG, CSS, HTTP, and the other myriad Internet standards out there. I don't think large punitive damages are out of the question considering the wasted time and effort their sorry excuse for a web browser causes us in having to maintain two different versions of stylesheets and web-pages (IE and non-IE).
</rant>
The effect is the same as mentioned in the article, albeit, on a much broader scale.
If there are enough seeders and downloaders for a file, it'll max out your bandwidth. I downloaded the Fedora Core 2 Test 3 ISOs a few days ago via bittorrent and got 350K/sec which is my connection's maximum speed. It only took an hour or so to get 2GB worth of data.
Bittorrent is only slow when there's not enough people interested in a file.
But this is true, that Apple "is not your friend". The same with MS, and IBM and HP, Dell, Sun, etc. Companies are not "friends", they are businesses and they will choose one course of action over another to make $$ or, at most, sometimes to win some goodwill (and probably someone is measuring this in $$ terms).
Apple is less our enemy than Microsoft at the moment. IBM is more our friend than either at the moment. Redhat is mostly our friend at the moment.
While it's true that you need to take companies with a heavy grain of salt (because they have priority obligations to their shareholders), you shouldn't discount them much more than you should a human friend -- who after all, can be your friend while at the same time having an obligation first and foremost to their own self preservation -- just because they are a company.
People don't blindly follow laws just because it's the law. I follow the law when I think it's fair, reasonable, and justified. The GPL is very fair and very reasonable, and is designed to give users as much freedom and empowerment over their system as possible. The RIAA want's to do exactly the opposite.
When I can respect where something is coming from like the GPL, I'm more inclined to comply with it. I can't say the same for the RIAA's stuff.
Everyone's agreed about the file associations mess. It's scheduled to get a clean up (total rewrite actually) for GNOME 2.8. There just isn't enough manpower right now to do everything that needs to be done. But that doesn't mean people can't innovate in the mean time. This is probably what causes the discreprencies between trying to be the best and "not being up to the standard of a current generation desktop" as you said.
It's being worked on though, and will be fixed eventually.
"Hey kids, when you have the choice between doing what's right and making a dollar, remember only the poor can afford a conscience! Pat Tillman chose to follow his principles, and look where he is now!"
The funny part is that this example you use to attempt discredit the grandparent post actually seems to validate it...
Would you rather be alive, financially secure, supporting your children, and able to admit your fallibility? Or would you rather be a righteous dead patriotic reactionary? I know which one I'd choose..
You have to read between the lines when listening to corporation and politician speak. Bush is a born again Christian. Even if he never actually made the quote in the grandparent's sig, I'm sure he probably feels that way.
Or use their GPL'ed products and send them bug reports and/or patches as you are able to. I personally can't wait to try out ifolder which is FOSS and has a plugin for nautilus and gnome. It might be the next samba. It's being written in C#/mono and is still in beta I think (for linux). Here is a flash intro.
Linux will be ready for the workplace desktop when it's ready for the home desktop.
I think you have it backwards. Linux is actually easier to use than windows if you have a geek set it up correctly for you. That's why it will take off in the corporate sector first, and with home lusers last. I thought this was common knowledge, but then again, I'm new here.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting considering that Symantec was considering (or at least said they were considering) switching to linux recently.
People will download just about anything if they might get some porn out of it.
Call me crazy, but I don't think that because spatial is not the default on MacOSX or Windows is any real indication of it's usefulness.
But then again, this is Slashdot, where not doing things differently is copying Windows, and doing things differently is repeating old mistakes.
see this link for more information.
Java you morons, not Solaris. Almost nobody gives a flying fuck about whether Solaris is opened or not.
However, it's pretty inaccurate to describe Chomsky as liberal (in the political sense of the word). He describes himself as a social anarchist, and he usually doesn't get involved in the liberal/conservative aspects of the US political debate. He is more concerned with the power structures (government, media, military-industry, corporations) of the US. And Liberalism is just as much a part of the power structure in the US as Conservatism is (well, almost as much :>).
I think your characterization of Chomsky as Liberal though, is a good example of how well the Conservative propaganda that labels liberals as anti-american/unpatriotic, has succeeded.
This looks to me more like one of those videos on "When Animals Attack" where a retarded guy provokes a polar bear by poking it in the ass with a stick.
Your contention in your original reply that their implementation is somehow acceptable because the PNG spec allows what they do is ludicrous. It's like saying that it's OK to make an XML office document format all one big binary blob surrounded by brackets, because the XML specification allows for it.
First of all, take a look at http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html#msie-wi n-unix, and then look at the PNG support by every other major browser on that list. Every major browser there currently supports full alpha transparency, except IE (even in current 6.0 versions). When everyone except MS implements a standard uniformly, you'd have to be very naive to think that is just Microsoft "choosing not to support alpha transparency".
Full alpha transparency is hugely important so that anti-aliased text can appear smoothly on a transparent background.
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html says:
Christ, there is even a petition to get them to fix this: http://www.petitiononline.com/msiepng/petition.htYou may not care about using Free software, fine. That doesn't mean Fedora "sucks ass". Quite the contrary. You should give such distributions and their users (Debian, Fedora) some respect, since they're sacrificing their own short-term convenience for everybody's (including your own) long-term prosperity.
Hmm... no. But my download speed just went up to 50KB/s, thanks!
Now maybe the Mozilla Foundation, the World Web Consortium, and an us Web Developers can collectively sue Microsoft for deliberately breaking PNG, CSS, HTTP, and the other myriad Internet standards out there. I don't think large punitive damages are out of the question considering the wasted time and effort their sorry excuse for a web browser causes us in having to maintain two different versions of stylesheets and web-pages (IE and non-IE).
</rant>
The effect is the same as mentioned in the article, albeit, on a much broader scale.
Hashes aren't encryption, and Blowfish and AES aren't hashes, they're one-way block cyphers IIRC.
If there are enough seeders and downloaders for a file, it'll max out your bandwidth. I downloaded the Fedora Core 2 Test 3 ISOs a few days ago via bittorrent and got 350K /sec which is my connection's maximum speed. It only took an hour or so to get 2GB worth of data.
Bittorrent is only slow when there's not enough people interested in a file.
Yeah your windows disappearing when you've haven't used them in a recent enough timeframe, that sounds real useful... Awesome job Apple, as usual.
While it's true that you need to take companies with a heavy grain of salt (because they have priority obligations to their shareholders), you shouldn't discount them much more than you should a human friend -- who after all, can be your friend while at the same time having an obligation first and foremost to their own self preservation -- just because they are a company.
People don't blindly follow laws just because it's the law. I follow the law when I think it's fair, reasonable, and justified. The GPL is very fair and very reasonable, and is designed to give users as much freedom and empowerment over their system as possible. The RIAA want's to do exactly the opposite.
When I can respect where something is coming from like the GPL, I'm more inclined to comply with it. I can't say the same for the RIAA's stuff.
It's being worked on though, and will be fixed eventually.
Would you rather be alive, financially secure, supporting your children, and able to admit your fallibility? Or would you rather be a righteous dead patriotic reactionary? I know which one I'd choose..
You have to read between the lines when listening to corporation and politician speak. Bush is a born again Christian. Even if he never actually made the quote in the grandparent's sig, I'm sure he probably feels that way.
Or use their GPL'ed products and send them bug reports and/or patches as you are able to. I personally can't wait to try out ifolder which is FOSS and has a plugin for nautilus and gnome. It might be the next samba. It's being written in C#/mono and is still in beta I think (for linux). Here is a flash intro.