You didn't see any ultra-left content because you are ultra-left.
The Nation is a very old magazine with roots in various flavors of progressive politics (think Teddy Roosevelt, Robert LaFollette, Eugene V Debs - maybe you'll have to ask your great-grandparents); it isn't ultra-anything, except maybe ultra-American. The "ultra-left" is a major (and often demonized) part of American politics in this century. You may think you're being cool with your post, but your predictable response is actually pretty sheep-like.
When sufficient numbers of the ruling and chattering classes (and those who parrot them - like ewe, for instance) are FUD-ing about, demonizing, and marginalizing "welfare cheats", "evil liberals", "drug abusers", "feminazis", and "faggots" and such, we're not far removed from a certain society that, once upon a time, did the same thing to Jews, Gypsies, communists, gays, and dissenters of various stripes. The NSDAP and its leader were democratically elected; they eventually took away the voters' right to vote them out. They also took away the people's right to speak out. You might say "it can't happen here" (I'm assuming you live in the Ewe Ess of Ay), but that is a sadly mistaken assumption; it really can happen here, but only in a modern, spin-doctored, blow-dried, media-savvy (or media-owning), red-white-and-blue apple-pie fashion. Maybe we're well on the way there. Just like many Depression-era Germans, we won't know what hit us until well after our bodies are covered in welts and bruises.
A business is no better than the people who run it. People are not fundamentially evil people. Just because I put on a suit before I go to work, does not mean I enter evil mode.
In general, I agree with you. I deliberately didn't use the word "evil" in my post; I used the word "amoral". If you're an employee, I'm sure you're doing the best job you can. If you're a boss, I'm sure the same is true. My point was that where there is conflict between what a corporation is doing and the "outside world", often the "outside world" loses out, and often there is government (and public) acquiescence to it.
So your medtech example needs to be broken up. Obviously the artificial pancreas is good, and I'll assume that the pricing of it is fair, because I don't want to get into a debate about the health-care system. There's no conflict there: people need that product, and the medtech company is selling it. My problem with it only comes in where (to drag a real-world example into this) that company, for example, closes down a factory in one location and moves to a place where the wages are much cheaper, and local government is giving them big tax breaks and is tacitly ignoring the excessive waste that the new factory will produce. It ends up a great deal for shareholders, but a bad one for the local economy, in that the tax base hasn't improved all that much, and there will eventually be a huge bill to pay environment-wise. My examples are taken from the maquilladora plants in Mexico and an old Proctor-Silex (IIRC) plant in a rural area of North Carolina - the Proctor-Silex plant relocated a few years later, BTW, having gotten an even sweeter deal elsewhere.
So yes, I do take it personally when some Red Dot Zealot implies that all capitalistic actions are somehow tainted.
But look at his last sentence: If you think a bunch of worthless people in the third world ( they have no net worth; they are, worthless) are more important that your corporations quarterly profits potential for the next ten years then you are no REAL Capitialist. I'm not sure how Red the person is. I'll drag out the the famous Dom Helder Camara quote here:
When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.
I'm the offspring of Republicans, and I consider myself to be one as well, a member of the party of Eisenhower (GM's Charles Wilson said "What's good for..." during his confirmation hearings for a post in Ike's Cabinet), Goldwater, Dirksen, and Javits. But when I became old enough to vote, I was so incensed at the thuggish Reagan Administration that I registered Democrat, and I've seen no reason to change it yet. One of the unfortunate circumstances resulting from the Reagan years is this deification of business and capitalism - anyone who dares to point out the flaws in The Way Things Are seems to get shouted down and called names (and even the word "liberal" has shamelessly been turned into a pejorative).
So, in my longwinded way, I support your putting-on of a suit and making artificial pancreases (and profits); my posts were not written to criticize that. But, at some point, a corporation is no longer hermetically sealed in the vacuum of dollars-and-cents-and-widgets and needs to be viewed in the larger landscape in which it is a part. The failure to do that is a major failing of contemporary capitalism, and it threatens to hurt us all in the long run.
The AC can speak for himself, of course, but the guy was being somewhat rational. Why go ballistic? We've put corporations on some kind of pedestal, and I don't understand why? We've gone from GM's Engine Charlie Wilson saying
What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.
back in the 50's to a situation now where the common perception is
What's good for GM is good for the country.
There's a big difference there; there's the opening of a little hole where all sorts of nonsense can creep in, where if the CEO says that green is red, then - dammit! - green is red. The general amorality of business wins out over the concerns of the population at large. Yes, Microsoft is pretty much the apotheosis of bad behavior, but few businesses (large or small) are in line for sainthood. Just ask a dollar-a-day garment worker in Honduras. Or, closer to home, ask some rural residents who have had their local environment crapped on by the local industries. A corporation answers first and foremost to its shareholders; any obligations beyond that tend to be ignored, unless it benefits the corporation and shareholders. This is a scenario in which people are considered worthless, at least those who don't own large blocks of shares or don't purchase what the corporation is selling.
Well for every one product that you can show me that the government is directly responsible for, there are 10000 others produced by private industry.
This is a meaningless point. Is the government responsible for any products? I'm not sure I'd count public education or garbage collection as a "product".
The fact is the government is not the best at allocating resources.
And the private sector hits a home run every time? I think the private sector is highly overrated in the resource-allocation department. They're good, but they're not "insanely great".
I shudder to think of a world in which the government is responsible for all scientific innovation...
That wasn't what I was talking about anyway, though upon re-reading your earlier post, I now see that you were. There's room for straightahead for-profit activity, and there's room for activity that substitutes other criteria in lieu of (or alongside) profit.
...Think U.S.S.R. They produced damn little for all the money they spent. Even in the military sector, most of their advances were mere copies of the wests. It is not that the USSR lacked great minds, there are many.
I'll bet the USSR did OK in the scientific aspect; there were surely other factors, like a corrupt bureaucracy stemming from a totalitarian society, that played a role in any shortcomings. Let's see whether or not the E2K is vapor before we Westerners decide what goes on the tombstone.
I still see no reason why there can't be a government (or UN) funded corporation designed to fill a specific niche, like an AIDS cure, or a non-fossil-fuel "People's Car" (or non-car), or a public broadcasting entity. Something where the profit motive takes a back seat to other concerns, and where the corporation is kept on a short-enough leash to prevent something like the $8000 toilet seats the Pentagon and the private sector are famous for.
Where are the "Free" advances in modern medicine[?] Which were brought all the way into fruition without capitalistic intentions.
Perhaps an example (not that I have any concrete ones) would be government-funded research - surely AIDS/SIDA research has benefitted in this way. If ever there were to be an "Open Medicine", government funding would probably have to be part of it. Of course, that would be "heresy" in today's climate, even if a desperately-needed cure for something was the promised (or even promising) end result.
No GNU is not a responsibility. I mean - how much responsibility does it take to run a business (even a non-profit) with no oversite and no one to argue with you.
Ask any sole proprietor about the responsibility; ask any full-time painter, sculptor, writer, musician...
To have a crusade is not to take responsibility. I don't care how many kids he has. I don't care if he has a wife or a house. But the FSF apparently does charge an awful lot for the CD's it presses. And the printed documentation is really cheesy (consisting of, mostly, copies of the manifesto and so on). That isn't really responsible.
The prices are ridiculous, but that's economics: why are many college textbooks relatively expensive? They don't have the luxury of a mass audience to recover the costs.
Many, many people have contributed to emacs and gcc. It isn't just his puppy (although he may well have written the originals by himself).
But isn't that the point of the (his) GPL and (his notion of) "sharing the software"?
OTOH, if I didn't have to work all day, I could write some pretty neat stuff too...
I don't know RMS' itinerary, but I suspect he's worked hard in the past, continues to do so, and will in the future. I ask you what I asked the previous troll: Who the fuck are you? Since when is coding and crusading not work, or a responsibility? And top of all that, he's put his ass on the line every day, risking (and receiving) public ridicule for the severity (and content) of his stances, and for the unconventionality of them. It's really quite easy to shrink from such a grand undertaking - 99.9% of us have chosen such shrinkage. RMS has not, it seems, backed down at all from his original vision. The man has willfully chosen a very bumpy and quixotic Road Less Traveled; he deserves respect for that, not ridicule. Some of the people (like RMS) who receive MacArthur Fellowships are people who've pretty much had to sweat blood to receive recognition for their work, because often that work doesn't conform to the Mo' Money ethos that unfortunately grips the society.
I'm not asking you to agree with him - I myself am typing this on a non-Free browser, with - on my desktop - a non-Free RealPlayer and apps using a non-Free Qt (...but at least I wrote 'em on emacs and compiled with gcc); I would rather just give money to the FSF than couch it in the jacked-up prices for its hard-copy materials. I would just like an end to these very silly potshots, especially the ones from misguided ACs.
Isn't GNU a responsibility? Isn't RMS' Free Software crusade a responsibility? Who has judged one responsibility to be of greater value than another? Priests and freedom fighters, among others, tend to go without the "responsibilities" that straight society feels people should be compelled to adopt. I've admired and worked with many people who have uncompromisingly rejected or postponed the trophy hunts that the mainstream urges upon us (and who often are considered "odd" in their behavior and "abrasive" in their personalities). Is the Dalai Lama a joke because he doesn't have a wife and 2.2 kids in Suburbia? Who the fuck are you?
The Founding Fathers of the U.S. were all well-heeled gentlemen . Many of them owned slaves; many of them were rapists, their acts conveniently sheltered under the purview of "property rights". Many of them took particular glee in fucking over the original inhabitants of the land. Yet somehow these men still get well-deserved credit (even from me) for nation-building.
If we're going to judge RMS by his appearance and belief system and by whether or not he "plays well with others", we're in pretty sad shape. Linus birthed the kernel, but the kernel itself isn't the soul of Linux, X/Linux, GNU/Linux, or RedHat Linux. Whose idea was it to invent the GPL, under which Linux has made all this progress. Who wrote gcc and emacs? Credit where credit is due. Call Linux what you want - call it Bob, for all I care - but this gratuitous bullshit RMS-bashing has got to stop. It's bad for our karma:)
Well, Slashdot continues to publish FUD like this, like it's newsworthy.
Why is this FUD? It's just a Linux user's musings on the social aspects of using it in a Windows World. There's no intent to feed Fear, Uncertainty, or Doubt here; it raises the usual (important) issue of file formats, something that fits in the "Stuff That Matters" category for any Linuxer who has to deal with Word-ed junk.
Slashdot continues to be visited mostly by Windows users...
Oh? Where are your numbers?
...who get a very negative impression from so many articles like this one.
Are we here to impress people? Screw them. Screw you.
Who is being served here?
/. readers. Nothing new with that.
Feature stories about what people are acutally doing with Linux and other open technology in education, business and at home.
Did you read the article? It was written by a writer for LA Weekly. She's in the writing business, or does that not count, since she doesn't pull in $100K? The article is Part One of three - the series is only one-third over, and you see fit to turn this thing into a gratuitous anti-/. rant that's as meaningful as the copy-and-paste antics of the recent pro-MS trollbots. Get a fsckin' grip!
Move along. Let us know when you get your site up and running. Will it be called "Pissed Geek Troll" or something?
This is the way things are supposed to work. Corporations, retailers, politicians... they work for us - at least they're fond of telling us that. Now here's one instance (a very small one) where a corporation actually is brought to listen to us small fry (at least a little bit), and you're complaining.
I just dl'd CPML; they sure ask a lot of questions on the registration form. I have a question for one of you Digital lurkers: will there eventually be a non-restrictive license on CPML? Or am I just in Wishful Thinking mode?
...infest the threads of this page, I'll take a potshot at Muth too. There's a men's clothier whose slogan is/was "An educated consumer is our best customer". As personal computing becomes a wider and more mature activity, maybe more and more consumers will free themselves of the need for a broad base of support for applications -- especially off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped applications [Muth's words]. Maybe "FTP" and "tarball" (and "RPM") will become part of the common vocabulary, just as "e-mail", "modem", and "browser" are now. And then Muth can move on to Proctor & Gamble or something.
Of course, Phineas T Barnum offers a dissenting voice: "There's a sucker born every minute". There's still a vast market for refried Osmond Brothers, i.e. Hanson, the Backstreet Boys and others of that ilk. Maybe MS needn't worry at all.
I've been wanting to see live Electric Butt Noise all my life!
Sheesh! For the uninitiated, EBN actually stands for Evolving Binary Nostrils, a dub-noise-Klezmer band from Brantford, Ontario. Their recordings are totally bitchin' and beer-style free on MP3 - you can get 'em from their web site. Please don't/. 'em - their server is an old Mega 2 ST.
From a business mans point of view, if you can build a huge empoire like that then the chances of it failling is 0 to none. Mr. Ford ( you knwo Ford trucks and cars ) tought us that.
MS won't die, but they'll be cut down to size, both by the DOJ and by the next recession (...see the air escape the gaping hole in the balloon...).
Ford's doing great, but it's not as big'n'bad as it once was; where once they hired thugs to beat up on unionizers, they now depend more and more on cheap labor (and, of course, techie smarts) - but when technology improvements and bad labor practices no longer produce sufficient gains, then what?
What about Rockefeller's monopoly? How are your oil stocks doing, now that that market has crashed yet again?
MS is not forever. It will be a victory merely if the computer-industry playing field becomes sane; I don't care if MS dies or not. A lot of nice folks are there in Redmond, believe it or not; I'd like them to keep working there - but for a Good Corporate Citizen rather than for an 800-pound octopus.
YOU LOSERS SHOULD USE WINDOWS, THE GREATEST OS OF ALL TIME!!! LINUX IS FOR NERDS WHO HAVE NO LIFE!!!
As I was dealing with the collateral damage of a RH5.0-to-5.2 upgrade (simple my ass! - it ignored a couple of ext2 partitions and tried to install 400M of files into a lone 70M partition... it got worse from there...), I was stuck with using Windows (ye olde original Win95) for a couple of days. It's not bad, actually. But I felt dirty and disoriented - where's my bash prompt? where's my excellent GIMP-fashioned wallpaper? why can't I move my little mousie to switch to another virtual screen? didn't they include egcs on this thing? why does nothing happen when I click the middle mousie button?
Windows: the OS of last resort. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
What would we do without these trolls trumpeting VisualDOS++^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows?
The WWW is a vat of sludge, with pearls of wisdom and usefulness floating within it. So the Web itself as a source of any sort of enlightenment seems a bit of wishful thinking; there's still a need for traditional churches (I say this from my Christian bias) to provide the kernel to any cybercommunity of faith. Yes, one can find spiritual signage in popular culture (the modern opiate of the masses), but that's because any narrative can be edifyingly framed within a religious context; everything is "brimming with spirituality". It doesn't mean that the signage will actually be used as food for spiritual thought. Religions themselves are rife with people who don't quite grasp the spirituality inherent in their own Holy Books (Jerry Falwell and J Random Hizbollah-Leader, for instance, not to mention the rank-and-file), why should some plot line in Ally McBeal be any more useful? As an ex-punk, I've often felt (culturally/politically) like a gatecrasher in many of the churches I've been in (in the US and Canada), so I'd welcome any change in that culture, whether it's brought on by the internet or just by ordinary demographic change. I haven't read Beaudoin's book (yet; though I've heard him speak before), but it may not be until several books from now that he fully digests his divinity-school education. I don't think he's quite there yet, and I doubt that this book will be The Important One in his oeuvre. Time will tell. The first "born-again Christian" I ever met was a cool, longhaired Jesus Freak cabbie, back around 1970. He would be a forerunner of these mythical Gen X seekers Katz and Beaudoin seem to be talking about. Seeing as those Jesus Freaks seem to have morphed into the staid, middle-class (and often right-wing) evangelicals of today, I wouldn't be too optimistic about the long-term results of any change the Gen X'ers bring to the scene. Culture changes, technology changes; spirit just is. So to just fixate on external trappings may be counterproductive.
I dunno. It's Friday. My mind's elsewhere. Thanks again, Katz - I guess this goes on the "to read" list:)
When has RMS done anything resembling disabling comments?
Gee, after the sublime comes the ridiculous. After Arthur's post sweetens my morning coffee, you have to drag this bit of misinformation into it. Go back to the page in question and read Rob and Sengan's addenda to the post. I'll leave it to you to find the URL.
The problem people had was that they interpreted him to be advocating using the loophole, which seems meanspirited, as opposed to just exposing the loophole, which was apparently his intent.
You're way too kind. I don't think anyone misunderstood the question (well, you maybe); people were just piling on Sengan, using it as an excuse. It's not the first time - this has been going on ever since the Iraq bombing; some people's IQs seem to hit bottom at the very sight of Sengan's name. And they all seem to post anonymously for some reason.
Actually, that just makes it worse. He can't take the heat.
So you piss on him either way, whether he removes it or not. I don't think he "can't take the heat"; it's more like "we had to kill the sentence in order to save the IQ level of the comments". Thank you very much for forcing him to censor himself; maybe/. should just remove all thought-provoking questions.
Sengan, instead of covering up your mistakes (like your probable censoring of this post) why not just not make the mistakes in the first place? Here's an easy way: Think first, then post.
There was no mistake. I wish you kneejerk anti-Sengan bastards would follow your own advice; take a look at your comments in this thread (while they're still here) - those comments show absolutely no thought at all.
Sengan's question was a "what if?", an attempt, I guess, to find a flaw in the license. Why this question should be misunderstood and misinterpreted by you people, I don't know. Why this misunderstanding should be so willfully and consistently done, I do know. I would love to play SlashCop and tell the lot of you to take a hike, but I'm just Joe Lurker. I just wish you guys had the brainpower and cojones to think about it and feel some small bit of shame.
Note: Sengan has removed the question in question.
Learn how to spell "fascist" - better yet, learn what it means - before using the word. Then maybe I (and I'm not a Free absolutist...yet) would pay attention to your adolescent nonsense. If becoming a "billionaire" is that important to you, maybe you should stop trolling and begin schmoozing a few drug cartels.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nation is a very old magazine with roots in various flavors of progressive politics (think Teddy Roosevelt, Robert LaFollette, Eugene V Debs - maybe you'll have to ask your great-grandparents); it isn't ultra-anything, except maybe ultra-American. The "ultra-left" is a major (and often demonized) part of American politics in this century. You may think you're being cool with your post, but your predictable response is actually pretty sheep-like.
When sufficient numbers of the ruling and chattering classes (and those who parrot them - like ewe, for instance) are FUD-ing about, demonizing, and marginalizing "welfare cheats", "evil liberals", "drug abusers", "feminazis", and "faggots" and such, we're not far removed from a certain society that, once upon a time, did the same thing to Jews, Gypsies, communists, gays, and dissenters of various stripes. The NSDAP and its leader were democratically elected; they eventually took away the voters' right to vote them out. They also took away the people's right to speak out. You might say "it can't happen here" (I'm assuming you live in the Ewe Ess of Ay), but that is a sadly mistaken assumption; it really can happen here, but only in a modern, spin-doctored, blow-dried, media-savvy (or media-owning), red-white-and-blue apple-pie fashion. Maybe we're well on the way there. Just like many Depression-era Germans, we won't know what hit us until well after our bodies are covered in welts and bruises.
--
In general, I agree with you. I deliberately didn't use the word "evil" in my post; I used the word "amoral". If you're an employee, I'm sure you're doing the best job you can. If you're a boss, I'm sure the same is true. My point was that where there is conflict between what a corporation is doing and the "outside world", often the "outside world" loses out, and often there is government (and public) acquiescence to it.
So your medtech example needs to be broken up. Obviously the artificial pancreas is good, and I'll assume that the pricing of it is fair, because I don't want to get into a debate about the health-care system. There's no conflict there: people need that product, and the medtech company is selling it. My problem with it only comes in where (to drag a real-world example into this) that company, for example, closes down a factory in one location and moves to a place where the wages are much cheaper, and local government is giving them big tax breaks and is tacitly ignoring the excessive waste that the new factory will produce. It ends up a great deal for shareholders, but a bad one for the local economy, in that the tax base hasn't improved all that much, and there will eventually be a huge bill to pay environment-wise. My examples are taken from the maquilladora plants in Mexico and an old Proctor-Silex (IIRC) plant in a rural area of North Carolina - the Proctor-Silex plant relocated a few years later, BTW, having gotten an even sweeter deal elsewhere.
So yes, I do take it personally when some Red Dot Zealot implies that all capitalistic actions are somehow tainted.
But look at his last sentence: If you think a bunch of worthless people in the third world ( they have no net worth; they are, worthless) are more important that your corporations quarterly profits potential for the next ten years then you are no REAL Capitialist. I'm not sure how Red the person is. I'll drag out the the famous Dom Helder Camara quote here:
When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.
I'm the offspring of Republicans, and I consider myself to be one as well, a member of the party of Eisenhower (GM's Charles Wilson said "What's good for..." during his confirmation hearings for a post in Ike's Cabinet), Goldwater, Dirksen, and Javits. But when I became old enough to vote, I was so incensed at the thuggish Reagan Administration that I registered Democrat, and I've seen no reason to change it yet. One of the unfortunate circumstances resulting from the Reagan years is this deification of business and capitalism - anyone who dares to point out the flaws in The Way Things Are seems to get shouted down and called names (and even the word "liberal" has shamelessly been turned into a pejorative).
So, in my longwinded way, I support your putting-on of a suit and making artificial pancreases (and profits); my posts were not written to criticize that. But, at some point, a corporation is no longer hermetically sealed in the vacuum of dollars-and-cents-and-widgets and needs to be viewed in the larger landscape in which it is a part. The failure to do that is a major failing of contemporary capitalism, and it threatens to hurt us all in the long run.
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What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.
back in the 50's to a situation now where the common perception is
What's good for GM is good for the country.
There's a big difference there; there's the opening of a little hole where all sorts of nonsense can creep in, where if the CEO says that green is red, then - dammit! - green is red. The general amorality of business wins out over the concerns of the population at large. Yes, Microsoft is pretty much the apotheosis of bad behavior, but few businesses (large or small) are in line for sainthood. Just ask a dollar-a-day garment worker in Honduras. Or, closer to home, ask some rural residents who have had their local environment crapped on by the local industries. A corporation answers first and foremost to its shareholders; any obligations beyond that tend to be ignored, unless it benefits the corporation and shareholders. This is a scenario in which people are considered worthless, at least those who don't own large blocks of shares or don't purchase what the corporation is selling.
Does this observation warrant namecalling?
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This is a meaningless point. Is the government responsible for any products? I'm not sure I'd count public education or garbage collection as a "product".
The fact is the government is not the best at allocating resources.
And the private sector hits a home run every time? I think the private sector is highly overrated in the resource-allocation department. They're good, but they're not "insanely great".
I shudder to think of a world in which the government is responsible for all scientific innovation...
That wasn't what I was talking about anyway, though upon re-reading your earlier post, I now see that you were. There's room for straightahead for-profit activity, and there's room for activity that substitutes other criteria in lieu of (or alongside) profit.
I'll bet the USSR did OK in the scientific aspect; there were surely other factors, like a corrupt bureaucracy stemming from a totalitarian society, that played a role in any shortcomings. Let's see whether or not the E2K is vapor before we Westerners decide what goes on the tombstone.
I still see no reason why there can't be a government (or UN) funded corporation designed to fill a specific niche, like an AIDS cure, or a non-fossil-fuel "People's Car" (or non-car), or a public broadcasting entity. Something where the profit motive takes a back seat to other concerns, and where the corporation is kept on a short-enough leash to prevent something like the $8000 toilet seats the Pentagon and the private sector are famous for.
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Perhaps an example (not that I have any concrete ones) would be government-funded research - surely AIDS/SIDA research has benefitted in this way. If ever there were to be an "Open Medicine", government funding would probably have to be part of it. Of course, that would be "heresy" in today's climate, even if a desperately-needed cure for something was the promised (or even promising) end result .
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Ask any sole proprietor about the responsibility; ask any full-time painter, sculptor, writer, musician...
To have a crusade is not to take responsibility. I don't care how many kids he has. I don't care if he has a wife or a house. But the FSF apparently does charge an awful lot for the CD's it presses. And the printed documentation is really cheesy (consisting of, mostly, copies of the manifesto and so on). That isn't really responsible.
The prices are ridiculous, but that's economics: why are many college textbooks relatively expensive? They don't have the luxury of a mass audience to recover the costs.
Many, many people have contributed to emacs and gcc. It isn't just his puppy (although he may well have written the originals by himself).
But isn't that the point of the (his) GPL and (his notion of) "sharing the software"?
OTOH, if I didn't have to work all day, I could write some pretty neat stuff too...
I don't know RMS' itinerary, but I suspect he's worked hard in the past, continues to do so, and will in the future. I ask you what I asked the previous troll: Who the fuck are you? Since when is coding and crusading not work, or a responsibility? And top of all that, he's put his ass on the line every day, risking (and receiving) public ridicule for the severity (and content) of his stances, and for the unconventionality of them. It's really quite easy to shrink from such a grand undertaking - 99.9% of us have chosen such shrinkage. RMS has not, it seems, backed down at all from his original vision. The man has willfully chosen a very bumpy and quixotic Road Less Traveled; he deserves respect for that, not ridicule. Some of the people (like RMS) who receive MacArthur Fellowships are people who've pretty much had to sweat blood to receive recognition for their work, because often that work doesn't conform to the Mo' Money ethos that unfortunately grips the society.
I'm not asking you to agree with him - I myself am typing this on a non-Free browser, with - on my desktop - a non-Free RealPlayer and apps using a non-Free Qt (...but at least I wrote 'em on emacs and compiled with gcc); I would rather just give money to the FSF than couch it in the jacked-up prices for its hard-copy materials. I would just like an end to these very silly potshots, especially the ones from misguided ACs.
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The Founding Fathers of the U.S. were all well-heeled gentlemen . Many of them owned slaves; many of them were rapists, their acts conveniently sheltered under the purview of "property rights". Many of them took particular glee in fucking over the original inhabitants of the land. Yet somehow these men still get well-deserved credit (even from me) for nation-building.
If we're going to judge RMS by his appearance and belief system and by whether or not he "plays well with others", we're in pretty sad shape. Linus birthed the kernel, but the kernel itself isn't the soul of Linux, X/Linux, GNU/Linux, or RedHat Linux. Whose idea was it to invent the GPL, under which Linux has made all this progress. Who wrote gcc and emacs? Credit where credit is due. Call Linux what you want - call it Bob, for all I care - but this gratuitous bullshit RMS-bashing has got to stop. It's bad for our karma :)
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Why is this FUD? It's just a Linux user's musings on the social aspects of using it in a Windows World. There's no intent to feed Fear, Uncertainty, or Doubt here; it raises the usual (important) issue of file formats, something that fits in the "Stuff That Matters" category for any Linuxer who has to deal with Word-ed junk.
Slashdot continues to be visited mostly by Windows users...
Oh? Where are your numbers?
Are we here to impress people? Screw them. Screw you.
Who is being served here?
Feature stories about what people are acutally doing with Linux and other open technology in education, business and at home.
Did you read the article? It was written by a writer for LA Weekly. She's in the writing business, or does that not count, since she doesn't pull in $100K? The article is Part One of three - the series is only one-third over, and you see fit to turn this thing into a gratuitous anti-/. rant that's as meaningful as the copy-and-paste antics of the recent pro-MS trollbots. Get a fsckin' grip!
Move along. Let us know when you get your site up and running. Will it be called "Pissed Geek Troll" or something?
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sed: Stream EDitor
ls: LiSt
grep: Get Regular Expression Pattern
seems mnemonic enough to me...
Only for English-speakers.
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I'll get to the Java 2 thing tomorrow.
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Of course, Phineas T Barnum offers a dissenting voice: "There's a sucker born every minute". There's still a vast market for refried Osmond Brothers, i.e. Hanson, the Backstreet Boys and others of that ilk. Maybe MS needn't worry at all.
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Sheesh! For the uninitiated, EBN actually stands for Evolving Binary Nostrils, a dub-noise-Klezmer band from Brantford, Ontario. Their recordings are totally bitchin' and beer-style free on MP3 - you can get 'em from their web site. Please don't /. 'em - their server is an old Mega 2 ST.
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MS won't die, but they'll be cut down to size, both by the DOJ and by the next recession (...see the air escape the gaping hole in the balloon...).
Ford's doing great, but it's not as big'n'bad as it once was; where once they hired thugs to beat up on unionizers, they now depend more and more on cheap labor (and, of course, techie smarts) - but when technology improvements and bad labor practices no longer produce sufficient gains, then what?
What about Rockefeller's monopoly? How are your oil stocks doing, now that that market has crashed yet again?
MS is not forever. It will be a victory merely if the computer-industry playing field becomes sane; I don't care if MS dies or not. A lot of nice folks are there in Redmond, believe it or not; I'd like them to keep working there - but for a Good Corporate Citizen rather than for an 800-pound octopus.
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[Obligatory "First Beowulf Post"; forgive me]
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Why didn't Beowulf win anything?
Congrats to Yahoo!^H^H^H^H^H^Hyouse guys.
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As I was dealing with the collateral damage of a RH5.0-to-5.2 upgrade (simple my ass! - it ignored a couple of ext2 partitions and tried to install 400M of files into a lone 70M partition... it got worse from there...), I was stuck with using Windows (ye olde original Win95) for a couple of days. It's not bad, actually. But I felt dirty and disoriented - where's my bash prompt? where's my excellent GIMP-fashioned wallpaper? why can't I move my little mousie to switch to another virtual screen? didn't they include egcs on this thing? why does nothing happen when I click the middle mousie button?
Windows: the OS of last resort. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
What would we do without these trolls trumpeting VisualDOS++^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows?
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I dunno. It's Friday. My mind's elsewhere. Thanks again, Katz - I guess this goes on the "to read" list :)
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Gee, after the sublime comes the ridiculous. After Arthur's post sweetens my morning coffee, you have to drag this bit of misinformation into it. Go back to the page in question and read Rob and Sengan's addenda to the post. I'll leave it to you to find the URL.
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You're way too kind. I don't think anyone misunderstood the question (well, you maybe); people were just piling on Sengan, using it as an excuse. It's not the first time - this has been going on ever since the Iraq bombing; some people's IQs seem to hit bottom at the very sight of Sengan's name. And they all seem to post anonymously for some reason.
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So you piss on him either way, whether he removes it or not. I don't think he "can't take the heat"; it's more like "we had to kill the sentence in order to save the IQ level of the comments". Thank you very much for forcing him to censor himself; maybe /. should just remove all thought-provoking questions.
Sengan, instead of covering up your mistakes (like your probable censoring of this post) why not just not make the mistakes in the first place? Here's an easy way: Think first, then post.
There was no mistake. I wish you kneejerk anti-Sengan bastards would follow your own advice; take a look at your comments in this thread (while they're still here) - those comments show absolutely no thought at all.
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Note: Sengan has removed the question in question.
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