"If there's one thing that's true about OS's, it's this: the less you paid for the OS, the less you are likely to be willing to pay for applications."
Are you sure? I think that because a person's money is limited, spending less on one item lets you spend more on another. Few people can afford to pay $300 for XP Professional and then another $400 for Office--just to get basic computer functionality. But if the OS is free, then there will be money available for a reasonably priced office suite and other software.
If you used RSS, you wouldn't have to check every 5 minutes! Instead, you could simply read it every hour, leaving you plenty of in-between moments for your fabulous inventions!
There are any number of censorship laws and tactics I think even the majority of Americans would go along with if it was accompanied by rhetoric about terrorism and democracy.
Also remember that censorship takes many forms. The US government doesn't really need to block anything; thanks to its enormous government agencies, it can simply monitor all communications and make tactical arrests when the time comes. I'm sure all the true patriots are already on lists for detainment if/when martial law comes.
I only reboot my iMac every two months when an OS update gets released. The secondhand iBook I bought last month gets used daily, and I haven't rebooted it since installing Tiger the day I got it.
If Slashdot wants to get rid of ACs, they should fix their registration process. I posted anonymously for a year because both attempts at registering failed. Slashdot simply never sent me my confirmation email or login info.
Is pointy-haired-manager language among your company's merits? Sorry, I couldn't resist commenting on your website's marketing statement.
"Sxip [HARD-TO-PROUNCE BRAND WORD] Identity provides identity management solutions [MEANINGLESS BUZZWORD] that leverage [NOT A VERB] the Sxip Network [BUZZWORD] and drive Identity 2.0 infrastructure [BUZZWORD]. Sxip empowers [BUZZWORD] individuals to create and manage their online digital identities and enables enterprises to instantly provision [NOT A VERB] and manage their users."
Whew! I still have no idea what you guys do, but I bet you're sure good at leveraging your solutions for better synergy!
Indonesia doesn't have the world's tallest skyscrapers. Not by a long shot.
Maybe you're thinking of Malaysia's Petronas towers. I guess you're American, and knowing anything about other countries is not the strong suit of most Americans.
I don't know why Americans always talk about "legal" copies of Windows, music, and so on, like it's some universal absolute. Legal depends on the jurisdiction, and there are at least 200 countries that are not the United States.
If Indonesia decides that copying Windows is legal, then it's legal there.
I agree that 5 years from now, once everyone's on an Intel Mac, porting games will be easier.
My point, though, is that until then, Mac games are going to have to be ported for not one, but two different binary-incompatible Mac platforms - and I highly doubt Rosetta is going to be useful for that. That has to suck for Mac game developers. I.e. gaming is going to get worse, not better, in the forseeable future.
Honestly, in the creative and home software markets, I don't know how this will work. Maybe the transition will be seamless, and maybe Jobs had just ushered in 7 years of binary and compatibility hell.
But I think it's really going to suck for games. Game companies don't write their software in Xcode and then build with Cocoa libraries. They write lean code optimized for the hardware and CPU.
So are Mac porting houses like Aspyr going to be forced to port, optimize, and build two different CPU versions of each game? That's not going to be worth the effort for a lot of marginal titles.
"Democracy has given humans the greatest amount of self-rule and self-determination ever in history."
Democracy lets majority take advantage of the minority. It lets large, organized groups plunder smaller, less organized groups through theft and redistribution. My views have never been represented by my "democratic representatives", so I fail to see how it has given me any self-rule or self-determination.
Rather, what little self-rule and determination I have left exists in spite of what politicans 1000 kilometres away have stolen from me. And with every session of their democratic body, they take a little more away from me. All because some well-connected lobby has a say, and I don't.
People who think of India as just another country don't realize how vast and diverse it is. It's really its own continent, with over twice the population of Europe and probably twice the cultural diversity in language, custom, and religion.
If you thought about India as a federation of many different nations with their own markets, languages, and so on, you'd be closer to the mark.
It's a fascinating place and I'd like to visit it someday. India is an enormous and invaluable repository of human culture and history.
I think you're falling for the famous Broken Window Fallacy.
Sure, destruction does keep everyone busy; but all it really does is destroy wealth (which is already valuable) and divert time and resources from improving the world, since said resources must instead be spent on merely restoring things to what they were.
More jobs doing the same thing is not progress. More jobs doing more productive things is.
Apply this to your software metaphor as you see fit.
If I were constructing a government today, in the constitution, I'd have a section saying that all laws must have a summary and rationale attached to them, detailing exactly why the law is required, and it would be a crime for somebody to vote for a bill without reading at least the summary and rationale.
I'd suggest something stricter. Give every bill a sunset of one year, so that every law on the books must be renewed or expire on an annual basis. That way, only the most worthwhile laws will stay in force. Additionally, require every legislator to quote a bill verbatim from memory if he wishes to vote "yea". If he's not intimately familiar with every clause and its ramifications, he shouldn't be voting for it. If it's too complex and full of legalese to remember, he shouldn't be voting for it.
Or better yet, put a comprehensive set of just laws in the constitution, and get rid of the legislature.
Well, the sky isn't anyone's property. I figure that if you abandon your property (i.e. a billboard) in low earth orbit and it's in my way for some reason, I can remove it. (Using a missile or whatever means is at my disposal.)
You can erect all the billboards you want on your own property, but the sky isn't yours.
I believe in the US it is possible to obtain a published set of all laws currently in effect and on the books. I think it's around 20 volumes, with the index itself being one 700-page monolithic tome.
The legislative model of democracy is absolutely ridiculous. Law has nothing to do with right and wrong any more; legislators spend all their time trying to pass as many laws as possible while spending no time actually reading or understanding these laws. Legislators think it's their job to "do something", and the media portrays a deadlocked Congress as an obstacle to progress. In fact, the opposite is true.
As a democracy progresses, it becomes absolutely impossible for any individual to know, understand, or abide by the actual law. Indeed, many of the hundreds of thousands of laws and statutes conflict with each other, so you're a law-breaker no matter what you do.
This is great for tyrants, since there's always a law you can accuse someone of breaking. That's especially true in the US, now that there's a whole class of federal "conspiracy" crimes that don't require any proof of wrongdoing for a conviction.
Legislatures have made law irrelevant, paradoxical, oppressive, and absurd; and Western democracy is going to fail because of it.
KDE does not "just work" as you say. I've spent some time with current Suse and Mandrake distros and given up after being unable to get fonts properly recognized.
One big problem is that KDE's font manager (whatever it's called) doesn't recognize font families and font relationships properly. So if I installed something with book, medium, bold, extra bold, italic, and so on, only one of those fonts (at random) would usually show up in an application. Gee, it's really great to be limited to the bold italic of every font family I install.
Also, Linux needs a proper Unicode or AAT engine. I don't think it has one yet, since I've never gotten the special features of Unicode fonts to work.
"Privacy doesn't include the right to hide your crimes.Privacy doesn't include the right to hide your crimes."
Sharing my data privately is not a crime in any moral sense. Show me in your Bible or Koran where it says I can't copy ideas or information.
"You are NOT entitled to have a copy of that song you like so much. "
If someone is willing to share it with me, I absolutely have the right (as a human being) to accept a copy. Copyright is simply an abridgement of my right to use my own computer and my own data as I wish. "Copyright" is an anti-right, and it was never designed to enforce outmoded business models. (It was in fact designed to give book publishers monopolies in return for political favours.)
"If you obtain a copy of a song without providing compensation to the copyright holder, your are breaking law and stealing from the copyright holder."
Nowhere does the law say I cannot receive a copy of a song someone gives me. If any such law exists in any place, it is certainly not universal, and does not apply in the jurisdictions in which the vast majority of the world's population lives.
If I'm not taking anything away from a person (and depriving them of that thing), then I'm not stealing. It might sound cliche here on Slashdot, but it's true. People who equate copying with stealing are committing a profound intellectual error.
If you really think copying ideas and data (the very cornerstone of human culture for 6000 years) is wrong, then feel free to hold yourself to those ideals. But please get off your high horse and stop trying to take away my rights. Live and let live.
"(if you aren't stealing the song, you are stealing the "right" to make copies)"
That's ridiculous. The original creator still has every right to make copies. I'm taking nothing from him. If he can't sustain a profit in an industry where the marginal cost of production is zero, that's his problem. Am I legally obligated to buy food from Safeway instead of growing vegetables in my own garden? Am I obligated to buy clothes from Sears instead of accepting hand-me-downs? Am I obligated to buy books instead of reading them at the library or borrowing from a friend? Of course not; even though all these activities arguably "steal" from the producers by the twisted logic of a corporate shill.
So please stop with the fraudulent "copying = stealing" arguments. Those of us who have woken up to the realities of the digital age and the basic rights of humans will never buy it.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
The parent makes a very good point. A lot of sleazy Digital Restrictions Management software uses spyware and malware tactics to control your computer. After all, it can't work without restricting your use of your own system to some degree.
Can Washingtonians now sue record labels that use malware to prevent CD copying? That would be a terrific step towards ending such nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
"If there's one thing that's true about OS's, it's this: the less you paid for the OS, the less you are likely to be willing to pay for applications."
Are you sure? I think that because a person's money is limited, spending less on one item lets you spend more on another. Few people can afford to pay $300 for XP Professional and then another $400 for Office--just to get basic computer functionality. But if the OS is free, then there will be money available for a reasonably priced office suite and other software.
You're just the do-it-yourself type. :)
My Mac didn't require me to install my operating system or Safari! Remember, he said there is no software that *users* need to install.
If you used RSS, you wouldn't have to check every 5 minutes! Instead, you could simply read it every hour, leaving you plenty of in-between moments for your fabulous inventions!
There are any number of censorship laws and tactics I think even the majority of Americans would go along with if it was accompanied by rhetoric about terrorism and democracy.
Also remember that censorship takes many forms. The US government doesn't really need to block anything; thanks to its enormous government agencies, it can simply monitor all communications and make tactical arrests when the time comes. I'm sure all the true patriots are already on lists for detainment if/when martial law comes.
I only reboot my iMac every two months when an OS update gets released. The secondhand iBook I bought last month gets used daily, and I haven't rebooted it since installing Tiger the day I got it.
If Slashdot wants to get rid of ACs, they should fix their registration process. I posted anonymously for a year because both attempts at registering failed. Slashdot simply never sent me my confirmation email or login info.
Is pointy-haired-manager language among your company's merits? Sorry, I couldn't resist commenting on your website's marketing statement.
"Sxip [HARD-TO-PROUNCE BRAND WORD] Identity provides identity management solutions [MEANINGLESS BUZZWORD] that leverage [NOT A VERB] the Sxip Network [BUZZWORD] and drive Identity 2.0 infrastructure [BUZZWORD]. Sxip empowers [BUZZWORD] individuals to create and manage their online digital identities and enables enterprises to instantly provision [NOT A VERB] and manage their users."
Whew! I still have no idea what you guys do, but I bet you're sure good at leveraging your solutions for better synergy!
I always assumed Lycoris was supposed to be pronounced "licorice", which at least means something.
Indonesia doesn't have the world's tallest skyscrapers. Not by a long shot.
Maybe you're thinking of Malaysia's Petronas towers. I guess you're American, and knowing anything about other countries is not the strong suit of most Americans.
I don't know why Americans always talk about "legal" copies of Windows, music, and so on, like it's some universal absolute. Legal depends on the jurisdiction, and there are at least 200 countries that are not the United States.
If Indonesia decides that copying Windows is legal, then it's legal there.
I agree that 5 years from now, once everyone's on an Intel Mac, porting games will be easier.
My point, though, is that until then, Mac games are going to have to be ported for not one, but two different binary-incompatible Mac platforms - and I highly doubt Rosetta is going to be useful for that. That has to suck for Mac game developers. I.e. gaming is going to get worse, not better, in the forseeable future.
Honestly, in the creative and home software markets, I don't know how this will work. Maybe the transition will be seamless, and maybe Jobs had just ushered in 7 years of binary and compatibility hell.
But I think it's really going to suck for games. Game companies don't write their software in Xcode and then build with Cocoa libraries. They write lean code optimized for the hardware and CPU.
So are Mac porting houses like Aspyr going to be forced to port, optimize, and build two different CPU versions of each game? That's not going to be worth the effort for a lot of marginal titles.
Well, why on earth would we count servers that have been thrown out a window? :) I doubt they're much good after that.
e st rate)
(http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=defen
"Democracy has given humans the greatest amount of self-rule and self-determination ever in history."
Democracy lets majority take advantage of the minority. It lets large, organized groups plunder smaller, less organized groups through theft and redistribution. My views have never been represented by my "democratic representatives", so I fail to see how it has given me any self-rule or self-determination.
Rather, what little self-rule and determination I have left exists in spite of what politicans 1000 kilometres away have stolen from me. And with every session of their democratic body, they take a little more away from me. All because some well-connected lobby has a say, and I don't.
You can keep your wonderful democracy.
People who think of India as just another country don't realize how vast and diverse it is. It's really its own continent, with over twice the population of Europe and probably twice the cultural diversity in language, custom, and religion.
If you thought about India as a federation of many different nations with their own markets, languages, and so on, you'd be closer to the mark.
It's a fascinating place and I'd like to visit it someday. India is an enormous and invaluable repository of human culture and history.
I think you're falling for the famous Broken Window Fallacy.
Sure, destruction does keep everyone busy; but all it really does is destroy wealth (which is already valuable) and divert time and resources from improving the world, since said resources must instead be spent on merely restoring things to what they were.
More jobs doing the same thing is not progress. More jobs doing more productive things is.
Apply this to your software metaphor as you see fit.
If I were constructing a government today, in the constitution, I'd have a section saying that all laws must have a summary and rationale attached to them, detailing exactly why the law is required, and it would be a crime for somebody to vote for a bill without reading at least the summary and rationale. I'd suggest something stricter. Give every bill a sunset of one year, so that every law on the books must be renewed or expire on an annual basis. That way, only the most worthwhile laws will stay in force. Additionally, require every legislator to quote a bill verbatim from memory if he wishes to vote "yea". If he's not intimately familiar with every clause and its ramifications, he shouldn't be voting for it. If it's too complex and full of legalese to remember, he shouldn't be voting for it. Or better yet, put a comprehensive set of just laws in the constitution, and get rid of the legislature.
Well, the sky isn't anyone's property. I figure that if you abandon your property (i.e. a billboard) in low earth orbit and it's in my way for some reason, I can remove it. (Using a missile or whatever means is at my disposal.)
You can erect all the billboards you want on your own property, but the sky isn't yours.
I believe in the US it is possible to obtain a published set of all laws currently in effect and on the books. I think it's around 20 volumes, with the index itself being one 700-page monolithic tome.
The legislative model of democracy is absolutely ridiculous. Law has nothing to do with right and wrong any more; legislators spend all their time trying to pass as many laws as possible while spending no time actually reading or understanding these laws. Legislators think it's their job to "do something", and the media portrays a deadlocked Congress as an obstacle to progress. In fact, the opposite is true.
As a democracy progresses, it becomes absolutely impossible for any individual to know, understand, or abide by the actual law. Indeed, many of the hundreds of thousands of laws and statutes conflict with each other, so you're a law-breaker no matter what you do.
This is great for tyrants, since there's always a law you can accuse someone of breaking. That's especially true in the US, now that there's a whole class of federal "conspiracy" crimes that don't require any proof of wrongdoing for a conviction.
Legislatures have made law irrelevant, paradoxical, oppressive, and absurd; and Western democracy is going to fail because of it.
KDE does not "just work" as you say. I've spent some time with current Suse and Mandrake distros and given up after being unable to get fonts properly recognized.
One big problem is that KDE's font manager (whatever it's called) doesn't recognize font families and font relationships properly. So if I installed something with book, medium, bold, extra bold, italic, and so on, only one of those fonts (at random) would usually show up in an application. Gee, it's really great to be limited to the bold italic of every font family I install.
Also, Linux needs a proper Unicode or AAT engine. I don't think it has one yet, since I've never gotten the special features of Unicode fonts to work.
(So yes, I gave up and bought a Mac.)
"Privacy doesn't include the right to hide your crimes.Privacy doesn't include the right to hide your crimes."
Sharing my data privately is not a crime in any moral sense. Show me in your Bible or Koran where it says I can't copy ideas or information.
"You are NOT entitled to have a copy of that song you like so much. "
If someone is willing to share it with me, I absolutely have the right (as a human being) to accept a copy. Copyright is simply an abridgement of my right to use my own computer and my own data as I wish. "Copyright" is an anti-right, and it was never designed to enforce outmoded business models. (It was in fact designed to give book publishers monopolies in return for political favours.)
"If you obtain a copy of a song without providing compensation to the copyright holder, your are breaking law and stealing from the copyright holder."
Nowhere does the law say I cannot receive a copy of a song someone gives me. If any such law exists in any place, it is certainly not universal, and does not apply in the jurisdictions in which the vast majority of the world's population lives.
If I'm not taking anything away from a person (and depriving them of that thing), then I'm not stealing. It might sound cliche here on Slashdot, but it's true. People who equate copying with stealing are committing a profound intellectual error.
If you really think copying ideas and data (the very cornerstone of human culture for 6000 years) is wrong, then feel free to hold yourself to those ideals. But please get off your high horse and stop trying to take away my rights. Live and let live.
"(if you aren't stealing the song, you are stealing the "right" to make copies)"
That's ridiculous. The original creator still has every right to make copies. I'm taking nothing from him. If he can't sustain a profit in an industry where the marginal cost of production is zero, that's his problem. Am I legally obligated to buy food from Safeway instead of growing vegetables in my own garden? Am I obligated to buy clothes from Sears instead of accepting hand-me-downs? Am I obligated to buy books instead of reading them at the library or borrowing from a friend? Of course not; even though all these activities arguably "steal" from the producers by the twisted logic of a corporate shill.
So please stop with the fraudulent "copying = stealing" arguments. Those of us who have woken up to the realities of the digital age and the basic rights of humans will never buy it.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
And if they write "loose" by accident instead of "loses", it's meaningless and therefore invalid! :)
I doubt such "terms of service" are valid if you're tricked into agreeing.
The parent makes a very good point. A lot of sleazy Digital Restrictions Management software uses spyware and malware tactics to control your computer. After all, it can't work without restricting your use of your own system to some degree.
Can Washingtonians now sue record labels that use malware to prevent CD copying? That would be a terrific step towards ending such nonsense.
They chose a zero-to-nine scale to avoid filing 10-Ks.
(ouch)