I'm sorry but did you just compare the deaths of hundreds of people with an argument about software licenses ? Cause it seems like you did ?
YES I DID.
And the reason I did is because whether one person dies or 800 people lose a month off their lives, it's the same, maybe even worse. Software licensing does not stand alone with no effects on others. In particular, the monopoly of microsoft has gigantic economic effects the world over - just where do you think that $40+ billion in cash that MS had in the bank a few years ago came from? It came from businesses and governments that could have used the money for better things like improved medical care, more efficient farming, distribution and markets. Just as the current oil prices affect all of those things - sending money to a bunch of rich arabs so they can sprinkle gold dust on their lattes in Abu Dubai instead of doing something useful with it locally like grow more food.
So, if you don't care about the general health and well being of the entire freakin planet, maybe you should refrain from lecturing others.
Free market forces, along with the incentives in capitalism, says that the labour market shifts to where the labour is cheap. I thought Americans were fans of the free market?
In Economics, monopoly (also "Pure oligopoly") exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.
Microsoft dictates almost everything about the desktop. For example, they've forced video card manufacturers to support directx, to even build in "protected path" drm-support in hardware.
Of course not, why would we allow a user to chose the software that best meets his needs from the widest possible selection?
Don't be a dillweed. Free software is about one specific issue - freedom of the end user to do what he wants with his software. That does not mean it precludes other issues. Your bitching is like saying that the national audubon society ought to support gun ownership. ITS NOT THE REASON THEY EXIST. Same with Free software, lack of choice is not the problem that motivated the movement.
You do seem to be laboring under the misconception that the word "Free" in "Free software" means whatever specific freedoms you want it to mean. It doesn't. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you'll understand that trying to stuff your personal issues under the mantra of "Free software" is inappropriate.
Hey, stop talking like this is a great and epic struggle.
Zimbabwe is a great struggle. We're just talking about computer operating systems.
No, you are wrong.
Zimbabwe is currently playing out a story that the earth has seen thousands of times in all corners. Each time it plays out, it only effects a small group of people. Sure it effects them drastically, but in the big picture its nothing new and does not have much of an impact beyond Zimbabwe's neighbors.
On the other hand, the current OS monopoly on the desktop affects hundreds of millions, maybe even more than a billion people world-wide across all countries. And in a more general sense, the "freedom vs control" of information conflict that this is a part of affects the destiny of the entire human race.
Just because the issues are more abstract with less of an obvious impact does not mean they are less important. To dismiss them in that way would be kind of like the farmers in the 13 colonies complaining that those dolts at that constitutional convention have their heads' up their asses, they ought to be doing something about this season's drought instead of blowing so much hot air around.
Free software is about the end-user's right to do with software as he pleases. It is not about having a choice, it is especially not about having a choice between multiple proprietary options. The difference may be subtle to some, but the day it bites you in the ass and you realize that you aren't free to use your software the way you want to, you'll probably figure it out real quick. I sure did, after spending $600 on nvidia video cards that would not work with my monitors under linux because of a &%$&^ bug in their linux drivers it was became real obvious to me.
For instance, I cannot fathom how anyone could have a problem with a knowledgeable user buying a DRMed song from iTunes. Sure, I wouldn't do so, but so long as that consumer understands the limitations on what he is buying, I don't see the problem.
The reason people have a problem with others simply making an informed choice is that you can't negotiate with a corporation. Just as most people can't fix a bug in Free software, even more so most people can't make a corporation fix a bug or support a feature in proprietary software. That other person's choice to accept arbitrary restrictions works against me by encouraging the market to remain proprietary. Sure my suffering is an externality to the other person. But don't expect me to be happy about it.
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation."
Could you direct me to the translation of Mein Kampf which contains that passage?
I can't find it.
I can find a few references to the first sentence. Like this one but the context is not the same:
The folkish state must make up for what everyone else today has neglected in this field. It must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one's own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world, and one highest honor: to renounce doing so.
And even they don't seem to cite which translation they are using.
The problem with the web site forums is the severe fragmentation.
I've long thought it would be a highly useful feature for all the forum software out there to supporting gatewaying to usenet. Create some alt group or hierarchy of groups to contain every post in each forum or subforum on a website.
I guess the financial incentive isn't there as they are probably worried they'll lose a fraction of their advertising eyeballs to usenet. But I think that in the long-run it would only generate more interest in the website plus they would get free archival services from google/deja and the usenet providers that have 100% retention in the text groups. One thing I really hate about web forum is their ephemeral nature, even the long lived ones often just delete older posts rather than spend the disk space on archiving them and the others can just disappear completely and take all their collected information with them.
Have you ever heard anyone chose and ISP because of USENET?
Actually, before this fiasco, Verizon was the ISP of choice for usenet access. Their retention never compared to the commercial services, at only about 10 days. But their coverage was 80-90% of the best. Many people chose verizon specifically for their usenet service, especially back when the cable internet speeds weren't much better than dsl. If the recent news hadn't polluted the google searches for older discussions regarding verizon and usenet, I'd probably be able to quickly dig up 10-20 threads specifically praising verizon's usenet service.
You could change X video resolution with a simple set of keystrokes... in 1993.
No, in 1993 you could change the monitor's resolution not the X video resolution.
The X server's resolution stayed the same - if the new monitor resolution was smaller than the X server's it would hardware pan the desktop. If the new monitor resolution was greater than the X server's it would only partially fill the monitor. Either way, the configuration of the framebuffer stayed the same. And, FWIW, all that was a particular implementation detail of XFree86, it was not a part of the X protocol it self as is the new RandR stuff that the previous poster was referring to.
No, not really. X's main problem is a reliance on request/acknowledge handshaking that makes it very, very sensitive to latency. You might even say that the X protocol does not have windows.
why do i need a mixing board or expensive software to see if a few superimposed tracks are going to work well together when i've been provided the tools for such a simple task for over a decade?
Because there is plenty of free mixing board software and what you propose to do with sndrec32 is more than a little masochistic.
As a musician, I would want to challenge this as abridgement of my rights, and I'd want to make a (worth $Billions$) anti-trust case out of it.
It isn't about recording audio input from microphones, it is about making a copy of whats going out to the speakers.
Any musician would be using more than simple playback software, probably some sort of mixer-board sort of thing, and would be able to record their own audio before even sending it to the speakers in the first place.
FWIW - its totally cultural. In Korea (yeah, cue the jokes) answering a cell phone almost always takes priority over whatever is going on in person and that's considered absolutely normal. I've heard Japan is the same way, but maybe to a lesser extent.
you can't protect yourself easily from terrorists who plan on deceiving and defying conventional wisdom while targeting unrelated and unsuspecting victims in order to cause action from an unrelated party. Therefore, a straight up comparison on body count isn't appropriate in deciding which resources deserve more attention and which ones are being wasted.
The last does not follow from the first. If the number of deaths due to any threat is minute you do not need to defend yourself, simply doing nothing is highly effective. It is even more effective when prediction is as difficult as you describe it. Whatever the case, irrational overblown responses are clearly counter-productive.
But Red Hat doesn't publish Free Software, it publishes Open Source
WTF? Almost everything that RedHat publishes is GNU licensed. The GPL is the closest thing to an archetype for Free software.
Your whole idea about "community" is balderdash. Free software is about freedom of the end user of the software to do what he wants with it. Full stop.
It has been a long while, but I remember enjoying them and they had some interesting concepts.
I'll second that. I don't remember a thing about the plots, I must have read them back around 4th or 5th grade, but I do remember liking them a lot for being just a little surreal. I think that was around the time that I found a few collections of short stories by JG Ballard which were completely off the scale of surreal.
If ERB is the Stephen King of SF/F then Anre Norton was the Judy Blume. Like ERB, almost all of her 300 books are suitable for younger readers.
It's been so long since I read her stuff, but don't ever remember being disappointed by any of her books. Some titles that come to mind:
Quag Keep Zero Stone Android at Arms Ice Crown Merlin's Mirror Voorloper Crossroads of Time Forerunner Foray Exiles of the Stars Postmarked for the Stars The Time Traders Galactic Derelict Witch World
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry but did you just compare the deaths of hundreds of people with an argument about software licenses ? Cause it seems like you did ?
YES I DID.
And the reason I did is because whether one person dies or 800 people lose a month off their lives, it's the same, maybe even worse. Software licensing does not stand alone with no effects on others. In particular, the monopoly of microsoft has gigantic economic effects the world over - just where do you think that $40+ billion in cash that MS had in the bank a few years ago came from? It came from businesses and governments that could have used the money for better things like improved medical care, more efficient farming, distribution and markets.
Just as the current oil prices affect all of those things - sending money to a bunch of rich arabs so they can sprinkle gold dust on their lattes in Abu Dubai instead of doing something useful with it locally like grow more food.
So, if you don't care about the general health and well being of the entire freakin planet, maybe you should refrain from lecturing others.
How the fuck news about the Nielsen company make the front page here?
They don't do techy things, make techy things or relate to tech at all.
You mean like http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/ ?
Free market forces, along with the incentives in capitalism, says that the labour market shifts to where the labour is cheap. I thought Americans were fans of the free market?
How do tax subsidies make for "a free market?"
Can we please use "Microsoft's market power" or something,
No we can not. The reason is we don't want to pander to your misunderstanding of the word monopoly. It does not mean one-and-only. It just means only-one-that-matters. I refer you to the definition used by Milton Friedman in his book "Capitalism and Freedom":
In Economics, monopoly (also "Pure oligopoly") exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.
Microsoft dictates almost everything about the desktop. For example, they've forced video card manufacturers to support directx, to even build in "protected path" drm-support in hardware.
Of course not, why would we allow a user to chose the software that best meets his needs from the widest possible selection?
Don't be a dillweed. Free software is about one specific issue - freedom of the end user to do what he wants with his software. That does not mean it precludes other issues. Your bitching is like saying that the national audubon society ought to support gun ownership. ITS NOT THE REASON THEY EXIST. Same with Free software, lack of choice is not the problem that motivated the movement.
You do seem to be laboring under the misconception that the word "Free" in "Free software" means whatever specific freedoms you want it to mean. It doesn't. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you'll understand that trying to stuff your personal issues under the mantra of "Free software" is inappropriate.
Hey, stop talking like this is a great and epic struggle.
Zimbabwe is a great struggle. We're just talking about computer operating systems.
No, you are wrong.
Zimbabwe is currently playing out a story that the earth has seen thousands of times in all corners. Each time it plays out, it only effects a small group of people. Sure it effects them drastically, but in the big picture its nothing new and does not have much of an impact beyond Zimbabwe's neighbors.
On the other hand, the current OS monopoly on the desktop affects hundreds of millions, maybe even more than a billion people world-wide across all countries. And in a more general sense, the "freedom vs control" of information conflict that this is a part of affects the destiny of the entire human race.
Just because the issues are more abstract with less of an obvious impact does not mean they are less important. To dismiss them in that way would be kind of like the farmers in the 13 colonies complaining that those dolts at that constitutional convention have their heads' up their asses, they ought to be doing something about this season's drought instead of blowing so much hot air around.
It's about choice right?
Free software is about the end-user's right to do with software as he pleases. It is not about having a choice, it is especially not about having a choice between multiple proprietary options. The difference may be subtle to some, but the day it bites you in the ass and you realize that you aren't free to use your software the way you want to, you'll probably figure it out real quick. I sure did, after spending $600 on nvidia video cards that would not work with my monitors under linux because of a &%$&^ bug in their linux drivers it was became real obvious to me.
For instance, I cannot fathom how anyone could have a problem with a knowledgeable user buying a DRMed song from iTunes. Sure, I wouldn't do so, but so long as that consumer understands the limitations on what he is buying, I don't see the problem.
The reason people have a problem with others simply making an informed choice is that you can't negotiate with a corporation. Just as most people can't fix a bug in Free software, even more so most people can't make a corporation fix a bug or support a feature in proprietary software. That other person's choice to accept arbitrary restrictions works against me by encouraging the market to remain proprietary. Sure my suffering is an externality to the other person. But don't expect me to be happy about it.
That's why big corporations can fuck with individuals, but not vice versa.
That's why there is FightClub.
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation."
Could you direct me to the translation of Mein Kampf which contains that passage?
I can't find it.
I can find a few references to the first sentence. Like this one but the context is not the same:
The folkish state must make up for what everyone else today has neglected in this field. It must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one's own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world, and one highest honor: to renounce doing so.
And even they don't seem to cite which translation they are using.
The problem with the web site forums is the severe fragmentation.
I've long thought it would be a highly useful feature for all the forum software out there to supporting gatewaying to usenet. Create some alt group or hierarchy of groups to contain every post in each forum or subforum on a website.
I guess the financial incentive isn't there as they are probably worried they'll lose a fraction of their advertising eyeballs to usenet. But I think that in the long-run it would only generate more interest in the website plus they would get free archival services from google/deja and the usenet providers that have 100% retention in the text groups. One thing I really hate about web forum is their ephemeral nature, even the long lived ones often just delete older posts rather than spend the disk space on archiving them and the others can just disappear completely and take all their collected information with them.
Have you ever heard anyone chose and ISP because of USENET?
Actually, before this fiasco, Verizon was the ISP of choice for usenet access. Their retention never compared to the commercial services, at only about 10 days. But their coverage was 80-90% of the best. Many people chose verizon specifically for their usenet service, especially back when the cable internet speeds weren't much better than dsl. If the recent news hadn't polluted the google searches for older discussions regarding verizon and usenet, I'd probably be able to quickly dig up 10-20 threads specifically praising verizon's usenet service.
You could change X video resolution with a simple set of keystrokes... in 1993.
No, in 1993 you could change the monitor's resolution not the X video resolution.
The X server's resolution stayed the same - if the new monitor resolution was smaller than the X server's it would hardware pan the desktop. If the new monitor resolution was greater than the X server's it would only partially fill the monitor. Either way, the configuration of the framebuffer stayed the same. And, FWIW, all that was a particular implementation detail of XFree86, it was not a part of the X protocol it self as is the new RandR stuff that the previous poster was referring to.
X is a bandwidth buster,
No, not really. X's main problem is a reliance on request/acknowledge handshaking that makes it very, very sensitive to latency. You might even say that the X protocol does not have windows.
I think you mean AVI because PowerDVD can not parse MKV files.
That said, get the latest version of Mediaplyer Classic Home Cinema (MPC:HC) it has native support for hardware acceleration too and it's Free.
The MPAA has decided that asking large computer manufacturers to disable any Video Out options, so pirates are thwarted.
It's called Protected Media Path.
Replace "threat" with "perceived but not actual threat" and we agree.
why do i need a mixing board or expensive software to see if a few superimposed tracks are going to work well together when i've been provided the tools for such a simple task for over a decade?
Because there is plenty of free mixing board software and what you propose to do with sndrec32 is more than a little masochistic.
As a musician, I would want to challenge this as abridgement of my rights, and I'd want to make a (worth $Billions$) anti-trust case out of it.
It isn't about recording audio input from microphones, it is about making a copy of whats going out to the speakers.
Any musician would be using more than simple playback software, probably some sort of mixer-board sort of thing, and would be able to record their own audio before even sending it to the speakers in the first place.
FWIW - its totally cultural. In Korea (yeah, cue the jokes) answering a cell phone almost always takes priority over whatever is going on in person and that's considered absolutely normal. I've heard Japan is the same way, but maybe to a lesser extent.
you can't protect yourself easily from terrorists who plan on deceiving and defying conventional wisdom while targeting unrelated and unsuspecting victims in order to cause action from an unrelated party. Therefore, a straight up comparison on body count isn't appropriate in deciding which resources deserve more attention and which ones are being wasted.
The last does not follow from the first. If the number of deaths due to any threat is minute you do not need to defend yourself, simply doing nothing is highly effective. It is even more effective when prediction is as difficult as you describe it. Whatever the case, irrational overblown responses are clearly counter-productive.
But Red Hat doesn't publish Free Software, it publishes Open Source
WTF? Almost everything that RedHat publishes is GNU licensed. The GPL is the closest thing to an archetype for Free software.
Your whole idea about "community" is balderdash. Free software is about freedom of the end user of the software to do what he wants with it. Full stop.
It has been a long while, but I remember enjoying them and they had some interesting concepts.
I'll second that. I don't remember a thing about the plots, I must have read them back around 4th or 5th grade, but I do remember liking them a lot for being just a little surreal. I think that was around the time that I found a few collections of short stories by JG Ballard which were completely off the scale of surreal.
make me wonder what stake you have
Hey moronic coward, you caught me. I am really Hans posting from prison trying to save my name on slashdot.
What a fucking dork you are.
Yeah, but as I said, then it is not blu-ray. It is something else.
If ERB is the Stephen King of SF/F then Anre Norton was the Judy Blume. Like ERB, almost all of her 300 books are suitable for younger readers.
It's been so long since I read her stuff, but don't ever remember being disappointed by any of her books.
Some titles that come to mind:
Quag Keep
Zero Stone
Android at Arms
Ice Crown
Merlin's Mirror
Voorloper
Crossroads of Time
Forerunner Foray
Exiles of the Stars
Postmarked for the Stars
The Time Traders
Galactic Derelict
Witch World