If you do it every day for a living, if you have a good junkyard, if...
But I have to admit, if I want a x86 box, I'll build it myself. Makes it easier to reduce the number of iNTEL parts on it. (I don't care to support _any_ virtual monopoly.)
This is tracking the argument that inferior tech always wins because iNTEL won with their inferior tech by making it just good enough to get the market and using the profits to fund the next ramp. Trash makes trash.
Logical fallacies abound in the argument, but SCSI and Firewire are not on the motherboard, so it must be right.
Sorry about being slow on the uptake, been out of the loop -- job hunt and such.
I know that power-mongers have abused religion throughout human history. They have also abused science. Power-mongers will abuse anything they can. They even try to abuse the human conscience. Unfortunately, they sort-of succeed at that sometimes, which is why governments which fail to recognize and encourage freedom are evil.
However, the existence of snake-oil salesmen and other fakirs aside, conscience does exist, and there is a being/principle that created the universe and still rules it. That being/principle gave humans both freedom and conscience, and told us to question everything in its time.
No, you don't question everything. If you did, you would still be stuck questioning your existence before you got out of bed the last time you got out of bed, and if you got past that you would be questioning the toilet, the sink where you wash your hands, the breakfast you ate or your ability to do without breakfast, etc., questions without end. (Hormones in the feed that went into the chicken that laid the egg on your McMuffin?) Even questioning requires prioritization.
When you say you question everything, you simply mean that the Bible is part of the set of everything you think you need to question. No big deal.
I don't particularly find the Song of Solomon inspiring, myself. (Not because the auther is infatuated, but because the cultural background of sexual domination is praised.)
The Bible is a collection of writings by people who were inspired by their search into truth. They were at peace with their consciences, many having had to pay a terrible price in undoing the layers of social false-common sense that had been taught them while they grew up. It also happens to have been culled by power-mongers and edited to the extent those power-mongers thought they could get away with without causing popular rejection. The amazing reality is that truth survives for people who want to find it there.
The authors' hands being "guided by God", but not forced by Him, may seem a small thing, but small things are aften bigger in the long run.
In this respect, the Bible and other scriptures have something a little beyond what is had in common literature. You can, of course, find truth in common literature as well, but scriptures in general have a bit stronger dose of it.
But if all truth could be contained in one book of scripture, this world would be such a poor world there would be no use in being born in it. Circumscribed, yes. Contained, no. The Bible does a better job of circumscribing truth than many other books of scriptures, but it does not contain all truth, especially not in minute detail.
It does contain such interesting truths as, "... ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." Questioning is not sufficient. You have to do things to understand them, or even to properly question them. But, "... ask, and ye shall receive," is not about asking for material wealth, is it?
The Testament of Judas? Spurious, thought not quite as spurious as the Song of Solomon or as Bel and the Dragon. However, if you read the Bible carefully, more than once through, you were already aware that Judas Iscariot thought he was acting at Jesus' command, and aware of other truths which that book emphasizes, including the necessity of the crucifixion. (Could Judas have betrayed Jesus without afterwards committing suicide? I hope I never have to ask God.)
The thing about questioning everything, is that it is useless to question if you believe there is no truth. But if you believe there is truth, the truth is already your God, in the only meaningful sense of the word, "God".
Well, there is definitely an evil version of faith and an evil version of good that has been invented by someone evil.
More than likely more than one of each. But we can blame the devil for starting it all be pretending to be God instend of being just god like the rest of us.
I think most of the fanatical arguments on both sides come from people who have been burned by the other side.
The most vocal arguments on both sides, however, come from a very few people trying to play power games with the philosophies they claim are implicit in their side.
I thinkk it's the power mongers that the rest of the fanatics are trying to stop.
Jobs simply has wanted Apples to run on iNTEL for a long time, and he was able to construct the timing last year, with a little help from IBM and Freescale (who really do have other, more useful things to do with their fabs than fueling Jobs's whachacallit envy).
Remember that unannounced, unofficial, incomplete processor upgrade in the Mini (not an IBM processor, BTW) last fall?
There's no way they'd have done that unless they were just having problems getting processors at the slow speeds.
I personally have no problem with Mac OS running on iNTEL. I do have problems with Apple dropping the PPC. They should not be dropping processors, they should be adding them. WHERE is the Darwin port to ARM?
There are systems so complex that merely becoming competent in them strips one of objectivity. Near as I can tell, Oracle's databases are such. db2 definitely used to be, I'm guessing it still is.
That kind of complexity is useful for a while, but then the advances of Technology tend to bury the product. Some people suspect Oracle of trying to pervert sleepy cat and others by burying them, but the announcements make me think they've realized the same thing as IBM -- the money in no longer in the software, but in the services. (Something tells me there is something dangerous about that situation, as well.)
Small is the way of the future. Big institutions are only useful to the extent that they enable individuals.
Obligations are ultimately not between man and man, but between man and God.
But that does not mean that the shirking of an obligation causes no one problems.
I don't know Theo's thoughts. I don't know God's thoughts in this matter. Maybe openbsd has filled its purpose and it's time to move on.
But maybe there is nothing wrong with Theo pointing out that, should a changing of the guard be forced before its time, those who have been making money from the obsd team's largess will find themselves severely inconvenienced.
And, yeah, the bad karma is exactly the point. Maybe it's a little awkward for the warning to come from Theo, but some people need to be warned they are breeding a wart on their own noses, erm, generating bad karma for themselves.
I have thought along similar lines, but it really demonstrates something that we must quit ignoring.
"Free" is an illusion.
When we use "free" software, we pay for it one way or another. Time or money, and, no, time is not money.
Money is green stuff that you through around on the crops to make things grow, as somebody in some famous musical once said, quoting somebody else, I'm sure. When you collect too much money in one place, it goes fetid.
Time is the true currency, although too much time can go fetid as well.
The licenses are gentlemen's agreements. It's a trade of time for time, with rules of courtesy. (EULAs are _not_ gentlemen's agreements, I am not taking about those licenses, they don't deserve to be called licenses.) The licenses form the ground rules for the community that forms around the software. It's very much like the old guilds, although much more open in a very good way.
With the GPL, some of the rules of courtesy which are important for maintaining the infrastructure of the guild are explicit. We might assume that this is because Stallman is a cynic, or because he is a realist, but must people are still confused and think he is an idealist.
With the BSD license, the rules are implicit, derived from the external society, the (Christian, though not entirely uniquely so in the current view of history) principle of casting one's bread on the water. It is expected that the waters will bring the bread back, multiplied. And this is where things have broken down.
Even under the BSD license, the rules of giving back are natural laws, and are not suspended. Humans whose primary product are sales presentations have no idea that they have to give back or the resource will be depleted. Stallman recognized that, Theo has not yet.
People have to be reminded to be courteous, and that's why an idealist and general nice guy like Theo ends up making enemies. The license doesn't remind people, so he has to spend his energy reminding them.
Putting new source under GPL would be one solution, but, as is well known, it is not one that can really be considered yet. A new modified BSD that contains a non-binding reminder that the resources don't renew themselves may be what's in order right now.
Every hour of overtime you put in is an hour somebody else could have been paid to work.
And if everyone were working 20, maybe 30 hours a week, there would be sufficient product for all. And we'd all have more time for taking care of our health, our relationships with family and friends, and other really important things.
A free people will use their imagination to improve their lives. Therefore, they will invent.
And, concerning strong patents, no, the US has not had particularly strong patents until fairly recently. Maybe it's a coincidence, but the telephone monopoly was broken up about the same time patents started being made too strong (by allowing algorithms, business methods, and other ideas to be made subject to patent, and the the swamp of re-tread patents that resulted, and the failure to check patents properly in the crush). Anyway, the telephone monopoly breakup is what has been fueling the innovation so that it could continue in spite of stronger patents.
And that is what SCO is on about. Darl should be excommunicated.
They'll call them Mac Pro or something, following the lead of MacBook Pro, but I'm pretty sure they will drop the "Power" from them. Why everyone seems surprised about this I have trouble understanding.
There's a certain irony in the name change, but that's what people get for using trademarks with too much semantic burden. (How heavy the irony will prove to be remains to be seen. The market momentum may save iNSMEL again.)
And I still think Apple had to silently deliver higher clocked G4s in the Mac Mini last fall simply because they were having trouble getting the lower clocked ones.
That's what my wife called me when I road my bike (bicycle for anyone who lives in a country where bikes have motors) seven hours round trip to pick up some hardware on another occasion.;-)
The toughest part was getting across the walkovers over the highways without dropping the package on the cargo carrier behind me.
But, yeah, I'm with on the driving to the mailbox. I can see letting the motor idle 30 seconds at the curb while you check the box on the way to work, but anyone who bothers to put the key in the ignition for less than a hundred meters is addicted.
On the other hand, there are places in the world where a hundred meters is about what you walk to get to your car in the first place. (And you pay about a fifth of what you pay in apartment rent for the privilege of parking it on an unprotected slice of asphalt with marginal road access.)
Not sure what any of this means, other than standard of living is not standard.
Next time I run down to the store to pick up a new computer, I'll bring in back home on my bike. Of course, it won't be in a box, so I'll take a blanket with me to the store to wrap it in for safety.
And, when I go for additional RAM, NATs, graphics boards, etc., I'll bring my own anti-static bags.
And then there's the candy and cookies for the kids. Buy in bulk or make our own, and when we take it with us we'll re-use baggies. Or wrap it in leaves.
Of course, since we'll be changing our suburban lifestyle, we won't be taking the kids to piano lessons all the time, that's less auto usage and less need for candy or cookies or other junk the can get quick energy on the road from. (On the other hand, if they are riding bicycles, they need more energy.)
Actually, this is not so much sarcasm as it might appear. I actually picked up my last sempron box with LCD monitor in Mikage, carried the bundle back to the train on foot (about a mile and a half if I remember right), and carried it from the local train station to home on the back of my bike.
My back was a little sore for a couple of days -- should have borrowed one of those wire-frame luggage carriers or something.
And my wife already does a lot of making and/or packaging her own quick food for the kids. Got to give her more credit for that.
do you advocate putting SELinux on Grandma's computer?
Hmm. Actually, if Grandma is just going to be doing e-mail, that might not be a bad idea. Does SELinux run well on old 256 MHz class x86 CPUs? Gotta get an elderly aunt off that MSW98.
How about my dad, who would occasionally want to install software for the foreign language classes he taught part time after he retired?
Surely you don't have sudo set up to allow non-admins to sudo root?
The default sudoers on Mac OS X does allow the initial (in other words, original admin) user to sudo, as I recall. No one else, however.
One thing Apple should do is something MS seems to be doing with recent XP (sometime since I wrote about it on my personal webserver which it seems no one but the search engines ever look at) --
Prompt the owner to set up a non-admin account in addition to the admin account. If the owner doesn't tell the setup routine otherwise, set it to auto-login to the non-admin account.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't.
...
If you do it every day for a living, if you have a good junkyard, if
But I have to admit, if I want a x86 box, I'll build it myself. Makes it easier to reduce the number of iNTEL parts on it. (I don't care to support _any_ virtual monopoly.)
One size fits all results in callouses on my feet. So, it's my fault for getting a lot of exercise?
This is tracking the argument that inferior tech always wins because iNTEL won with their inferior tech by making it just good enough to get the market and using the profits to fund the next ramp. Trash makes trash.
Logical fallacies abound in the argument, but SCSI and Firewire are not on the motherboard, so it must be right.
Seriously.
Empires are based on economy, not on stuffed-shirt politicians.
Sorry about being slow on the uptake, been out of the loop -- job hunt and such.
I know that power-mongers have abused religion throughout human history. They have also abused science. Power-mongers will abuse anything they can. They even try to abuse the human conscience. Unfortunately, they sort-of succeed at that sometimes, which is why governments which fail to recognize and encourage freedom are evil.
However, the existence of snake-oil salesmen and other fakirs aside, conscience does exist, and there is a being/principle that created the universe and still rules it. That being/principle gave humans both freedom and conscience, and told us to question everything in its time.
No, you don't question everything. If you did, you would still be stuck questioning your existence before you got out of bed the last time you got out of bed, and if you got past that you would be questioning the toilet, the sink where you wash your hands, the breakfast you ate or your ability to do without breakfast, etc., questions without end. (Hormones in the feed that went into the chicken that laid the egg on your McMuffin?) Even questioning requires prioritization.
When you say you question everything, you simply mean that the Bible is part of the set of everything you think you need to question. No big deal.
I don't particularly find the Song of Solomon inspiring, myself. (Not because the auther is infatuated, but because the cultural background of sexual domination is praised.)
The Bible is a collection of writings by people who were inspired by their search into truth. They were at peace with their consciences, many having had to pay a terrible price in undoing the layers of social false-common sense that had been taught them while they grew up. It also happens to have been culled by power-mongers and edited to the extent those power-mongers thought they could get away with without causing popular rejection. The amazing reality is that truth survives for people who want to find it there.
The authors' hands being "guided by God", but not forced by Him, may seem a small thing, but small things are aften bigger in the long run.
In this respect, the Bible and other scriptures have something a little beyond what is had in common literature. You can, of course, find truth in common literature as well, but scriptures in general have a bit stronger dose of it.
But if all truth could be contained in one book of scripture, this world would be such a poor world there would be no use in being born in it. Circumscribed, yes. Contained, no. The Bible does a better job of circumscribing truth than many other books of scriptures, but it does not contain all truth, especially not in minute detail.
It does contain such interesting truths as, "... ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." Questioning is not sufficient. You have to do things to understand them, or even to properly question them. But, "... ask, and ye shall receive," is not about asking for material wealth, is it?
The Testament of Judas? Spurious, thought not quite as spurious as the Song of Solomon or as Bel and the Dragon. However, if you read the Bible carefully, more than once through, you were already aware that Judas Iscariot thought he was acting at Jesus' command, and aware of other truths which that book emphasizes, including the necessity of the crucifixion. (Could Judas have betrayed Jesus without afterwards committing suicide? I hope I never have to ask God.)
The thing about questioning everything, is that it is useless to question if you believe there is no truth. But if you believe there is truth, the truth is already your God, in the only meaningful sense of the word, "God".
The fake demigods are the ones who tell you not to question what they tell you, only what the other guy says.
Well, there is definitely an evil version of faith and an evil version of good that has been invented by someone evil.
More than likely more than one of each. But we can blame the devil for starting it all be pretending to be God instend of being just god like the rest of us.
I think most of the fanatical arguments on both sides come from people who have been burned by the other side.
The most vocal arguments on both sides, however, come from a very few people trying to play power games with the philosophies they claim are implicit in their side.
I thinkk it's the power mongers that the rest of the fanatics are trying to stop.
Last time I checked the price was closer to $1000 and the speed was under 1GHz.
I wonder if they'll get the dual core unit out any time soon. These are prices I can afford.
gradually becomes more and more clear.
Jobs simply has wanted Apples to run on iNTEL for a long time, and he was able to construct the timing last year, with a little help from IBM and Freescale (who really do have other, more useful things to do with their fabs than fueling Jobs's whachacallit envy).
Remember that unannounced, unofficial, incomplete processor upgrade in the Mini (not an IBM processor, BTW) last fall?
There's no way they'd have done that unless they were just having problems getting processors at the slow speeds.
I personally have no problem with Mac OS running on iNTEL. I do have problems with Apple dropping the PPC. They should not be dropping processors, they should be adding them. WHERE is the Darwin port to ARM?
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM996HS.html
...
and, since I'm posting,
The ARM996HSTM processor is the industry's first
licensable clockless processor and
"licensable"
There are systems so complex that merely becoming competent in them strips one of objectivity. Near as I can tell, Oracle's databases are such. db2 definitely used to be, I'm guessing it still is.
That kind of complexity is useful for a while, but then the advances of Technology tend to bury the product. Some people suspect Oracle of trying to pervert sleepy cat and others by burying them, but the announcements make me think they've realized the same thing as IBM -- the money in no longer in the software, but in the services. (Something tells me there is something dangerous about that situation, as well.)
Small is the way of the future. Big institutions are only useful to the extent that they enable individuals.
like everyone else, but
bad wireless all around.
Obligations are ultimately not between man and man, but between man and God.
But that does not mean that the shirking of an obligation causes no one problems.
I don't know Theo's thoughts. I don't know God's thoughts in this matter. Maybe openbsd has filled its purpose and it's time to move on.
But maybe there is nothing wrong with Theo pointing out that, should a changing of the guard be forced before its time, those who have been making money from the obsd team's largess will find themselves severely inconvenienced.
And, yeah, the bad karma is exactly the point. Maybe it's a little awkward for the warning to come from Theo, but some people need to be warned they are breeding a wart on their own noses, erm, generating bad karma for themselves.
google pays for linux and apache.
I have thought along similar lines, but it really demonstrates something that we must quit ignoring.
"Free" is an illusion.
When we use "free" software, we pay for it one way or another. Time or money, and, no, time is not money.
Money is green stuff that you through around on the crops to make things grow, as somebody in some famous musical once said, quoting somebody else, I'm sure. When you collect too much money in one place, it goes fetid.
Time is the true currency, although too much time can go fetid as well.
The licenses are gentlemen's agreements. It's a trade of time for time, with rules of courtesy. (EULAs are _not_ gentlemen's agreements, I am not taking about those licenses, they don't deserve to be called licenses.) The licenses form the ground rules for the community that forms around the software. It's very much like the old guilds, although much more open in a very good way.
With the GPL, some of the rules of courtesy which are important for maintaining the infrastructure of the guild are explicit. We might assume that this is because Stallman is a cynic, or because he is a realist, but must people are still confused and think he is an idealist.
With the BSD license, the rules are implicit, derived from the external society, the (Christian, though not entirely uniquely so in the current view of history) principle of casting one's bread on the water. It is expected that the waters will bring the bread back, multiplied. And this is where things have broken down.
Even under the BSD license, the rules of giving back are natural laws, and are not suspended. Humans whose primary product are sales presentations have no idea that they have to give back or the resource will be depleted. Stallman recognized that, Theo has not yet.
People have to be reminded to be courteous, and that's why an idealist and general nice guy like Theo ends up making enemies. The license doesn't remind people, so he has to spend his energy reminding them.
Putting new source under GPL would be one solution, but, as is well known, it is not one that can really be considered yet. A new modified BSD that contains a non-binding reminder that the resources don't renew themselves may be what's in order right now.
and the world would be better for it.
Every hour of overtime you put in is an hour somebody else could have been paid to work.
And if everyone were working 20, maybe 30 hours a week, there would be sufficient product for all. And we'd all have more time for taking care of our health, our relationships with family and friends, and other really important things.
Look at freedom instead of patents.
A free people will use their imagination to improve their lives. Therefore, they will invent.
And, concerning strong patents, no, the US has not had particularly strong patents until fairly recently. Maybe it's a coincidence, but the telephone monopoly was broken up about the same time patents started being made too strong (by allowing algorithms, business methods, and other ideas to be made subject to patent, and the the swamp of re-tread patents that resulted, and the failure to check patents properly in the crush). Anyway, the telephone monopoly breakup is what has been fueling the innovation so that it could continue in spite of stronger patents.
And that is what SCO is on about. Darl should be excommunicated.
Obviously.
They'll call them Mac Pro or something, following the lead of MacBook Pro, but I'm pretty sure they will drop the "Power" from them. Why everyone seems surprised about this I have trouble understanding.
There's a certain irony in the name change, but that's what people get for using trademarks with too much semantic burden. (How heavy the irony will prove to be remains to be seen. The market momentum may save iNSMEL again.)
And I still think Apple had to silently deliver higher clocked G4s in the Mac Mini last fall simply because they were having trouble getting the lower clocked ones.
That's what my wife called me when I road my bike (bicycle for anyone who lives in a country where bikes have motors) seven hours round trip to pick up some hardware on another occasion. ;-)
The toughest part was getting across the walkovers over the highways without dropping the package on the cargo carrier behind me.
But, yeah, I'm with on the driving to the mailbox. I can see letting the motor idle 30 seconds at the curb while you check the box on the way to work, but anyone who bothers to put the key in the ignition for less than a hundred meters is addicted.
On the other hand, there are places in the world where a hundred meters is about what you walk to get to your car in the first place. (And you pay about a fifth of what you pay in apartment rent for the privilege of parking it on an unprotected slice of asphalt with marginal road access.)
Not sure what any of this means, other than standard of living is not standard.
Yeah, I'm with you there.
Next time I run down to the store to pick up a new computer, I'll bring in back home on my bike. Of course, it won't be in a box, so I'll take a blanket with me to the store to wrap it in for safety.
And, when I go for additional RAM, NATs, graphics boards, etc., I'll bring my own anti-static bags.
And then there's the candy and cookies for the kids. Buy in bulk or make our own, and when we take it with us we'll re-use baggies. Or wrap it in leaves.
Of course, since we'll be changing our suburban lifestyle, we won't be taking the kids to piano lessons all the time, that's less auto usage and less need for candy or cookies or other junk the can get quick energy on the road from. (On the other hand, if they are riding bicycles, they need more energy.)
Actually, this is not so much sarcasm as it might appear. I actually picked up my last sempron box with LCD monitor in Mikage, carried the bundle back to the train on foot (about a mile and a half if I remember right), and carried it from the local train station to home on the back of my bike.
My back was a little sore for a couple of days -- should have borrowed one of those wire-frame luggage carriers or something.
And my wife already does a lot of making and/or packaging her own quick food for the kids. Got to give her more credit for that.
do you advocate putting SELinux on Grandma's computer?
Hmm. Actually, if Grandma is just going to be doing e-mail, that might not be a bad idea. Does SELinux run well on old 256 MHz class x86 CPUs? Gotta get an elderly aunt off that MSW98.
How about my dad, who would occasionally want to install software for the foreign language classes he taught part time after he retired?
he has a neat script for giving people ssh accounts. I wonder if he thought to make them non-admin.
Oh, and he proved that Mac OS X is not SELinux. (Neither is FC4 for most users, but that's beside the point, I suppose.)
letting someone ssh in as an admin?
Surely you don't have sudo set up to allow non-admins to sudo root?
The default sudoers on Mac OS X does allow the initial (in other words, original admin) user to sudo, as I recall. No one else, however.
One thing Apple should do is something MS seems to be doing with recent XP (sometime since I wrote about it on my personal webserver which it seems no one but the search engines ever look at) --
Prompt the owner to set up a non-admin account in addition to the admin account. If the owner doesn't tell the setup routine otherwise, set it to auto-login to the non-admin account.