Ironically, the Chinese (both in the US and in China) seem to work harder than many Americans I know. Not to mention that Chinese economic growth is, at least currently, much higher than the US's (although that's perhaps not a fair comparison, as they are a developing nation).
"Incentive to work" doesn't mean being trampled on, necessarily.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
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Business Under Fire
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not really sure they ever asked for our help in World War II, although they were certainly grateful. Of course, we did tremendously well for ourselves in that deal, too, lest you forget. It's not like WW2 was all American sacrifice. It pulled us out of the great depression and made us (quite literally) the superpower we are today. Whatsmore, it was completely fought on the soil of other nations -- nations whose economies, previously powerful, and infrastructures, previously widespread, were reduced to rubble. Of course, we offered to rebuild it for them. At a cost. Nothing wrong with that. We forgave them much of their debts, later.
Anyway, allies help each other and that's been the case for a long time -- and despite what many of us think, it hasn't always been the US helping everyone else. We are powerful now but once were weak -- we bested the United Kingdom, the most powerful empire in the world, only with the help of the French, ironically. Yet you don't generally hear the French saying to Americans "Remember 1776?". Instead, an American, like myself, needs to point it out to you.
WW2 was more recent than our liberation, to be sure, but we have to learn that we can't expect the goodwill of Europe to go on forever because of deeds done by our grandfathers. Relationships are ever-changing things. No one European that I know would disparage US involvement in WW2 or deny that it was needed and helpful. But that doesn't give America a magic "get out of trouble" card with respect to European foreign policy for the rest of eternity.
The truth is, Europe hasn't been militarily threatened for many years now. They've had skirmishes, sure -- Bosnia was quite a mess, as was mentioned -- but the EU is emerging as a force to be reckoned with and frankly I think the GP was right when he said that Europe no longer needs America's protection as much as America seems to think it does.
Frankly, my opinion -- as an American, mind you -- is that we like to think of ourselves as policemen, and we take the same self-righteous attitude they do: "You complain when we beat up black guys in the ghetto but when your sister gets murdered, who do you come crying to for justice?" It's not entirely wrong, either. When you're strong you're tempted to use that strength to influence people around you, and I doubt (for what its worth) that Europe would be any different, if they were in our shoes (or any other nation, for that matter). And history certainly seems to support my assessment.
But the fact remains that we could probably slice our military spending considerably without any adverse effects whatsoever to Europe, anyway. Some smaller third world nations might suffer, but then again, they might not. Happily, none of the military superpowers (by this I mean the top few, say the US, the EU, China, Russia?) want war, anymore. At one point, wars were fought with weapons, and economic growth was the end in question. Now, wars are fought with trade, and economic growth is still the end in question. Most of the big boys have seen that people not getting killed works better in our tiny, well-connected world than the alternative.
And so there is, at this point in time, an unprecedented unwillingness to greatly destablize the world with a large war. So we have small, localized skirmishes instead. And terrorism, too. None of these are greatly aided by a US acting as a world policeman.
I'm not suggesting we all get rid of our militaries. It would be nice, but unrealistic... "If you would have peace, prepare for war," as they say. But a small, defensive military is really all anyone needs these days. We can ramp it up quickly if the need becomes great again.
No, truthfully, the US wants to keep its military not to defend the world, but to remind the world that this is the Pax Americana, and keep nations great and small in constant awe and fear of our mightiness. We've gotten used to this position and it suits us. Terrorism is a direct result of this, as
I too have noticed this trend. I think there are two major reasons, both related. One is the old adage, "familiarity breeds contempt." Truth be told, Christian beliefs are no more ridiculous, short sighted or bigotted than the beliefs of the rest of the world's religions, but the average Slashdotter is a westerner, and knows far less about Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc, than he knows about Christianity.
I often hear people claim that religions like Buddhism are better or less biggotted or whatever than Christianity, but my guess is that most of the people that say that didn't grow up in a country where Buddhism is the dominant faith, they've just read some books about it and thought to themselves, "hey, this karma stuff is cool!"
Of course, exactly the same thing happens here in Asia, vis-a-vis Christianity. People read about it, and it's mostly about loving your neighbor and such, and so they think, man, this is way better than Buddhism/Taoism/Shintoism/whatever -- it's all love and acceptance!
The point is that when two dominant religions clash, there is usually war, because people are very passionate about their beliefs.
The second reason (perhaps more founded) is that due to the dominance of European culture, Christianity, one of Western culture's central features, has been able to spread and gain dominance in a way that other religions were less able to do.
Further, there's the issue of Christianity's particular history in Europe. The Catholic church was a force to be reckoned with, and the renaissance and the "enlightenment", which brought science and reason to Europe at least, were largely in spite of the Church. So within a forum that values science and reason, the Church has a rather bad rap.
Of course you'll note that very little of this has anything to do with the actual beliefs espoused by Christians, just with the way they've historically been practiced.
And it's further worth noting that since many Slashdotters are Americans, and America has an astoundingly large number of loud religious fundamentalists -- I'm using this term literally, not as a slur for anyone who believes in the Jesus/God/Holy Ghost thing -- who continue to do their best to make the lives of people who value freedom of expression and a world without censorship and imposed morality miserable.
Scientifically minded people also usually dislike creationists, who seem bent on willfully distorting words and data to make a not particularly inspired point.
So you see, lots of people assume that all Christians are like the loud, obnoxious fundies that seem to be representative (but aren't, which I well know).
Having said all that, though, I think dogging on Christians on Slashdot is as time honoured a tradition as bringing up Linux in non-Linux related discussions. Obnoxious, yes. Immature, yes. But that's Slashdot, and we love it.
I believe the GP's point was that guns are machines designed for the sole purpose of killing people. Now, mastering a weapon (be it a gun or a samurai sword) is a typical form of rewarding recreation in many societies, and will remain so, and I support that (in fact, I'm against gun control). But the fact remains that weapons are designed for killing people (or at least, living things).
Laser pointers, on the other hand, are not designed for killing people (and neither is your car). They both have the capacity to kill people -- but then as was demonstrated in the John Waters classic, "Serial Mom", you could kill someone with a leg of mutton, too.
There's so much anti-gun rhetoric these days that for those of us that support the second amendment it's tempting to read hysterical gun-phobia into everything that doesn't explicitly support our right to bear arms. But let's not go too far.
Fact: guns are designed to kill people. This does not make them, as tools, responsible for the act of killing -- the old adage about guns not killing people is completely true. But guns do little other than shoot at things for the purpose of killing something. If you use them for target practice or skeet shooting, that's great. But these are essentially just training exercises so that you can use them more effectively at what they're designed to do. Those exercises just happen to be fun, more fun in fact than actually shooting living things, in most cases.
Laser pointers are different because, like cars, killing things isn't even their intended use. The GP was pointing out the irony here -- we won't outlaw things expressly designed to kill, but will discuss outlawing things that aren't, but might just be used that way, in an extremely inprobable situation, by some nut.
I don't read his post as suggesting we ought to outlaw guns, or that gun laws are stupid. Rather, I see him as pointing out that outlawing laser pointers is stupid. And I agree with him.
So I guess accepting this christmas present is theft, eh? After all, I obtained it, but didn't pay for it...
Oh, wait, that wasn't what you meant, huh? You meant to say something completely different, and you're thinking to yourself, right now "Man, 808140 is such a pedantic fuck. He knows what I mean." And you're right, friend, I do. I know exactly what you mean.
But authoring a law is rather like programming a computer. I had a coworker back when I worked at NASA who (being a geek girl) was very into outreach stuff. She would go to girl scout troop meetings and try to get girls interested in tech, you know? So she had this little skit she used to do, where she would bring a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, and she would say to the girls, "I'm a computer, and I'm going to do exactly what you tell me to do. Tell me how to make a peanut butter sandwich."
And so the girls would say, "Put the peanut butter on the bread!" and she would put the jar of peanut butter on (top of) the loaf of bread. "Nononono," would be reply, "you're doing it wrong..."
But she wasn't, obviously. She was trying to teach them that computers are stupid, and do exactly what you tell them to do -- you can't expect it to magically know what you want. The law, unfortunately, is exactly like this.
Why? Because lawyers are pedantic. Ever had an argument with one? These are folks that say things like, "it depends on your definition of the word is..."
It may infuriate those of us who are less pedantic, but the truth is, laws need to be worded very, very specifically, and with as little ambiguity as possible, because it is in the lawyer's professional interest to "abuse" the letter of the law by convincing the judge that his client falls into legal gray area, because the law isn't specific enough.
This, in fact, is exactly why we have the term "copyright infringement". Because the legal definition of theft has nothing to do with money -- the legal definition has to do with depriving an owner of property. And copyright infringement, whatever you think of it, doesn't deprive anyone of anything. So it can't be called theft. Not legally, anyway.
This, in itself, is not a value judgement. Lots of people here (and, as it happens, the US judicial branch agrees) think that copyright infringement isn't as bad as actual theft, but having two very specific words for these two deeds doesn't in itself make one worse than the other.
It's entirely possible that in the brave new IP-regulated world we're entering, copyright infringement could be seen as worse than theft. Who knows? It used to be that lynching black people wasn't considered a very serious crime in some states. But nowadays, thankfully, judicial opinion has changed somewhat. Legal interpretation is in constant flux and changes with the times.
I wouldn't like it, but there's nothing stopping aggressive plutocratic lobbying by large IP-committed corps from changing this interpretation of theft and copyright infringement, and making copyright infringement the more punishable of the two. Who knows?
But the fact remains, legally they are not the same thing, and never will be. Colloquially (as I mentioned in an earlier post), they may very well be (he stole my idea!) but that doesn't change how the law interprets them, and we're talking about the law here.
Unfortunately, in this case, it is you who are incorrect. Citing a dictionary definition of theft, or common usage of the word "steal" in popular discourse, do not a legal argument make.
Now, I am not a lawyer. However, even not being one, I am aware that law makes very precise definitions of terms in order to minimize gray area during enforcement. The fact that these terms do not always line up exactly with their "common" counterparts is a well-documented fact -- in fact, we have a term for it: legalese.
The reason we're using the legal term here on Slashdot, instead of the common usage (he stole my idea!) is because we're talking about the law. And the legal repercussions of theft (in the legal sense) and copyright infringement are not at all the same.
The RIAA/MPAA, whom you claim to hate, are deliberately using this discontinuity to their advantage, much as companies like Microsoft have used the dual meaning of the word free to their advantage. They know that people use "steal" in a very idiomatic and legally sloppy way. So they attempt to equate theft with copyright infringment -- the latter being a long, cumbersome term that no average person would use -- in the public mind, and they succeed, as you have so clearly demonstrated.
Unless you were claiming to hate the RIAA/MPAA to gain credibility on an (admittedly) very-anti-IP board and thus avoid a blow to your karma, you should be upset that you've been deceived. You needn't take my word for it. Go ask a lawyer, and after he tells you that legally speaking, copyright infringement and theft are not the same, ask him why. Then read the constitution (a short document), especially as relates to copyright.
Let me make one thing completely clear, however: copyright infringement, despite not being theft, is still illegal, and still punishable. I am in no way saying that I agree with that practice. Simply that it's not the same as theft.
Unfortunately, this is not something that we can argue about, if we both accept that we're using legal terms, not colloquial ones. You're simply wrong. There's no loss of face in that -- look at it this way, you've learned something new.
There was nothing illegal on these sites. They provided instructions (in the form of links) to material which, in some countries, would be illegal to download.
Bit-torrent makes no effort to evade traceability -- in fact, it's tremendously easy to track down who is seeding, who is downloading, etc. A centralized site posting links to working torrents is actually doing law enforcement a favor, if you think about it. All they have to do is go down the list, looking for illegal content (there's lots of it), and prosecute the people providing it.
But that's not what they did. What they did was shutdown the site linking, not the site providing. Let's take another example.
Suppose that I hate child porn and think it's an abomination. In an effort to make it easier to catch the bastards producing it, I set up a site that links to sites that provide child porn, links to the ISPs hosting them, information about them, etc. I, not being in law enforcement, am powerless to actually do anything about the problem -- but by providing information to law enforcement, I am doing what I can to help.
Now, the intent is manifestly different, of course. These sites were linking to torrents to make it easier for copyright infringers to locate warez or whatever else, whereas in my example I'm trying to make it easier for law enforcement to catch kiddie-porn peddling bastards. But that's all that's different. Technically speaking, we are both doing exactly the same thing.
What concerns me here is not that I can't find warez -- in actuality, I'm probably the only slashdotter that doesn't use bittorrent for anything (I live in Asia, I can get pirated DVDs on the cheap, and as I run only Linux, there's no non-free software that I might want to pirate) -- what concerns me is that essentially, they're saying that just linking to objectional material is illegal.
So suppose you live in France and you link to say, stormfront, the neonazi white supremacist site. Do you see how this sets precedent? You're not doing anything illegal -- heck, you might flaming the hell out of them in your blog -- but nazi propaganda/racist hate speech is illegal in France (Jean Marie LePenn notwithstanding), and if we start thinking of links to illegal material as illegal, well then -- that perfectly innocent flame becomes a possible source of legal hassle.
But wait, it gets worse. What if I link to a site that links to illegal material? How many degrees of seperation do there need to be between me and illegal material for me to be considered an accomplice? Do you see how quickly this gets out of hand?
It's easy to argue on intent -- these torrent sites were obviously built to facilitate the breaking of the law -- but that in itself should not be illegal in any society that calls itself free. What if I'm a nuclear physicist specializing in the fluid mechanics at the center of hydrogen bomb, and I want to publish a paper on the subject? What if someone uses that information to build a weapon? Am I liable? These things are all related.
Information in itself should never be illegal -- that is censorship, no matter your politics. Breaking the law is illegal, but is giving someone the information they need to break the law illegal? Should it be?
And if it isn't illegal -- it's not, thankfully, at least not yet -- what will the Finnish cops charge the admins of this site of?
We can't be complacent while this happens. Sometimes ideas sound good -- like outlawing Nazism or child-porn -- but have far reaching legal repercussions that we didn't envision and don't want to deal with.
Understand that no-one (at least, not me) is suggesting that providing material for illegal download is legal. But linking to a site that does, well, that's different. Isn't it?
It'll just take a while. But CVS is dying, and Subversion, its logical successor, does not run with Apache 1.3. And in our increasingly firewalled internet, subversion's apache-based access means that if you can surf the web, you can checkout subversion repositories, commit changes, etc.
It's much more convenient than cvs, especially for anonymous access (typical of open source projects).
Apache 2 has suffered from the critical mass catch-22: "I won't use it until it's better tested, deployed in more production environments, etc". Because there hasn't been a compelling reason for most people to use Apache 2, they haven't switched, prefering to stand by the age old "if it ain't broke don't fix it" wisdom.
Subversion offers that compelling reason. Many opensource hosting sites (such as sourceforge) sustain a huge number of hits per day. As subversion displaces CVS, these sites will begin to support it, and I would not be surprised if they begin running Apache 2 as their standard web server to kill two birds with one stone.
I switched to Apache 2 for subversion support. I can't be alone.
As for PHP, well, I hate to say this, but PHP's authors can't be bothered to make their module threadsafe. I know, I know, they link to libraries that might not be thread safe, but as any developer knows, there are many ways to work around possible race conditions (using locks and such) and make the system stable. That's how other programming languages (like perl and python) do it.
PHP is suffering from bitrot, plain and simple. The world around it is changing and it needs to change too. Its developers know this will be a ton of work, and so they resist it. And PHP suffers from the talent problem -- PHP is too easy to use. Bear with me for a moment -- this means that many PHP users are not technically competent enough to hack up a thread safe version of PHP, or aid in its development (this is far less true of the Perl, Python and Ruby communities).
Personally, I use mod_perl. Very nice. PHP has some good points, but some dedicated people are going to have to pull it into the 21st century or it will get left behind. Not being thread-safe is simply not acceptable these days.
You're under the mistaken impression that the media sells news. No, I'm not being faecetious.
Actually, the media sells people. You, the reader, are not their customer -- you are their product. Advertisers are their customers. The cost of printing newspapers (which typically sell for 25-35 cents for daily in the US) is not even remotely covered by their retail value. Once, perhaps, but not today.
You just don't understand their motivation. Adverts on-line and adverts on dead trees both do the same thing -- on-line adverts might be even better, because they're much more dynamic (but perhaps also easily blocked).
In a way, I want to agree with you. But I'd like to point out where your Ford/Honda/gas analogy breaks down: interfaces.
You see, good hardware is very important in a purchase decision. However, hardware on its own is not particularly useful, nor does it sell particularly well -- you'll note that it's rather hard to purchase systems independant of an operating system.
While a Windows server and a GNU/Linux server may run on the same hardware, people are buying the servers running GNU/Linux, rather than the servers running Windows (or Solaris, or HP-UX, or whatever). In essence, GNU/Linux is important because it is probably driving these sales -- people are looking at GNU/Linux and saying, gee, I want to do XYZ with a computer, and a RH/SuSe/whatever server is the one for me. They aren't going to buy a GNU/Linux server and install Windows on it.
See, the problem with the Honda Ford analogy is that a car is just a car. They all have the same interface; the only selling point is the hardware. So if I buy a Ferrari, or a Honda, or whatever, I'm not making my purchase decision based on how to drive it -- all cars are driven the same way.
In computers, the opposite is (normally) true. Hardware is generally just hardware, it all essentially does the same sort of stuff (ie, manipulate integers and floats). The OS is what makes it useful, and even more, the software that runs on that OS. So while the OS may not generate the actual revenue, it is what drives the sale.
It's gratifying to know that your desire to care for your grandparents is a function of how much capital you expect to recieve for their death.
Frankly, if I were your rich grandparent, I would sell my rights and use that money to live a happy, healthy retirement, in my own house, with my own caretakers. It would probably be cheaper, too.
Ok, first off: I hate Windows. I hate its stupid UI, its ugly fonts, and the company that produces it. I jumped ship and switched to Linux before Windows 95 came out. I mean, I hate it, and I would never run an OS that even superficially resembles it. That includes ReactOS.
But.
ReactOS is a perfect example of the OSS spirit. Lots of folks here have been making comments along the lines of "You ought to be working on Linux" or "You ought to be working on WINE" or the like. It surprises me that a site as devoted to the OSS concept would parrot such ridiculous drivel.
It's possible that Linux-based OSS has gotten so popular that we now have lusers of our own. You know what makes a hacker? Someone who codes because he (or she) loves to code. Loves, you know? Not to be productive. Not because they want to change the world. These things may be true of some hackers, but these things alone do not a hacker make.
There was a time when people here respected this. When the majority of Slashdotters were active hackers themselves. Don't be fooled by my high UID -- I remember those times. We wrote software because we loved to. I rather suspect that lots of folks would have told Tim Berners Lee that the web was a dead end idea, or that at the very least it would never be useful. Lots of people have belittled Linux over the years using the same flaccid arguments.
You know GNU? The group that started it all? What was their goal? To produce a free UNIX. Yes, a clone. You understand this? In those days, there was no Windows (1984). A hacker at MIT decided that he wasn't going to put up with this proprietary software bullshit and he said, "I'm going to make a free UNIX clone." And people laughed at him. They said it would never happen. But it did, didn't it? I'm typing this from my Debian GNU/Linux workstation. People like Stallman and Torvalds made that happen. All they wanted was a free OS to replace the one they used at school/work and loved.
Now, most of us (myself included) dislike Windows. We dislike Microsoft (but then, I'm sure RMS disliked IBM, Sun and HP, too). But aren't you missing the point? Some guys like Windows. They like its interface. But like RMS, they demand freedom. Freedom, you know? In this world of the business-friendly "Open Source" movement, people seem to have forgotten this concept, the concept that motivated hackers to create a free UNIX in the first place. It's easy to forget about uncomfortable, uncomprimising ideals like Freedom. But people like Richard Stallman and Theo De Raadt -- and even Linus -- for all their failings -- are motivated by this ideal.
ReactOS is simply another GNU project. But this time, the hackers that have undertaken it aren't fond of the UNIX way. So what? They like an OS I don't like, but so the fuck what? Look at what they're doing. They're creating a free replacement. Free. As in Freedom, you know. So people everywhere that like Windows can use Free Software.
As difficult as it is for me, a unix-geek, to believe, some people don't like UNIX. Some people prefer VMS (I actually quite like VMS and wouldn't mind a FreeVMS). Some people prefer Windows. BeOS. Whatever.
People seem to think that if these guys weren't working on ReactOS, they'd be working on Linux, or BSD, or the HURD, or whatever pet project you have. But that's not how it works. Developers scratch and itch, you know? Because they're coding for love, because they like to code. Not for you. Not so that you can sit on your fat ass and benefit from their work. They do it for themselves, in an ultimately selfish way, to scratch their personal itches. And if you benefit, that's great.
Lusers are people that think FS devs are out to serve them. But guess what: just because you discovered Linux last week and found out that you can run on your machine and get work done doesn't mean that its a "product" that is being "produced" for you to consume. It's a labour of love, made by
I haven't used gEDA but I do work in semiconductors and the design software we use is pretty complex; frankly given the small user base gEDA has, it wouldn't surprise me if it were rather behind (you need a fairly large base of developers and users to get a complex open source project going well, I think). That of course is no reason to be disparaging -- the better it gets, the more users it'll have, the better it'll get, etc.
However, I think your bit about using vim or notepad to write webpages is a bit silly. While I agree that notepad would be pushing it, and being an emacs user myself, I'd like to say that vim is also pushing it, but let's get real. Real, professional web designers don't use stuff like Frontpage or its ilk. That's what unprofessional folks use. The typical web development flow is photoshop (or the GIMP, I guess) for design, which is then handed off to the implementor (who might be the same person) who typically writes all the HTML/CSS by hand (that is, with a plain text editor) and tweaks it until it displays properly on all supported browsers. We'd all love a program like Composer that produces clean, portable HTML/CSS, but unfortunately, these don't exist.
People that use Frontpage or Dreamweaver are almost exclusively non-professional folks. Professional web design companies (at least, all the ones I've worked with) have people that know design (these use photoshop) and people that know web development (these use a text editor). And that's how it's essentially always been.
I'm going to assume you don't know this. But you might be trolling...
All Chinese dialects have a distinctive l sound, and Mandarin (the most widely spoken one) is richly retroflex, so producing the English r for most Chinese is easier than it is for most non-English Europeans.
While I agree that Japanese pronunciation of English is funny, I try not to laugh at them too much because my pronunciation of Japanese is probably funnier.
To me though, equating all this with the Chinese just suggests to me that you're one of those "who cares, they're all yellow" hicks. Given than we're talking about the majority of the world's population here, you're probably better off learning to make the distinction. Believe it or not, Japanese and Chinese don't even look the same, much less speak an even vaguely similar language.
It's interesting that you've made this connection. There's certainly a correlation between the two, but your implied causality (many languages -> poverty) is incorrect.
Actually, as countries and cultures become more advanced, language diversity tends to be lost. For example, in my grandfather's time, every village in France had its own language, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. Of course, in France there had been the notion of "Langue d'Oil" as being the primary trade language for northern France for sometime, but it wasn't until the proliferation of standardized education, radio, and television that people began speaking that particular dialect (instead of their own) at home.
The process can be seen in China now. Language diversity in China is very great, but you can already see local dialects dying in favor of Mandarin. The central government's policy is mandarin based, to be certain, but theirs is an attitude of tolerance when it comes to people speaking their own languages -- unlike France in my grandfather's time, when speaking Chti in school was asking for the paddle.
The thing is, when television, popular music, and education are all in Mandarin, it's only natural that the local languages begin to die. In Shanghai, we see this now with Shanghainese. There are many factors contributing to its slow decline -- the ones I mentioned above, plus the mass immigration of Chinese from other parts of China, who cannot be bothered to learn the local language when Mandarin is already widely spoken.
So while I agree with your correlation, I think the causality goes the other way. Language diversity begins to die as countries industrialize. Just look and language diversity in Europe now compared to a hundred years ago.
I believe in global warming. Fact: the earth is getting hotter -- by 0.5 degrees C on average, as of 100 years ago. Fact: the insular nature of certain types of gas causes greater heat retention. Fact: many of those gases are produced en masse by human industry.
These things are all true. There's no doubt about any of them. How can our dumping tons and tons of pollutants into the atmosphere be anything but bad?
But to say that I believe in global warming is very different from saying that it's true. Let me underscore this: I consider myself an environmentalist. I don't drive a car as a lifestyle choice, I have told people that I won't own a motor vehicle unless it's zero emmissions (ie, electric), and I intend to stand by that decision.
But the truth is, while believing in global warming is all well and good, the evidence for it is largely circumstancial. All the things I said in the first paragraph are true; that is, the change in temperature over the last 100 years and the change in emmission of greenhouse gasses over the same period are in what statisticians call "positive correlation". What this means, essentially, is that if you take the data points and graph them on orthogonal axes, the slope of the resulting linear fit will be positive.
But correlation is not causation, even if it seems likely. Obviously, two completely unrelated things can be positively correlated: take the last home game in Washington DC before an election thingee that came up on Slashdot a while ago. Obviously, the outcome of a US presidential election and a football game don't have anything to do with each other, and yet, they seem to, by virtue of positive correlation.
Now, it gets a bit more difficult to keep your head on straight when two related data sets are positively correlated. But unless you can quantify the relationship, you have not established causality. This may seem like nit-picking, and in a way it is. Remember, I believe in global warming, and I believe that the reduction of greenhouse gases produced worldwide is good policy.
But, and this is important, global warming fails the science test. An increase in 0.5 degrees, average, over the last 100 years is frightening, but doing the same measurement in the 1930s reveals a net cooling effect! What gives?
What gives is that we don't know how climate change operates. I think that causality is reasonable... that is, I'm willing to accept the lack of scientific evidence because I believe that reduction of pollutants is good policy.
But I don't believe that we should sacrifice the quality of science to achieve political ends. Global warming, as far as science is concerned, is bunk -- just like acid rain, second hand smoke, and nuclear winter. Good policy, bad science. No one wants acid rain, no one wants second hand smoke, and no one wants a nuclear holocaust -- and by the same token, no one wants global warming. So it makes sense to me to institute preventive measures and policies to protect against these undesirable outcomes.
But when you start spouting pseudoscience, or implying that the two page digested soundbite in Newsweek on the subject is representative of proper scientific methodology, you start losing my support.
Protect the earth, yes. Protect the integrity of science, yes. I guess I'm just the only environmentalist I know that feels that the ends (reduced pollution) don't justify the means (cheapening of science), even if I believe firmly in those ends (firmly enough to deny myself the convenience of a car, even if it means a two hour commute by bus and metro that would otherwise take 20 minutes).
Now ask yourself, how much does a qualified full time Linux technician cost? I don't mean someone who follows the directions and installs the software -- I mean someone who is there for you, 24/7, to make sure your servers don't go down, who knows everything about the OS that's running on your computers, etc. How much would you pay to have someone like that on call, per year?
350 to 1500? I don't think so.
See, the service industry for Linux systems is in most respects exactly the same business model as medical insurance. Redhat employs some techs that know their distribution inside and out, makes sure they're aware of every little kink, and provides them on call any time your business needs them.
In the meantime, they offer you Linux, which is extremely stable and getting more and more stable every day. As many people on Slashdot point out, who needs support? 99% percent of the time, you put the machine(s) in a corner and forget about them, and they just work.
But not having support in case something goes wrong is like not having medical insurance. You may be willing to risk it for yourself, but would you risk it for your family? The businessman thinks the same way about his company's servers. Sure, in all likelyhood nothing will happen, but what if it does? If I were running this server in my basement at home, well, no biggie. But what if I need really solid uptime? Guarantees?
Insurance companies make money because most of the time, people don't get sick, but when they do, it's expensive. Insurance companies take the monthly check from the people that buy their policies and basically pocket the money as profits, keeping a margin to pay for the 5% of people that actually need the medical care.
Redhat makes money the same way. It's much, much cheaper to pay 1000 or even 10000 dollars per year for an unlimited no hassle support contract than it is to hire the support people yourself (they typically cost upwards of 80 grand per year). Because Linux is really stable, most companies will probably never call in support, so Redhat can bet that most of that money will just go straight into their pockets. When something does go wrong, they have the capital necessary to make sure that it never happens again. Typically companies that make their money this way will have a tech at your company at 3 in the morning to fix whatever the problem is, no questions asked.
That's how a support based company works.
Now Microsoft tries to make its money on the initial cost of the software, and not on support. So they offer "free" or "low cost" support contracts that without exception suck ass. You need to buy the premium support contract to get anything resembling what RH and Sun offer standard. And you also have to pay a massive initial licensing fee, usually per server or even per CPU.
You have to understand that RHEL is free (both as in beer and as in speech). All you're buying is insurance. They're going to show up and take care of it if shit hits the fan. That's how they make their money.
And really, when you compare a 24/7/365 no questions asked support contract to the cost of hiring someone on site to do the same job, as long as it costs less than 80 grand per year, you're on top.
I can't believe this crap got modded insightful. It's quite clear that Alomex has no personal experience whatsoever with Lenovo. Lenovo (Legend, Lianxiang) is a very high quality company, that has managed to essentially monopolize much of Asia's laptop and desktop PC market for quite sometime now.
The reason you don't know much about them if you live outside of the greater China area is not because they're of poor quality, it's because the guy who runs the company has his head screwed on straight. I saw a very interesting interview with him when I was in Hong Kong a few months ago, where he was asked if he was going to take his products global. He said that it was definitely on his mind, but that he wanted to develop a strong lead in China, which he perceives as the 21st century's major market, before moving into Europe and the US.
Lenovo laptops are of high quality make and are priced very competitively. They're very widely regarded here (Shanghai) and my personal experience with them is that they're put together very well, better than say, Sony laptops.
The Chairman Mao dig is just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard. All it does is demonstrate that Alomex has never been to China and knows diddly squat about it (and if that's not the case, then he's a troll, plain and simple.) Chairman Mao has essentially no credibility in China (which isn't surprising at all) and while the CCP may continue to give him face in certain respects (it's not considered polite to speak ill of the dead here) any marketing rep worth his snuff knows that it's absolute suicide to try to connect your product with Mao and come out on top. The common people (especially in the demographic that buys computers) were mostly pretty badly burnt by the Cultural revolution and as that wasn't very long ago it remains fresh in people's minds.
China is, at this point, anything but communist. Anyone that makes this accusation is just showing himself to be a bubbling moron.
Lenovo, in particular, is not a state owned company (there are very few of these anymore, and the Chinese government is dumping them/privatizing them as quickly as they possibly can), it's profitable, successful, and international.
With their local connections, they will do well. I own a Thinkpad X40 and I personally am not at all concerned that quality will drop. Thinkpads are expensive machines, and if Lenovo keeps them at their current price, they'll be able to make an absolute crapload of money without dropping the quality at all, based on their current offerings.
This China trolling from desperate Americans worried about losing their economic and technological dominance in the near future needs to stop. I'm American, and let me tell you, no amount of whining is going to stop the PRC. The sleeping dragon is waking and the world, as Napoleon predicted, is trembling.
I think you've been trolled, friend. If it was a troll, let's take a moment and congratulate its author: you have to admit, it was pretty good. Got me all riled up just reading it.
My girlfriend (who was having lots of problems with Windows in general) recently bought a Mac OS X TiBook and it's beautiful. Really nice. I mean, everything seems to just work. When I use it, I get the feeling that it's quite professionally done.
And yet, like you, I use Linux. Exclusively. At work. At home.
You know what really cracks me up is the "sucky fonts" troll. Mine is the only Linux box in my department at work, in a sea of Windows 2k and XP boxes (I convinced management that letting me run Linux on my desktop would be a good way to cut costs, as we were going to have to buy a new server to run a little intranet web application cum file server, yay). My coworkers constantly wonder aloud why my fonts look so damn good.
And as much as I respect Apple, I have to say it: the fonts on Linux look better than on OS X. The OS X font antialiasing algorithm is too aggressive, giving fonts a fuzzy look -- part of this seems to be that they make poor use of subpixel rendering on LCD displays. Freetype, on the other hand -- even using their patent-free, supposedly substandard hinter -- produces nice, clear antialiased fonts that aren't fuzzy and aren't pixelated. Perfect balance.
Now, I'm not saying the Linux GUI is better than OS X's -- I don't honestly depend much on complex GUIs so I wouldn't be the right person to make the comparison -- but in terms of fonts at least, Linux seems to blow both Mac OS X and Windows away, in all the languages I type in.
And yet, despite this, people continue to fall back on the old "Linux fonts suck" chestnut!
As a long time reader of USENET, I respect a good troll (I really do). But this whole Linux font thing is getting too obvious. We need something more subtle. Although I'm in most respects a Linux zealot, I'm aware that there are lots of places that Linux is rough around the edges still. Taking one of these and blowing it subtly out of proportion would get an aspiring troll a much higher Voodoo rating, I think.
In the meantime, I, like you, will continue to use Debian. Mmmm.
That's not actually true. For one thing, the concept of a locale is pretty much a UNIX thing (it originated with Solaris IIRC), and they exist on Mac OS X as well (although I don't know if Quartz uses them). Windows normally has localized versions of its OS -- meaning that you buy Windows (Simplified Chinese version, Thai version, Japanese version, etc) and can't switch it up too much. I don't actually use Windows at all so this may be incorrect for modern NT-based versions (let me know if it is) but it used to be that way, at least.
At any rate, a "locale" has nothing to do with unicode. Locales essentially provide a way for the user to customize the operating environment for things like messages (what language the menus are in, for example), sorting order (what does "alphabetical order" mean in languages like Chinese?), date formats, currency symbols, what to use as a decimal point, what to use as a digit group seperator (is one thousand "1,000" or "1.000" or "1 000" or "1000"?), how many digits to group (10,000 or 1,0000?), etc. Unicode is only a character encoding. Pretty much any modern app that supports full localization is unicode internally, anyway, because it's a pain in the butt otherwise (emacs is a lamentable exception to this rule).
Abiword is unicode internally, anyway. glibc wchar_t is (on Linux, anyway) unicode internally, and converts legacy encodings (like iso8859-1, big5, gbk, etc) into unicode automatically. This is true on Mac OS X too, I think.
So yeah, "unicode" is just a way of mapping characters to numbers. It's only better because it has more characters than any other encoding I think (although there is some huge GB encoding that might be larger, but I can't remember what it's called).
I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing this out. It hadn't occured to me, for some reason, that fair use applied to source code also -- but obviously it must.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically, the Chinese (both in the US and in China) seem to work harder than many Americans I know. Not to mention that Chinese economic growth is, at least currently, much higher than the US's (although that's perhaps not a fair comparison, as they are a developing nation).
"Incentive to work" doesn't mean being trampled on, necessarily.
Can you hard link directories?
I'm not really sure they ever asked for our help in World War II, although they were certainly grateful. Of course, we did tremendously well for ourselves in that deal, too, lest you forget. It's not like WW2 was all American sacrifice. It pulled us out of the great depression and made us (quite literally) the superpower we are today. Whatsmore, it was completely fought on the soil of other nations -- nations whose economies, previously powerful, and infrastructures, previously widespread, were reduced to rubble. Of course, we offered to rebuild it for them. At a cost. Nothing wrong with that. We forgave them much of their debts, later.
Anyway, allies help each other and that's been the case for a long time -- and despite what many of us think, it hasn't always been the US helping everyone else. We are powerful now but once were weak -- we bested the United Kingdom, the most powerful empire in the world, only with the help of the French, ironically. Yet you don't generally hear the French saying to Americans "Remember 1776?". Instead, an American, like myself, needs to point it out to you.
WW2 was more recent than our liberation, to be sure, but we have to learn that we can't expect the goodwill of Europe to go on forever because of deeds done by our grandfathers. Relationships are ever-changing things. No one European that I know would disparage US involvement in WW2 or deny that it was needed and helpful. But that doesn't give America a magic "get out of trouble" card with respect to European foreign policy for the rest of eternity.
The truth is, Europe hasn't been militarily threatened for many years now. They've had skirmishes, sure -- Bosnia was quite a mess, as was mentioned -- but the EU is emerging as a force to be reckoned with and frankly I think the GP was right when he said that Europe no longer needs America's protection as much as America seems to think it does.
Frankly, my opinion -- as an American, mind you -- is that we like to think of ourselves as policemen, and we take the same self-righteous attitude they do: "You complain when we beat up black guys in the ghetto but when your sister gets murdered, who do you come crying to for justice?" It's not entirely wrong, either. When you're strong you're tempted to use that strength to influence people around you, and I doubt (for what its worth) that Europe would be any different, if they were in our shoes (or any other nation, for that matter). And history certainly seems to support my assessment.
But the fact remains that we could probably slice our military spending considerably without any adverse effects whatsoever to Europe, anyway. Some smaller third world nations might suffer, but then again, they might not. Happily, none of the military superpowers (by this I mean the top few, say the US, the EU, China, Russia?) want war, anymore. At one point, wars were fought with weapons, and economic growth was the end in question. Now, wars are fought with trade, and economic growth is still the end in question. Most of the big boys have seen that people not getting killed works better in our tiny, well-connected world than the alternative.
And so there is, at this point in time, an unprecedented unwillingness to greatly destablize the world with a large war. So we have small, localized skirmishes instead. And terrorism, too. None of these are greatly aided by a US acting as a world policeman.
I'm not suggesting we all get rid of our militaries. It would be nice, but unrealistic... "If you would have peace, prepare for war," as they say. But a small, defensive military is really all anyone needs these days. We can ramp it up quickly if the need becomes great again.
No, truthfully, the US wants to keep its military not to defend the world, but to remind the world that this is the Pax Americana, and keep nations great and small in constant awe and fear of our mightiness. We've gotten used to this position and it suits us. Terrorism is a direct result of this, as
I too have noticed this trend. I think there are two major reasons, both related. One is the old adage, "familiarity breeds contempt." Truth be told, Christian beliefs are no more ridiculous, short sighted or bigotted than the beliefs of the rest of the world's religions, but the average Slashdotter is a westerner, and knows far less about Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc, than he knows about Christianity.
I often hear people claim that religions like Buddhism are better or less biggotted or whatever than Christianity, but my guess is that most of the people that say that didn't grow up in a country where Buddhism is the dominant faith, they've just read some books about it and thought to themselves, "hey, this karma stuff is cool!"
Of course, exactly the same thing happens here in Asia, vis-a-vis Christianity. People read about it, and it's mostly about loving your neighbor and such, and so they think, man, this is way better than Buddhism/Taoism/Shintoism/whatever -- it's all love and acceptance!
The point is that when two dominant religions clash, there is usually war, because people are very passionate about their beliefs.
The second reason (perhaps more founded) is that due to the dominance of European culture, Christianity, one of Western culture's central features, has been able to spread and gain dominance in a way that other religions were less able to do.
Further, there's the issue of Christianity's particular history in Europe. The Catholic church was a force to be reckoned with, and the renaissance and the "enlightenment", which brought science and reason to Europe at least, were largely in spite of the Church. So within a forum that values science and reason, the Church has a rather bad rap.
Of course you'll note that very little of this has anything to do with the actual beliefs espoused by Christians, just with the way they've historically been practiced.
And it's further worth noting that since many Slashdotters are Americans, and America has an astoundingly large number of loud religious fundamentalists -- I'm using this term literally, not as a slur for anyone who believes in the Jesus/God/Holy Ghost thing -- who continue to do their best to make the lives of people who value freedom of expression and a world without censorship and imposed morality miserable.
Scientifically minded people also usually dislike creationists, who seem bent on willfully distorting words and data to make a not particularly inspired point.
So you see, lots of people assume that all Christians are like the loud, obnoxious fundies that seem to be representative (but aren't, which I well know).
Having said all that, though, I think dogging on Christians on Slashdot is as time honoured a tradition as bringing up Linux in non-Linux related discussions. Obnoxious, yes. Immature, yes. But that's Slashdot, and we love it.
Whoa, slow down there, cowboy!
I believe the GP's point was that guns are machines designed for the sole purpose of killing people. Now, mastering a weapon (be it a gun or a samurai sword) is a typical form of rewarding recreation in many societies, and will remain so, and I support that (in fact, I'm against gun control). But the fact remains that weapons are designed for killing people (or at least, living things).
Laser pointers, on the other hand, are not designed for killing people (and neither is your car). They both have the capacity to kill people -- but then as was demonstrated in the John Waters classic, "Serial Mom", you could kill someone with a leg of mutton, too.
There's so much anti-gun rhetoric these days that for those of us that support the second amendment it's tempting to read hysterical gun-phobia into everything that doesn't explicitly support our right to bear arms. But let's not go too far.
Fact: guns are designed to kill people. This does not make them, as tools, responsible for the act of killing -- the old adage about guns not killing people is completely true. But guns do little other than shoot at things for the purpose of killing something. If you use them for target practice or skeet shooting, that's great. But these are essentially just training exercises so that you can use them more effectively at what they're designed to do. Those exercises just happen to be fun, more fun in fact than actually shooting living things, in most cases.
Laser pointers are different because, like cars, killing things isn't even their intended use. The GP was pointing out the irony here -- we won't outlaw things expressly designed to kill, but will discuss outlawing things that aren't, but might just be used that way, in an extremely inprobable situation, by some nut.
I don't read his post as suggesting we ought to outlaw guns, or that gun laws are stupid. Rather, I see him as pointing out that outlawing laser pointers is stupid. And I agree with him.
So I guess accepting this christmas present is theft, eh? After all, I obtained it, but didn't pay for it ...
..."
Oh, wait, that wasn't what you meant, huh? You meant to say something completely different, and you're thinking to yourself, right now "Man, 808140 is such a pedantic fuck. He knows what I mean." And you're right, friend, I do. I know exactly what you mean.
But authoring a law is rather like programming a computer. I had a coworker back when I worked at NASA who (being a geek girl) was very into outreach stuff. She would go to girl scout troop meetings and try to get girls interested in tech, you know? So she had this little skit she used to do, where she would bring a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, and she would say to the girls, "I'm a computer, and I'm going to do exactly what you tell me to do. Tell me how to make a peanut butter sandwich."
And so the girls would say, "Put the peanut butter on the bread!" and she would put the jar of peanut butter on (top of) the loaf of bread. "Nononono," would be reply, "you're doing it wrong..."
But she wasn't, obviously. She was trying to teach them that computers are stupid, and do exactly what you tell them to do -- you can't expect it to magically know what you want. The law, unfortunately, is exactly like this.
Why? Because lawyers are pedantic. Ever had an argument with one? These are folks that say things like, "it depends on your definition of the word is
It may infuriate those of us who are less pedantic, but the truth is, laws need to be worded very, very specifically, and with as little ambiguity as possible, because it is in the lawyer's professional interest to "abuse" the letter of the law by convincing the judge that his client falls into legal gray area, because the law isn't specific enough.
This, in fact, is exactly why we have the term "copyright infringement". Because the legal definition of theft has nothing to do with money -- the legal definition has to do with depriving an owner of property. And copyright infringement, whatever you think of it, doesn't deprive anyone of anything. So it can't be called theft. Not legally, anyway.
This, in itself, is not a value judgement. Lots of people here (and, as it happens, the US judicial branch agrees) think that copyright infringement isn't as bad as actual theft, but having two very specific words for these two deeds doesn't in itself make one worse than the other.
It's entirely possible that in the brave new IP-regulated world we're entering, copyright infringement could be seen as worse than theft. Who knows? It used to be that lynching black people wasn't considered a very serious crime in some states. But nowadays, thankfully, judicial opinion has changed somewhat. Legal interpretation is in constant flux and changes with the times.
I wouldn't like it, but there's nothing stopping aggressive plutocratic lobbying by large IP-committed corps from changing this interpretation of theft and copyright infringement, and making copyright infringement the more punishable of the two. Who knows?
But the fact remains, legally they are not the same thing, and never will be. Colloquially (as I mentioned in an earlier post), they may very well be (he stole my idea!) but that doesn't change how the law interprets them, and we're talking about the law here.
Unfortunately, in this case, it is you who are incorrect. Citing a dictionary definition of theft, or common usage of the word "steal" in popular discourse, do not a legal argument make.
Now, I am not a lawyer. However, even not being one, I am aware that law makes very precise definitions of terms in order to minimize gray area during enforcement. The fact that these terms do not always line up exactly with their "common" counterparts is a well-documented fact -- in fact, we have a term for it: legalese.
The reason we're using the legal term here on Slashdot, instead of the common usage (he stole my idea!) is because we're talking about the law. And the legal repercussions of theft (in the legal sense) and copyright infringement are not at all the same.
The RIAA/MPAA, whom you claim to hate, are deliberately using this discontinuity to their advantage, much as companies like Microsoft have used the dual meaning of the word free to their advantage. They know that people use "steal" in a very idiomatic and legally sloppy way. So they attempt to equate theft with copyright infringment -- the latter being a long, cumbersome term that no average person would use -- in the public mind, and they succeed, as you have so clearly demonstrated.
Unless you were claiming to hate the RIAA/MPAA to gain credibility on an (admittedly) very-anti-IP board and thus avoid a blow to your karma, you should be upset that you've been deceived. You needn't take my word for it. Go ask a lawyer, and after he tells you that legally speaking, copyright infringement and theft are not the same, ask him why. Then read the constitution (a short document), especially as relates to copyright.
Let me make one thing completely clear, however: copyright infringement, despite not being theft, is still illegal, and still punishable. I am in no way saying that I agree with that practice. Simply that it's not the same as theft.
Unfortunately, this is not something that we can argue about, if we both accept that we're using legal terms, not colloquial ones. You're simply wrong. There's no loss of face in that -- look at it this way, you've learned something new.
That's the whole point, unfortunately.
There was nothing illegal on these sites. They provided instructions (in the form of links) to material which, in some countries, would be illegal to download.
Bit-torrent makes no effort to evade traceability -- in fact, it's tremendously easy to track down who is seeding, who is downloading, etc. A centralized site posting links to working torrents is actually doing law enforcement a favor, if you think about it. All they have to do is go down the list, looking for illegal content (there's lots of it), and prosecute the people providing it.
But that's not what they did. What they did was shutdown the site linking, not the site providing. Let's take another example.
Suppose that I hate child porn and think it's an abomination. In an effort to make it easier to catch the bastards producing it, I set up a site that links to sites that provide child porn, links to the ISPs hosting them, information about them, etc. I, not being in law enforcement, am powerless to actually do anything about the problem -- but by providing information to law enforcement, I am doing what I can to help.
Now, the intent is manifestly different, of course. These sites were linking to torrents to make it easier for copyright infringers to locate warez or whatever else, whereas in my example I'm trying to make it easier for law enforcement to catch kiddie-porn peddling bastards. But that's all that's different. Technically speaking, we are both doing exactly the same thing.
What concerns me here is not that I can't find warez -- in actuality, I'm probably the only slashdotter that doesn't use bittorrent for anything (I live in Asia, I can get pirated DVDs on the cheap, and as I run only Linux, there's no non-free software that I might want to pirate) -- what concerns me is that essentially, they're saying that just linking to objectional material is illegal.
So suppose you live in France and you link to say, stormfront, the neonazi white supremacist site. Do you see how this sets precedent? You're not doing anything illegal -- heck, you might flaming the hell out of them in your blog -- but nazi propaganda/racist hate speech is illegal in France (Jean Marie LePenn notwithstanding), and if we start thinking of links to illegal material as illegal, well then -- that perfectly innocent flame becomes a possible source of legal hassle.
But wait, it gets worse. What if I link to a site that links to illegal material? How many degrees of seperation do there need to be between me and illegal material for me to be considered an accomplice? Do you see how quickly this gets out of hand?
It's easy to argue on intent -- these torrent sites were obviously built to facilitate the breaking of the law -- but that in itself should not be illegal in any society that calls itself free. What if I'm a nuclear physicist specializing in the fluid mechanics at the center of hydrogen bomb, and I want to publish a paper on the subject? What if someone uses that information to build a weapon? Am I liable? These things are all related.
Information in itself should never be illegal -- that is censorship, no matter your politics. Breaking the law is illegal, but is giving someone the information they need to break the law illegal? Should it be?
And if it isn't illegal -- it's not, thankfully, at least not yet -- what will the Finnish cops charge the admins of this site of?
We can't be complacent while this happens. Sometimes ideas sound good -- like outlawing Nazism or child-porn -- but have far reaching legal repercussions that we didn't envision and don't want to deal with.
Understand that no-one (at least, not me) is suggesting that providing material for illegal download is legal. But linking to a site that does, well, that's different. Isn't it?
It'll just take a while. But CVS is dying, and Subversion, its logical successor, does not run with Apache 1.3. And in our increasingly firewalled internet, subversion's apache-based access means that if you can surf the web, you can checkout subversion repositories, commit changes, etc.
It's much more convenient than cvs, especially for anonymous access (typical of open source projects).
Apache 2 has suffered from the critical mass catch-22: "I won't use it until it's better tested, deployed in more production environments, etc". Because there hasn't been a compelling reason for most people to use Apache 2, they haven't switched, prefering to stand by the age old "if it ain't broke don't fix it" wisdom.
Subversion offers that compelling reason. Many opensource hosting sites (such as sourceforge) sustain a huge number of hits per day. As subversion displaces CVS, these sites will begin to support it, and I would not be surprised if they begin running Apache 2 as their standard web server to kill two birds with one stone.
I switched to Apache 2 for subversion support. I can't be alone.
As for PHP, well, I hate to say this, but PHP's authors can't be bothered to make their module threadsafe. I know, I know, they link to libraries that might not be thread safe, but as any developer knows, there are many ways to work around possible race conditions (using locks and such) and make the system stable. That's how other programming languages (like perl and python) do it.
PHP is suffering from bitrot, plain and simple. The world around it is changing and it needs to change too. Its developers know this will be a ton of work, and so they resist it. And PHP suffers from the talent problem -- PHP is too easy to use. Bear with me for a moment -- this means that many PHP users are not technically competent enough to hack up a thread safe version of PHP, or aid in its development (this is far less true of the Perl, Python and Ruby communities).
Personally, I use mod_perl. Very nice. PHP has some good points, but some dedicated people are going to have to pull it into the 21st century or it will get left behind. Not being thread-safe is simply not acceptable these days.
You're under the mistaken impression that the media sells news. No, I'm not being faecetious.
Actually, the media sells people. You, the reader, are not their customer -- you are their product. Advertisers are their customers. The cost of printing newspapers (which typically sell for 25-35 cents for daily in the US) is not even remotely covered by their retail value. Once, perhaps, but not today.
You just don't understand their motivation. Adverts on-line and adverts on dead trees both do the same thing -- on-line adverts might be even better, because they're much more dynamic (but perhaps also easily blocked).
Anyway, think about it.
In a way, I want to agree with you. But I'd like to point out where your Ford/Honda/gas analogy breaks down: interfaces.
You see, good hardware is very important in a purchase decision. However, hardware on its own is not particularly useful, nor does it sell particularly well -- you'll note that it's rather hard to purchase systems independant of an operating system.
While a Windows server and a GNU/Linux server may run on the same hardware, people are buying the servers running GNU/Linux, rather than the servers running Windows (or Solaris, or HP-UX, or whatever). In essence, GNU/Linux is important because it is probably driving these sales -- people are looking at GNU/Linux and saying, gee, I want to do XYZ with a computer, and a RH/SuSe/whatever server is the one for me. They aren't going to buy a GNU/Linux server and install Windows on it.
See, the problem with the Honda Ford analogy is that a car is just a car. They all have the same interface; the only selling point is the hardware. So if I buy a Ferrari, or a Honda, or whatever, I'm not making my purchase decision based on how to drive it -- all cars are driven the same way.
In computers, the opposite is (normally) true. Hardware is generally just hardware, it all essentially does the same sort of stuff (ie, manipulate integers and floats). The OS is what makes it useful, and even more, the software that runs on that OS. So while the OS may not generate the actual revenue, it is what drives the sale.
That's why it's important.
Serious reply to a funny: did you know that Brontosaurus never actually existed?
It really messes with my childhood. Sigh.
It's gratifying to know that your desire to care for your grandparents is a function of how much capital you expect to recieve for their death.
Frankly, if I were your rich grandparent, I would sell my rights and use that money to live a happy, healthy retirement, in my own house, with my own caretakers. It would probably be cheaper, too.
Ok, first off: I hate Windows. I hate its stupid UI, its ugly fonts, and the company that produces it. I jumped ship and switched to Linux before Windows 95 came out. I mean, I hate it, and I would never run an OS that even superficially resembles it. That includes ReactOS.
But.
ReactOS is a perfect example of the OSS spirit. Lots of folks here have been making comments along the lines of "You ought to be working on Linux" or "You ought to be working on WINE" or the like. It surprises me that a site as devoted to the OSS concept would parrot such ridiculous drivel.
It's possible that Linux-based OSS has gotten so popular that we now have lusers of our own. You know what makes a hacker? Someone who codes because he (or she) loves to code. Loves, you know? Not to be productive. Not because they want to change the world. These things may be true of some hackers, but these things alone do not a hacker make.
There was a time when people here respected this. When the majority of Slashdotters were active hackers themselves. Don't be fooled by my high UID -- I remember those times. We wrote software because we loved to. I rather suspect that lots of folks would have told Tim Berners Lee that the web was a dead end idea, or that at the very least it would never be useful. Lots of people have belittled Linux over the years using the same flaccid arguments.
You know GNU? The group that started it all? What was their goal? To produce a free UNIX. Yes, a clone. You understand this? In those days, there was no Windows (1984). A hacker at MIT decided that he wasn't going to put up with this proprietary software bullshit and he said, "I'm going to make a free UNIX clone." And people laughed at him. They said it would never happen. But it did, didn't it? I'm typing this from my Debian GNU/Linux workstation. People like Stallman and Torvalds made that happen. All they wanted was a free OS to replace the one they used at school/work and loved.
Now, most of us (myself included) dislike Windows. We dislike Microsoft (but then, I'm sure RMS disliked IBM, Sun and HP, too). But aren't you missing the point? Some guys like Windows. They like its interface. But like RMS, they demand freedom. Freedom, you know? In this world of the business-friendly "Open Source" movement, people seem to have forgotten this concept, the concept that motivated hackers to create a free UNIX in the first place. It's easy to forget about uncomfortable, uncomprimising ideals like Freedom. But people like Richard Stallman and Theo De Raadt -- and even Linus -- for all their failings -- are motivated by this ideal.
ReactOS is simply another GNU project. But this time, the hackers that have undertaken it aren't fond of the UNIX way. So what? They like an OS I don't like, but so the fuck what? Look at what they're doing. They're creating a free replacement. Free. As in Freedom, you know. So people everywhere that like Windows can use Free Software.
As difficult as it is for me, a unix-geek, to believe, some people don't like UNIX. Some people prefer VMS (I actually quite like VMS and wouldn't mind a FreeVMS). Some people prefer Windows. BeOS. Whatever.
People seem to think that if these guys weren't working on ReactOS, they'd be working on Linux, or BSD, or the HURD, or whatever pet project you have. But that's not how it works. Developers scratch and itch, you know? Because they're coding for love, because they like to code. Not for you. Not so that you can sit on your fat ass and benefit from their work. They do it for themselves, in an ultimately selfish way, to scratch their personal itches. And if you benefit, that's great.
Lusers are people that think FS devs are out to serve them. But guess what: just because you discovered Linux last week and found out that you can run on your machine and get work done doesn't mean that its a "product" that is being "produced" for you to consume. It's a labour of love, made by
I haven't used gEDA but I do work in semiconductors and the design software we use is pretty complex; frankly given the small user base gEDA has, it wouldn't surprise me if it were rather behind (you need a fairly large base of developers and users to get a complex open source project going well, I think). That of course is no reason to be disparaging -- the better it gets, the more users it'll have, the better it'll get, etc.
However, I think your bit about using vim or notepad to write webpages is a bit silly. While I agree that notepad would be pushing it, and being an emacs user myself, I'd like to say that vim is also pushing it, but let's get real. Real, professional web designers don't use stuff like Frontpage or its ilk. That's what unprofessional folks use. The typical web development flow is photoshop (or the GIMP, I guess) for design, which is then handed off to the implementor (who might be the same person) who typically writes all the HTML/CSS by hand (that is, with a plain text editor) and tweaks it until it displays properly on all supported browsers. We'd all love a program like Composer that produces clean, portable HTML/CSS, but unfortunately, these don't exist.
People that use Frontpage or Dreamweaver are almost exclusively non-professional folks. Professional web design companies (at least, all the ones I've worked with) have people that know design (these use photoshop) and people that know web development (these use a text editor). And that's how it's essentially always been.
I'm going to assume you don't know this. But you might be trolling...
Engrish is a Japanese phenomenon.
All Chinese dialects have a distinctive l sound, and Mandarin (the most widely spoken one) is richly retroflex, so producing the English r for most Chinese is easier than it is for most non-English Europeans.
While I agree that Japanese pronunciation of English is funny, I try not to laugh at them too much because my pronunciation of Japanese is probably funnier.
To me though, equating all this with the Chinese just suggests to me that you're one of those "who cares, they're all yellow" hicks. Given than we're talking about the majority of the world's population here, you're probably better off learning to make the distinction. Believe it or not, Japanese and Chinese don't even look the same, much less speak an even vaguely similar language.
It's interesting that you've made this connection. There's certainly a correlation between the two, but your implied causality (many languages -> poverty) is incorrect.
Actually, as countries and cultures become more advanced, language diversity tends to be lost. For example, in my grandfather's time, every village in France had its own language, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. Of course, in France there had been the notion of "Langue d'Oil" as being the primary trade language for northern France for sometime, but it wasn't until the proliferation of standardized education, radio, and television that people began speaking that particular dialect (instead of their own) at home.
The process can be seen in China now. Language diversity in China is very great, but you can already see local dialects dying in favor of Mandarin. The central government's policy is mandarin based, to be certain, but theirs is an attitude of tolerance when it comes to people speaking their own languages -- unlike France in my grandfather's time, when speaking Chti in school was asking for the paddle.
The thing is, when television, popular music, and education are all in Mandarin, it's only natural that the local languages begin to die. In Shanghai, we see this now with Shanghainese. There are many factors contributing to its slow decline -- the ones I mentioned above, plus the mass immigration of Chinese from other parts of China, who cannot be bothered to learn the local language when Mandarin is already widely spoken.
So while I agree with your correlation, I think the causality goes the other way. Language diversity begins to die as countries industrialize. Just look and language diversity in Europe now compared to a hundred years ago.
TSIA
I believe in global warming. Fact: the earth is getting hotter -- by 0.5 degrees C on average, as of 100 years ago. Fact: the insular nature of certain types of gas causes greater heat retention. Fact: many of those gases are produced en masse by human industry.
... that is, I'm willing to accept the lack of scientific evidence because I believe that reduction of pollutants is good policy.
These things are all true. There's no doubt about any of them. How can our dumping tons and tons of pollutants into the atmosphere be anything but bad?
But to say that I believe in global warming is very different from saying that it's true. Let me underscore this: I consider myself an environmentalist. I don't drive a car as a lifestyle choice, I have told people that I won't own a motor vehicle unless it's zero emmissions (ie, electric), and I intend to stand by that decision.
But the truth is, while believing in global warming is all well and good, the evidence for it is largely circumstancial. All the things I said in the first paragraph are true; that is, the change in temperature over the last 100 years and the change in emmission of greenhouse gasses over the same period are in what statisticians call "positive correlation". What this means, essentially, is that if you take the data points and graph them on orthogonal axes, the slope of the resulting linear fit will be positive.
But correlation is not causation, even if it seems likely. Obviously, two completely unrelated things can be positively correlated: take the last home game in Washington DC before an election thingee that came up on Slashdot a while ago. Obviously, the outcome of a US presidential election and a football game don't have anything to do with each other, and yet, they seem to, by virtue of positive correlation.
Now, it gets a bit more difficult to keep your head on straight when two related data sets are positively correlated. But unless you can quantify the relationship, you have not established causality. This may seem like nit-picking, and in a way it is. Remember, I believe in global warming, and I believe that the reduction of greenhouse gases produced worldwide is good policy.
But, and this is important, global warming fails the science test. An increase in 0.5 degrees, average, over the last 100 years is frightening, but doing the same measurement in the 1930s reveals a net cooling effect! What gives?
What gives is that we don't know how climate change operates. I think that causality is reasonable
But I don't believe that we should sacrifice the quality of science to achieve political ends. Global warming, as far as science is concerned, is bunk -- just like acid rain, second hand smoke, and nuclear winter. Good policy, bad science. No one wants acid rain, no one wants second hand smoke, and no one wants a nuclear holocaust -- and by the same token, no one wants global warming. So it makes sense to me to institute preventive measures and policies to protect against these undesirable outcomes.
But when you start spouting pseudoscience, or implying that the two page digested soundbite in Newsweek on the subject is representative of proper scientific methodology, you start losing my support.
Protect the earth, yes. Protect the integrity of science, yes. I guess I'm just the only environmentalist I know that feels that the ends (reduced pollution) don't justify the means (cheapening of science), even if I believe firmly in those ends (firmly enough to deny myself the convenience of a car, even if it means a two hour commute by bus and metro that would otherwise take 20 minutes).
350 to 1500 dollars per year, eh?
Now ask yourself, how much does a qualified full time Linux technician cost? I don't mean someone who follows the directions and installs the software -- I mean someone who is there for you, 24/7, to make sure your servers don't go down, who knows everything about the OS that's running on your computers, etc. How much would you pay to have someone like that on call, per year?
350 to 1500? I don't think so.
See, the service industry for Linux systems is in most respects exactly the same business model as medical insurance. Redhat employs some techs that know their distribution inside and out, makes sure they're aware of every little kink, and provides them on call any time your business needs them.
In the meantime, they offer you Linux, which is extremely stable and getting more and more stable every day. As many people on Slashdot point out, who needs support? 99% percent of the time, you put the machine(s) in a corner and forget about them, and they just work.
But not having support in case something goes wrong is like not having medical insurance. You may be willing to risk it for yourself, but would you risk it for your family? The businessman thinks the same way about his company's servers. Sure, in all likelyhood nothing will happen, but what if it does? If I were running this server in my basement at home, well, no biggie. But what if I need really solid uptime? Guarantees?
Insurance companies make money because most of the time, people don't get sick, but when they do, it's expensive. Insurance companies take the monthly check from the people that buy their policies and basically pocket the money as profits, keeping a margin to pay for the 5% of people that actually need the medical care.
Redhat makes money the same way. It's much, much cheaper to pay 1000 or even 10000 dollars per year for an unlimited no hassle support contract than it is to hire the support people yourself (they typically cost upwards of 80 grand per year). Because Linux is really stable, most companies will probably never call in support, so Redhat can bet that most of that money will just go straight into their pockets. When something does go wrong, they have the capital necessary to make sure that it never happens again. Typically companies that make their money this way will have a tech at your company at 3 in the morning to fix whatever the problem is, no questions asked.
That's how a support based company works.
Now Microsoft tries to make its money on the initial cost of the software, and not on support. So they offer "free" or "low cost" support contracts that without exception suck ass. You need to buy the premium support contract to get anything resembling what RH and Sun offer standard. And you also have to pay a massive initial licensing fee, usually per server or even per CPU.
You have to understand that RHEL is free (both as in beer and as in speech). All you're buying is insurance. They're going to show up and take care of it if shit hits the fan. That's how they make their money.
And really, when you compare a 24/7/365 no questions asked support contract to the cost of hiring someone on site to do the same job, as long as it costs less than 80 grand per year, you're on top.
I can't believe this crap got modded insightful. It's quite clear that Alomex has no personal experience whatsoever with Lenovo. Lenovo (Legend, Lianxiang) is a very high quality company, that has managed to essentially monopolize much of Asia's laptop and desktop PC market for quite sometime now.
The reason you don't know much about them if you live outside of the greater China area is not because they're of poor quality, it's because the guy who runs the company has his head screwed on straight. I saw a very interesting interview with him when I was in Hong Kong a few months ago, where he was asked if he was going to take his products global. He said that it was definitely on his mind, but that he wanted to develop a strong lead in China, which he perceives as the 21st century's major market, before moving into Europe and the US.
Lenovo laptops are of high quality make and are priced very competitively. They're very widely regarded here (Shanghai) and my personal experience with them is that they're put together very well, better than say, Sony laptops.
The Chairman Mao dig is just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard. All it does is demonstrate that Alomex has never been to China and knows diddly squat about it (and if that's not the case, then he's a troll, plain and simple.) Chairman Mao has essentially no credibility in China (which isn't surprising at all) and while the CCP may continue to give him face in certain respects (it's not considered polite to speak ill of the dead here) any marketing rep worth his snuff knows that it's absolute suicide to try to connect your product with Mao and come out on top. The common people (especially in the demographic that buys computers) were mostly pretty badly burnt by the Cultural revolution and as that wasn't very long ago it remains fresh in people's minds.
China is, at this point, anything but communist. Anyone that makes this accusation is just showing himself to be a bubbling moron.
Lenovo, in particular, is not a state owned company (there are very few of these anymore, and the Chinese government is dumping them/privatizing them as quickly as they possibly can), it's profitable, successful, and international.
With their local connections, they will do well. I own a Thinkpad X40 and I personally am not at all concerned that quality will drop. Thinkpads are expensive machines, and if Lenovo keeps them at their current price, they'll be able to make an absolute crapload of money without dropping the quality at all, based on their current offerings.
This China trolling from desperate Americans worried about losing their economic and technological dominance in the near future needs to stop. I'm American, and let me tell you, no amount of whining is going to stop the PRC. The sleeping dragon is waking and the world, as Napoleon predicted, is trembling.
I think you've been trolled, friend. If it was a troll, let's take a moment and congratulate its author: you have to admit, it was pretty good. Got me all riled up just reading it.
My girlfriend (who was having lots of problems with Windows in general) recently bought a Mac OS X TiBook and it's beautiful. Really nice. I mean, everything seems to just work. When I use it, I get the feeling that it's quite professionally done.
And yet, like you, I use Linux. Exclusively. At work. At home.
You know what really cracks me up is the "sucky fonts" troll. Mine is the only Linux box in my department at work, in a sea of Windows 2k and XP boxes (I convinced management that letting me run Linux on my desktop would be a good way to cut costs, as we were going to have to buy a new server to run a little intranet web application cum file server, yay). My coworkers constantly wonder aloud why my fonts look so damn good.
Seriously. Pango + freetype looks absolutely unbelievably awesome.
And as much as I respect Apple, I have to say it: the fonts on Linux look better than on OS X. The OS X font antialiasing algorithm is too aggressive, giving fonts a fuzzy look -- part of this seems to be that they make poor use of subpixel rendering on LCD displays. Freetype, on the other hand -- even using their patent-free, supposedly substandard hinter -- produces nice, clear antialiased fonts that aren't fuzzy and aren't pixelated. Perfect balance.
Now, I'm not saying the Linux GUI is better than OS X's -- I don't honestly depend much on complex GUIs so I wouldn't be the right person to make the comparison -- but in terms of fonts at least, Linux seems to blow both Mac OS X and Windows away, in all the languages I type in.
And yet, despite this, people continue to fall back on the old "Linux fonts suck" chestnut!
As a long time reader of USENET, I respect a good troll (I really do). But this whole Linux font thing is getting too obvious. We need something more subtle. Although I'm in most respects a Linux zealot, I'm aware that there are lots of places that Linux is rough around the edges still. Taking one of these and blowing it subtly out of proportion would get an aspiring troll a much higher Voodoo rating, I think.
In the meantime, I, like you, will continue to use Debian. Mmmm.
Hey! What's wrong with beastiality? I like beastiality. Mmmm, sheep.
Meeeh.
That's not actually true. For one thing, the concept of a locale is pretty much a UNIX thing (it originated with Solaris IIRC), and they exist on Mac OS X as well (although I don't know if Quartz uses them). Windows normally has localized versions of its OS -- meaning that you buy Windows (Simplified Chinese version, Thai version, Japanese version, etc) and can't switch it up too much. I don't actually use Windows at all so this may be incorrect for modern NT-based versions (let me know if it is) but it used to be that way, at least.
At any rate, a "locale" has nothing to do with unicode. Locales essentially provide a way for the user to customize the operating environment for things like messages (what language the menus are in, for example), sorting order (what does "alphabetical order" mean in languages like Chinese?), date formats, currency symbols, what to use as a decimal point, what to use as a digit group seperator (is one thousand "1,000" or "1.000" or "1 000" or "1000"?), how many digits to group (10,000 or 1,0000?), etc. Unicode is only a character encoding. Pretty much any modern app that supports full localization is unicode internally, anyway, because it's a pain in the butt otherwise (emacs is a lamentable exception to this rule).
Abiword is unicode internally, anyway. glibc wchar_t is (on Linux, anyway) unicode internally, and converts legacy encodings (like iso8859-1, big5, gbk, etc) into unicode automatically. This is true on Mac OS X too, I think.
So yeah, "unicode" is just a way of mapping characters to numbers. It's only better because it has more characters than any other encoding I think (although there is some huge GB encoding that might be larger, but I can't remember what it's called).
I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing this out. It hadn't occured to me, for some reason, that fair use applied to source code also -- but obviously it must.
Thanks.