Seeing news items like that, I just don't get what the Republicans dislike so much about China. I mean, think about it
it's a law-and-order country with harsh penalties for drug use and pornography
justice is swift and harsh, with lots of death penalty cases and without inconcenient rules that impede the legal process and create unnecessary expenses for tax payers
it manages to successfully combine a strict adherence to Taoist values with a strict separation of church and state (just like the Republicans want to combine a strict adherence to fundamentalist Christian values, norms, and rules, with a strict separation of church and state)
it values family deeply
any kind of socially disruptive or disharmonious behavior is strictly suppressed
the media are carefully regulated in order to keep smut and dangerous ideas (which might corrupt the young) out of them
it's a republic for the people and by the people (that's why it's called the "People's Republic" after all)
the way politicians get into power is carefully controled so that there are no unpleasant, non-conforming surprises to mess up the political, economic, and social system that has been so carefully built
and, perhaps best of all, free enterprise is allowed to flourish, with few inconvenient and inefficient regulations to stifle workers and with excellent government support of entrepreneurs and industry (in return for "campaign contributions")
Seems to me that that's what many politicians are working towards in the US. When they complain about China, are they perhaps just jealous that the Chinese leadership has achieved what they haven't (yet)?
if KDE goes on to become the defacto Linux desktop, then I won't shed that many tears. Of course, GNOME, I'm sure, will be around for a long while yet.
There won't be any "defacto Linux desktop": people have too many different ideas for where to take the desktop. And that's a good thing. KDE has two additional strikes against it: the license of the underlying toolkit (dual GPL/commercial) and the fact that it's C++ based.
KDE is a pretty nice desktop. But it doesn't matter how nice it is, no single desktop will take over the Linux desktop. And KDE has two additional strikes against it. First, KDE is based on Qt and Qt's current license is a problem (dual GPL/commercial). Also, a significant number of people don't like the fact that it's C++-based.
Well, what about them? Presumably, their whole purpose in life is to make interfacing to a variety of hardware easier and more portable.
Furthermore, Apple uses many standard components in their systems anyway, so the hardware is quite similar. The only real problem could be hidden byte order dependencies in poorly written code, but those should be found and eliminated anyway.
Maybe they could use the opportunity to finally kill Carbon!
I suspect that Carbon will be around in MacOS for a long time, perhaps longer than Cocoa. Most of the ports and third party toolkits, as well as a lot of OS X software, for Macintosh are based on Carbon. Without it, OS X would be in crisis.
These were all built specifically for Mac OS X on PPC, and that's just naming a few.
But what would be "specific" about them? Most of those are regular C, ObjC, and C++ libraries. They may contain a few assembly language inner loops, but those can be replaced easily. They may contain some hardware-related code, but that must already have a hardware abstraction, and, in any case, it's usually the same hardware as on PCs anyway (e.g., QuartzExtreme).
If the entire Debian and Gentoo distributions, composed of thousands of components from thousands of developers, can be maintained on half a dozen platforms each, I don't see why a much smaller platform from a single company couldn't be.
The main problem would be to get third party developers to recompile their applications.
Carbon would be tricky, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as trying to port Classic.
I don't think Classic needs to be ported--on every Mac I have owned, it was the first thing to go. If it needed to be ported, the most sensible thing would be as an emulator.
The entire GUI and all of the hundreds of libraries ("Frameworks" in Mac OS X) that Mac OS X apps depend on would need to be ported, and many of these are only designed to work on PowerPC currently.
Well, no, that's not true. The actual OS X GUI, frameworks, and libraries are largely NeXTStep, and that stuff is quite portable and even ran on x86 at some point.
Of course, OS X also has Carbon and the backwards compatibility stuff in it and that might be harder to port.
What, so farms aren't in the public good cause they're making a profit?
Basically, yes. "Public good" doesn't mean "something that's good for the public", it refers to a specific kind of commodity.
I guess I don't see why objecting to folks using GMail for pr0n storage is so unreasonable.
What's objectionable to me is to refer to private enterprise as a "public good"--there are real public goods that are being neglected by politicians because people (like you) have become convinced that public goods can be produced by private companies.
As for Google, they can look out for themselves. And what you or I say won't make any difference for what other people do. 1G of online storage isn't worth it anyway.
There are, in fact, lots of different kinds of "unauthorized sofware".
There is the kind that introduces viruses, the kind that is used for trading porn, the kind used for trading Windows source code, the kind for sharing MP3's with a million of your closest friends, and the kind that people use for running a side business.
And then there is the kind that people use to contribute to a not-for-profit scientific effort at a public university for no financial gain, software that only uses idle cycles and is known not to interfere with anybody's applications.
Unauthorized use of sofware of those different kinds demands different kinds of responses. The use of the latter kind of software use warrants at most a warning.
If you would read the article, it clearly states that they pushed their way through a police barricade. Presidential candidates are still US citizens just like everyone else, and as such, they are subject to the laws of the land. [...] They knew exactly what they were doing and fully expected to get in trouble.
And your point is what? The people who got killed by police in Tiananmen, or East Germany, or the Soviet Union also violated the laws of their lands. They also knew what was might happen to them. Should they have just blindly accepted what their governments did and how they were exluded from the political process? What about African-Americans--should they just have continued to be quiet?
neither of these candidates have EVER been elected to ANY political office
But if they don't believe in what either party stands for, they would have a big problem in local and state elections as well. Sure, occasionally, a third party or independent candidate slips in, but it's rare, and even then, they are rarely truly "independent".
I think the rest of the world would welcome if the US elected these people: it would effectively eliminate the US as a world player or economic competition.
You are confusing libertarianism and feudalism. In libertarianism, the political process is still public. Once you cross the threshold and privatize it, it becomes feudalism.
Tell that to the tens of thousands of people who already depend on gMail as their primary email. What are they called again? Oh yes, the "public." And would you say they regard a huge free email account as something "bad" or something "good"?
Bullshit. "Good" doesn't refer to the opposite of "bad", it refers to something that is produced. And a "public good" is a good that people aren't motivated to produce by market forces. Free Email is a "loss leader", a revenue generator, or simply a marketing gimmick, whether Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google does it.
There are so many companies who do bad things right and left, and that deserve to get kicked in the teeth. Google continually offers innovative projects that vastly improve the public good
They are a for-profit company that makes decent products, nothing more and nothing less.
why spend energy kicking them in the teeth, too?
More bullshit. I'm not "kicking them in the teeth". Google made a business decision with GMail and they are smart enough to calculate the consequences. They don't need your whining in order to succeed (and if they did, they'd be in trouble).
They all look dorky to me. The Smart car are dorky in a nerdy sort of way, while the Firebird/Viper/GT are dorky in a Beavis-and-Butthead sort of way. But the Smart at least fulfills a bunch of useful purposes: it saves money and it's easy to park.
The downside is that it essentially destroys a useful public good by filling its pages with gibberish and causing OSDN to bear unacceptable server costs. But who cares becaue you are an arrogant prick
GMail isn't a "public good", it's a marketing gimmick created by a company trying to get market share.
WebEquityManager is a web based program. It doesn't work properly under FireFox - how will it using a different browser under linux?
If it doesn't work with FireFox, that means it has a bug that ought to get fixed. It may still work with Konqueror or Opera or other browsers, which are a little more eager to emulate IE bugs than Firefox.
Alternative products work much the same way - there are no linux based equivalents of these packages.
I really doubt that claim. There must be standards-compliant web-based equivalents for these kinds of financial applications. Some banks have moved all their financial apps over to web-based systems. The employees seem to it (compared to the cumbersome Windows software they were using before), and it shows that it can be done. Even if you can't get the software that a big bank is using, either there is already web-based software you can get if you look a little harder, or it will be there soon because it simply makes more sense.
Why not make hping a Perl script, with no C code? Perl already has the bindings to libpcap, libdnet, and libnet, so hping would not require any native code installation on many systems. And the kind of people likely to use hping are also a bit more likely to already know perl.
(I'm not making any argument as to the relative merits of Perl or Tcl as languages--as languages, I would prefer something else anwyay. But Perl's extensive collection of libraries often makes it the path of least resistance.)
could tip the balance in this year's presidental election, like Ralph Nader is accused of having done in 2000
One of the least corrupt and most consistent politicians devotes his life to public service and makes sacrifices in order to run for public office and people make it sound like he is a criminal.
Folks, if you can't figure out who to vote for and what the consequences of your choices are, that's your problem. The problem in 2000 was not that a few percent chose Nader, the problem in 2000 was that nearly half the voters chose an obviously incompetent candidate that immediately dragged us into a lengthy and costly war and proceded to empty people's pockets and, perhaps more importantly, that the other half of the population chose to stay at home. Don't blame Nader for the stupidity of three quarters of the US population.
Even BSD UNIX on PDP-11 really wanted more than 64k of RAM and more than 512k of disk space, and that was for a 16bit processor.
I don't think it's worth worrying about porting Linux to this. Give it another year and they'll be up to 256k. Until then, there are other open source solutions one could run on this.
Bullshit. You keep badmouthing Linux and X11, yet you have nothing better to show and refuse to make any concrete statements what your ideas for how to do better are. You just arrogantly assume that you will be able to do better and don't care about the damage your unfounded and unsubstantiated assertions are doing in the meantime. And then, when you fail to deliver (as you doubtlessly will), you'll just disappear from the scene.
Here is some of the stuff you wrote:
We have good reasons for not using X; the fact that it is heavy weight, that is simply does not have a standard toolkit, that it's rendering model is outdated
Yes, I am ignoring any technical merit in todays technology because it comes with an entire metric tonne of bad technology as well, and you can't seperate the good from the bad. The UNIX mindset does not work on the desktop and the sooner people realise this the sooner Open Source can actually begin to work for users on the desktop. Users want a fast, responsive, integrated system that just works. Linux and other OSS solutions do not give them that. I'm sorry that you can't understand the reasons or our design choices.
Fine with me, you're welcome too it. I know that Linux as a desktop Operating System sucks, badly, and it isn't getting better. X is just one small reason for it, and X is also the foundation of some other problems. If you think that we're doing Syllable simply because, as you put it "X11 sucks" then you've missed the point: the entire package sucks.
The women are more than likely "resistant" to HIV infection, not "immune" to it. While colloquially, the two terms may mean the same thing, the term "immune" suggests that they can't be infected by HIV because their immune system recognizes and destroys the virus. "Resistance" works by some mechanism other than an immune response.
In other words, you must have a pathetically weak immune system (or none at all), and your body's cells must be so fragile that any abnormality of any kind will destroy them instantly.
A small fraction of people seems to be resistant to HIV infection because they carry idiosyncratic mutations that interfere with the way the HIV virus works. That doesn't mean they have a "pathetically weak immune system"; in fact, such mutations generally have no known effects at all other than conferring HIV resistance. Furthermore, resistance of some fraction of the population to specific viruses is a common occurrence.
But, hey, if that's what these two women want for their life, that's their problem.
WTF is that supposed to mean? One of the women in question was exposed to HIV from her husband, who was infected through a blood transfusion. It's bad enough that bigoted right wingers confuse stupidity and carelessness (unprotected sex) with immorality, but now people like you even consider accidentally getting a tainted blood transfusion a lifestyle choice and a moral failing?
I think you demonstrate just how absurd your kinds of views are, and the blithering nonsense that preceded it showed how uninformed you are.
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Seems to me that that's what many politicians are working towards in the US. When they complain about China, are they perhaps just jealous that the Chinese leadership has achieved what they haven't (yet)?
You need Carbon: many new programs are written to the Carbon API and that isn't changing any time soon.
if KDE goes on to become the defacto Linux desktop, then I won't shed that many tears. Of course, GNOME, I'm sure, will be around for a long while yet.
There won't be any "defacto Linux desktop": people have too many different ideas for where to take the desktop. And that's a good thing. KDE has two additional strikes against it: the license of the underlying toolkit (dual GPL/commercial) and the fact that it's C++ based.
KDE is a pretty nice desktop. But it doesn't matter how nice it is, no single desktop will take over the Linux desktop. And KDE has two additional strikes against it. First, KDE is based on Qt and Qt's current license is a problem (dual GPL/commercial). Also, a significant number of people don't like the fact that it's C++-based.
what about the hardware frameworks?
Well, what about them? Presumably, their whole purpose in life is to make interfacing to a variety of hardware easier and more portable.
Furthermore, Apple uses many standard components in their systems anyway, so the hardware is quite similar. The only real problem could be hidden byte order dependencies in poorly written code, but those should be found and eliminated anyway.
Maybe they could use the opportunity to finally kill Carbon!
I suspect that Carbon will be around in MacOS for a long time, perhaps longer than Cocoa. Most of the ports and third party toolkits, as well as a lot of OS X software, for Macintosh are based on Carbon. Without it, OS X would be in crisis.
These were all built specifically for Mac OS X on PPC, and that's just naming a few.
But what would be "specific" about them? Most of those are regular C, ObjC, and C++ libraries. They may contain a few assembly language inner loops, but those can be replaced easily. They may contain some hardware-related code, but that must already have a hardware abstraction, and, in any case, it's usually the same hardware as on PCs anyway (e.g., QuartzExtreme).
If the entire Debian and Gentoo distributions, composed of thousands of components from thousands of developers, can be maintained on half a dozen platforms each, I don't see why a much smaller platform from a single company couldn't be.
The main problem would be to get third party developers to recompile their applications.
Carbon would be tricky, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as trying to port Classic.
I don't think Classic needs to be ported--on every Mac I have owned, it was the first thing to go. If it needed to be ported, the most sensible thing would be as an emulator.
The entire GUI and all of the hundreds of libraries ("Frameworks" in Mac OS X) that Mac OS X apps depend on would need to be ported, and many of these are only designed to work on PowerPC currently.
Well, no, that's not true. The actual OS X GUI, frameworks, and libraries are largely NeXTStep, and that stuff is quite portable and even ran on x86 at some point.
Of course, OS X also has Carbon and the backwards compatibility stuff in it and that might be harder to port.
What, so farms aren't in the public good cause they're making a profit?
Basically, yes. "Public good" doesn't mean "something that's good for the public", it refers to a specific kind of commodity.
I guess I don't see why objecting to folks using GMail for pr0n storage is so unreasonable.
What's objectionable to me is to refer to private enterprise as a "public good"--there are real public goods that are being neglected by politicians because people (like you) have become convinced that public goods can be produced by private companies.
As for Google, they can look out for themselves. And what you or I say won't make any difference for what other people do. 1G of online storage isn't worth it anyway.
There are, in fact, lots of different kinds of "unauthorized sofware".
There is the kind that introduces viruses, the kind that is used for trading porn, the kind used for trading Windows source code, the kind for sharing MP3's with a million of your closest friends, and the kind that people use for running a side business.
And then there is the kind that people use to contribute to a not-for-profit scientific effort at a public university for no financial gain, software that only uses idle cycles and is known not to interfere with anybody's applications.
Unauthorized use of sofware of those different kinds demands different kinds of responses. The use of the latter kind of software use warrants at most a warning.
"I think the real indicator will be when somebody confesses that they cried at level 17,"
Daikatana made my cry at level 1.
Still, the guys have a point: video games are not engaging enough.
If you would read the article, it clearly states that they pushed their way through a police barricade. Presidential candidates are still US citizens just like everyone else, and as such, they are subject to the laws of the land. [...] They knew exactly what they were doing and fully expected to get in trouble.
And your point is what? The people who got killed by police in Tiananmen, or East Germany, or the Soviet Union also violated the laws of their lands. They also knew what was might happen to them. Should they have just blindly accepted what their governments did and how they were exluded from the political process? What about African-Americans--should they just have continued to be quiet?
neither of these candidates have EVER been elected to ANY political office
But if they don't believe in what either party stands for, they would have a big problem in local and state elections as well. Sure, occasionally, a third party or independent candidate slips in, but it's rare, and even then, they are rarely truly "independent".
I think the rest of the world would welcome if the US elected these people: it would effectively eliminate the US as a world player or economic competition.
You are confusing libertarianism and feudalism. In libertarianism, the political process is still public. Once you cross the threshold and privatize it, it becomes feudalism.
Tell that to the tens of thousands of people who already depend on gMail as their primary email. What are they called again? Oh yes, the "public." And would you say they regard a huge free email account as something "bad" or something "good"?
Bullshit. "Good" doesn't refer to the opposite of "bad", it refers to something that is produced. And a "public good" is a good that people aren't motivated to produce by market forces. Free Email is a "loss leader", a revenue generator, or simply a marketing gimmick, whether Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google does it.
There are so many companies who do bad things right and left, and that deserve to get kicked in the teeth. Google continually offers innovative projects that vastly improve the public good
They are a for-profit company that makes decent products, nothing more and nothing less.
why spend energy kicking them in the teeth, too?
More bullshit. I'm not "kicking them in the teeth". Google made a business decision with GMail and they are smart enough to calculate the consequences. They don't need your whining in order to succeed (and if they did, they'd be in trouble).
They all look dorky to me. The Smart car are dorky in a nerdy sort of way, while the Firebird/Viper/GT are dorky in a Beavis-and-Butthead sort of way. But the Smart at least fulfills a bunch of useful purposes: it saves money and it's easy to park.
The downside is that it essentially destroys a useful public good by filling its pages with gibberish and causing OSDN to bear unacceptable server costs. But who cares becaue you are an arrogant prick
GMail isn't a "public good", it's a marketing gimmick created by a company trying to get market share.
WebEquityManager is a web based program. It doesn't work properly under FireFox - how will it using a different browser under linux?
If it doesn't work with FireFox, that means it has a bug that ought to get fixed. It may still work with Konqueror or Opera or other browsers, which are a little more eager to emulate IE bugs than Firefox.
Alternative products work much the same way - there are no linux based equivalents of these packages.
I really doubt that claim. There must be standards-compliant web-based equivalents for these kinds of financial applications. Some banks have moved all their financial apps over to web-based systems. The employees seem to it (compared to the cumbersome Windows software they were using before), and it shows that it can be done. Even if you can't get the software that a big bank is using, either there is already web-based software you can get if you look a little harder, or it will be there soon because it simply makes more sense.
The term "criminal negligence" refers to carelessness that causes others harm, and even then, it's a particular kind of carelessness.
Furthermore, not all illegal behaviors are immoral and not all immoral behaviors are illegal.
Why not make hping a Perl script, with no C code? Perl already has the bindings to libpcap, libdnet, and libnet, so hping would not require any native code installation on many systems. And the kind of people likely to use hping are also a bit more likely to already know perl.
(I'm not making any argument as to the relative merits of Perl or Tcl as languages--as languages, I would prefer something else anwyay. But Perl's extensive collection of libraries often makes it the path of least resistance.)
could tip the balance in this year's presidental election, like Ralph Nader is accused of having done in 2000
One of the least corrupt and most consistent politicians devotes his life to public service and makes sacrifices in order to run for public office and people make it sound like he is a criminal.
Folks, if you can't figure out who to vote for and what the consequences of your choices are, that's your problem. The problem in 2000 was not that a few percent chose Nader, the problem in 2000 was that nearly half the voters chose an obviously incompetent candidate that immediately dragged us into a lengthy and costly war and proceded to empty people's pockets and, perhaps more importantly, that the other half of the population chose to stay at home. Don't blame Nader for the stupidity of three quarters of the US population.
Even BSD UNIX on PDP-11 really wanted more than 64k of RAM and more than 512k of disk space, and that was for a 16bit processor.
I don't think it's worth worrying about porting Linux to this. Give it another year and they'll be up to 256k. Until then, there are other open source solutions one could run on this.
Here is some of the stuff you wrote:
The women are more than likely "resistant" to HIV infection, not "immune" to it. While colloquially, the two terms may mean the same thing, the term "immune" suggests that they can't be infected by HIV because their immune system recognizes and destroys the virus. "Resistance" works by some mechanism other than an immune response.
In other words, you must have a pathetically weak immune system (or none at all), and your body's cells must be so fragile that any abnormality of any kind will destroy them instantly.
A small fraction of people seems to be resistant to HIV infection because they carry idiosyncratic mutations that interfere with the way the HIV virus works. That doesn't mean they have a "pathetically weak immune system"; in fact, such mutations generally have no known effects at all other than conferring HIV resistance. Furthermore, resistance of some fraction of the population to specific viruses is a common occurrence.
But, hey, if that's what these two women want for their life, that's their problem.
WTF is that supposed to mean? One of the women in question was exposed to HIV from her husband, who was infected through a blood transfusion. It's bad enough that bigoted right wingers confuse stupidity and carelessness (unprotected sex) with immorality, but now people like you even consider accidentally getting a tainted blood transfusion a lifestyle choice and a moral failing?
I think you demonstrate just how absurd your kinds of views are, and the blithering nonsense that preceded it showed how uninformed you are.