I just checked out the site - it's very well done, has a huge selection, and - amazingly - is only $0.02/MB (the original poster failed to mention the price).
I think that's a really good idea, actually, and I expect it would work surprisingly well.
I've said for years now that the way to encourage thoughtful commentary on Slashdot is to eliminate Anonymous Cowards and limit to one account per e-mail (maybe this is already the case), and I still stand by that. People nowadays are too willing to just spout off kneejerk reactions or mindless bullshit, because they can just check the box and suddenly there are no reprocussions for their actions.
If you have something to say and you are afraid to put your name to it, then you either are saying something that shouldn't be said, or you are a frightened little child worrying too much about what others think. I've never posted anonymously (except that one time I couldn't log in), and I've been moderated up down and sideways. So what?
Anonymous Cowards exist only to let people be total fuckwads without reprocussions. Take that away, and the S/N ratio would improve dramatically.
A list of banned books is a list. It doesn't facilitate anything. What you do with that list is up to you.
A library that contains books on how to pick locks is providing information. What you do with it is up to you.
LokiTorrent was hosting links to torrents that violated copyright. They were directly, knowingly, and intentionally assisting piracy. Let me give a better parallel than your examples:
How is Lokitorrent different from introducing a guy who wants to kill his wife to a hitman? How is it different from introducing a junkie to a drug dealer? It's accessory, period. Loki could never make any case about 'what you do with these torrents is up to you', because it's not hard to prove they knew exactly what people were doing.
Loki wasn't hosting a list of software that you could get via bittorrents (as in 'these pieces of software are somewhere on the internet'). Loki wasn't providing a guide on how to make a torrent and upload it to a tracker. Loki was providing direct links to files whose only purpose was piracy, period.
The government needs to collect evidence? Sure. The evidence is that Loki was hosting direct links to torrents (not links to pages with torrents, which is subtly different). The only reason to have those links is piracy, period.
So a site that was designed solely to break the law was shut down. Cry me a river. Now it will be slightly more difficult to break the law, boo hoo. Give me a break.
And it should be pointed out that the server hardware problems were because they had planned for 600k users over the next year, and had fully expected to find bugs and bottlenecks in their code over the course of their increasing userbase.
Suddenly, they had all 600k users in a month, and they had a year of bugs and bottlenecks to fix immediately.
Honestly, I now see the reason for World Passes. FFXI was flawless (as much as one could expect) during it's NA PS2 launch.
I concur. I would put forth that for GUI work, the best option is Objective-C (using GNUStep/OpenStep/Cocoa). With the Interface Builder, it's absurd.
A few years ago, I would have said that C++ is good for systems that actually deal with the interaction of objects - gaming I guess, daemons, and so on - but now that Java's performance and power has improved dramatically, it's getting to the point where I wouldn't use C++ for anything anymore. Hmm...
This is actually an interesting idea, and one I shall have to experiment with once I get a replacement for my current USB drive. I can't think of anything we would use it for, but it would be neat to experiment with.
Still, it would make more sense to have them all be separate drives, and to create a set of keys that require two (or three, or four) out of five (or ten, or twenty) to activate - one of those 'any two senior officers' kinds of things.
Plus the whole refering them to tubgirl and other "shocker" stuff has always been, in my opinion, a little extreme.
If I were a simple webhost client with a bandwidth limit, those links would most likely have put me over my limit. Fortunately, the server I have is colocated at a rather large colo, and we don't pay much for bandwidth, so it only really came down to a few dollars (basically it cost me a day's worth of my usual decadent lunch).
Yeah, it's extreme, but putting an image on someone else's server into your sig on an absurdly popular message board is also extreme - but they don't realize it. I certainly can't e-mail them and say 'please don't use my image', and I shouldn't have to waste my time making a 'don't steal this image' image for one site. So, I just used what I had, managed to wget an image without having to look at it, and voila, problem solved.
For reference, it's this gif that I have that gets linked to.
I was thinking of linking my copy here and setting the rewrite rule to 'if the referer isn't slashdot, show tubgirl', but then people would copy/paste the links to their friends, who would get an unpleasant surprise.
Either way, the link I provided above seems to be webspace on an ISP's server. I'm sure it can handle it.
I have a file called bestgif.gif on my website - simply put, the best gif ever. Then Mexicans started putting it in their sig on these huge forums, and my bandwidth went up near a few gigs a month (from almost nothing). So...
I'm willing to bet their accounts got suspended when suddenly their sigs contained a large picture of a large woman spewing a fountain of shit into the air.
My bandwidth usage drops off completely soon after I add a site to the list.
Well, orbital distance is a function of the mass of the two bodies involved as well as the speed of the object as it traverses its orbit. Thus, in order for an object to travel at the same orbital velocity as earth, and along the same path, it would have to have the same mass (technically, not impossible, but it would take some engineering).
Also, it would take forever to get to the satellites if you ever needed to make repairs (I don't fancy trying to keep up with the earth as it hurtles along its orbital path).
Alternately, you could build a satellite with regular mass and put it in the same orbital path, but with a slower orbital velocity (so it would eventually hit/be hit by the earth), or make it the same size and give it the same orbital velocity, but put it at a different orbit around the sun.
* MS has no skill making a successful web service. Hotmail and MSNBC are strategic grabs of other services or content (anyone have a counterexample?).
From the dawning days of internet access in Canada, the brand to pick was 'Sympatico'. Telcos across the country had 'Sympatico' dial-up service, and even well into the broadband era, there is still 'Bell Sympatico Hi-Speed Internet'.
Going to a Sympatico website, however, such as www.sympatico.ca, sends you to sympatico.msn.com, which is your portal to the 'online services' that your ISP claims to offer (assuming you use Sympatico).
A sad day in our history, but good for brand recognition - when your ISP's portal is MSN, that gets you some good brand recognition.
As for making a profit, MS will probably use sponsored ads, so that when you search for 'tatami mats' you get a few main hits from companies that are willing to pay money to be first - and considering that IE does the 'MSN Search' thing if it can't find the website you're looking for, that could be very lucrative.
While you point out an interesting contradiction, keep in mind one subtle difference: the women on magazine covers are women - they are real. Perhaps they are more 'beautiful' (read: airbrushed) than the average woman, but they are still real. Real breasts, real hips, real legs.
Women in videogames are pretty much 100% fantasy. Waists so thin they can wear a wedding ring as a belt, breasts so huge that no material existing today could truly contain their gravity, and of course, so much jiggle that any real woman would be unable to maintain her balance. Oh yeah, and no depth. They just kill things, or look pretty (or both).
The best comparison is between video games and porn - the typical non-amateur 'porn star' is so over-inflated and made-up that they bear no more resemblance to the average woman than the average man does. You never see their personality, and most consumers don't really care anyway.
Let's have realistic woman, let's have interesting women, let's have personalities. Look at Jade from Beyond Good and Evil, or Alex from Half-Life 2. Real women, and attractive (insofar as they're not real) - not hard on the eyes, but not unrealistic either. As such, they're easier to realte to as well, for any gamer.
I can't speak as to their hosting, but Dotster is a great registrar. A little tricky to navigate their site, but you get used to it pretty fast.
Their front page is way too busy, but I've referred everyone that I know to them, and no one's had a single bad experience. No stolen domains (domain locking is on by default) reasonable prices ($15us/yr for.com/net/org, and it only cost me $10 to transfer from netsol to Dotster, when Netsol wanted $35/yr).
If their hosting is anything like I've found their other business to be, I'd consider giving it a try.
Anything derived from GPL licensed code has to make its source accessible, which in turn allows the user to make modification, to check out the source, fix bugs, evolve the software, customize it, etc. That is freedom. Period.
That's not freedom at all, I don't understand where this idea comes from. If someone wants to use my code for a particular purpose, they can. That's freedom. If a company uses it and closes the source, that's fine, because the users can just get my copy. If the company's copy is better, then they deserve to get paid for it (after all, they put time and money into improving it).
Your last line seems to imply that the GPL only helps users, and a BSD-style license only helps corporations. This is not true. The GPL helps SOME people, but doesn't even help other open-source projects! Meanwhile, a BSD-style license helps EVERYONE, regardless of their intentions, and if I can make someone's life easier, be it a user or a developer, then so be it.
I have faith in Open-Source that people will begin to use it for philosophical reasons. I prefer BSD-style license because I believe that even if people make closed-source programs with open-source code, the programs won't be as good. For example, take Windows and the BSD TCP/IP stack. They took the best TCP stack out there, and their OS still can't handle load like BSD or Linux can.
The GPL draws a line in the sand, it says 'if you won't play by our rules, you can't play'. It tries to force open-source, but that won't work. Companies will use open-sourced code in whatever way they can, and will ignore the GPL if it suits their purpose to do so.
A lot of FSF/GPL/OSS advocates will argue that we have to fight closed-source with weapons like the GPL. I'm of the mindset that if we share with everyone, whtaever their intentions, they will eventually realize that our way is better, that we can only succeed (and we can all succeed) by working together. The GPL to me seems agressive, though it has certainly served an important purpose of protecting open-source code until it could come into its own. Now, however, now that we have an audience, a stage, and a presence, we can share our message with the world - share because you want to, not because you have to.
I believe we can compete and win, even on the corporations' terms. In order to really compete, they'd need to replace everything they've written with stuff the open-source community has written, but they still won't be able to do it as well as the open-source community can.
So let Microsoft take the stack. It won't help them, because they're going about it wrong anyway. GPL'ed code won't help them realize their mistakes, because they either won't use it, or they'll take it out of spite without giving back. With BSD code, they can do it all they want, ask OSS developers for help, and perhaps, eventually, they will realize that this way is better.
Just because someone can make a closed source "DNS server that's exactly like bind but not" by using the BIND code, doesn't mean everyone loses bind, its still there for everyone to use just like always.
An interesting point. My (somewhat similar) philosophy regarding the BSD license is thus: if I write some code, maybe a networking protocol stack or something, and it sucks, no one will use it. If it's good, then people will want to use it. If it's good and it's BSD-style licensed, then corporations can use it freely, but if it's good and it's GPL'ed, then corporations can only use it if they open-source their project too.
So if I build a better networking stack than anyone else and GPL it, then only people using open-source can benefit - but only some of them! Even though Sun's new license, Apple's license, and the BSDs' licenses are all open-source licenses, they can't use my code. So it's not a win for open-source, it's only a win for GPL'ed open source. The GPL is, in this situation, self-serving, as it only helps itself.
If I build a better networking stack and BSD-style license it, then literally anyone can use it. If Linux wants to use it to make their networking better, than they can. If Apple wants to, or FreeBSD, or ReactOS or some other hobbyist whom no one has even heard of yet, they all can, and they can make better software because of it. Also, if a big company wants to use it in their software, like Windows, or HP-UX, or whatever, they can do that too. Some people say this is bad, but why? People use Windows, that's a fact, so if I can make Windows better, then isn't that a good thing? You don't need a reason to help people.
The GPL doesn't grant freedom to the users, it grants control to the author. They say that their code can only be used to help GPL'ed projects, they restrict you from using it in certain ways, and even restrict other open-source programmers from using it. That is too bad. The BSD license grants freedom to everyone, so if they want to make a closed-source OS or a proprietary router or a networkable baby-mulching machine, then they are free to do so, whatever I might think of it. Not that I support baby-mulching, but that is freedom, like it or not.
The LGPL is better in a lot of ways, in that they only really have to give source for their modifications to the code that you gave them, and I can agree with that. The problem is that the FSF bigwigs like Stallman see the LGPL as a necessary evil, and not an important compromise (balancing their need for control with the end users' need for freedom). It's not acceptable, it's just necessary.
Oh well. I prefer the BSD license because it gives freedom to users, and not control to programmers.
You can still get a gig of ram for these (PC2700, DDR333) for $226 (unbuffered non-ecc) or $299 (registered ecc) from Crucial. Given the price and comparing with their usual upgrade markups, I'm guessing the Apple upgrade is the former, not the latter. Still, compared to the usual markup, this is pretty good.
I would suggest OS X. It's UNIX, it's BSD, and it's lickably-good. You get an operating system that can run all your POSIX-compliant goodies, X server, the whole two bits, but you also get an easy, modern, flexible operating system as well.
Of course, it won't run on your Celeron, so it doesn't really matter, but if you ever have $500 sitting around and want to learn another BSD and get a machine for the wife/kids/pets/sheep/plants, then there you go.
The power of this book is not that it reveals some hidden truths that turn you into Mr Personality, but rather, it is a list of examples and a collection of reminders. Reading the book frequently to keep the suggestions in your mind, you will more easily remember to do things that you know you should probably do anyway.
For example, one chapter is dedicated to smiling. You should smile often, because it makes you seem happier, more approachable, and a nicer person in general. Our mothers always tell us we should smile more, but most people don't really think about it (I look for smiling people on the Metro when I go to and from work - people never smile who are there alone, and rarely if they are with someone).
Consider it a book of reminders that will keep your personality friendly and brighten your day and the days of those around you, and make your managerial job a hundred times easier. Highly recommended for anyone who ever has to deal with people in any fasion - which is everyone. And at $10 CDN, it's a steal.
Microsoft makes the only competing product for Firefox - them hiring him would be absurdly conspicuous. Google, on the other hand, has a competitor in Microsoft, as does Firefox, and if the IE monopoly stays put, then MSN Search as a default in IE may overtake Google in the same way IE as a default in Windows (and, eventually, Mac) overtook Netscape.
If, however, Google can help make Firefox a heavy player (not that it isn't already), and can also provide to Firefox users more and better integration with Google (should they so choose), then Firefox's growing platform will help Google, and Google's will help Firefox.
My roommate has been growing some habanero plants for quite a while. I guess he waters them profusely every now and then, and uses plant food meant for tomatos, and the crazy thing has grown twice its size in two weeks. Very rewarding, and edible too!
Not to mention the ability to run Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro, arguably the finest video editing package(s) out there. For video editing, FCP is a make-or-break for me, and I wouldn't consider not using a Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
I just checked out the site - it's very well done, has a huge selection, and - amazingly - is only $0.02/MB (the original poster failed to mention the price).
Oh, and the songs are good quality, no mistake.
I think that's a really good idea, actually, and I expect it would work surprisingly well.
I've said for years now that the way to encourage thoughtful commentary on Slashdot is to eliminate Anonymous Cowards and limit to one account per e-mail (maybe this is already the case), and I still stand by that. People nowadays are too willing to just spout off kneejerk reactions or mindless bullshit, because they can just check the box and suddenly there are no reprocussions for their actions.
If you have something to say and you are afraid to put your name to it, then you either are saying something that shouldn't be said, or you are a frightened little child worrying too much about what others think. I've never posted anonymously (except that one time I couldn't log in), and I've been moderated up down and sideways. So what?
Anonymous Cowards exist only to let people be total fuckwads without reprocussions. Take that away, and the S/N ratio would improve dramatically.
And, making only part-time slaves out of people is OK?
There's an Electronic Arts joke here just waiting to be made.
Ok, I'll bite.
A list of banned books is a list. It doesn't facilitate anything. What you do with that list is up to you.
A library that contains books on how to pick locks is providing information. What you do with it is up to you.
LokiTorrent was hosting links to torrents that violated copyright. They were directly, knowingly, and intentionally assisting piracy. Let me give a better parallel than your examples:
How is Lokitorrent different from introducing a guy who wants to kill his wife to a hitman? How is it different from introducing a junkie to a drug dealer? It's accessory, period. Loki could never make any case about 'what you do with these torrents is up to you', because it's not hard to prove they knew exactly what people were doing.
Loki wasn't hosting a list of software that you could get via bittorrents (as in 'these pieces of software are somewhere on the internet'). Loki wasn't providing a guide on how to make a torrent and upload it to a tracker. Loki was providing direct links to files whose only purpose was piracy, period.
The government needs to collect evidence? Sure. The evidence is that Loki was hosting direct links to torrents (not links to pages with torrents, which is subtly different). The only reason to have those links is piracy, period.
So a site that was designed solely to break the law was shut down. Cry me a river. Now it will be slightly more difficult to break the law, boo hoo. Give me a break.
And it should be pointed out that the server hardware problems were because they had planned for 600k users over the next year, and had fully expected to find bugs and bottlenecks in their code over the course of their increasing userbase.
Suddenly, they had all 600k users in a month, and they had a year of bugs and bottlenecks to fix immediately.
Honestly, I now see the reason for World Passes. FFXI was flawless (as much as one could expect) during it's NA PS2 launch.
I concur. I would put forth that for GUI work, the best option is Objective-C (using GNUStep/OpenStep/Cocoa). With the Interface Builder, it's absurd.
A few years ago, I would have said that C++ is good for systems that actually deal with the interaction of objects - gaming I guess, daemons, and so on - but now that Java's performance and power has improved dramatically, it's getting to the point where I wouldn't use C++ for anything anymore. Hmm...
I decided long ago that any language where '$|++;' is a complete line of code is not worth my time.
For reference, that's a pipe, not an 'L' or a '1', and that line turns off output buffering. OBVIOUSLY.
Perl is useful for a lot of different things, but so are a lot of other languages, and they aren't nearly so obtuse.
This is actually an interesting idea, and one I shall have to experiment with once I get a replacement for my current USB drive. I can't think of anything we would use it for, but it would be neat to experiment with.
Still, it would make more sense to have them all be separate drives, and to create a set of keys that require two (or three, or four) out of five (or ten, or twenty) to activate - one of those 'any two senior officers' kinds of things.
--Dan
Yeha, but it's a lot more funny to post it on slashdot and read the replies. That Uconn thing had me laughing for quite a while.
Plus the whole refering them to tubgirl and other "shocker" stuff has always been, in my opinion, a little extreme.
If I were a simple webhost client with a bandwidth limit, those links would most likely have put me over my limit. Fortunately, the server I have is colocated at a rather large colo, and we don't pay much for bandwidth, so it only really came down to a few dollars (basically it cost me a day's worth of my usual decadent lunch).
Yeah, it's extreme, but putting an image on someone else's server into your sig on an absurdly popular message board is also extreme - but they don't realize it. I certainly can't e-mail them and say 'please don't use my image', and I shouldn't have to waste my time making a 'don't steal this image' image for one site. So, I just used what I had, managed to wget an image without having to look at it, and voila, problem solved.
For reference, it's this gif that I have that gets linked to.
I was thinking of linking my copy here and setting the rewrite rule to 'if the referer isn't slashdot, show tubgirl', but then people would copy/paste the links to their friends, who would get an unpleasant surprise.
Either way, the link I provided above seems to be webspace on an ISP's server. I'm sure it can handle it.
I have a file called bestgif.gif on my website - simply put, the best gif ever. Then Mexicans started putting it in their sig on these huge forums, and my bandwidth went up near a few gigs a month (from almost nothing). So...
.*bestgif\.gif$ http://sites.darien.ca/temp/.tubgirl.jpg [R,NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://pkpidgeot.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule
I'm willing to bet their accounts got suspended when suddenly their sigs contained a large picture of a large woman spewing a fountain of shit into the air.
My bandwidth usage drops off completely soon after I add a site to the list.
Well, orbital distance is a function of the mass of the two bodies involved as well as the speed of the object as it traverses its orbit. Thus, in order for an object to travel at the same orbital velocity as earth, and along the same path, it would have to have the same mass (technically, not impossible, but it would take some engineering).
Also, it would take forever to get to the satellites if you ever needed to make repairs (I don't fancy trying to keep up with the earth as it hurtles along its orbital path).
Alternately, you could build a satellite with regular mass and put it in the same orbital path, but with a slower orbital velocity (so it would eventually hit/be hit by the earth), or make it the same size and give it the same orbital velocity, but put it at a different orbit around the sun.
Either way, not really a possibility.
Not sure what you're referring to. MSN Search seems pretty bare to me. Looks nice too.
* MS has no skill making a successful web service. Hotmail and MSNBC are strategic grabs of other services or content (anyone have a counterexample?).
From the dawning days of internet access in Canada, the brand to pick was 'Sympatico'. Telcos across the country had 'Sympatico' dial-up service, and even well into the broadband era, there is still 'Bell Sympatico Hi-Speed Internet'.
Going to a Sympatico website, however, such as www.sympatico.ca, sends you to sympatico.msn.com, which is your portal to the 'online services' that your ISP claims to offer (assuming you use Sympatico).
A sad day in our history, but good for brand recognition - when your ISP's portal is MSN, that gets you some good brand recognition.
As for making a profit, MS will probably use sponsored ads, so that when you search for 'tatami mats' you get a few main hits from companies that are willing to pay money to be first - and considering that IE does the 'MSN Search' thing if it can't find the website you're looking for, that could be very lucrative.
While you point out an interesting contradiction, keep in mind one subtle difference: the women on magazine covers are women - they are real. Perhaps they are more 'beautiful' (read: airbrushed) than the average woman, but they are still real. Real breasts, real hips, real legs.
Women in videogames are pretty much 100% fantasy. Waists so thin they can wear a wedding ring as a belt, breasts so huge that no material existing today could truly contain their gravity, and of course, so much jiggle that any real woman would be unable to maintain her balance. Oh yeah, and no depth. They just kill things, or look pretty (or both).
The best comparison is between video games and porn - the typical non-amateur 'porn star' is so over-inflated and made-up that they bear no more resemblance to the average woman than the average man does. You never see their personality, and most consumers don't really care anyway.
Let's have realistic woman, let's have interesting women, let's have personalities. Look at Jade from Beyond Good and Evil, or Alex from Half-Life 2. Real women, and attractive (insofar as they're not real) - not hard on the eyes, but not unrealistic either. As such, they're easier to realte to as well, for any gamer.
Boy, would that be nice.
I can't speak as to their hosting, but Dotster is a great registrar. A little tricky to navigate their site, but you get used to it pretty fast.
.com/net/org, and it only cost me $10 to transfer from netsol to Dotster, when Netsol wanted $35/yr).
Their front page is way too busy, but I've referred everyone that I know to them, and no one's had a single bad experience. No stolen domains (domain locking is on by default) reasonable prices ($15us/yr for
If their hosting is anything like I've found their other business to be, I'd consider giving it a try.
Anything derived from GPL licensed code has to make its source accessible, which in turn allows the user to make modification, to check out the source, fix bugs, evolve the software, customize it, etc. That is freedom. Period.
That's not freedom at all, I don't understand where this idea comes from. If someone wants to use my code for a particular purpose, they can. That's freedom. If a company uses it and closes the source, that's fine, because the users can just get my copy. If the company's copy is better, then they deserve to get paid for it (after all, they put time and money into improving it).
Your last line seems to imply that the GPL only helps users, and a BSD-style license only helps corporations. This is not true. The GPL helps SOME people, but doesn't even help other open-source projects! Meanwhile, a BSD-style license helps EVERYONE, regardless of their intentions, and if I can make someone's life easier, be it a user or a developer, then so be it.
I have faith in Open-Source that people will begin to use it for philosophical reasons. I prefer BSD-style license because I believe that even if people make closed-source programs with open-source code, the programs won't be as good. For example, take Windows and the BSD TCP/IP stack. They took the best TCP stack out there, and their OS still can't handle load like BSD or Linux can.
The GPL draws a line in the sand, it says 'if you won't play by our rules, you can't play'. It tries to force open-source, but that won't work. Companies will use open-sourced code in whatever way they can, and will ignore the GPL if it suits their purpose to do so.
A lot of FSF/GPL/OSS advocates will argue that we have to fight closed-source with weapons like the GPL. I'm of the mindset that if we share with everyone, whtaever their intentions, they will eventually realize that our way is better, that we can only succeed (and we can all succeed) by working together. The GPL to me seems agressive, though it has certainly served an important purpose of protecting open-source code until it could come into its own. Now, however, now that we have an audience, a stage, and a presence, we can share our message with the world - share because you want to, not because you have to.
I believe we can compete and win, even on the corporations' terms. In order to really compete, they'd need to replace everything they've written with stuff the open-source community has written, but they still won't be able to do it as well as the open-source community can.
So let Microsoft take the stack. It won't help them, because they're going about it wrong anyway. GPL'ed code won't help them realize their mistakes, because they either won't use it, or they'll take it out of spite without giving back. With BSD code, they can do it all they want, ask OSS developers for help, and perhaps, eventually, they will realize that this way is better.
This is what I believe.
Just because someone can make a closed source "DNS server that's exactly like bind but not" by using the BIND code, doesn't mean everyone loses bind, its still there for everyone to use just like always.
An interesting point. My (somewhat similar) philosophy regarding the BSD license is thus: if I write some code, maybe a networking protocol stack or something, and it sucks, no one will use it. If it's good, then people will want to use it. If it's good and it's BSD-style licensed, then corporations can use it freely, but if it's good and it's GPL'ed, then corporations can only use it if they open-source their project too.
So if I build a better networking stack than anyone else and GPL it, then only people using open-source can benefit - but only some of them! Even though Sun's new license, Apple's license, and the BSDs' licenses are all open-source licenses, they can't use my code. So it's not a win for open-source, it's only a win for GPL'ed open source. The GPL is, in this situation, self-serving, as it only helps itself.
If I build a better networking stack and BSD-style license it, then literally anyone can use it. If Linux wants to use it to make their networking better, than they can. If Apple wants to, or FreeBSD, or ReactOS or some other hobbyist whom no one has even heard of yet, they all can, and they can make better software because of it. Also, if a big company wants to use it in their software, like Windows, or HP-UX, or whatever, they can do that too. Some people say this is bad, but why? People use Windows, that's a fact, so if I can make Windows better, then isn't that a good thing? You don't need a reason to help people.
The GPL doesn't grant freedom to the users, it grants control to the author. They say that their code can only be used to help GPL'ed projects, they restrict you from using it in certain ways, and even restrict other open-source programmers from using it. That is too bad. The BSD license grants freedom to everyone, so if they want to make a closed-source OS or a proprietary router or a networkable baby-mulching machine, then they are free to do so, whatever I might think of it. Not that I support baby-mulching, but that is freedom, like it or not.
The LGPL is better in a lot of ways, in that they only really have to give source for their modifications to the code that you gave them, and I can agree with that. The problem is that the FSF bigwigs like Stallman see the LGPL as a necessary evil, and not an important compromise (balancing their need for control with the end users' need for freedom). It's not acceptable, it's just necessary.
Oh well. I prefer the BSD license because it gives freedom to users, and not control to programmers.
You can still get a gig of ram for these (PC2700, DDR333) for $226 (unbuffered non-ecc) or $299 (registered ecc) from Crucial. Given the price and comparing with their usual upgrade markups, I'm guessing the Apple upgrade is the former, not the latter. Still, compared to the usual markup, this is pretty good.
I would suggest OS X. It's UNIX, it's BSD, and it's lickably-good. You get an operating system that can run all your POSIX-compliant goodies, X server, the whole two bits, but you also get an easy, modern, flexible operating system as well.
Of course, it won't run on your Celeron, so it doesn't really matter, but if you ever have $500 sitting around and want to learn another BSD and get a machine for the wife/kids/pets/sheep/plants, then there you go.
I'd like to second this.
The power of this book is not that it reveals some hidden truths that turn you into Mr Personality, but rather, it is a list of examples and a collection of reminders. Reading the book frequently to keep the suggestions in your mind, you will more easily remember to do things that you know you should probably do anyway.
For example, one chapter is dedicated to smiling. You should smile often, because it makes you seem happier, more approachable, and a nicer person in general. Our mothers always tell us we should smile more, but most people don't really think about it (I look for smiling people on the Metro when I go to and from work - people never smile who are there alone, and rarely if they are with someone).
Consider it a book of reminders that will keep your personality friendly and brighten your day and the days of those around you, and make your managerial job a hundred times easier. Highly recommended for anyone who ever has to deal with people in any fasion - which is everyone. And at $10 CDN, it's a steal.
Microsoft makes the only competing product for Firefox - them hiring him would be absurdly conspicuous. Google, on the other hand, has a competitor in Microsoft, as does Firefox, and if the IE monopoly stays put, then MSN Search as a default in IE may overtake Google in the same way IE as a default in Windows (and, eventually, Mac) overtook Netscape.
If, however, Google can help make Firefox a heavy player (not that it isn't already), and can also provide to Firefox users more and better integration with Google (should they so choose), then Firefox's growing platform will help Google, and Google's will help Firefox.
My roommate has been growing some habanero plants for quite a while. I guess he waters them profusely every now and then, and uses plant food meant for tomatos, and the crazy thing has grown twice its size in two weeks. Very rewarding, and edible too!
Not to mention the ability to run Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro, arguably the finest video editing package(s) out there. For video editing, FCP is a make-or-break for me, and I wouldn't consider not using a Mac.