"The Xerox machine was the big usurper of our potential income," he said. "But now the internet is taking more of a bite out of sheet music and printed music sales so we're taking a more proactive stance."
Ok, I can understand a street peddler selling burned copies of CDs is illegal. I can sort of understand that downloading digital facsimiles of songs without paying for them is illegal. But to infer that two innovations in communications (Xerox, internetworking) have 'usurped the potential income' of a business that sells printed information is not entirely surprising to me, and I am not in the least bit surprised it took these idiots 7 years to figure out that their entire business is obsolete now.
Sheet music publishers made their initial business footprint by publishing information that was elsewhere unavailable. Now that technology has finally permitted people to information more freely and readily, and sheet music publishers have not jumped on the bandwagon of progress, they're becoming unuseful and obsolete. Sure, if someone makes a photocopy of their material and puts it on a web page without obtaining reproduction rights they are in violation of copyright - but to claim that the information of what essentially is the description of what a song sounds like to be under their rightful domain is ridiculous. People simply have another source of information that is free and available, and whenever the common man is empowered it's always the duty of the corporate entity to throw a tantrum and scream "it's not fair, I'm supposed to get money for services I'm unable to convince people to use anymore!"
But then again some jackholes were already allowed to open pandora's box with the introduction of "intellectual property", which basically means that any corporate entity can get copyright and patent protection for just about the vaguest of ideas. I'm surprised the process of "suing competing information providers on notice of ineptitude of buiness model" hasn't been copyrighted and patented yet. Imagine how much money the RIAA, MPAA, and MPA could get in court if they figured that one out...
Re:Been Done Before... Sorta
on
Build Your Own MMOG
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But yeah, when it comes down it, not many blockbuster titles really used somebody else's source. Half-life is the only one I can think of that redefined gaming.
Half life was built on a heavily modified Quake I engine (which still looks gorgeous to me). Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Jedi Knight II were built with the Quake III engine. Those were fairly popular games, as I recall. A good list of games derived from the engine can be found here.
But that's always how iD has been. John Carmack is a dyed-in-the-wool algorithm wizard. He writes very elegant and optimized code to solve problems, and researches data structures and algorithms heavily to build his tools the 'right' way. If you read Michael Abrash's Grpahics Programming Black book, he notes Carmack's obsession with optimizing his spatial organization routines and data structures - how he stayed up late nights trying out different data structures and algorithms to get the most optimal rendering time out of his engine. Unfortunately, while the engines are superb implementations of advanced concepts, for the most part iD doesn't push out the same kind of content that people like Valve can 'pump' out. They're just more programming-centric. But when a content-centric entity publishes a title built on one of iD's engines, it's usually pretty rad.
Does anyone here care to promise that during the hype caused by the release of the PS3 that they will be reminding everyone of this event?
I did so with the release of the Playstation, Windows 2000, Windows XP, the XBox, the Playstation 2, and the XBox 360. I promise to continue my embargo of discontent on Sony's PS3 as well.
Much beyond that, on networks where I've been responsible for the DHCP server, anyway, there was really no benefit to keeping them.
...Except to protect your ass in court when one of your users is logged on another system doing something illegal? Like defacing a US government website per se? And the cops come and haul your systems off to track down the perpetrator?
And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research -- but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects. Congress has enabled them and protects them.
So basically, our freedoms of speech, press, and anonymity are Bad Things because one person wrote something false and mean about John Seigenthaler Sr. on the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit and is not a factual source. That's a fantastic way to look at things. I have one question though, Johnny... if the bio was wrong and you knew it, why didn't you simply volunteer yourself and correct it? You were able to get an article out on USA Today's web site, so surely you could have typed up the corrections on the wiki? But this really isn't about truth anyway is it? I mean you are pointing your lawyers around looking for someone's goose aren't you? I think this has a little more to do with media attention and money than the truth of a speculative biography, which could be corrected at any moment by a more knowlegable writer.
"I share your concern about the increase in coarse programming on television and radio today," he told the forum. "I also share your belief that the best solution would be for the industry to voluntarily take action to address the issue. But I do believe that something needs to be done."
Tansposed: "I'd like to take this opportunity to offload the responsibility of this issue from the FCC to the cable companies, who share no vested interest in lowering costs for their subscribers nor for the regulation of telecommunications. Thank you and goodnight, my TiVo is waiting for me at home."
Basically, Martin has just said "yeah a la carte is a great idea. We at the FCC think the cable companies should continue to think about it." That's not exactly a fantastic event.. the FCC just seems to be avoiding a confrontation with the media giants.
Further, I'd argue that even if their primary motivation is protection of their "family and friends", such protection, on a broad and indirect scale (i.e., actions not taken specifically and explicitly to protect an individual person), necessarily extends to anyone of similar background: if an indirect action is believed to protect that federal official's "family", it also protects everyone else.
I fail to see how what's best for... say as an example... Haliburton's corporate officers and chief stockholders is what's best for me. If you can explain this, I'd be happy to hear it. Because, quite frankly, I think their concern for the life,liberty, and property of Joe Blow falls far below that for the guaranteed financial success of Haliburton in their list of priorities.
"Can the driver correctly ascertain fair and valid answers to these issues, and drive accordingly in a safe manner?"
I'm sure the driver's license exam was intended to answer these questions. Unfortunately nobody took it very seriously, and (at least in the US) there isn't near enough attention paid to catching dangerous drivers in this phase. The test I took was 10 multiple-choice questions (When turning left, should you A) honk your horn, B) speed up, or C) signal left and slow down?) for a learner's permit followed by a short moving evaluation. The exam passed on a 60% or higher score. The moving evaluation was a short (<1 mile) drive around downtown with 4 right turns and a parallel parking test. The test doesn't address high speed driving, reaction to poor weather, or freeway and turnpike performance - and these are arguably the most dangerous situations for the driver. The test is taken once upon first applying for the license, and then no further testing is required to renew the license at its expiry. That doesn't reassure me very much.
IT Manager: "Hey I want you to do xxx in a week."
Me: "Ok." [tap tap tap... ]
[six days pass]
Me: "Alright, that's done."
IT Manager: "Wait, this isn't what I wanted."
Me: "You asked me for xxx."
IT Manager: "Well, I guess what I really wanted was yyy."
Me: "Ok. I'll do yyy, if you're really sure that's what you want."
IT Manager: "Yeah do that. You'll still deliver that tomorrow right?"
Me: "No, I spent all week working on code that does xxx that I have to throw away now. I will need another week to write yyy."
IT Manager: "But then I'll look bad!"
That's part of the beauty of Everquest. You don't have to play it at all and it's still just as interesting.
I'd rephrase that more along the lines of: You don't play it most of the time anyway.
Monkeyboy: Hey Dylan Starshine popped! I can get the next page for my cleric quest! I've been sitting here for weeks and he's finally really here!
Monkeygirl: lol watch out b 4 u hit him
You hit Dylan Starshine for 40 points of damage!
Dylan Starshine hits YOU for 12 points of damage!
A smuggler hits YOU for 144 points of damage!
You have been interrupted!
Dylan Starshine hits YOU for 14 points of damage!
You have been interrupted!
A smuggler hits YOU for 185 points of damage!
A smuggler hits YOU for 143 points of damage!
A smuggler backstabs YOU for 300 points of damage!
You have been killed by a smuggler.
Loading, please wait...
Interestingly enough, I had no problems getting Ubuntu up on my NVidia card with good performance. But with my ATI card I finally gave up after 2 weeks and stuck with the VESA drivers.
I had nothing but stability problems with the FreeBSD driver. The operating system would lock after creating 3 or 4 gl contexts, and as I recall I had to load NVidia's agp driver in order to get that far. I know I'm not alone, and I'm sure there's a fairly comparable number of success and horror stories. In fairness, I could just have easily substituted ATI for NVidia in that example.
Personally, I favor DRI fundamentally for acceleration. It's open and free, it is an extension to the X standard rather than a libGL hack that puts the direct rendering out of X's influence. As a side effect of the DRI solution, you are also not trapped into one vendor. You can have 5 heads on your machine from 5 different vendors and the DRI extension will not care. It will use them all concurrently. You can't get this interoperability with an NVidia or ATI proprietary driver.
But why force hardware developers to open their driver code?
The system depends on the drivers to operate the hardware. This is a simple concept - so the system's nature is very dependent on the nature of its drivers. Linux is a spearhead of the open source and free software movement, which hold forward above all else the availability and freedom from restriciton of software. If hardware vendors that want linux customers are able to provide binary drivers to placate them, there is no impetus for any of them to align with the policies of free and open source software, so very few (if any) of them will. The Linux system will then be dependent on closed source, restricted use software that - through the dependence of the system on the drivers - will trump the free (as in speech) use of the system. No users -from solitaire players to developers - will have available to them the source code for drivers that allow the system to operate on the machine, the rights permitted to users for use of the software will be at the mercy of the hardware vendor, and (as has been demonstrated by nvidia) the quality and currency of proprietary linux drivers will be intolerably poor since they are provided by vendors that will never consider linux to be worth their resources until linux systems provide for a definite majority of their sales.
That is why vendors should be forced to release the code that drives their hardware. Because without it, linux is no longer free.
This whole issue is not about safety, not about precaution, and definitely not about education. It is about control. Religion is not content to being a part of a person's life; as an organization it seeks to dominate all influences to the person. Hence why we have such an outcry from the religious right for things such as prayer in schools, banning of abortion, banning of homosexual relationships, et cetera ad infinitum. These people are not content to live their own lives, but feel a great desire to dominate the lives of others because they really can't play well with the other children. Now in this situation in Sparta, Reverend McHugh has simply seen a way to infiltrate his students' lives outside of school and has taken action on it, assured that the parents will not risk protecting their children from this social predator because of the cash they blow on tuition and the social ramifications of being ostricized in the catholic 'community' for disagreeing with the clergy.
<homeowner>: (to builder) My house fell down. <builder>: Ok. Do you know why it fell down? <homeowner>: The insurance company says it has bugs. <builder>: What kind of bugs? <homeowner>: Termites. <builder>: I see. Termites are bad for wood. Were the termites in the house when you bought it, or did they come in later? <homeowner>: They must have been there, because I never bring anything with bugs into the house. <builder>: Nobody ever does. I'll speak to the builders about this. <homeowner>: Whatever. My lawyer and I are filing suit against you.
(fade to building site) <builder>: (to workers) You let bugs get into this lady's house. <workers>: Bugs come from all over the place, and the house is outside while we build it. <builder>: We sell only bug-free houses, mister. You just need to work harder. <workers>: But bugs can be so microscopic, the amount of lumber used in the house is so enormous and we already have impossible deadlines to meet. How can we possibly keep bugs from being in the house? <builder>: That's not my problem. I'm tired of getting sued for buggy houses, so from now on when you build a buggy house I will send the lawyers to you. <workers>: But you don't even give us the chance to examine the house after it's finished! <lumberman>: Here's your delivery of lumber. <worker>: Hey, I found a termite on this 2x4. <lumberman>: We certify our lumber to be bug-free. You must have introduced that bug yourself. <workers> (to builder): Even if we could keep the bugs off the house while we build it, the lumber you provide already has bugs in it that will show up later. Shouldn't the lumberman share some responsibility here? <builder>: (eating sandwich) The lumberman has assured me his lumber is bug free, or weren't you listening? These bugs must be your fault. <workers>: I don't see you building a better house. <builder>: I can't use a hammer, that's your job. <workers>: Well, what's your job then? <builder>: To sell what you build with the lumber I buy. <workers>: So why don't you wait until we know it is bug-free to sell it? Why are we liable for you selling it when it isn't ready? <builder>: How is a house that's built not ready? I have buyers that want these things yesterday. I can't keep a house sitting around while you look for bugs that shouldn't have been let in at all in the first place. Now you get back to work, and I don't want to see any more bugs.
(builder tosses half-eaten sandwich on the ground next to the building site, ants are seen crawling out of the ground underneath it)
What eats resources is the X11 windowing system. {Though object-oriented, interpreted languages -- such as the JavaScript embedded into web browsers -- probably don't help much either.} It used to be that KDE was horribly bloated, but GNOME is no longer a lightweight alternative. Of course there are less resource-intensive desktops {my favourite, which I will be using in my own distro, is WindowMaker} but most people are expecting a Windows XP clone. Hence, KDE or a heavily-customised GNOME.
Don't equate X with a desktop system like KDE or GNOME. As you've even said here, X is a window system, not a window manager or desktop system. Desktop systems are collections of X clients. The clients you mentioned, which belong to the KDE and GNOME packages, seem to be a source of overhead to you. So your real beef is with some of the clients that are written for X, not X itself. X has been useful on quite a number of machine architectures that have clock speeds in the double digits, and addressable memory sizes that wouldn't make for a decent USB thumb drive today. Now would KDE run worth a damn on these machines? My guess is no, since KDE really is a fairly new piece of software that is written to current software standards in which a lean profile takes a back seat to feature overload and eye candy. But that's why god invented twm.
They for years have provided a Light version, which was lighter than all this div-itis; why can't they continue to provide something like that.
It's called "progress". I'm sure that many people were distraught when the x86 processor moved from 16 bit to 32 bit architecture and the 16 bit machines were left in the dust. I'm sure that many people were distraught when token ring network was surpassed by 10BaseT UTP, and network infrastructures were uprooted and changed. I'm sure many people were distraught when Windows 3.x was officially abandoned, and people had to switch to Windows 95 or above; and again when Windows 95 was abandoned, an people had to switch again. I'm sure that many people were distraught when Javascript (Livescript) first started appearing in web content, and they had to upgrade their browsers to use it. I'm also sure that many people were distraught when floppy drives were first phased out of computer systems in favor of flash media and CD-RWs. And now, I'm sure you and others like you are distraught that css is here to put more separation between content and presentation, and to provide accessibility to a wider range of devices and browsers with the same html, and your outdated revision of your browser is unable to cope. CSS is not particularly new, and it solves a lot of web content problems. CSS is the future of web content, I'm sorry if your browser doesn't have proper support for it, but it really is your problem since that support has actually been provided in current revisions of the browser.
This is such a BS stance on the issue. So if your electronic device has an OS it's a computer and shoudn't play DRM-CDs, but if the device is straight circuits it's cool?
More directly - the DSP in the CD player that transforms the digital data on the CD into analog audio is a processor with IO, memory, and probably firmware to drive it - thus the CD player is a computer. The statement that a CD is allowed on a CD player but not a computer is directly in conflict with itself.
I did nothing to my software, and it worked just fine before (and works fine elsewhere). Checking my home computer's konqueror, it works fine.
So you're telling me that the Konqueror package on these systems has a perfect implementation of khtml and has absolutely zero known or unknown rendering bugs? I find that difficult to swallow.
When a geek website breaks the version of konqueror that ships with half a dozen major distros (yes, EL4 would be newer, but EL3 isn't that old - it's from when, 2003? EL4 just came out this year, so expecting people in a business environment (where you can't do whatever upgrades you please) to have upgraded everything isn't realistic), its users have a right to complain.
Slashdot can not be expected to be responsible for bugs or feature absence in 3rd party software, I'm sorry to say. If khtml is broken in your version of konqueror on your red hat system, and does not correctly render all css pages, then your problem exists with konqueror and not with slashdot. Konqueror and khtml have changed quite a bit since 2003, for a glimpse just look at the feature plans for 3.3 and 3.4. Notice that CSS 2.1 and 3.0 features are still in the process of being introduced at this point. Did slashdot hide these CSS property descriptions from KDE developers to make Konqueror unable to render Slashdot prior to version 3.4? I doubt it. It seems fairly obvious to me that Slashdot can't be expected to hold off on development of their product to current accepted standards because a few users can't or don't want to use software beyond outdated shipped packages that are unable to comply with them. Web developers already have enough of a problem with IE web standards being an exception to all the rules that we must constantly worry about, Konqueror < 3.3 not implementing a css featureset doesn't warrant another special exception.
I was wondering what on Earth slashdot did to make things look so horrible. The teal article header background now takes up over an entire page for the first article on the page (including in comments view). The input boxes are now way to spaced out - it looks like below (only worse)
Konqueror 3.4.1 on FreeBSD 5.4 shows no such problem for me. Both Firefox 1.6 and Konqueror display identical. Perhaps you should check your software first instead of bitching about slashdot for trying to adhere to web standards?
More to the point, this whole reverence for the magical power of "root" is an anachronism from the days when Unix use meant a multi-user system. It's pure superstition in single-user Linux systems where the user/admin has exactly as much power to cause damage as he has to do anything else, regardless of the security scheme.
Well, Linux proponents have been trying to get Linux to the phase that it's competing with Windows on the desktop.. I'd say it's moving along quite nicely. After all, a system can't be a successful, easy to use desktop unless the user's account has the rights to do everything, including installing software, deleting/boot/vmlinuz, and spreading viruses to core system binaries. -except in the Professional edition, which costs more money.
Because intuition and logic aren't the same thing. For a simple example take the birthday paradox (which isn't a paradox, but I didn't name it so don't blame me). It is completely unintuitive that a random set of 23 people has a greater than 50% chance of containing at two people who share a birthday. However, a straightforward proof shows that this is indeed the case.
You mean mathematically or statistically correct, not logical. Logic deals with truths and falsehoods, not statistics or numbers.
e.g. A=" a -> b" is true. a is true. Therefore by the truth table of ->, b is true.
But I will concede that logic is not necessarily intuitive (arising from experience or instinct) and my little pun isn't correct.
Why should I spend half a day compiling packages from source every time I install Linux? I can get a Linux box up-and-running in less than two hours because of binary packages.
In fact, there are Linux proponents that indeed claim the the FreeBSD ports tree is a reason to use Linux in favor of FreeBSD. Now, I'm not saying there is any credibility at all in this flake's argument, but I will say that there are advantages in having both binary packages and source port available for use, and getting rid of either is a silly idea. Especially since binary packages are built from source ports anyway (at least in the BSD world).
Slashdot Mirror
I just have a bookmark... it gives me every book I need =)
Ok, I can understand a street peddler selling burned copies of CDs is illegal. I can sort of understand that downloading digital facsimiles of songs without paying for them is illegal. But to infer that two innovations in communications (Xerox, internetworking) have 'usurped the potential income' of a business that sells printed information is not entirely surprising to me, and I am not in the least bit surprised it took these idiots 7 years to figure out that their entire business is obsolete now.
Sheet music publishers made their initial business footprint by publishing information that was elsewhere unavailable. Now that technology has finally permitted people to information more freely and readily, and sheet music publishers have not jumped on the bandwagon of progress, they're becoming unuseful and obsolete. Sure, if someone makes a photocopy of their material and puts it on a web page without obtaining reproduction rights they are in violation of copyright - but to claim that the information of what essentially is the description of what a song sounds like to be under their rightful domain is ridiculous. People simply have another source of information that is free and available, and whenever the common man is empowered it's always the duty of the corporate entity to throw a tantrum and scream "it's not fair, I'm supposed to get money for services I'm unable to convince people to use anymore!"
But then again some jackholes were already allowed to open pandora's box with the introduction of "intellectual property", which basically means that any corporate entity can get copyright and patent protection for just about the vaguest of ideas. I'm surprised the process of "suing competing information providers on notice of ineptitude of buiness model" hasn't been copyrighted and patented yet. Imagine how much money the RIAA, MPAA, and MPA could get in court if they figured that one out...
Half life was built on a heavily modified Quake I engine (which still looks gorgeous to me). Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Jedi Knight II were built with the Quake III engine. Those were fairly popular games, as I recall. A good list of games derived from the engine can be found here.
But that's always how iD has been. John Carmack is a dyed-in-the-wool algorithm wizard. He writes very elegant and optimized code to solve problems, and researches data structures and algorithms heavily to build his tools the 'right' way. If you read Michael Abrash's Grpahics Programming Black book, he notes Carmack's obsession with optimizing his spatial organization routines and data structures - how he stayed up late nights trying out different data structures and algorithms to get the most optimal rendering time out of his engine. Unfortunately, while the engines are superb implementations of advanced concepts, for the most part iD doesn't push out the same kind of content that people like Valve can 'pump' out. They're just more programming-centric. But when a content-centric entity publishes a title built on one of iD's engines, it's usually pretty rad.
I did so with the release of the Playstation, Windows 2000, Windows XP, the XBox, the Playstation 2, and the XBox 360. I promise to continue my embargo of discontent on Sony's PS3 as well.
...Except to protect your ass in court when one of your users is logged on another system doing something illegal? Like defacing a US government website per se? And the cops come and haul your systems off to track down the perpetrator?
So basically, our freedoms of speech, press, and anonymity are Bad Things because one person wrote something false and mean about John Seigenthaler Sr. on the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit and is not a factual source. That's a fantastic way to look at things. I have one question though, Johnny... if the bio was wrong and you knew it, why didn't you simply volunteer yourself and correct it? You were able to get an article out on USA Today's web site, so surely you could have typed up the corrections on the wiki? But this really isn't about truth anyway is it? I mean you are pointing your lawyers around looking for someone's goose aren't you? I think this has a little more to do with media attention and money than the truth of a speculative biography, which could be corrected at any moment by a more knowlegable writer.
Tansposed: "I'd like to take this opportunity to offload the responsibility of this issue from the FCC to the cable companies, who share no vested interest in lowering costs for their subscribers nor for the regulation of telecommunications. Thank you and goodnight, my TiVo is waiting for me at home."
Basically, Martin has just said "yeah a la carte is a great idea. We at the FCC think the cable companies should continue to think about it." That's not exactly a fantastic event.. the FCC just seems to be avoiding a confrontation with the media giants.
I fail to see how what's best for... say as an example... Haliburton's corporate officers and chief stockholders is what's best for me. If you can explain this, I'd be happy to hear it. Because, quite frankly, I think their concern for the life,liberty, and property of Joe Blow falls far below that for the guaranteed financial success of Haliburton in their list of priorities.
I'm sure the driver's license exam was intended to answer these questions. Unfortunately nobody took it very seriously, and (at least in the US) there isn't near enough attention paid to catching dangerous drivers in this phase. The test I took was 10 multiple-choice questions (When turning left, should you A) honk your horn, B) speed up, or C) signal left and slow down?) for a learner's permit followed by a short moving evaluation. The exam passed on a 60% or higher score. The moving evaluation was a short (<1 mile) drive around downtown with 4 right turns and a parallel parking test. The test doesn't address high speed driving, reaction to poor weather, or freeway and turnpike performance - and these are arguably the most dangerous situations for the driver. The test is taken once upon first applying for the license, and then no further testing is required to renew the license at its expiry. That doesn't reassure me very much.
Me: "Ok." [tap tap tap
[six days pass]
Me: "Alright, that's done."
IT Manager: "Wait, this isn't what I wanted."
Me: "You asked me for xxx."
IT Manager: "Well, I guess what I really wanted was yyy."
Me: "Ok. I'll do yyy, if you're really sure that's what you want."
IT Manager: "Yeah do that. You'll still deliver that tomorrow right?"
Me: "No, I spent all week working on code that does xxx that I have to throw away now. I will need another week to write yyy."
IT Manager: "But then I'll look bad!"
Aaaah coding practice.
I'd rephrase that more along the lines of: You don't play it most of the time anyway.
Monkeyboy: Hey Dylan Starshine popped! I can get the next page for my cleric quest! I've been sitting here for weeks and he's finally really here!Monkeygirl: lol watch out b 4 u hit him
You hit Dylan Starshine for 40 points of damage!
Dylan Starshine hits YOU for 12 points of damage!
A smuggler hits YOU for 144 points of damage!
You have been interrupted!
Dylan Starshine hits YOU for 14 points of damage!
You have been interrupted!
A smuggler hits YOU for 185 points of damage!
A smuggler hits YOU for 143 points of damage!
A smuggler backstabs YOU for 300 points of damage!
You have been killed by a smuggler.
Loading, please wait...
Just for clarification, is that with or without the overhead of INVARIANTS and WITNESS?
I had nothing but stability problems with the FreeBSD driver. The operating system would lock after creating 3 or 4 gl contexts, and as I recall I had to load NVidia's agp driver in order to get that far. I know I'm not alone, and I'm sure there's a fairly comparable number of success and horror stories. In fairness, I could just have easily substituted ATI for NVidia in that example.
Personally, I favor DRI fundamentally for acceleration. It's open and free, it is an extension to the X standard rather than a libGL hack that puts the direct rendering out of X's influence. As a side effect of the DRI solution, you are also not trapped into one vendor. You can have 5 heads on your machine from 5 different vendors and the DRI extension will not care. It will use them all concurrently. You can't get this interoperability with an NVidia or ATI proprietary driver.
The system depends on the drivers to operate the hardware. This is a simple concept - so the system's nature is very dependent on the nature of its drivers. Linux is a spearhead of the open source and free software movement, which hold forward above all else the availability and freedom from restriciton of software. If hardware vendors that want linux customers are able to provide binary drivers to placate them, there is no impetus for any of them to align with the policies of free and open source software, so very few (if any) of them will. The Linux system will then be dependent on closed source, restricted use software that - through the dependence of the system on the drivers - will trump the free (as in speech) use of the system. No users -from solitaire players to developers - will have available to them the source code for drivers that allow the system to operate on the machine, the rights permitted to users for use of the software will be at the mercy of the hardware vendor, and (as has been demonstrated by nvidia) the quality and currency of proprietary linux drivers will be intolerably poor since they are provided by vendors that will never consider linux to be worth their resources until linux systems provide for a definite majority of their sales.
That is why vendors should be forced to release the code that drives their hardware. Because without it, linux is no longer free.
This whole issue is not about safety, not about precaution, and definitely not about education. It is about control. Religion is not content to being a part of a person's life; as an organization it seeks to dominate all influences to the person. Hence why we have such an outcry from the religious right for things such as prayer in schools, banning of abortion, banning of homosexual relationships, et cetera ad infinitum. These people are not content to live their own lives, but feel a great desire to dominate the lives of others because they really can't play well with the other children. Now in this situation in Sparta, Reverend McHugh has simply seen a way to infiltrate his students' lives outside of school and has taken action on it, assured that the parents will not risk protecting their children from this social predator because of the cash they blow on tuition and the social ramifications of being ostricized in the catholic 'community' for disagreeing with the clergy.
<homeowner>: (to builder) My house fell down.
<builder>: Ok. Do you know why it fell down?
<homeowner>: The insurance company says it has bugs.
<builder>: What kind of bugs?
<homeowner>: Termites.
<builder>: I see. Termites are bad for wood. Were the termites in the house when you bought it, or did they come in later?
<homeowner>: They must have been there, because I never bring anything with bugs into the house.
<builder>: Nobody ever does. I'll speak to the builders about this.
<homeowner>: Whatever. My lawyer and I are filing suit against you.
(fade to building site)
<builder>: (to workers) You let bugs get into this lady's house.
<workers>: Bugs come from all over the place, and the house is outside while we build it.
<builder>: We sell only bug-free houses, mister. You just need to work harder.
<workers>: But bugs can be so microscopic, the amount of lumber used in the house is so enormous and we already have impossible deadlines to meet. How can we possibly keep bugs from being in the house?
<builder>: That's not my problem. I'm tired of getting sued for buggy houses, so from now on when you build a buggy house I will send the lawyers to you.
<workers>: But you don't even give us the chance to examine the house after it's finished!
<lumberman>: Here's your delivery of lumber.
<worker>: Hey, I found a termite on this 2x4.
<lumberman>: We certify our lumber to be bug-free. You must have introduced that bug yourself.
<workers> (to builder): Even if we could keep the bugs off the house while we build it, the lumber you provide already has bugs in it that will show up later. Shouldn't the lumberman share some responsibility here?
<builder>: (eating sandwich) The lumberman has assured me his lumber is bug free, or weren't you listening? These bugs must be your fault.
<workers>: I don't see you building a better house.
<builder>: I can't use a hammer, that's your job.
<workers>: Well, what's your job then?
<builder>: To sell what you build with the lumber I buy.
<workers>: So why don't you wait until we know it is bug-free to sell it? Why are we liable for you selling it when it isn't ready?
<builder>: How is a house that's built not ready? I have buyers that want these things yesterday. I can't keep a house sitting around while you look for bugs that shouldn't have been let in at all in the first place. Now you get back to work, and I don't want to see any more bugs.
(builder tosses half-eaten sandwich on the ground next to the building site, ants are seen crawling out of the ground underneath it)
Don't equate X with a desktop system like KDE or GNOME. As you've even said here, X is a window system, not a window manager or desktop system. Desktop systems are collections of X clients. The clients you mentioned, which belong to the KDE and GNOME packages, seem to be a source of overhead to you. So your real beef is with some of the clients that are written for X, not X itself. X has been useful on quite a number of machine architectures that have clock speeds in the double digits, and addressable memory sizes that wouldn't make for a decent USB thumb drive today. Now would KDE run worth a damn on these machines? My guess is no, since KDE really is a fairly new piece of software that is written to current software standards in which a lean profile takes a back seat to feature overload and eye candy. But that's why god invented twm.
It's called "progress". I'm sure that many people were distraught when the x86 processor moved from 16 bit to 32 bit architecture and the 16 bit machines were left in the dust. I'm sure that many people were distraught when token ring network was surpassed by 10BaseT UTP, and network infrastructures were uprooted and changed. I'm sure many people were distraught when Windows 3.x was officially abandoned, and people had to switch to Windows 95 or above; and again when Windows 95 was abandoned, an people had to switch again. I'm sure that many people were distraught when Javascript (Livescript) first started appearing in web content, and they had to upgrade their browsers to use it. I'm also sure that many people were distraught when floppy drives were first phased out of computer systems in favor of flash media and CD-RWs. And now, I'm sure you and others like you are distraught that css is here to put more separation between content and presentation, and to provide accessibility to a wider range of devices and browsers with the same html, and your outdated revision of your browser is unable to cope. CSS is not particularly new, and it solves a lot of web content problems. CSS is the future of web content, I'm sorry if your browser doesn't have proper support for it, but it really is your problem since that support has actually been provided in current revisions of the browser.
That demands the obligatory George McFly:
"Are you oh-kay?"
More directly - the DSP in the CD player that transforms the digital data on the CD into analog audio is a processor with IO, memory, and probably firmware to drive it - thus the CD player is a computer. The statement that a CD is allowed on a CD player but not a computer is directly in conflict with itself.
So you're telling me that the Konqueror package on these systems has a perfect implementation of khtml and has absolutely zero known or unknown rendering bugs? I find that difficult to swallow.
Slashdot can not be expected to be responsible for bugs or feature absence in 3rd party software, I'm sorry to say. If khtml is broken in your version of konqueror on your red hat system, and does not correctly render all css pages, then your problem exists with konqueror and not with slashdot. Konqueror and khtml have changed quite a bit since 2003, for a glimpse just look at the feature plans for 3.3 and 3.4. Notice that CSS 2.1 and 3.0 features are still in the process of being introduced at this point. Did slashdot hide these CSS property descriptions from KDE developers to make Konqueror unable to render Slashdot prior to version 3.4? I doubt it. It seems fairly obvious to me that Slashdot can't be expected to hold off on development of their product to current accepted standards because a few users can't or don't want to use software beyond outdated shipped packages that are unable to comply with them. Web developers already have enough of a problem with IE web standards being an exception to all the rules that we must constantly worry about, Konqueror < 3.3 not implementing a css featureset doesn't warrant another special exception.
Konqueror 3.4.1 on FreeBSD 5.4 shows no such problem for me. Both Firefox 1.6 and Konqueror display identical. Perhaps you should check your software first instead of bitching about slashdot for trying to adhere to web standards?
Just a thought...
Well, Linux proponents have been trying to get Linux to the phase that it's competing with Windows on the desktop.. I'd say it's moving along quite nicely. After all, a system can't be a successful, easy to use desktop unless the user's account has the rights to do everything, including installing software, deleting /boot/vmlinuz, and spreading viruses to core system binaries. -except in the Professional edition, which costs more money.
You mean mathematically or statistically correct, not logical. Logic deals with truths and falsehoods, not statistics or numbers.
e.g. A=" a -> b" is true. a is true. Therefore by the truth table of ->, b is true.
But I will concede that logic is not necessarily intuitive (arising from experience or instinct) and my little pun isn't correct.
In fact, there are Linux proponents that indeed claim the the FreeBSD ports tree is a reason to use Linux in favor of FreeBSD. Now, I'm not saying there is any credibility at all in this flake's argument, but I will say that there are advantages in having both binary packages and source port available for use, and getting rid of either is a silly idea. Especially since binary packages are built from source ports anyway (at least in the BSD world).