I'm generally for accuracy however 90% of success comes from enthusiasm and a positive attitude. Given the forces opposing Linux, you need to be relentlessly positive (and that includes making it as easy and friendly for Linux newcomers as possible). Saying "we are doomed... DOOOMED!" is not going to make the right impression on possible new linux users.
First-- I think you need to drink a little less coffee.
Second-- I openly admitted that I'm not the lily white pure knight in this area. Then I explain my moral justification is that once they make what I consider to be an obscene profit (about 2 million a song spread over 20 people), I think the *intent* of copyright has been met.
Yes, you can tell my boss to stop paying me. People do that all the time. They suggest going to cheaper labor in india a lot. And I don't have a copyright law that requires my boss to pay only me to maintain my software.
Fact is the compensation available today (with a market of billions) was not considered when copyright law was written. And now the amount of money available to the companies is allowing them to severely corrupt the process.
The only morally clean way is to avoid using RIAA products.
If you had a sleazy farmer would you have a right to take and keep part of his crops for the year (I mean he can grow more- it's not like you took his right to grow corn- only an instance of his corn).
I'm not morally clean myself-- but the world is so grey these days, it is hard to be without feeling like a sucker.
Keep in mind that legal and illegal do not equal moral and immoral. The underlying principle is that it is their song and they have the right to never release it or to release it under certain conditions. We grant them short term monopolies so they will release them. They are trying to convert them into longer term monopolies.
My feeling is once a few dozen people have made each made a year's income ($100k) off of a single song, then that song has been paid for and is in the public domain. They don't have a moral right to make 8 billion bucks off of a song (in my opinion).
While a particular policeman may or may not abuse the system, as a class, policeman have well-documented history of every kind of abuse possible. It is reasonable to assume, that as a class, they will similarly abuse any future systems. I can see them using these systems to track their spouses and children for example. I can see them erasing their own entries or having some way of evading the tracking system.
Because even now a policeman might remember seeing a red dodge charger in a driveway last week that was a associated with a crime today.
The end result tho is them tracking us 24/7- no privacy.
And in all likelyhood policemen and government officials will have something in the law so their own tags are immunized from this process. Just like it turns out all of our local government officials do not pay tolls in their private vehicles recently.
Just like there may be a million universes where life didn't start... there are probably hundreds stories of good wizard boys who die or are corrupted before they succeed in Rowling's universe. The story of harry is of that one lucky one who made it to the end.
I have plenty of experience in Windows (and DOS before that back to "Rise of the Triad").
For the last three or four years, setting it up consists of plugging in the cable in the back, right clicking on the machine and saying what to share. For the other machines, I have to know to click on the network icon and browse local computers. Otherwise everything is wonderful networky goodness.
I do not have to deal with Active directory. I agree that the professional business environments for both are non-trivial and would not be as simple to set up (and may be roughly the same difficulty to set up).
I'm only talking about a small home network set up. I haven't had a windows network issue in my home environment for years.
I want to be able to easily take my linux box-- plug it into the switch-- and then we can play games or swap files. I'm sure by 2010 I will be on Linux. I'm actively going to O/S agnostic applications and have been for a few years now. There will be almost no change in my user experience the day I swap out the O/S. I forgot to mention firefox above i think but one of the main reasons I use it is that it's on linux.
My software stack is almost all OS agnostic- except Corel Draw and Corel Photo Paint.
Actually, if you have over a 10% negative response rate, the result is generally bad. Les Gibson in "How to be People Smart" says you will be perceived as a negative person that people do not want to deal with or be friends with if you are negative more than 10% of the time. People generally like to be around people that are pleasant and agree with them. You have to build up a bit of positive credit before you can let loose with a "No."
It takes a lot of positive, supportive words and deeds to guide people to do things. Most people collapse very easily in the face of any challenge, negativity, or rudeness. They are typically very brittle about it too- they think and act like they are completely committed but after 10-20 minutes of seriously struggling with something they are done and want to quit and never deal with it again.
While you may relentlessly attack Linux issues, how well do you handle a single social rejection? A single rude comment by a new group of friends? Perhaps a single failure at trying a new activity like dancing or wood-carving. Learning slow dancing was one of the hardest things I've ever done emotionally- Linux doesn't even compare.
Similarly, a person who is trying out Linux can be turned away by a single negative response. Linux is not their passion. They are just mildly interested in it and a surprisingly small amount of rudeness can drive them away.
And there you have Windows, all cuddly and friendly (and Mac- even MORE cuddly and friendly) waiting with open arms for them.
So what I am hearing is folks would be happy if ATI would make a linux only card that they published full accurate interface specs for and provided a skeletal driver (40 to 120 hours of coding max but functional) with source code which the community would finish and implement all the features that minimal driver did not implement.
To me that seems reasonable. The only thing I disagreed with was expecting the company to pay someone six months salary to develop code and then give it away. The company would not waste any effort on developing the software perhaps 40 hours of one coder.
I'm not sure the community would deliver but it seems like the cost to ATI would be minor and would likely be covered by the additional hardware sales.
I think as the hardware gets more stable this kind of thing may happen anyway. Computers are not changing as fast as they used to.
I want my three machines to all talk to each other automagically like my windows boxes do so I can easily move stuff around.
I want to be able to view video (I use videolan so it that will be a no brainer). I want a p2p application that works well (I use azureus- so no brainer tho I hear there is better). I want an easy to use graphics editor (Gimp isn't cutting it). I want an easy to use video editor (???) I want an easy to use office suite (Openoffice has come a long way-- not quite there yet but 99.9%-- i think as of release 2.4 it will be where i require it) I want an easy to use sound editor (Audacity is super-- and on linux too so good there) I want usb drives and a color laser printer that works.
The biggest problem I had last time with linux is that it didn't "just work". Windows "just works" and the two times I have had a problem in 12 years of windows usage, I called up- paid my $35 and Microsoft fixed it (heroically in one case- they had 5 engineers including a couple senior ones on the call last time - spent several hours).
Microsoft has very good customer service compared to Sony (who I despise and will never buy another product from- haven't since 2000 when customer service was actually insulting). Linux has no customer service. It has a large community of experts who often act like Sony customer service to people who do not have a clue.
So I guess what I need most of all to finish the move to Linux is a community of people who are friendly to and supportive of absolute beginners. They have most of the hardware and software options I need. It's just the people treatment and skills mostly now (and a good easy to use graphic editor).
It is also equivalent to Microsoft giving a huge subsidy to companies that compete with us. My company spends a couple million a year on Microsoft licenses. I'm sure they would be ecstatic to hear that their indian and chinese competitors are getting the same software for free.
Yet another reason for them to move everything except the executives over to india and china.
In the US they have it set up so that they have to vote Aagainst their pay raises or they automagically get them when they give other federal employees raises.
The faulty mod was referring to making the original author I was responding to "flamebait."
He was expressing an opinion- it wasn't flamebait. We have a lot of crappy down-modding to censor people at Slashdot over the last 12 months. I disagree with down-modding opinions you dislike. "Troll" should be reserved for posts like that "gay nigger" guy who tried to first post everything. The grandparents post was on topic and a legitimate opinion.
I can see your point that if they would release the hardware specs then you could write your own drivers. As long as it is about you writing your own drivers from scratch, I'm for that. Asking them to pay someone to write a driver and then release the driver and the code is what I disagreed with.
Perhaps part of the issue is that open source drivers could be written to do anything. Various legal restrictions currently require that hardware does less than it is capable of. With open drivers, the hardware could do everything- even if it broke the law.
I have a music player-- it won't let me copy songs off it to the hard drive. OTH, if i take out the memory card and put it in a card reader, I can copy the songs off.
So the restriction on the music player is really stupid. But they did it anyway. Probably for legal reasons.
Your opinion is that only open free code is of value.
However, in the real world, a lot of things won't get done unless someone is compensated in some way.
Over 45 years, I've seen that most people who declare things should be free do not contribute a bit of their time to help things be free. They want to be compensated for their time but they want to get everything free.
Given a choice between no driver and a closed driver that works and is installed as a binary object, I have to disagree with you.
Since ATI is a hardware company, I think they'd be foolish to ignore a rapidly growing portion of the market to sell their hardware too. However, if that market doesn't buy enough cards to pay the salary ($150k a year with benefits) of the driver developer then ATI is being extremely rational to blow them off. $150k would probably require a minimum of 20k card sales per year on linux boxes.
A law that has 90% support is likely to be fundamental magna carta type stuff or mob rule type stuff (anti-communism comes to mind). The second is a bit disturbing and happens now. The fundamental stuff like murder, bribery and so on should not have to be repassed because you run into situations where they screw up and a murderer gets off because it wasn't illegal to commit murder for a few weeks until they repassed the laws.
Stuff like that actually happens right now when some of these temporary laws expire.
It's a benign one, but in the end, you have no rights. They can do anything they want to you without notice at any time and your only option is to stop participating.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm generally for accuracy however 90% of success comes from enthusiasm and a positive attitude. Given the forces opposing Linux, you need to be relentlessly positive (and that includes making it as easy and friendly for Linux newcomers as possible). Saying "we are doomed... DOOOMED!" is not going to make the right impression on possible new linux users.
First-- I think you need to drink a little less coffee.
Second-- I openly admitted that I'm not the lily white pure knight in this area. Then I explain my moral justification is that once they make what I consider to be an obscene profit (about 2 million a song spread over 20 people), I think the *intent* of copyright has been met.
Yes, you can tell my boss to stop paying me. People do that all the time. They suggest going to cheaper labor in india a lot. And I don't have a copyright law that requires my boss to pay only me to maintain my software.
Fact is the compensation available today (with a market of billions) was not considered when copyright law was written. And now the amount of money available to the companies is allowing them to severely corrupt the process.
Actually, I would expect an mag named "Linuxworld" to promote linux.
Sounds like they have been subverted to me.
Probably..
I was just being picky.
If there is money to be made- people will be killed. I assume people have been killed in N.Z. but maybe I'm just jaded by the U.S.
Stephen
The only morally clean way is to avoid using RIAA products.
If you had a sleazy farmer would you have a right to take and keep part of his crops for the year (I mean he can grow more- it's not like you took his right to grow corn- only an instance of his corn).
I'm not morally clean myself-- but the world is so grey these days, it is hard to be without feeling like a sucker.
Keep in mind that legal and illegal do not equal moral and immoral. The underlying principle is that it is their song and they have the right to never release it or to release it under certain conditions. We grant them short term monopolies so they will release them. They are trying to convert them into longer term monopolies.
My feeling is once a few dozen people have made each made a year's income ($100k) off of a single song, then that song has been paid for and is in the public domain. They don't have a moral right to make 8 billion bucks off of a song (in my opinion).
If it were cheap enough, I would have this for all my short trips and reserve my regular car for longer trips.
While a particular policeman may or may not abuse the system, as a class, policeman have well-documented history of every kind of abuse possible. It is reasonable to assume, that as a class, they will similarly abuse any future systems. I can see them using these systems to track their spouses and children for example. I can see them erasing their own entries or having some way of evading the tracking system.
I see the issue is the efficiency of it.
Because even now a policeman might remember seeing a red dodge charger in a driveway last week that was a associated with a crime today.
The end result tho is them tracking us 24/7- no privacy.
And in all likelyhood policemen and government officials will have something in the law so their own tags are immunized from this process. Just like it turns out all of our local government officials do not pay tolls in their private vehicles recently.
Dude.
If they do kill people, it would be part of N.Z. government policy anyway.
Sheesh.
Given two equally skilled players, the only difference is their personalities.
At the top level of play the players skill levels are essentially equal so psychology and luck of the draw is all that matters.
Just like there may be a million universes where life didn't start... there are probably hundreds stories of good wizard boys who die or are corrupted before they succeed in Rowling's universe. The story of harry is of that one lucky one who made it to the end.
Wow!
That's cool- it really looks like she had the ending seven years ago.
Nice Find!
I have plenty of experience in Windows (and DOS before that back to "Rise of the Triad").
For the last three or four years, setting it up consists of plugging in the cable in the back, right clicking on the machine and saying what to share.
For the other machines, I have to know to click on the network icon and browse local computers. Otherwise everything is wonderful networky goodness.
I do not have to deal with Active directory. I agree that the professional business environments for both are non-trivial and would not be as simple to set up (and may be roughly the same difficulty to set up).
I'm only talking about a small home network set up. I haven't had a windows network issue in my home environment for years.
I want to be able to easily take my linux box-- plug it into the switch-- and then we can play games or swap files. I'm sure by 2010 I will be on Linux. I'm actively going to O/S agnostic applications and have been for a few years now. There will be almost no change in my user experience the day I swap out the O/S. I forgot to mention firefox above i think but one of the main reasons I use it is that it's on linux.
My software stack is almost all OS agnostic- except Corel Draw and Corel Photo Paint.
Actually, if you have over a 10% negative response rate, the result is generally bad. Les Gibson in "How to be People Smart" says you will be perceived as a negative person that people do not want to deal with or be friends with if you are negative more than 10% of the time. People generally like to be around people that are pleasant and agree with them. You have to build up a bit of positive credit before you can let loose with a "No."
It takes a lot of positive, supportive words and deeds to guide people to do things. Most people collapse very easily in the face of any challenge, negativity, or rudeness. They are typically very brittle about it too- they think and act like they are completely committed but after 10-20 minutes of seriously struggling with something they are done and want to quit and never deal with it again.
While you may relentlessly attack Linux issues, how well do you handle a single social rejection? A single rude comment by a new group of friends? Perhaps a single failure at trying a new activity like dancing or wood-carving. Learning slow dancing was one of the hardest things I've ever done emotionally- Linux doesn't even compare.
Similarly, a person who is trying out Linux can be turned away by a single negative response. Linux is not their passion. They are just mildly interested in it and a surprisingly small amount of rudeness can drive them away.
And there you have Windows, all cuddly and friendly (and Mac- even MORE cuddly and friendly) waiting with open arms for them.
So what I am hearing is folks would be happy if ATI would make a linux only card that they published full accurate interface specs for and provided a skeletal driver (40 to 120 hours of coding max but functional) with source code which the community would finish and implement all the features that minimal driver did not implement.
To me that seems reasonable. The only thing I disagreed with was expecting the company to pay someone six months salary to develop code and then give it away. The company would not waste any effort on developing the software perhaps 40 hours of one coder.
I'm not sure the community would deliver but it seems like the cost to ATI would be minor and would likely be covered by the additional hardware sales.
I think as the hardware gets more stable this kind of thing may happen anyway. Computers are not changing as fast as they used to.
I am headed towards linux.
Here is what I want when I finally get there.
I want my three machines to all talk to each other automagically like my windows boxes do so I can easily move stuff around.
I want to be able to view video (I use videolan so it that will be a no brainer).
I want a p2p application that works well (I use azureus- so no brainer tho I hear there is better).
I want an easy to use graphics editor (Gimp isn't cutting it).
I want an easy to use video editor (???)
I want an easy to use office suite (Openoffice has come a long way-- not quite there yet but 99.9%-- i think as of release 2.4 it will be where i require it)
I want an easy to use sound editor (Audacity is super-- and on linux too so good there)
I want usb drives and a color laser printer that works.
The biggest problem I had last time with linux is that it didn't "just work". Windows "just works" and the two times I have had a problem in 12 years of windows usage, I called up- paid my $35 and Microsoft fixed it (heroically in one case- they had 5 engineers including a couple senior ones on the call last time - spent several hours).
Microsoft has very good customer service compared to Sony (who I despise and will never buy another product from- haven't since 2000 when customer service was actually insulting). Linux has no customer service. It has a large community of experts who often act like Sony customer service to people who do not have a clue.
So I guess what I need most of all to finish the move to Linux is a community of people who are friendly to and supportive of absolute beginners. They have most of the hardware and software options I need. It's just the people treatment and skills mostly now (and a good easy to use graphic editor).
is equivalent to "dumping" the product.
It is also equivalent to Microsoft giving a huge subsidy to companies that compete with us. My company spends a couple million a year on Microsoft licenses. I'm sure they would be ecstatic to hear that their indian and chinese competitors are getting the same software for free.
Yet another reason for them to move everything except the executives over to india and china.
No. I think immel got to the root of the problem best.
This is a combined hardware/software package.
The hardware without the driver is worthless therefore the driver has value.
Given complete specs of the hardware, it becomes possible to make a knockoff.
In the US they have it set up so that they have to vote Aagainst their pay raises or they automagically get them when they give other federal employees raises.
The faulty mod was referring to making the original author I was responding to "flamebait."
He was expressing an opinion- it wasn't flamebait. We have a lot of crappy down-modding to censor people at Slashdot over the last 12 months. I disagree with down-modding opinions you dislike. "Troll" should be reserved for posts like that "gay nigger" guy who tried to first post everything. The grandparents post was on topic and a legitimate opinion.
I can see your point that if they would release the hardware specs then you could write your own drivers. As long as it is about you writing your own drivers from scratch, I'm for that. Asking them to pay someone to write a driver and then release the driver and the code is what I disagreed with.
Um. If the source code is available, I just gave up any ability to be further compensated.
Except for "thank you". I can't put food on the table with "Thank you".
Perhaps part of the issue is that open source drivers could be written to do anything.
Various legal restrictions currently require that hardware does less than it is capable of.
With open drivers, the hardware could do everything- even if it broke the law.
I have a music player-- it won't let me copy songs off it to the hard drive.
OTH, if i take out the memory card and put it in a card reader, I can copy the songs off.
So the restriction on the music player is really stupid. But they did it anyway. Probably for legal reasons.
Another faulty mod at slashdot...
Your opinion is that only open free code is of value.
However, in the real world, a lot of things won't get done unless someone is compensated in some way.
Over 45 years, I've seen that most people who declare things should be free do not contribute a bit of their time to help things be free. They want to be compensated for their time but they want to get everything free.
Given a choice between no driver and a closed driver that works and is installed as a binary object, I have to disagree with you.
Since ATI is a hardware company, I think they'd be foolish to ignore a rapidly growing portion of the market to sell their hardware too. However, if that market doesn't buy enough cards to pay the salary ($150k a year with benefits) of the driver developer then ATI is being extremely rational to blow them off. $150k would probably require a minimum of 20k card sales per year on linux boxes.
A law that has 90% support is likely to be fundamental magna carta type stuff or mob rule type stuff (anti-communism comes to mind). The second is a bit disturbing and happens now. The fundamental stuff like murder, bribery and so on should not have to be repassed because you run into situations where they screw up and a murderer gets off because it wasn't illegal to commit murder for a few weeks until they repassed the laws.
Stuff like that actually happens right now when some of these temporary laws expire.
It's a benign one, but in the end, you have no rights. They can do anything they want to you without notice at any time and your only option is to stop participating.