Again you seem to be ignoring the points that I'm making: 1. That the story did not just 'break' now, it was well known at the time of its occurance, by a wide circle of people. It bubbled onto the rader of mass media under vague headlines of CIA discontent with pressurce from the administration.
2. The systematic supression, and attempts at supression created an atmosphere of self-censoring. Here the censor does not need to censor all mediums, the behaviour is internalised after few examples and setting up of the environment. But I don't think this is all that relevant, more importantly, even if there were partisan reasons for appeareance as you say, you are avoiding the issue, it is whether the statements and attitude taken by this administration contradicts the reality of the dissent at the time. It is impossible to conclude otherwise, than the positive.
Although all forms of political commentary is abhorent to me, I must insist that the issue here is not only that they (the administration) made a mistake based on the mistake of others, which is what Ms. Rice and you are now defending ('people are still debating this'), it is the one-sided push for war and destruction which Mr. Cheney ('irrfutable evidence'), and Ms. Rice ('only really suited for nuclear weapons programs') and the relegation of alternate views, or the very existence of alternate views, as opposed to the actual, and important, alternate views that did exist, which were not countenanced publicly by this administration. Now (if I were to use your method, or as you like to slander Occam by, 'Occam's Razor' which in actuallity is: 'one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything' [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/OCCAMRAZ.html]), I would wonder why, so conveniently, the Administration refused to show information, which just happened to go against the case that they had already decided upon. One wonders.
Note: I do not know or care about the 'Bush Guard Records' issue, to me it is a non-issue, not related to policy and current executive action.
The post above is naive and simplistic to the point of being an embarrasing joke. It ignores the definite rumblings of protest, both overt and covert that arose during the build up to the war, and afterwards, from both the CIA, and other intelligence sources.
The post malevolently misconstrues the nature of this administrations tactical history, where viscious, if vapid criticism is the norm. Examples are plenty, but the Plame case is an excellent case in point.
The post above also misunderstands, and so confuses the nature of the new security/polical nexus that has developed in Washington, where 'people should watch what they say' is, or at least was, an offical position. It is as if Saddam accused his accusors of lacking credibility by saying, 'well why didn't you complain earlier? and not anonymously?' when they were under his brutal regime.
The fact is this: the above post is disingeniously simplistic and partisan, it is sickening. It is also ironic, that a post decrying a lack of credibility, itself undercuts its own crediility through sheer, unmitigated tendentiosnes.
Again things are being politicised by posters like the one above. This isn't a question of whether the 'opposing side' lied, or would have lied in the same way. They might have, but that is, for this issue, that is the killing and maiming of humans (Iraqi and American, and members of the 'Coalition of the Willing.'), under purposefully false, purposefully misleading pretences, lies, fabrications. This is the issue, not some partisan bickering. That is an attempt to deviate attention away. It is dispicable.
Perfect: 'Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil.'
Is there anything more pathetic then restricting oneself from opposing views? Well, perhaps trying to impose 'democracy' in a state we don't understand, isn't ready for it, and perhaps doesn't even want it. And of course, this new 'democracy' should have an 'Exclude Anti-US, Anti-US-Puppet-Government' section in all its media.
Your fundemental argument here is incorrect. Although you make a good point which in itself is not incorrect neither is it the correct response. What the original poster is reffering to is the aggregate quality and focus on the quality of code.
This pertains to large companies, where if there was a set linit to speed (i.e the effective implementation of new-exciting-revolutionary features would take a backseat as what becomes possible is limited by speed). This does not entail the end of computing evolution however as the concentration of coders, ideas-people, marketers, consumers, managers and Board of directors would focus on the next step in the evolution of computing into the next century.
Case in point: a lot of coding books 4+ years old (and up to this day for some) emphasise sitting down with pen and paper to work out an algorithm. This is a remanent of the "hardware-era" of the past, where computer resource time was much more expensive then human resource time. Now at the start of the third mellenium the opposite is true.
The future is "information applications". At the risk of sounding very much like a maketing hypeist... the future will move to offering the average consumer what the need, want and understand. What they do not understand is the assembler code for the x86 architecture. What they do understand is the $ sign on e-commerce websites. This is the future as computers become even more pervaisive and ubiquitous with day-to-day tasks.
Hence naturally if software becomes the most important cash-cow for companies and firms in the future, where do you think the research dollars are going to go? On new software methodolgies or creating a new thermal compound to reduce the heat of chips ? Sure this does not discount the fact that hardware is the fundemental base upon which technology is built upon and will be in the future, but the quility of code is horrendous in its current form. Money goes to where money is needed.
The GIMP is definitely one of the jewels in the open source crown, but the distance between stable realeases is a worrying factor. As with the 2.2 Kernel the 1.2 GIMP seems to have taken a very long time in deveopment.
Linus has pointed out the increased activity in bug fixing and less on features adding to current Kernel builds to reduce release time cycles. This is a very good thing. As what is the point of having excellent and reveloutionary features when the users cannot get a hold of a stable product to utilise ? The GIMP is a prime target for such a criticism.
As mentioned in the article (though a little short) 0.99 took a long time to mature. Condsidering the complexity and simply the number of features that were integrated into the product this is quite understandable. Though a cleaner and more functional interface (a common complaint from profesional users) would have been desired over some of the more esotoric features.
The feature list for 1.2 is simply mind-boggling. That a team of open source developers could achieve so much in a 0.2 realease. It shows the effective and effecient and creative nature of open source projects. Though this realease could easily be a 1.4 realease. And if so, we could have had a 1.2 realease 2 months back. Most users i know would be most happy with the ability to use atleast half of thee new feautures in a stable realease 2 months back rather then wait on for this long. Finally i must stress that i fully support the GIMP projects as it clearly shows to the world the productivity of open source and "free" software and any complaints i have made are from a satisfie user.
GNOME, BASH, GPG are open source projects. Mozilla has just recently (& i mean recently started recieving help from the open source community). The lacklustre support that they attained during the initial development stages of the project was due to Netscape having open sourced the project in theory only though in actuality 80% of the developers were inhouse. This plainly goes to show that Mozilla has not been the most widely accepted open source project.
Though why you accept the fact unconditionally that open source automatically means an excellent project i do not quite comprehend. Though i am in total support of mozilla development as it is one of the fundemental tools required in the coming expansion of the Information age. Also i have total respect for open source devlopment strategies, but i do not suffer from the illusions that all open source code is by its very definition perfect.
Also my worry is that most of the decisions about marketing (& considering the power of the marketing department of the the techies in most companies) that AOL will suddenly decide before initial realease to integrate their IM with Mozilla to increase market share. Who is going to say no and achieve a no from them ? The 30 developers who commited hours upon hours of free time on it ? Trust me... AOL wont care.
I realise this. Though i was commenting on what they should not do in the future. Not what is being done right now. Though the chance of capturing even a little market share of the huge IM and to a lesser extent the IRC market maybe a little to much potential profit to pass up for AOL.
I think it's very important for Netscape (or is this really going to AOL ? If so i might as well give up now.) to have clear goals for mozilla. Adding to the already totally rewritten codebase, third party products of dubious quality or usability seems a littly pointless.
From the start as i understood it, the goals for mozilla was to have a very fast layout engine (NGLayout is brilliant) and a thin footprint. That is exactly what most serious users want out of this client. A stable and speedy browser, not bloatware.
Though i do understand that the target market includes many users who do not spend over 5 hours a day on the internet or hacking their 1980's tape kernel drivers for linux. Any such addons such as an instant messager should be a seperate entity that can be downloaded if required.
All the hard work has nearly been done, do not wreck it with bloatware or a by diluting the original worthy goals.
I must take the liberty of warning potential readers of my comment, it's going to be a cliche reaction to a cliche occurance with cliche participants.
Being an Australian (yeah right Kangaroos. Let's move on.) I care nought that the Australian government has data on me. Why ? Due to the simple fact that they are incompentant. Our ASIO is the laughing stock of the spy world. Also we lack terrorists and unibomabers and psychos and serial killers (well not in abundence anyway, though i think Tasmania might have a Serial Killers guild). Even so the collection of data on an individual is one the most worrying things that has and will come out of the computer revolution.
The fundemental power that is provided by digital data storing is centralised & integrated relational databases. One of the computers greatest strength is to collate, sort, modify, control and generally keep track of huge amounts of data. Though the real danger comes when all these seperate databases are collected together and integrated. Then truly can your privacy be shot to bits. The tax department recieves daily updates from you insurance company and your work. You said you haden't worked for a month due to penis extension surgery. Wrong. They have it in their records.
Sure it could be argued that if your innocent then you have nothing to hide. But once this infrastructure geets put into place it could be used for massively distructive purposes by the wrong people. So what have the Israeli military hackers been doing lately ? And what platform are these systems on ? It seems the NSA have such a good relationship with Microsoft, maybe the NSA spies are playing Solataire as we speak...
There is no such thing as an innocent invasion of privacy.
Reassuring for all the freakled 16 year old anti-socilites, sitting in their darkned bedrooms. Busily preparing themselves for the day technology rules and they become the rulers.
Computing is the next step in human evolution . True ? I believe so, but can human evolution be controlled by a handful of charasmatic, singleminded, power-hungry, egotistical evangilists ? Aren't we as a species as a culture as a civilisation greater then this ? When one company controls 90% market share for a product essential to the operation of the single most important tool for out advancement, can we truly believe ourselves to be free ?
The G4 is a new processor. A new way of imprinting etchings on a piece of silicon. There are greater forces at play here.
Reassuring for all the freakled 16 year old anti-socilites, sitting in their darkned bedrooms. Busily preparing themselves for the day technology rules and they become the rulers.
Computing is the next step in human evolution . True ? I believe so, but can human evolution be controlled by a handful of charasmatic and singleminded evangilists ? Aren't we as a species as a culture as a civilisation greater then this ? When one company controls 90% market share for a product essential to the operation of the single most important tool for out advancement, can we truly believe ourselves to be free ?
The G4 is a new processor. A new way of imprinting etchings on a piece of silicon. There are greater forces at play here.
Considering what kind of freedom we had with the source code when StarDivision was in control... effectively Zero. Complaining about what we haven't gained seems a little imature & premature as this story is far from over (infact the license has not come into effect as yet) and other developments might heareld a more open view on StarOffice's availability.
Also the sheer impossible hope that Sun was going to pay a half a billion dollars for a company to effectively "open source" it would have been delusional. It just does not work that way with entities whose prime function is to make a profit period. In this age of wall street highs, exploding growth in technological industries and cannabalising mergers and takeovers, it hardly seems realistic to think that Sun would only rely on indirect methods of revenue from the product. I would not be amazed to hear after StartOffice has gained sufficent market share that Sun started charging a nominal fee for the currently free version.
Seriously, how much are they going to make from workstation and server sales because some individuals have StarOffice at home ? Though I do not want to give the false impretion that I feel negatively about this whole affair. It was a brave move on their part to invest in this product and realease the code, though under their restricted license. My dad always said don't look a gift horse in the mouth. While we haven't got the ideal situation in terms of source code. Showing Sun what the excellent Open Source communitu can do with their code might convince them to give us a chance.
Though the colour of money is green and everybody lacks some green in their lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Again you seem to be ignoring the points that I'm making:
1. That the story did not just 'break' now, it was well known at the time of its occurance, by a wide circle of people. It bubbled onto the rader of mass media under vague headlines of CIA discontent with pressurce from the administration.
2. The systematic supression, and attempts at supression created an atmosphere of self-censoring. Here the censor does not need to censor all mediums, the behaviour is internalised after few examples and setting up of the environment. But I don't think this is all that relevant, more importantly, even if there were partisan reasons for appeareance as you say, you are avoiding the issue, it is whether the statements and attitude taken by this administration contradicts the reality of the dissent at the time. It is impossible to conclude otherwise, than the positive.
Although all forms of political commentary is abhorent to me, I must insist that the issue here is not only that they (the administration) made a mistake based on the mistake of others, which is what Ms. Rice and you are now defending ('people are still debating this'), it is the one-sided push for war and destruction which Mr. Cheney ('irrfutable evidence'), and Ms. Rice ('only really suited for nuclear weapons programs') and the relegation of alternate views, or the very existence of alternate views, as opposed to the actual, and important, alternate views that did exist, which were not countenanced publicly by this administration. Now (if I were to use your method, or as you like to slander Occam by, 'Occam's Razor' which in actuallity is: 'one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything' [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/OCCAMRAZ.html]), I would wonder why, so conveniently, the Administration refused to show information, which just happened to go against the case that they had already decided upon. One wonders.
Note: I do not know or care about the 'Bush Guard Records' issue, to me it is a non-issue, not related to policy and current executive action.
The post above is naive and simplistic to the point of being an embarrasing joke. It ignores the definite rumblings of protest, both overt and covert that arose during the build up to the war, and afterwards, from both the CIA, and other intelligence sources.
The post malevolently misconstrues the nature of this administrations tactical history, where viscious, if vapid criticism is the norm. Examples are plenty, but the Plame case is an excellent case in point.
The post above also misunderstands, and so confuses the nature of the new security/polical nexus that has developed in Washington, where 'people should watch what they say' is, or at least was, an offical position. It is as if Saddam accused his accusors of lacking credibility by saying, 'well why didn't you complain earlier? and not anonymously?' when they were under his brutal regime.
The fact is this: the above post is disingeniously simplistic and partisan, it is sickening. It is also ironic, that a post decrying a lack of credibility, itself undercuts its own crediility through sheer, unmitigated tendentiosnes.
untimely.net
Again things are being politicised by posters like the one above. This isn't a question of whether the 'opposing side' lied, or would have lied in the same way. They might have, but that is, for this issue, that is the killing and maiming of humans (Iraqi and American, and members of the 'Coalition of the Willing.'), under purposefully false, purposefully misleading pretences, lies, fabrications. This is the issue, not some partisan bickering. That is an attempt to deviate attention away. It is dispicable.
untimely.net
Perfect: 'Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil.'
Is there anything more pathetic then restricting oneself from opposing views? Well, perhaps trying to impose 'democracy' in a state we don't understand, isn't ready for it, and perhaps doesn't even want it. And of course, this new 'democracy' should have an 'Exclude Anti-US, Anti-US-Puppet-Government' section in all its media.
After all, it's the American Way(tm).
There is glut of emotional responses here without a hint of factual backup. Here are your answers.
Stuff computing, we accountants have been harshly treated by hollywood media moguls for ages, give us a break, we're interesting!! honest.
(Making a profession look interesting is very difficult to do.)
Your fundemental argument here is incorrect. Although you make a good point which in itself is not incorrect neither is it the correct response. What the original poster is reffering to is the aggregate quality and focus on the quality of code.
This pertains to large companies, where if there was a set linit to speed (i.e the effective implementation of new-exciting-revolutionary features would take a backseat as what becomes possible is limited by speed). This does not entail the end of computing evolution however as the concentration of coders, ideas-people, marketers, consumers, managers and Board of directors would focus on the next step in the evolution of computing into the next century.
Case in point: a lot of coding books 4+ years old (and up to this day for some) emphasise sitting down with pen and paper to work out an algorithm. This is a remanent of the "hardware-era" of the past, where computer resource time was much more expensive then human resource time. Now at the start of the third mellenium the opposite is true.
The future is "information applications". At the risk of sounding very much like a maketing hypeist... the future will move to offering the average consumer what the need, want and understand. What they do not understand is the assembler code for the x86 architecture. What they do understand is the $ sign on e-commerce websites. This is the future as computers become even more pervaisive and ubiquitous with day-to-day tasks.Hence naturally if software becomes the most important cash-cow for companies and firms in the future, where do you think the research dollars are going to go? On new software methodolgies or creating a new thermal compound to reduce the heat of chips ? Sure this does not discount the fact that hardware is the fundemental base upon which technology is built upon and will be in the future, but the quility of code is horrendous in its current form. Money goes to where money is needed.
The GIMP is definitely one of the jewels in the open source crown, but the distance between stable realeases is a worrying factor. As with the 2.2 Kernel the 1.2 GIMP seems to have taken a very long time in deveopment.
Linus has pointed out the increased activity in bug fixing and less on features adding to current Kernel builds to reduce release time cycles. This is a very good thing. As what is the point of having excellent and reveloutionary features when the users cannot get a hold of a stable product to utilise ? The GIMP is a prime target for such a criticism.
As mentioned in the article (though a little short) 0.99 took a long time to mature. Condsidering the complexity and simply the number of features that were integrated into the product this is quite understandable. Though a cleaner and more functional interface (a common complaint from profesional users) would have been desired over some of the more esotoric features.
The feature list for 1.2 is simply mind-boggling. That a team of open source developers could achieve so much in a 0.2 realease. It shows the effective and effecient and creative nature of open source projects. Though this realease could easily be a 1.4 realease. And if so, we could have had a 1.2 realease 2 months back. Most users i know would be most happy with the ability to use atleast half of thee new feautures in a stable realease 2 months back rather then wait on for this long. Finally i must stress that i fully support the GIMP projects as it clearly shows to the world the productivity of open source and "free" software and any complaints i have made are from a satisfie user.
I somehow doubt a windows user is going to start passing compilation options to their GCC.
GNOME, BASH, GPG are open source projects. Mozilla has just recently (& i mean recently started recieving help from the open source community). The lacklustre support that they attained during the initial development stages of the project was due to Netscape having open sourced the project in theory only though in actuality 80% of the developers were inhouse. This plainly goes to show that Mozilla has not been the most widely accepted open source project.
Though why you accept the fact unconditionally that open source automatically means an excellent project i do not quite comprehend. Though i am in total support of mozilla development as it is one of the fundemental tools required in the coming expansion of the Information age. Also i have total respect for open source devlopment strategies, but i do not suffer from the illusions that all open source code is by its very definition perfect.
Also my worry is that most of the decisions about marketing (& considering the power of the marketing department of the the techies in most companies) that AOL will suddenly decide before initial realease to integrate their IM with Mozilla to increase market share. Who is going to say no and achieve a no from them ? The 30 developers who commited hours upon hours of free time on it ? Trust me... AOL wont care.
I realise this. Though i was commenting on what they should not do in the future. Not what is being done right now. Though the chance of capturing even a little market share of the huge IM and to a lesser extent the IRC market maybe a little to much potential profit to pass up for AOL.
I think it's very important for Netscape (or is this really going to AOL ? If so i might as well give up now.) to have clear goals for mozilla. Adding to the already totally rewritten codebase, third party products of dubious quality or usability seems a littly pointless.
From the start as i understood it, the goals for mozilla was to have a very fast layout engine (NGLayout is brilliant) and a thin footprint. That is exactly what most serious users want out of this client. A stable and speedy browser, not bloatware.
Though i do understand that the target market includes many users who do not spend over 5 hours a day on the internet or hacking their 1980's tape kernel drivers for linux. Any such addons such as an instant messager should be a seperate entity that can be downloaded if required.
All the hard work has nearly been done, do not wreck it with bloatware or a by diluting the original worthy goals.
I must take the liberty of warning potential readers of my comment, it's going to be a cliche reaction to a cliche occurance with cliche participants.
Being an Australian (yeah right Kangaroos. Let's move on.) I care nought that the Australian government has data on me. Why ? Due to the simple fact that they are incompentant. Our ASIO is the laughing stock of the spy world. Also we lack terrorists and unibomabers and psychos and serial killers (well not in abundence anyway, though i think Tasmania might have a Serial Killers guild). Even so the collection of data on an individual is one the most worrying things that has and will come out of the computer revolution.
The fundemental power that is provided by digital data storing is centralised & integrated relational databases. One of the computers greatest strength is to collate, sort, modify, control and generally keep track of huge amounts of data. Though the real danger comes when all these seperate databases are collected together and integrated. Then truly can your privacy be shot to bits. The tax department recieves daily updates from you insurance company and your work. You said you haden't worked for a month due to penis extension surgery. Wrong. They have it in their records.
Sure it could be argued that if your innocent then you have nothing to hide. But once this infrastructure geets put into place it could be used for massively distructive purposes by the wrong people. So what have the Israeli military hackers been doing lately ? And what platform are these systems on ? It seems the NSA have such a good relationship with Microsoft, maybe the NSA spies are playing Solataire as we speak...
There is no such thing as an innocent invasion of privacy.
sorry.
Computers == freedom
A well used line.
Reassuring for all the freakled 16 year old anti-socilites, sitting in their darkned bedrooms. Busily preparing themselves for the day technology rules and they become the rulers.
Computing is the next step in human evolution . True ? I believe so, but can human evolution be controlled by a handful of charasmatic, singleminded, power-hungry, egotistical evangilists ? Aren't we as a species as a culture as a civilisation greater then this ? When one company controls 90% market share for a product essential to the operation of the single most important tool for out advancement, can we truly believe ourselves to be free ?
The G4 is a new processor. A new way of imprinting etchings on a piece of silicon. There are greater forces at play here.
A well used line.
Reassuring for all the freakled 16 year old anti-socilites, sitting in their darkned bedrooms. Busily preparing themselves for the day technology rules and they become the rulers.
Computing is the next step in human evolution . True ? I believe so, but can human evolution be controlled by a handful of charasmatic and singleminded evangilists ? Aren't we as a species as a culture as a civilisation greater then this ? When one company controls 90% market share for a product essential to the operation of the single most important tool for out advancement, can we truly believe ourselves to be free ?
The G4 is a new processor. A new way of imprinting etchings on a piece of silicon. There are greater forces at play here.
Considering what kind of freedom we had with the source code when StarDivision was in control... effectively Zero. Complaining about what we haven't gained seems a little imature & premature as this story is far from over (infact the license has not come into effect as yet) and other developments might heareld a more open view on StarOffice's availability.
Also the sheer impossible hope that Sun was going to pay a half a billion dollars for a company to effectively "open source" it would have been delusional. It just does not work that way with entities whose prime function is to make a profit period. In this age of wall street highs, exploding growth in technological industries and cannabalising mergers and takeovers, it hardly seems realistic to think that Sun would only rely on indirect methods of revenue from the product. I would not be amazed to hear after StartOffice has gained sufficent market share that Sun started charging a nominal fee for the currently free version.
Seriously, how much are they going to make from workstation and server sales because some individuals have StarOffice at home ? Though I do not want to give the false impretion that I feel negatively about this whole affair. It was a brave move on their part to invest in this product and realease the code, though under their restricted license. My dad always said don't look a gift horse in the mouth. While we haven't got the ideal situation in terms of source code. Showing Sun what the excellent Open Source communitu can do with their code might convince them to give us a chance.
Though the colour of money is green and everybody lacks some green in their lives.