Sure - if the software fits the clients needs (as is). Or the client has the money, or charm, to get the developer or a programmer to get the software to work or to add needed features.
Isn't that dilemma what every client faces with every IT implementation? Either find some off-the-shelf software (whether commercial or open-source) and adapt your needs/business model to that, or hire developers to write/customize solutions to fit your needs/business model.
In the second case, you need to hire developers anyway. In the first, open source at least gives you the option of making any modifications you want if you need them, where with commercial solutions you are bound by whatever the software provider allows.
AIDS _and_ climate prediction? Which client is that? And how do they determine which is more important, the AIDS or the climate prediction? or do they just split it 50-50?
but if all they're doing is saying "hey bud, your front door is unlocked, just ta let ya know..."
Personally, I wouldn't like it at all if the cops went around checking my front door to see if it were locked (especially if they did not obtain my consent to do). Of course, that differs a bit from scanning for open wireless access points because checking my front door requires them to trespass on my property.
My bigger issue with the wireless scanning would be paying these public servants with my tax dollars for what I see as entire waste of their time. But it's still a little more Big Brother-ish than I'm comfortable with.
If the guy is fresh out of college, then he should know a few people who at least minored in graphic design who'd be happy to have something to put in their portfolio, one would think.
A couple suggestions...
1) Yellow is a poor choice of background color.
2) OpenOffice has a nicely designed logo for its splash screen. Why not follow the graphic design already suggested by the product? The overall look of the ad is more appropriate for a used car lot or a bail bondsman.
3) Instead of focusing only on freedom, how about something for the more practically minded, like mentioning how the MS Office can often cost more than the computer it runs on.
4) Get a few more people involved (including some folks OUTSIDE the FOSS community) and brainstorm a bit.
And here I was thinking all this time that all these FOSS references related to the American composer Lukas Foss.
Then again, I spent several years under the assumption that the Internet was inhabited by disproportionately large numbers of Lol Coxhill fans, so maybe I'm just a little slow on the uptake.
I think you misunderstood me, I was agreeing with you. I was merely further pointing out the absurd circular logic of that type of ad hominem. The guy didn't address the argument other than to make an ad hominem, which was solely based upon the argument he didn't address.
I suspect you are indeed part of the majority which dismisses arguments based on who is making the argument and not based on the merrits of that argument.
...and, in circular fashion, bases the dismissal of the person making the argument on that argument alone, again without any critical thought applied to the argument itself.
...how embarrasing would it be if the human race were wiped out by cute robot dogs?
Yeah, it would be embarrassing, but you can take some consolation knowing that they would eventually end up at the bottom of a frozen ocean, gazing at the Blue Hydrant for eternity.
Ad agencies have evolved into social parasites, latching to every spontaneous trend in order to suck coin from us, finally kill it with opportunism and cynicism. To my mind they are far more harmful than purveyors of video games, depictions of violence, porn, or all the other typical boogey-men, not the least for the fact we're continually exposed to their prevarications from the moment we're first dropped in front of the television.
By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.
No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.
Seriously though, if you are, do.
Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers. Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.
A couple of nits on this, though I think we are for the most part eye-to-eye...
That's incorrect. My late Grandmother, who was born in 1903 and died in 2003, gave me the lowdown on prohibition. Before prohibition, few women drank, and no women drank publically.
Well, slightly incorrect. Had I written "eligible voters" instead of "adult Americans", I'd have been correct, since women did not yet have the right to vote when Prohibition was passed. Since the original point was about the electorate assenting to a law against something the majority of them do, I'd say the point still stands.
But you are correct that Prohibition ushered in social acceptance of women drinking in public.
You say "Perhaps even during it," there was a marked rise in drinking during prohibition. You don't have to take my (or Grandma's) word for it, look up the statistics on how many drank before then after prohibition.
The statistics I've seen showed that alcohol usage did not return to its pre-Prohibition levels until WWII. For instance, see here.
I never seen any statistic that showed a rise in drinking during Prohibition. Any such "statistic" is fairly meaningless anyway; just like the illegal drug usage surveys today, the only way to track an illicit activity is to ask people "Have you committed a felony today?"
I doubt anyone at all refrained from drinking during prohibition.
I don't doubt that some people refrained from drinking, just as I don't doubt that the drug laws deter some people from using drugs. The problem is that the people who will be deterred will entirely consist of light to moderate users, i.e., the people who are the least part of the "problem" that you're trying to address. That's how prohibitions work, take an activity that is harmless to most people but detrimental to a few, restrict the freedom of those who aren't the problem, and heap endless amounts of negative social consequences on those who don't comply to "save them from themselves." Oh, and as a side benefit, expand police state powers while guaranteeing a generous revenue stream to organized crime.
Actually, I just re-read that and even what I meant to say was unclear. I meant to say 2/3 of both houses of Congress and 2/3 of the all state legislatures.
But you are correct it is 3/4 of the state legislatures, 38 of 50 as of now.
The whole of Hollywood is about 10 Billion. Video games are about 10 billion, Porn is about 12 billion, Music is about 6 billion.
Interesting...
Based on those numbers, I'd say it's reasonable to assume that porn is a very large (if not maybe the largest) category of pirated copyright infringement. (Can't imagine much argument with that on/.)
So, in the name of the Equal Portection Clause, I want to see those "porn artists" get the same level of government assistance and publicity to protect their intellectual property as they give to the RIAA and MPAA. It's only fair.
Semantics of 'War on Terror' aside, the fact that it is unwinnable (which would be eliminating terrorism forever), in no way makes it a more or less worthy cause.
...until those "bad semantics" allow you conflate your rhetorical pseudo-war with an actual war, to the point where a leader can assume actual war powers for something we know will never end. Now however worthy a cause you may have had has transformed into a government in a perpetual state of actual war.
It's pretty stupid to claim that if we had a war on porn, then 70% of the population would be criminals. If 70% of the population supported porn in a democracy that criminalized porn, then they would be a shining example of stupidity in action.
Think about alcohol Prohibition. Before and after Prohibition, a majority of adult Americans drank alcohol at least occasionally. (Perhaps even during it, though we'll never know.) Yet the idea was popular enough to get passed via constitutional amendment, requiring the approval of two thirds of both houses of Congress AND all the state legislatures. Not that it wasn't stupid, it was *so* stupid that 13 years later it became the only amendment ever repealed.
Never underestimate the ability of the American electorate to be precisely that stupid.
Eventually it was discovered That God Did not want us to be All the same
This was Bad News For the Governments of The World As it seemed contrary To the doctrine of Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly If The Future Was going to work
Various ways were sought To bind us all together But, alas Same-ness was unenforcable
It was about this time That someone Came up with the idea of Total Criminalization
Based on the principle that If we were All crooks We could at least be uniform To some degree In the eyes of The Law
Shrewdly our legislators calculated That most people were Too lazy to perform a Real Crime So new laws were manufactored Making it possible for anyone To violate them any time of the day or night, And Once we had all broken some kind of law We'd all be in the same big happy club Right up there with the President The most excalted industrialists, And the clerical big shots Of all your favorite religions
Total Criminalization Was the greatest idea of its time And was vastly popular Except with those people Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be Tricked Into It... Which is one of the reasons why Music Was eventually made Illegal.
--Frank Zappa (from the booklet of Joe's Garage, Acts II & III - 1979)
Actually, Google doesn't pay for a lot of its traffic because of their extensive peering arrangements with ISPs around the world.
People keep bringing this up, and I will readily admit that I don't really understand the whys and hows of peering arrangements.
However, from the Wikipedia article...
Peer (or swap) - Two networks exchange traffic between each other's customers freely, and for mutual benefit.
Obviously, if all these peering arrangements are greatly reducing Google bandwidth costs, then those providers must be gaining some perceived benefit or they wouldn't do so. As such Google is bartering that perceived benefit in exchange for that traffic, and thus are paying *something* for it, even if it's not cash.
I've found the accuracy of Google Maps and Google Earth to be quite variable. Just the satellite images alone...some places you can zoom in and see people, some places you can hardly discern the roads. Perhaps poor resolution and poor alignment are related?
First of all, I think this is a dubious solution. While it could very well make software less buggy, it would likely also curtail technological innovation by driving the QA cost of developing any new software functionality (commercial or open source) through the roof.
But since legal liability tends to chase those with the deepest pockets, I can see where the commercial closed source software vendor would face the greatest exposure to expensive litigation from "bug liability". Distributed development processes that are not centrally owned by one company (i.e., open source) could very well be the only way to get anything new written without facing expensive litigation.
Not that I think any of this is a remote possibility, but it could very well cause the opposite of what TFA speculates.
people leaving their systems on overnight for the sake of 20 seconds in the morning are wasting energy and money.
As a developer who routinely has a crapload of apps open at any given time, a reboot is often times more than "the sake of 20 seconds". It means all my open applications are shut down, many of which will not automatically restart and/or not reopen all of the documents I had open. For me, from a productivity standpoint the difference between logging off/shutting down overnight as opposed to sleep mode/leaving it running is as much as 15-30 minutes of trying to figure out where I left off compared to everything being exactly as I left it the night before.
Software as a service plainly doesn't make sense for word processing or spreadsheets.
Even if "Office-as-a-service" made sense from the users' perspective (and I'd agree that it doesn't), I think it would be disaster for Microsoft.
How many rarely or never used $300+ Office suite licenses has Microsoft sold over the years? If Office becomes subscription based and "pay as you use", they lose the the lion's share of that revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that dilemma what every client faces with every IT implementation? Either find some off-the-shelf software (whether commercial or open-source) and adapt your needs/business model to that, or hire developers to write/customize solutions to fit your needs/business model.
In the second case, you need to hire developers anyway. In the first, open source at least gives you the option of making any modifications you want if you need them, where with commercial solutions you are bound by whatever the software provider allows.
The client is BOINC.
You can run a number of different projects concurrently, and choose what percentage of your computer's resources are allocated to each.
Personally, I wouldn't like it at all if the cops went around checking my front door to see if it were locked (especially if they did not obtain my consent to do). Of course, that differs a bit from scanning for open wireless access points because checking my front door requires them to trespass on my property.
My bigger issue with the wireless scanning would be paying these public servants with my tax dollars for what I see as entire waste of their time. But it's still a little more Big Brother-ish than I'm comfortable with.
If the guy is fresh out of college, then he should know a few people who at least minored in graphic design who'd be happy to have something to put in their portfolio, one would think.
A couple suggestions...
1) Yellow is a poor choice of background color.
2) OpenOffice has a nicely designed logo for its splash screen. Why not follow the graphic design already suggested by the product? The overall look of the ad is more appropriate for a used car lot or a bail bondsman.
3) Instead of focusing only on freedom, how about something for the more practically minded, like mentioning how the MS Office can often cost more than the computer it runs on.
4) Get a few more people involved (including some folks OUTSIDE the FOSS community) and brainstorm a bit.
What part of producing an xml document "requires" Java?
This was inevitable, but good job.
And here I was thinking all this time that all these FOSS references related to the American composer Lukas Foss.
Then again, I spent several years under the assumption that the Internet was inhabited by disproportionately large numbers of Lol Coxhill fans, so maybe I'm just a little slow on the uptake.
I think you misunderstood me, I was agreeing with you. I was merely further pointing out the absurd circular logic of that type of ad hominem. The guy didn't address the argument other than to make an ad hominem, which was solely based upon the argument he didn't address.
...and, in circular fashion, bases the dismissal of the person making the argument on that argument alone, again without any critical thought applied to the argument itself.
Yeah, it would be embarrassing, but you can take some consolation knowing that they would eventually end up at the bottom of a frozen ocean, gazing at the Blue Hydrant for eternity.
Microsoft ED-209...And beware the stairs...
Fires chairs, done in by stairs...
I love it.
PLEASE PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON. YOU HAVE 20 SECONDS TO COMPLY.
By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.
No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.
Seriously though, if you are, do.
Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers. Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.
-- Bill Hicks
A couple of nits on this, though I think we are for the most part eye-to-eye...
Well, slightly incorrect. Had I written "eligible voters" instead of "adult Americans", I'd have been correct, since women did not yet have the right to vote when Prohibition was passed. Since the original point was about the electorate assenting to a law against something the majority of them do, I'd say the point still stands. But you are correct that Prohibition ushered in social acceptance of women drinking in public.
The statistics I've seen showed that alcohol usage did not return to its pre-Prohibition levels until WWII. For instance, see here.
I never seen any statistic that showed a rise in drinking during Prohibition. Any such "statistic" is fairly meaningless anyway; just like the illegal drug usage surveys today, the only way to track an illicit activity is to ask people "Have you committed a felony today?"
I don't doubt that some people refrained from drinking, just as I don't doubt that the drug laws deter some people from using drugs. The problem is that the people who will be deterred will entirely consist of light to moderate users, i.e., the people who are the least part of the "problem" that you're trying to address. That's how prohibitions work, take an activity that is harmless to most people but detrimental to a few, restrict the freedom of those who aren't the problem, and heap endless amounts of negative social consequences on those who don't comply to "save them from themselves." Oh, and as a side benefit, expand police state powers while guaranteeing a generous revenue stream to organized crime.
Actually, I just re-read that and even what I meant to say was unclear. I meant to say 2/3 of both houses of Congress and 2/3 of the all state legislatures.
But you are correct it is 3/4 of the state legislatures, 38 of 50 as of now.
Interesting...
Based on those numbers, I'd say it's reasonable to assume that porn is a very large (if not maybe the largest) category of pirated copyright infringement. (Can't imagine much argument with that on /.)
So, in the name of the Equal Portection Clause, I want to see those "porn artists" get the same level of government assistance and publicity to protect their intellectual property as they give to the RIAA and MPAA. It's only fair.
...until those "bad semantics" allow you conflate your rhetorical pseudo-war with an actual war, to the point where a leader can assume actual war powers for something we know will never end. Now however worthy a cause you may have had has transformed into a government in a perpetual state of actual war.
Semantics do matter.
Think about alcohol Prohibition. Before and after Prohibition, a majority of adult Americans drank alcohol at least occasionally. (Perhaps even during it, though we'll never know.) Yet the idea was popular enough to get passed via constitutional amendment, requiring the approval of two thirds of both houses of Congress AND all the state legislatures. Not that it wasn't stupid, it was *so* stupid that 13 years later it became the only amendment ever repealed.
Never underestimate the ability of the American electorate to be precisely that stupid.
Eventually it was discovered
...
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same
This was
Bad News
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly
If
The Future
Was going to work
Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas
Same-ness was unenforcable
It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of
Total Criminalization
Based on the principle that
If we were All crooks
We could at least be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of
The Law
Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
Real Crime
So new laws were manufactored
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President
The most excalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions
Total Criminalization
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be
Tricked Into It
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal.
--Frank Zappa (from the booklet of Joe's Garage, Acts II & III - 1979)
People keep bringing this up, and I will readily admit that I don't really understand the whys and hows of peering arrangements.
However, from the Wikipedia article...
Peer (or swap) - Two networks exchange traffic between each other's customers freely, and for mutual benefit.
Obviously, if all these peering arrangements are greatly reducing Google bandwidth costs, then those providers must be gaining some perceived benefit or they wouldn't do so. As such Google is bartering that perceived benefit in exchange for that traffic, and thus are paying *something* for it, even if it's not cash.
I've found the accuracy of Google Maps and Google Earth to be quite variable. Just the satellite images alone...some places you can zoom in and see people, some places you can hardly discern the roads. Perhaps poor resolution and poor alignment are related?
But since legal liability tends to chase those with the deepest pockets, I can see where the commercial closed source software vendor would face the greatest exposure to expensive litigation from "bug liability". Distributed development processes that are not centrally owned by one company (i.e., open source) could very well be the only way to get anything new written without facing expensive litigation.
Not that I think any of this is a remote possibility, but it could very well cause the opposite of what TFA speculates.
As a developer who routinely has a crapload of apps open at any given time, a reboot is often times more than "the sake of 20 seconds". It means all my open applications are shut down, many of which will not automatically restart and/or not reopen all of the documents I had open. For me, from a productivity standpoint the difference between logging off/shutting down overnight as opposed to sleep mode/leaving it running is as much as 15-30 minutes of trying to figure out where I left off compared to everything being exactly as I left it the night before.
Even if "Office-as-a-service" made sense from the users' perspective (and I'd agree that it doesn't), I think it would be disaster for Microsoft.
How many rarely or never used $300+ Office suite licenses has Microsoft sold over the years? If Office becomes subscription based and "pay as you use", they lose the the lion's share of that revenue.
I certainly don't see enough difference in kind between the two things where one is legal and encouraged and the other risks being declared a felony.