"If they really cared about the internet and such, we would have people like Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds (oh yeah, and CowboyNeal and CmdrTaco and...)"
The upcoming election in South Carolina is so hopelessly depressing that I'd welcome the addition of a CowboyNeal option:
Who should be governor?
( ) Mark Sanford (Republican) ( ) Jim Hodges (Democrat) (X) CowboyNeal is my candidate of choice!
Don't worry -- this will pass soon, and then Slashdot readers will quit making fun of New Jersey and go back to doing what they do best: making fun of the Slashdot editors.
On a serious note, I do understand how you feel. When I went to school in Minnesota, all the tasteless Southern jokes really started to piss me off. I think it works like this:
Rule 1: Making fun of someone else's state is condescending and can piss people off.
Rule 2: Making fun of your own state is OK because, since you live there too, there's not so much condescention (how do you spell that?) involved.
Rule 3: It is always appropriate, no matter what the circumstance, to make fun of France and the French.
I hate everything about Microsoft and use Gentoo Linux as my main desktop OS. However, when I need Windows I need Windows, so I've had to install Windows 2000 on one of my computers.
Upgrading from a fresh install to SP3 wasn't very difficult at all for me. I downloaded and ran the installer, rebooted, and then promptly turned off the stupid auto-update thingy. It didn't take long at all, and compared to the trouble of repartitioning my drives to make room for a new OS, tracking down ethernet and video drivers, and actually installing the OS, applying SP3 was trivial. Of course, not being an NT guru, there's a good chance that I'm missing something important, but it does seem that people are too quick to badmouth Microsoft.
In fact, as far as Windows goes, Windows 2000 isn't that bad. After installing Mozilla, OpenOffice, and some other goodies, I've got a pretty decent setup. I still think Linux is much, much better for many, many reasons, but not giving Microsoft credit when it's due doesn't do anyone any good.
I actually agree that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that most of what passes for ethical relativism is a bunch of crap. My complaint about Enterprise is that, when the show tackles some moral issue, its treatment of that issue tends to be simplistic and preachy. If something isn't interesting, challenging, or educational, it probably isn't very good entertainment.
The Next Generation did a much better job of handling moral questions. Picard knows when to repsect foreign customs, but there are a couple of times in TNG when he has to decide whether the ethical relativism of the Prime Directive is more important than his own personal sense of right and wrong. And Picard violates the Prime Directive at least twice in order to do the right thing. But there is always some discussion of the moral complexities involved. You don't really see that in Enterprise.
"The Q and the Borg are races that humans should look up to!"
No, the Q and the Borg are even more self-serving than the humans on Enterprise are. Captain Archer may be ethnocentric, but he doesn't conquer and enslave the planets he visits (like the Borg), and he doesn't torture and experiment with innocent people like Q does.
I agree with you that Star Trek has a "my way or the highway" approach to morality, and that it's especially heavy-handed in Enterprise. Even when Archer goes through that apology ritual, he only does it to get the equipment, not because he actually cares that he offended the inhabitants of that planet they were visiting.
On the other hand, though, I think the fact that the humans are immature, ethnocentric, and a bit xenophobic is important to the series. They've only recently developed the ability to explore space and Archer and his crew are the first humans to encounter all these different cultures. It makes sense, then, that the Enterprise crew lacks the sophistication to interact well with other species.
What bothers me about Enterprise is that the character development is so heavy-handed. Like the whole Archer-T'Pal sexual tension thing. On TNG, you had occasional sexual tension between Picard and Dr. Crusher, but that was generally very subtle. On Enterprise, though, we're treated to Archer's bizarre sexual fantasies in which he and T'Pal basically fuck in the Detox chamber. Also, the whole crew-comeraderie thing is really sloppy. Lt. Reed complains about the lack of structure and discipline on Enterprise, then calls Hoshi Sato "Hoshi" rather than "Ensign Sato," and calls T'Pal "T'Pal" instead of "Subcommander T'Pal." It just doesn't gel.
But the worst part about Enterprise is, of course, the lame-ass time-travel episodes. I change the station every time they do that shit in Voyager and TNG, but when Enterprise started out, the central conflict of the show was this stupid "Temporal Cold War." Fuck that. If you're going to have a time travel episode, it had better involve travelling back to the early 21st century to bitchslap Rick Berman for writing such corny scripts.
Listen up, SEAN COMBS. You owe me for having to put up with your over-sampled, entirely lifted 'music'. You are an excellent example of how 'the public' will eat anything put in front of them, including a steaming bowl of crap.
In Midwest or South you can earn mere 55k while in California you may get whopping $80k for almost the same job.
Yes, but at least in the South, money goes a long way. Someone making $55k in Spartanburg SC is probably living more comfortably than someone earning $80k in the Bay Area. Of course, I'd take California over South Carolina any day, under almost any circumstance, but that's just me.
In my previous post, I admitted to being not very familiar with the creation or destruction of new elements, and now that you mention it, I see some value in the pursuit. But scientists (and all academics) have a tendency to research only the things that interest them and to publish the results only to their academic peers. The fruits of the research never leave the Ivory Tower.
This is fine if the scholars are going to pay for everything themselves, but if they use scarce public resources to conduct their research, they have a responsibility to give back to the public. It doesn't need to be a marketable or practical payback, but real people in the real world ought to wiser as a result of the work that scholars do.
Scientists are actually pretty good about giving back, but the current state of some disciplines is just disgraceful. Philosphers, for example, seem to have totally abandoned their responsibility to the public that funds their research.
"it is possible to develop an internally consistent cosmology that does have the Earth at its center, with the Sun and the rest of the planets orbiting us. It is based on a model initially proposed by the astronomer Tycho Brahe."
They teach Tycho Brahe's system in school, but you have to take a college astronomy course to hear about it. Brahe had access to the best empirical data that could be gathered with the naked eye (he collected it himself). This was the data that Kepler used to formulate his view that planets orbit in elipses rather than circles. But since Brahe didn't have access to telescopes, his data still wasn't all that great.
The advent of telescopes made it possible to collect data that was even better than what Brahe had collected. Once you have telescopes, you have the ability to see the shadows that the sun casts on planets as they (or the sun, if that makes you happy) move around. I forget the exact situation, but someone was able to observe a shadow that, due to the angles involved, was impossible in a geocentric system, even in Brahe's.
Though Brahe's system failed, I heard from a retired math professor that you can construct a complete mathematical model of planetary movement by assuming that, instead of living on the surface of a sphere, we live on the inside of a sphere, with the sun at the center. I don't know anything about this, though, and can't explain how or if it works.
While I understand the need to search for near-earth asternoids (the extinction of the human species doesn't appeal to me), there should be some resources reserved for projects like SETI. In retrospect, when we think of the greatest achivements of science, more often than not we think of the advances that changed, in a fundamental way, our understanding of the natural world. I don't see how knowing that the earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around made anyone's life better at the time, but the proof of this ranks as one of the greatest achievements in human history because it revolutionized the way we thought about God, ourselves, and the world we live in.
I think that the discovery of an extraterrestial civilization would be an achievement on par with the proof of heliocentrism. Knowing that there are civilizations on other planets would have no immediate practical consequences (we wouldn't be able to travel to their planet and meet them), but the knowledge that we aren't the only civilized species would radically alter the way that we think about the world, especially in terms of theology and metaphysics.
What I, in my ignorance, consider to be a waste of resources is the development of new elements. This is something that has no practical value and no effect on our worldview. Creating new elements in particle accelerators must be very, very expensive, and the finished product only lasts for a short period of time. Even if they found that, somewhere down the line, element 315 is stable, it wouldn't matter because they're making these things one atom at a time. If element 315 had an atomic mass of 700, they'd have to produce something like 8x10^20 atoms just to get a gram of it. I vote that we take their grant money and use it to search for near-earth asteroids.
And it's their own fault that no one refers to the GNU project by name. GNU is a stupid-sounding name to begin with, and their made-up pronunciation (Guh-New) is counterintuitive and only makes their name even less attractive. I deeply respect the work that the FSF has done, and I have nothing but praise for the actual software they've written. But the fact is that if you want to sell your product, it really helps to have a cool name for it, or at least not a stupid name.
"Linux" is a great name. It sounds fast and high tech. When you attach "Guh-New" to the front, it loses its sex appeal. Geeks night not care, but when you're pitching Linux to your PHB (or your PHB's PHB), these trivial cosmetic things matter.
It's not just the FSF -- many free software projects have totally brain-dead names. Like the GIMP. The GIMP is an awesome product, and many of the K12 schools that spend a zillion dollars for a single copy of Photoshop that everyone has to share could outfit their entire computer lab with the GIMP for free. But as soon as the teacher walks into the classroom and says, "All right kids, let's fire up the GIMP..." every kid in the room who's seen Pulp Fiction is going to burst out laughing. Then parents might get pissed because it isn't politically correct to have a program named "GIMP" loaded on school computers. Advocates of Free Software in the classroom would do the world a great service if they repackaged the GIMP and gave it a new, school-safe name.
Free Software developers need to start thinking about more than just making cool-ass software. They need to think about how they want to present their software to the public. If they don't start thinking about their images, Free Software will never break out of the server room.
One of the better "scamming the scammers" exchanges is documented here.
He plays along with the scammer, and when asked for a scan of his passport, he photoshops together a passport belonging to James Tiberius Kirk, complete with a picture of William Shatner in a Starfleet uniform. I can imagine someone trying to use that to get across the border....
"You would think... that a perosn in a law firm would be smart enough to figure this out...."
She was only a secretary at the law firm, so I don't imagine that she would have had any legal training herself. Not that it's an excuse -- she's still more stupid than stupid itself for falling for such an old scam.
"This is a very American thing. I hate to say that the influence of it, like patents and copyrights and all the other stuff you guys are perpetrating down there, is starting to poison us elsewhere."
Do they not have elections where you live? The American people are responsible for what has happened in America, but we don't vote in Canadian, Australian, or European elections, so what happens there isn't our fault.
Of course, the United States has a lot of political and economic power, and we use that to pressure other countries into doing what we want. This puts Europe (as an example) in the difficult position of having to choose whether to cave in or to stick up for itself. However, there is a choice, and if Europeans choose poorly, it's their own fault.
"Much of the world would like America's prosperity and much of the world envies it. Well, these are the sorts of things you have to do if you want that prosperity."
Saying that in order to be as prosperous as the US, you have to do everything the American way is like saying that since Grandpa Earl smoked a pack a day and lived to be 100, the secret to long life is to chain smoke. Perhaps NDAs and aggressive IP laws contributed to our prosperity, but perhaps if we didn't have those things, we'd be even more prosperous. Things are too complicated to easily determine what has and hasn't contributed to our success.
I think that there's something essentially un-American about aggressive IP laws. I understand the need to foster creativity, but no one owes anyone else a living. If I rip off your copyrighted work, then you have the right to track me down and prosecute me. But laws like the DMCA restrict consumer choice and consumer freedom based on something that they might do in the future -- this really is an attack on our freedom. Corporations and individuals ought to have IP rights, but the responsibility of looking after those rights belongs to the patent/copyright holder, not to Congress, and not to the regular law-abiding citizen. I don't download MP3's and DIVX movies, and I shouldn't have to be penalized for someone else's problem. If they can't or don't want to track down individual violations, then they should change their business model. No one put guns to the heads of Hollywood execs and told them to make movies.
I played a shitload of Metal Gear Solid 2 when it first came out, and was surprised at all of the product placement for FHM. In fact, you could actually collect issues of FHM that are laying around the facility and leave them on the floor to distract the porn-loving guards. What they really needed in MGS2 was White Castle. When Snake finds and eats a bag of White Castle sliders, his health should immediately drop by 75%, and he should start dropping ass, thereby alerting guards to his presence.
It's too late for MGS2, but I think it would be hillarious to see Sims characters getting bellyaches from eating too much nasty-ass fast food.
"I think RPM's are better for the casual user (note I think of casual as inexperienced)."
I suppose that the word casual does imply a lack of experience. By casual use, I meant that you use Linux on your computer, but you don't want to fool with it too much. For the experienced user who uses his computer casually, RPM can be overkill. Instead of searching rpmfind.net for the correct RPMs, you could just download the tarball from SourceForge and just./configure, make, make install. But for the inexperienced user (who doesn't care much about flexibility), RPM and Red Carpet can be just want they need.
Yeah, I can kinda see that. Compared to OpenBSD, Debian, or Gentoo, Red Hat seems bloated, bland, and corporate. When using the newer versions of Red Hat, I don't quite know what's installed on my system and I feel alienated from my computer and from my OS -- which is one reason why I don't like running Windows on my machines. I can't explain it, but Red Hat just isn't fun anymore. Lately, when I screw around with computers, I'd rather screw around with Gentoo or BSD.
But that's where the comparison between Red Hat and Microsoft ends. Sure, Red Hat can act unilaterally and piss lots of people off (GCC 2.96), but they're generally good corporate citizens. They make their ISOs freely available for download, even though they aren't obligated to do so (hell, even OpenBSD refuses to release official ISOs on their FTP site). They don't launch campaigns to embrace-and-extend Debian and Gentoo into existence. They don't charge K-12 schools assloads of money for site licenses and threaten to audit them if they don't pay up.
Red Hat's freely available, easy-to-use software is what enabled me to learn how to program. I'd always been interested in programming, but didn't know where to start and could never afford Windows compilers. Red Hat 5.0 provided an easy-to-use (by 1998 standards!) introduction to UNIX and Perl which ultimately led me to switch my major to CS. I know Debian is freely available, but try doing an FTP install over the phone line. I've since abandoned Red Hat in favor of Gentoo, but it's my experience with Red Hat that gave me the technical proficiency to install and manage Gentoo and, most importantly, to realize that Gentoo suits my needs better than Red Hat in the first place.
As much as I disagree with some of the design decisions that Red Hat has made, I think that their distribution is a fine product. I think RPM can be overkill for the casual user, but if you're an admin for a sizeable institution (I'm not, but I used to work for someone who was), and you've got Linux boxes scattered all over the place, Red Hat's package management is a good way to keep things syncronized. If I ever end up as a sysadmin in a similar situation, I'd very likely deploy Red Hat, just as they did.
Red Hat isn't perfect and it's totally legitimate to blame them when they do something that you think is dumb. But they aren't nearly as bad as Microsoft.
"It only runs on one platform?! Someone better alert the mono team!"
Until Mono is finished, C# only runs on one platform. While the Mono project appears to be going well, they've still got a lot to do before they're ready for prime time.
Slashdot Mirror
"If they really cared about the internet and such, we would have people like Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds (oh yeah, and CowboyNeal and CmdrTaco and...)"
The upcoming election in South Carolina is so hopelessly depressing that I'd welcome the addition of a CowboyNeal option:
Who should be governor?
( ) Mark Sanford (Republican)
( ) Jim Hodges (Democrat)
(X) CowboyNeal is my candidate of choice!
[VOTE] [Results] [Polls]
Your vote (3) has been registered.
Steve
Don't worry -- this will pass soon, and then Slashdot readers will quit making fun of New Jersey and go back to doing what they do best: making fun of the Slashdot editors.
On a serious note, I do understand how you feel. When I went to school in Minnesota, all the tasteless Southern jokes really started to piss me off. I think it works like this:
Rule 1: Making fun of someone else's state is condescending and can piss people off.
Rule 2: Making fun of your own state is OK because, since you live there too, there's not so much condescention (how do you spell that?) involved.
Rule 3: It is always appropriate, no matter what the circumstance, to make fun of France and the French.
Steve
I hate everything about Microsoft and use Gentoo Linux as my main desktop OS. However, when I need Windows I need Windows, so I've had to install Windows 2000 on one of my computers.
Upgrading from a fresh install to SP3 wasn't very difficult at all for me. I downloaded and ran the installer, rebooted, and then promptly turned off the stupid auto-update thingy. It didn't take long at all, and compared to the trouble of repartitioning my drives to make room for a new OS, tracking down ethernet and video drivers, and actually installing the OS, applying SP3 was trivial. Of course, not being an NT guru, there's a good chance that I'm missing something important, but it does seem that people are too quick to badmouth Microsoft.
In fact, as far as Windows goes, Windows 2000 isn't that bad. After installing Mozilla, OpenOffice, and some other goodies, I've got a pretty decent setup. I still think Linux is much, much better for many, many reasons, but not giving Microsoft credit when it's due doesn't do anyone any good.
Steve
I actually agree that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that most of what passes for ethical relativism is a bunch of crap. My complaint about Enterprise is that, when the show tackles some moral issue, its treatment of that issue tends to be simplistic and preachy. If something isn't interesting, challenging, or educational, it probably isn't very good entertainment.
The Next Generation did a much better job of handling moral questions. Picard knows when to repsect foreign customs, but there are a couple of times in TNG when he has to decide whether the ethical relativism of the Prime Directive is more important than his own personal sense of right and wrong. And Picard violates the Prime Directive at least twice in order to do the right thing. But there is always some discussion of the moral complexities involved. You don't really see that in Enterprise.
Steve
"The Q and the Borg are races that humans should look up to!"
No, the Q and the Borg are even more self-serving than the humans on Enterprise are. Captain Archer may be ethnocentric, but he doesn't conquer and enslave the planets he visits (like the Borg), and he doesn't torture and experiment with innocent people like Q does.
I agree with you that Star Trek has a "my way or the highway" approach to morality, and that it's especially heavy-handed in Enterprise. Even when Archer goes through that apology ritual, he only does it to get the equipment, not because he actually cares that he offended the inhabitants of that planet they were visiting.
On the other hand, though, I think the fact that the humans are immature, ethnocentric, and a bit xenophobic is important to the series. They've only recently developed the ability to explore space and Archer and his crew are the first humans to encounter all these different cultures. It makes sense, then, that the Enterprise crew lacks the sophistication to interact well with other species.
What bothers me about Enterprise is that the character development is so heavy-handed. Like the whole Archer-T'Pal sexual tension thing. On TNG, you had occasional sexual tension between Picard and Dr. Crusher, but that was generally very subtle. On Enterprise, though, we're treated to Archer's bizarre sexual fantasies in which he and T'Pal basically fuck in the Detox chamber. Also, the whole crew-comeraderie thing is really sloppy. Lt. Reed complains about the lack of structure and discipline on Enterprise, then calls Hoshi Sato "Hoshi" rather than "Ensign Sato," and calls T'Pal "T'Pal" instead of "Subcommander T'Pal." It just doesn't gel.
But the worst part about Enterprise is, of course, the lame-ass time-travel episodes. I change the station every time they do that shit in Voyager and TNG, but when Enterprise started out, the central conflict of the show was this stupid "Temporal Cold War." Fuck that. If you're going to have a time travel episode, it had better involve travelling back to the early 21st century to bitchslap Rick Berman for writing such corny scripts.
Steve
"I was under the impression that it was the Video Tape that would kill the Box Office."
Not quite. Video Killed the Radio Star.
(-1 Lame Joke)
Steve
Listen up, SEAN COMBS. You owe me for having to put up with your over-sampled, entirely lifted 'music'. You are an excellent example of how 'the public' will eat anything put in front of them, including a steaming bowl of crap.
Hey, watch it, pal! Do not disturb the sexy!
Steve
In Midwest or South you can earn mere 55k while in California you may get whopping $80k for almost the same job.
Yes, but at least in the South, money goes a long way. Someone making $55k in Spartanburg SC is probably living more comfortably than someone earning $80k in the Bay Area. Of course, I'd take California over South Carolina any day, under almost any circumstance, but that's just me.
Steve
Better yet, is there a way to dual-boot Solaris and Linux in such a way that the two OSs can share the same /home partitions?
Steve
In my previous post, I admitted to being not very familiar with the creation or destruction of new elements, and now that you mention it, I see some value in the pursuit. But scientists (and all academics) have a tendency to research only the things that interest them and to publish the results only to their academic peers. The fruits of the research never leave the Ivory Tower.
This is fine if the scholars are going to pay for everything themselves, but if they use scarce public resources to conduct their research, they have a responsibility to give back to the public. It doesn't need to be a marketable or practical payback, but real people in the real world ought to wiser as a result of the work that scholars do.
Scientists are actually pretty good about giving back, but the current state of some disciplines is just disgraceful. Philosphers, for example, seem to have totally abandoned their responsibility to the public that funds their research.
Steve
"it is possible to develop an internally consistent cosmology that does have the Earth at its center, with the Sun and the rest of the planets orbiting us. It is based on a model initially proposed by the astronomer Tycho Brahe."
They teach Tycho Brahe's system in school, but you have to take a college astronomy course to hear about it. Brahe had access to the best empirical data that could be gathered with the naked eye (he collected it himself). This was the data that Kepler used to formulate his view that planets orbit in elipses rather than circles. But since Brahe didn't have access to telescopes, his data still wasn't all that great.
The advent of telescopes made it possible to collect data that was even better than what Brahe had collected. Once you have telescopes, you have the ability to see the shadows that the sun casts on planets as they (or the sun, if that makes you happy) move around. I forget the exact situation, but someone was able to observe a shadow that, due to the angles involved, was impossible in a geocentric system, even in Brahe's.
Though Brahe's system failed, I heard from a retired math professor that you can construct a complete mathematical model of planetary movement by assuming that, instead of living on the surface of a sphere, we live on the inside of a sphere, with the sun at the center. I don't know anything about this, though, and can't explain how or if it works.
Steve
While I understand the need to search for near-earth asternoids (the extinction of the human species doesn't appeal to me), there should be some resources reserved for projects like SETI. In retrospect, when we think of the greatest achivements of science, more often than not we think of the advances that changed, in a fundamental way, our understanding of the natural world. I don't see how knowing that the earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around made anyone's life better at the time, but the proof of this ranks as one of the greatest achievements in human history because it revolutionized the way we thought about God, ourselves, and the world we live in.
I think that the discovery of an extraterrestial civilization would be an achievement on par with the proof of heliocentrism. Knowing that there are civilizations on other planets would have no immediate practical consequences (we wouldn't be able to travel to their planet and meet them), but the knowledge that we aren't the only civilized species would radically alter the way that we think about the world, especially in terms of theology and metaphysics.
What I, in my ignorance, consider to be a waste of resources is the development of new elements. This is something that has no practical value and no effect on our worldview. Creating new elements in particle accelerators must be very, very expensive, and the finished product only lasts for a short period of time. Even if they found that, somewhere down the line, element 315 is stable, it wouldn't matter because they're making these things one atom at a time. If element 315 had an atomic mass of 700, they'd have to produce something like 8x10^20 atoms just to get a gram of it. I vote that we take their grant money and use it to search for near-earth asteroids.
Steve
"Will they make alliances with each other and scheme to get the other scientists?"
They're academics, aren't they?
Steve
And it's their own fault that no one refers to the GNU project by name. GNU is a stupid-sounding name to begin with, and their made-up pronunciation (Guh-New) is counterintuitive and only makes their name even less attractive. I deeply respect the work that the FSF has done, and I have nothing but praise for the actual software they've written. But the fact is that if you want to sell your product, it really helps to have a cool name for it, or at least not a stupid name.
"Linux" is a great name. It sounds fast and high tech. When you attach "Guh-New" to the front, it loses its sex appeal. Geeks night not care, but when you're pitching Linux to your PHB (or your PHB's PHB), these trivial cosmetic things matter.
It's not just the FSF -- many free software projects have totally brain-dead names. Like the GIMP. The GIMP is an awesome product, and many of the K12 schools that spend a zillion dollars for a single copy of Photoshop that everyone has to share could outfit their entire computer lab with the GIMP for free. But as soon as the teacher walks into the classroom and says, "All right kids, let's fire up the GIMP..." every kid in the room who's seen Pulp Fiction is going to burst out laughing. Then parents might get pissed because it isn't politically correct to have a program named "GIMP" loaded on school computers. Advocates of Free Software in the classroom would do the world a great service if they repackaged the GIMP and gave it a new, school-safe name.
Free Software developers need to start thinking about more than just making cool-ass software. They need to think about how they want to present their software to the public. If they don't start thinking about their images, Free Software will never break out of the server room.
Steev
One of the better "scamming the scammers" exchanges is documented here.
He plays along with the scammer, and when asked for a scan of his passport, he photoshops together a passport belonging to James Tiberius Kirk, complete with a picture of William Shatner in a Starfleet uniform. I can imagine someone trying to use that to get across the border....
"You would think ... that a perosn in a law firm would be smart enough to figure this out...."
She was only a secretary at the law firm, so I don't imagine that she would have had any legal training herself. Not that it's an excuse -- she's still more stupid than stupid itself for falling for such an old scam.
Steve
At least he admits that he's biased.
Steve
"This is a very American thing. I hate to say that the influence of it, like patents and copyrights and all the other stuff you guys are perpetrating down there, is starting to poison us elsewhere."
Do they not have elections where you live? The American people are responsible for what has happened in America, but we don't vote in Canadian, Australian, or European elections, so what happens there isn't our fault.
Of course, the United States has a lot of political and economic power, and we use that to pressure other countries into doing what we want. This puts Europe (as an example) in the difficult position of having to choose whether to cave in or to stick up for itself. However, there is a choice, and if Europeans choose poorly, it's their own fault.
Steve
"Much of the world would like America's prosperity and much of the world envies it. Well, these are the sorts of things you have to do if you want that prosperity."
Saying that in order to be as prosperous as the US, you have to do everything the American way is like saying that since Grandpa Earl smoked a pack a day and lived to be 100, the secret to long life is to chain smoke. Perhaps NDAs and aggressive IP laws contributed to our prosperity, but perhaps if we didn't have those things, we'd be even more prosperous. Things are too complicated to easily determine what has and hasn't contributed to our success.
I think that there's something essentially un-American about aggressive IP laws. I understand the need to foster creativity, but no one owes anyone else a living. If I rip off your copyrighted work, then you have the right to track me down and prosecute me. But laws like the DMCA restrict consumer choice and consumer freedom based on something that they might do in the future -- this really is an attack on our freedom. Corporations and individuals ought to have IP rights, but the responsibility of looking after those rights belongs to the patent/copyright holder, not to Congress, and not to the regular law-abiding citizen. I don't download MP3's and DIVX movies, and I shouldn't have to be penalized for someone else's problem. If they can't or don't want to track down individual violations, then they should change their business model. No one put guns to the heads of Hollywood execs and told them to make movies.
Steve
I played a shitload of Metal Gear Solid 2 when it first came out, and was surprised at all of the product placement for FHM. In fact, you could actually collect issues of FHM that are laying around the facility and leave them on the floor to distract the porn-loving guards. What they really needed in MGS2 was White Castle. When Snake finds and eats a bag of White Castle sliders, his health should immediately drop by 75%, and he should start dropping ass, thereby alerting guards to his presence.
It's too late for MGS2, but I think it would be hillarious to see Sims characters getting bellyaches from eating too much nasty-ass fast food.
Steve
I'd spend my money on a 2400 baud modem -- high speed internet access is the future....
"I think RPM's are better for the casual user (note I think of casual as inexperienced)."
./configure, make, make install. But for the inexperienced user (who doesn't care much about flexibility), RPM and Red Carpet can be just want they need.
I suppose that the word casual does imply a lack of experience. By casual use, I meant that you use Linux on your computer, but you don't want to fool with it too much. For the experienced user who uses his computer casually, RPM can be overkill. Instead of searching rpmfind.net for the correct RPMs, you could just download the tarball from SourceForge and just
Steve
"Red Hat is the Microsoft of the Linux world."
Yeah, I can kinda see that. Compared to OpenBSD, Debian, or Gentoo, Red Hat seems bloated, bland, and corporate. When using the newer versions of Red Hat, I don't quite know what's installed on my system and I feel alienated from my computer and from my OS -- which is one reason why I don't like running Windows on my machines. I can't explain it, but Red Hat just isn't fun anymore. Lately, when I screw around with computers, I'd rather screw around with Gentoo or BSD.
But that's where the comparison between Red Hat and Microsoft ends. Sure, Red Hat can act unilaterally and piss lots of people off (GCC 2.96), but they're generally good corporate citizens. They make their ISOs freely available for download, even though they aren't obligated to do so (hell, even OpenBSD refuses to release official ISOs on their FTP site). They don't launch campaigns to embrace-and-extend Debian and Gentoo into existence. They don't charge K-12 schools assloads of money for site licenses and threaten to audit them if they don't pay up.
Red Hat's freely available, easy-to-use software is what enabled me to learn how to program. I'd always been interested in programming, but didn't know where to start and could never afford Windows compilers. Red Hat 5.0 provided an easy-to-use (by 1998 standards!) introduction to UNIX and Perl which ultimately led me to switch my major to CS. I know Debian is freely available, but try doing an FTP install over the phone line. I've since abandoned Red Hat in favor of Gentoo, but it's my experience with Red Hat that gave me the technical proficiency to install and manage Gentoo and, most importantly, to realize that Gentoo suits my needs better than Red Hat in the first place.
As much as I disagree with some of the design decisions that Red Hat has made, I think that their distribution is a fine product. I think RPM can be overkill for the casual user, but if you're an admin for a sizeable institution (I'm not, but I used to work for someone who was), and you've got Linux boxes scattered all over the place, Red Hat's package management is a good way to keep things syncronized. If I ever end up as a sysadmin in a similar situation, I'd very likely deploy Red Hat, just as they did.
Red Hat isn't perfect and it's totally legitimate to blame them when they do something that you think is dumb. But they aren't nearly as bad as Microsoft.
Steve
"Put it on something that can't be digitally extracted."
8-tracks, baby!
"It only runs on one platform?! Someone better alert the mono team!"
Until Mono is finished, C# only runs on one platform. While the Mono project appears to be going well, they've still got a lot to do before they're ready for prime time.
Steve