I'm not allowed to sit on the jury for my own court case. It's not sensorship. It's assuring a fair trial by filtering out people who have a high interest in the result. In this case, it's a finacial interest.
Why is it illegal to sell a (much in demand) service in the land of the free?
Abestos removal. You can do it yourself, but you can't do it for other people because of the danger involved with comming in contact with that stuff too much. Also prostitution is often something that people get into without understanding the consequences and often there is a lot of coersion involved too.
... and "Bed" is closer than "Bee" to "Beta", yet everyone says "Bee". At least the American pronunciation of the alphabet is internally consistent.;)
And the great thing is that as far as linguistics is concerned. It doesn't matter. All that matters is how the people use it.
Linguistics is a great field: if you make a mistake once (or just a few times), your wrong; but once you've make a mistake enough times, it's not a mistake anymore, and you become right.
This is even more true when it comes to remembering our history. Ages ago, most of the records were passed no by word of mouth because there was no equipment to right things down on. However, their ability to remember lengthy oral accounts (at least the spirit of it, sometimes the details are muddled) is unmatched by anything we have today. That's why we have a lot of fairly reliable knowledge about the Palistinan guy named Jesus even though writings about him didn't come out for 30-60 years after his death. With other acient figures, like Muhammad and the Greek philosophers, the dates are not so nice (like 200-500 years between death and writings comming about) but the information we have is still fairly good.
As you noted, technology can easily fail us, and when it comes to historical records, when it's gone, it's gone. I'm afraid we might end up through ourselves into a dark age soon enough if were don't careful. Even today there is a lot of uncertainty about events that happened just a few decades ago.
Or wait until GPL v3 is released (is there a set date for that?)?
According to the FSF's website, they are planning to release it next spring. I remember some SUN guy talking about it, and they say they like the GPL3, but they want to open source their stuff now.
Actually, I worked at a school that had many 2000 machines. It had nothing to with paranoid (these guys would have jumped off a cliff if MS asked). It had everything to do with cost, and Microsoft hadn't released anything in the past 7 years that they would find cost-effective.
Me, I've always relied on Larry Wall's script [fsu.edu] exclusively to rename files interactively. Scripts, on the hand, are often best written with/bin/sh in mind, and should as a rule be as simple, clean and efficient as possible.
Wait, first you mention perl, and then you start talking about scripts being simple and clean?
The term "semantic" is very poorly used. Almost, every search engine employs some level of semantics. For example, text that is inside page headers (like <h1> elements) has more importance than other text. Things like meta tags are seached for information. The people who talk about semantic seach engines are really asking for more semantics than currently exist. It's something of a pipe dream though, because it takes a long time to change the way that websites talk to each other.
The point is the message that this brings across. At the moment people are pretty lax about binary dirvers. A ban on them in the vanilla kernel will go a long way in telling the driver vendors to make their specs free or get out of Linux land. Free drivers would be awesome, but I don't know if Linux is strong enough to actually influence the vendors at this point so we might end up with nothing. Plus, implementing this at the code level seems like the wrong place to be doing it. As Linus said, the license ought to control the distribution not the usage.
Yes, but not all the software that OLE interfaces with. I stick a video in an MS Word document, I probably won't be able to open it in Linux. This is a fundamental problem with the way that OLE works, and OLE's goals are incompatible with a standardized document format.
Eventually (I am not kidding) the CIO forbade the use of spreadsheets by the sales people and made them go through accounting instead. Eventually he had the IT staff write a custom app to do the pricing so that business rules could be enforced properly.
Wow, that's impressive. Most management types I know would do everything possible to maintain the status quo. Consider yourself lucky to be working for such a guy.
How do you reach that conclusion? Win9x isn't any more virus prone than WinXP (in fact, you could argue it is less so since it's no longer the main target). As far as bugs, it has it's share, but again, so does WinXP (I just did an fresh install of XP on my wife's computer that didn't take, and is causing all sorts of minor headaches like disabling the sound server every-other time the comp is started).
Security is the excuse that is most commonly given because it's fairly effective in shutting up the dissidents who really have no clue what they're talking about. The reality is it's probably more of a 'how much is it worth to you' issue. Win9x compatibility is nice, but it's a lot of work, and the Firefox devs think that having a faster and more powerful rendering system (cairo) is more important. Porting cairo to Win9x is more work than they're willing to do.
And don't worry about your unfortunate Win9x boxen. I'm pretty sure someone will maintain a patched version of firefox 2 for quite some time.
I doubt this was intentional, but you should be more careful because you are begging the question with your loaded words. The critics of the OLPC gui design are claiming that it is not "more friendly". There is a constant confusion between a GUI that appears friendly and a GUI that is friendly. The difference is subtle, but important. (note: Gnome is my favourite desktop so I'm going to pick on them just to be fair)
It is easy to make a GUI appear friendly:
Draw metaphores from common every-day things
Use cute imagery
Use slang and idiomatic phrases in messages
On the other hand, in order to actually be friendly, it's far more important to:
Use consistent metaphores, and ones that are actually useful. Gnome 2's "applications as objects" failed in this respect. I don't know anyone who likes nautilus when it's not in browser mode. It's a pain dealing with all those windows. Almost all applications behave like traditional applications. Nautilus is the only one that wants to open up a new window every time it does something.
Use obvious and commonly understood imagery. Gnome has been pretty decent with this lately, but a quick look in nautuilus reveals a few offenders: some CUPS thing with text that is a couple pixels wide, the Nmap logo, bug-buddy (interestingly this is a gnome icon, and it violates the gnome HIG), Lyx (I don't know what that animal is supposed to be)
Use clear and consise messages. Avoid words idioms that not all speakers of the language understand. Also avoid words that evoke an emotional response as that tends to confuse things.
That's a great idea, but it's not going to happen overnight. The current metaphore has it's downsides, but it's fairly well understood and supported. In order to replace it, a complete overhaul of the system is required and that will require breaking a lot of things. Most importantly it will break a lot of Human Interface Guidelines requiring users to get used the new metaphore.
Gnome 3 is planning to do something like this, but at the moment they're still planning and brainstorming. If you want more info: google "Topaz Gnome".
Because they chose not to "share" their work, and that's their right. By forcing them to "share" their work, then that's coercision. That's taking somebody's work from them by force. That's very bad.
Your making the assumtion that ideas have ownership. If ideas can't be owned then it's not 'their' work and they have no right as to what others do with the free knowledge.
Ownership is simply an idea that we have contrived because it is economicly useful. There's nothing particularly obvious about it. That's why the Native Americans got pushed around so easily. It didn't make sense to them that land could be owned, so they would trade land for piddly trinkets. It wasn't until later that they understood what the Europeans meant by owning land (The concept of land ownership wasn't useful to the Native Americans because they didn't have a high population density, there was always plenty of free space).
When bugs were found in firefox's rendering engine (see the slashdot formatting bug a while back) they got fixed, rather than the microsoft attitude of "so what, we wont fix it, let them break their site to work with our bugs"
Well, to be fair. There have been a number of outstanding bugs in firefox that have sat around for a long time (but not near as many, and the process is all transparent).
Also Microsoft does have an enormous problem with backwards compatibility issues. You can blame them all you want for stupid people making websites that conform with IE's bugs, but that won't solve the problem. As it is right now, I don't think we can expect IE to drop it's quirks mode any time in the next 7 years. Too many dumb websites would break. Also as long as that quirks mode is available, stupid devs will continue to use it. So you have the bootstraping problem.
Yet you seem determined to put me, the only FOSS-friendly voice in an entire school district, off by calling me an idiot.
The GP was definitly being rude, but you probably don't realize how anoying it can be for students like my younger brother who would love to learn a thing or two about computers, but the school has some retarted Windows setup that won't except anything but Microsoft software.
Of course it's not really your fault. There are a lot of things involved and most system administrators I've met seem to have no desire to learn anything new, so your attitude is commendable. Moving from a Windows based system to anything else is difficult at best.
Well there's nothing stoping you from creating a new ID for every website you log into. So worst case you get the same efficiency as before, with the added advantage of having control over your own passwords instead of having them stored on another (potentially hackable) server.
Of course a more likely sitution is that you'd have an ID that you really didn't care about that you would use for things like slashdot and random websites, another one that you more important things like email, and a third one for you blog or something. How you do it is up to you. That's the point of OpenID.
The author may have wanted to imply a vague concept of access control, for whatever reason.
I doubt it. In Canadian contract law (and I think American too), if part of a contract is vague it counts in favour of the person who didn't write it. In this case that's us (the users). I have a strong feeling that if the DCMA ever got taken to court it would be tossed out fairly quickly. In addition to its senseless wording, it violates Fair Use which is a pretty fundamental aspect of copyright law.
I'm guessing you know almost nothing about web development.
While this is hardly a good excuse, the fact that IE exists means that web technology is at about the year 2000. Anything developed since then is useless to us because IE does not support it. There are also many other cool technologies that we would love to use (like MathML) but can't because IE doesn't support it.
As for IE, there's no excuse for its utter crappiness. It's not like Microsoft is a poor, tiny software company. So sometimes web developers get really annoyed and do something like this. I don't think it's a good idea to intentionaly block any browser, but that's why they do it.
As for me, I develop my site so that it works in any standards-compliant browser and IE users get to see it in all IE's buggy glory (which usually isn't that bad because I know how to avoid the common bugs). If I was getting money from my website I might make some more work to make IE work nicely, but right now I really don't care.
Actually, I think it's more a matter of greed. This particular method is known as Yellow_journalism and it's hardly limited to MS bashing or even the tech sector.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not allowed to sit on the jury for my own court case. It's not sensorship. It's assuring a fair trial by filtering out people who have a high interest in the result. In this case, it's a finacial interest.
Abestos removal. You can do it yourself, but you can't do it for other people because of the danger involved with comming in contact with that stuff too much. Also prostitution is often something that people get into without understanding the consequences and often there is a lot of coersion involved too.
And the great thing is that as far as linguistics is concerned. It doesn't matter. All that matters is how the people use it.
Linguistics is a great field: if you make a mistake once (or just a few times), your wrong; but once you've make a mistake enough times, it's not a mistake anymore, and you become right.
This is even more true when it comes to remembering our history. Ages ago, most of the records were passed no by word of mouth because there was no equipment to right things down on. However, their ability to remember lengthy oral accounts (at least the spirit of it, sometimes the details are muddled) is unmatched by anything we have today. That's why we have a lot of fairly reliable knowledge about the Palistinan guy named Jesus even though writings about him didn't come out for 30-60 years after his death. With other acient figures, like Muhammad and the Greek philosophers, the dates are not so nice (like 200-500 years between death and writings comming about) but the information we have is still fairly good.
As you noted, technology can easily fail us, and when it comes to historical records, when it's gone, it's gone. I'm afraid we might end up through ourselves into a dark age soon enough if were don't careful. Even today there is a lot of uncertainty about events that happened just a few decades ago.
According to the FSF's website, they are planning to release it next spring. I remember some SUN guy talking about it, and they say they like the GPL3, but they want to open source their stuff now.
Actually, I worked at a school that had many 2000 machines. It had nothing to with paranoid (these guys would have jumped off a cliff if MS asked). It had everything to do with cost, and Microsoft hadn't released anything in the past 7 years that they would find cost-effective.
Wait, first you mention perl, and then you start talking about scripts being simple and clean?
The term "semantic" is very poorly used. Almost, every search engine employs some level of semantics. For example, text that is inside page headers (like <h1> elements) has more importance than other text. Things like meta tags are seached for information. The people who talk about semantic seach engines are really asking for more semantics than currently exist. It's something of a pipe dream though, because it takes a long time to change the way that websites talk to each other.
The point is the message that this brings across. At the moment people are pretty lax about binary dirvers. A ban on them in the vanilla kernel will go a long way in telling the driver vendors to make their specs free or get out of Linux land. Free drivers would be awesome, but I don't know if Linux is strong enough to actually influence the vendors at this point so we might end up with nothing. Plus, implementing this at the code level seems like the wrong place to be doing it. As Linus said, the license ought to control the distribution not the usage.
Yes, but not all the software that OLE interfaces with. I stick a video in an MS Word document, I probably won't be able to open it in Linux. This is a fundamental problem with the way that OLE works, and OLE's goals are incompatible with a standardized document format.
Wow, that's impressive. Most management types I know would do everything possible to maintain the status quo. Consider yourself lucky to be working for such a guy.
Security is the excuse that is most commonly given because it's fairly effective in shutting up the dissidents who really have no clue what they're talking about. The reality is it's probably more of a 'how much is it worth to you' issue. Win9x compatibility is nice, but it's a lot of work, and the Firefox devs think that having a faster and more powerful rendering system (cairo) is more important. Porting cairo to Win9x is more work than they're willing to do.
And don't worry about your unfortunate Win9x boxen. I'm pretty sure someone will maintain a patched version of firefox 2 for quite some time.
CTCP is not just a Microsoft thing. http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man7/ctcp.7.html
(That's not to say that Microsoft's implementation isn't completely borked and incompatible with everyone else)
As for CTCP itself, I don't see much use for it, but I could be wrong.
I doubt this was intentional, but you should be more careful because you are begging the question with your loaded words. The critics of the OLPC gui design are claiming that it is not "more friendly". There is a constant confusion between a GUI that appears friendly and a GUI that is friendly. The difference is subtle, but important. (note: Gnome is my favourite desktop so I'm going to pick on them just to be fair)
It is easy to make a GUI appear friendly:
On the other hand, in order to actually be friendly, it's far more important to:
That's a great idea, but it's not going to happen overnight. The current metaphore has it's downsides, but it's fairly well understood and supported. In order to replace it, a complete overhaul of the system is required and that will require breaking a lot of things. Most importantly it will break a lot of Human Interface Guidelines requiring users to get used the new metaphore.
Gnome 3 is planning to do something like this, but at the moment they're still planning and brainstorming. If you want more info: google "Topaz Gnome".
Your making the assumtion that ideas have ownership. If ideas can't be owned then it's not 'their' work and they have no right as to what others do with the free knowledge.
Ownership is simply an idea that we have contrived because it is economicly useful. There's nothing particularly obvious about it. That's why the Native Americans got pushed around so easily. It didn't make sense to them that land could be owned, so they would trade land for piddly trinkets. It wasn't until later that they understood what the Europeans meant by owning land (The concept of land ownership wasn't useful to the Native Americans because they didn't have a high population density, there was always plenty of free space).
So basically, OOXML is unless unless they open up OLE and all the interfaces behined everything that OLE uses too.
Well, to be fair. There have been a number of outstanding bugs in firefox that have sat around for a long time (but not near as many, and the process is all transparent).
Also Microsoft does have an enormous problem with backwards compatibility issues. You can blame them all you want for stupid people making websites that conform with IE's bugs, but that won't solve the problem. As it is right now, I don't think we can expect IE to drop it's quirks mode any time in the next 7 years. Too many dumb websites would break. Also as long as that quirks mode is available, stupid devs will continue to use it. So you have the bootstraping problem.
The GP was definitly being rude, but you probably don't realize how anoying it can be for students like my younger brother who would love to learn a thing or two about computers, but the school has some retarted Windows setup that won't except anything but Microsoft software.
Of course it's not really your fault. There are a lot of things involved and most system administrators I've met seem to have no desire to learn anything new, so your attitude is commendable. Moving from a Windows based system to anything else is difficult at best.
Well there's nothing stoping you from creating a new ID for every website you log into. So worst case you get the same efficiency as before, with the added advantage of having control over your own passwords instead of having them stored on another (potentially hackable) server.
Of course a more likely sitution is that you'd have an ID that you really didn't care about that you would use for things like slashdot and random websites, another one that you more important things like email, and a third one for you blog or something. How you do it is up to you. That's the point of OpenID.
I doubt it. In Canadian contract law (and I think American too), if part of a contract is vague it counts in favour of the person who didn't write it. In this case that's us (the users). I have a strong feeling that if the DCMA ever got taken to court it would be tossed out fairly quickly. In addition to its senseless wording, it violates Fair Use which is a pretty fundamental aspect of copyright law.
So that's why you use the OpenDocument format!
If only it was that easy :(
I'm guessing you know almost nothing about web development.
While this is hardly a good excuse, the fact that IE exists means that web technology is at about the year 2000. Anything developed since then is useless to us because IE does not support it. There are also many other cool technologies that we would love to use (like MathML) but can't because IE doesn't support it.
As for IE, there's no excuse for its utter crappiness. It's not like Microsoft is a poor, tiny software company. So sometimes web developers get really annoyed and do something like this. I don't think it's a good idea to intentionaly block any browser, but that's why they do it.
As for me, I develop my site so that it works in any standards-compliant browser and IE users get to see it in all IE's buggy glory (which usually isn't that bad because I know how to avoid the common bugs). If I was getting money from my website I might make some more work to make IE work nicely, but right now I really don't care.
Actually, I think it's more a matter of greed. This particular method is known as Yellow_journalism and it's hardly limited to MS bashing or even the tech sector.