You know, he _does achieve what he wants - that the GNU name and ideas remain in circulation. The simple fact that every time RMS says something, the main part of the "discussion" is about RMS's personality, and about the naming issue, already ensures that people coming to free software can't avoid to know about GNU. The astounding and sometimes scary thing about RMS is that he doesn't care whether it makes him look like an idiot. I bet he thought this through in this brilliant mind of his, decided that it's the way that promises to be most successful in keeping the ideas around, and just went for it with the same bloody-mindedness that made him start the FSF and GNU in the first place.
Man, read the GNU page. Nowhere did RMS say "knowledge wants to be free". There even is some interview on the web where he specifically denies to have said that or even believe in what it's commonly taken to be its meaning*. Nowhere does he say that "everything should be free no matter what the people making it think". He just says that users better reject unfree stuff because in the long turn it is shackling them.
* In fact this commonly understood meaning is (i) stupid, but (ii) not what was originally meant.
(i) Obviously information does not "want" anything. Obviously producers can in some way and extent (to be defined by law) regulate what can be done with it
(ii) Originally that phrase was a joking way to refer to the characteristics of information control under the influence of entropy. The thing is, while you can limit information transfer even when communication channels are very good, doing so forces you to spend energy. Left to its own devices, information will spread in a well-connected environment. (Finding examples in history is left as an exercise to the reader.) You can't keep it from spreading for an unlimited time. This property makes information behave in a way that to the naive observer may suggest that it "wants" to be free. (That was the joke.) It also ensures that at one point it will be free, i.e., be available to those who care. (This assumes that the medium of information exchange keeps intact, and that the knowledge repositories are not destroyed by external influences)
Only on/. can the idea that obesity is somehow healthy get +5 Insightful.
Look, I don't argue the point that the BMI method may be flawed, and I don't doubt that the numbers may be fabricated. I am convinced that the food industry has a terrible influence on our diet, and they probably fake the numbers as they like, depending on whether they currently would like to sell fat, antibiotic-poisoned meat, or so-called "light" products that are even worse.
We don't need to argue about the fact that some people are just heavier, and some are lighter than some artificial average, and as long as one feels ok and is healthy, there is no point in forcing oneself to have some artificial "ideal" weight.
I give you a hint: check out people that do regular manual work in healthy conditions, and are relatively self-sufficient wrt to their food. Try to find some without US TV. Then check if they are obese. May tell you something
If you'd read more than the blurb of the article you linked to, you'd see that they qualify it in the 2nd sentence: Is it possible that urging the overweight or mildly obese to cut calories and lose weight may actually do more harm than good?
So, sure, if someone has 10 kg too much, forcing him to dieting will do more harm than good, if he does not actually like to do it. This is probably because he wil get into a gain-lose cycle which is frequently caused by the "diet-of-the-day" stupidities (grapefruit diet, hollywood diet and the like).
You are kidding yourself if you take this to mean that it suddenly has no effect to put twice the wheight on your intervertebral discs, flood your intestinal system with sugar, etc.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For the last 3 years I have been representing my company in a project to develop plugins for PowerPoint and Excel. The coding is done by a software shop independent from us. We have learned a great deal about those apps during this time.
On the one hand it's actually great that Office at least partially supports what we do. But it does so reluctantly, and I guess we spend more time programming around bugs in PPT and Excel than driving our own ideas forward. In truth they are a piece of shit internally.
We submit what we find to MS, but they just don't care. A colleague of mine from a totally unrelated department mentioned that we frequently run into bugs to a Microsoft guy she had there for an unrelated issue (but also from the Office group). He just shrugged, and said that we are on our own when we build a plugin. Hey, we are trying to use their fucking APIs, and we are on our own? Great, thanks for letting the software shop pay for being a "Microsoft Partner".
We would have loved to be able to look at the Office code, and we would have fixed countless bugs over these years, if they would just let us. But no, we have to fix bugs by patching the MS binaries in RAM.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
It's only "largely the same result" if you ignore that in one case the original holder or owner is being deprived of the item in question, and in the other case he is not.
Regarding the "you have no need and therefore no right to it" you have advocated in this thread:
While I see where you are coming from, it's IMO not that easy. You must have a right to understand the, and therefore a need to partake in, the culture of your country, popular and not. Even if you can't agree to the terms, esp. if they are as obviously disputable.
Ironically, the media industry, along with the other parts of the ruling system, would benefit most from such a right. This is because they want and need their culture to be total. As far as I am concerned, the media industry could be relegated to niche products for people who can afford to spend a few hundred dollars per month on DRM'ed media if they want to stay current on developments in even only one art. The art produced in these niches sucks anyway, and the people can get back to making their own thing, out of necessity and free from interference.
see thousands of americans go to cuba and pass out books, radios, dollars, etc to the black underclass of Cuba
Problem for Castro is that he knows (because he's seen it) that they would also immediately start to fuck the 8 to 18 year part of the cuban population (both sexes)
It may also be interesting to look into how often US aggression against a country that took its matter into its own hands, has significantly contributed to the new leaderships' (who very often started out with the very best intentions and were bright, educated people - Che/Castro and gang, the Sandinistas, etc.) problems and frequent eventual demise into dictatorship.
The US could have been friendly to those latin american nations, but instead they chose to raise tremendous pressure. Of course they also employ counterrevolutionary agents. The new leadership, after having finally, against all odds, successfully gotten rid of an awful fascist (US-backed) dictatorship (Batista, Somoza, etc.), of course hangs on with its bare teeth and can easily slip into totalitarianism (some have resisted this slip, but are gone). How different could those countries have developed with a little help. It's sad, really
I've been recently to Cuba. I won't get into an argument about political issues on/. so one thing must serve as an example: the country is poor, but poor handicapped old people have shiny new aluminium crutches.
I can say that I have seen much different in the rich "morally superior" US.
My head spins. You found the missing third part of the perfect triangle, free speech - free love - free beer. This is so much more, um , complete. Now we can't NOT win.
Rest of the post +1 Insightful of course. Rare enough on/. in threads like this.
I have seen Notes only as used in our company, and I can only imagine that it's the mail template we use and not Notes as such, but (and dig this)
our Notes does not support mail threading
No, this is not 1972. Yes, my inbox and all other mail folders are fucking flat lists. No, I also don't know how I'm supposed to work like that when I get 100 mails a day. (Mind you, there is a "Thread View", but it's only available for a view of all mails, not in the individual folders I sort my mail into.)
Best thing is I complained several times to IT, and they didn't know what I'm talking about. I made screenshots of Evolution for them. I dunno, does Outlook not use mail threads? Shouldn't everbody just know how that works?
And why the fuck should I as a user care about which server a DB is on, manually switch to another replica when the my main server is down, and remember to switch back when it is up again? I swear, I did seriously think to learn Notes administration just to find out whether our IT dept. is a bunch of morons, or the Notes dev team is.
Wrt to the window managers, there are some that implement tabs, but I think this is too little. An advantage of tabs on the app level is that different tab behavior may be needed depending on app - or at least the app needs to interact with the tabs cleverly. What I'd really like is a Gnome-aware Ion wm (with individual desktops that can have overlapping windows for the odd gimp session)
I concede the point about Excel's tabs not being MDI tabs, but otherwise I don't think that your arguments are good:
First, even if Excel's tabs aren't MDI tabs, it's still different parts of the doc in a common container. Users (yes, even the proverbial stupid users I encounter daily) do get how that works, and I don't see a reason why they wouldn't get browser tabs.
Second, Notes is a bad example. I think that people are simply scared of Notes, tabs or no, because it is a piece of shit in more ways than I have time to describe. On the contrary, when Lotus/IBM tried to remove the tab/tile interface and replace it with a (shitty) bookmark system in R6, user pressure made them keep the tab/tile system. We have Notes in our company and while I see users fighting with nearly all parts of Notes all the time, the tabs are not a problem.
Third, none of the browsers that have tabs today "force" users to use them, and IE7 won't either, so this is a strawman.
All in all I think that tabs should be a part of the window manager, not implemented in individual apps
Thanks. Last thing I had read was that the only known use of the phone number had been the press conference call.
The other thing (McBride predicting the stuff from the article) still stands though, in a sense. Sure, it cold be that McBride just gave MOG ideas, but this seems not too convincing to me, and even if it's true it's not surprising that people get the idea MOG is a paid shill after her stunts.
Where did he do a job explaining why? Let alone good? IMO part of explaining why MOG is no shill would include explaining
Where did she get PJ's phone number from? (Seems fishy to me that the same phone number was used by PJ to call into the SCO press conference a few weeks ago.
Why did McBride practically predict the article in said press conference?
And it's not as if this was the first article by MOG. How about checking out her trolling history? ("Linux kernel will be rewritten due to IP problems", ROFL)
Slashdot Mirror
You know, he _does achieve what he wants - that the GNU name and ideas remain in circulation. The simple fact that every time RMS says something, the main part of the "discussion" is about RMS's personality, and about the naming issue, already ensures that people coming to free software can't avoid to know about GNU.
The astounding and sometimes scary thing about RMS is that he doesn't care whether it makes him look like an idiot. I bet he thought this through in this brilliant mind of his, decided that it's the way that promises to be most successful in keeping the ideas around, and just went for it with the same bloody-mindedness that made him start the FSF and GNU in the first place.
Man, read the GNU page. Nowhere did RMS say "knowledge wants to be free". There even is some interview on the web where he specifically denies to have said that or even believe in what it's commonly taken to be its meaning*.
Nowhere does he say that "everything should be free no matter what the people making it think". He just says that users better reject unfree stuff because in the long turn it is shackling them.
* In fact this commonly understood meaning is (i) stupid, but (ii) not what was originally meant.
(i) Obviously information does not "want" anything. Obviously producers can in some way and extent (to be defined by law) regulate what can be done with it
(ii) Originally that phrase was a joking way to refer to the characteristics of information control under the influence of entropy.
The thing is, while you can limit information transfer even when communication channels are very good, doing so forces you to spend energy. Left to its own devices, information will spread in a well-connected environment. (Finding examples in history is left as an exercise to the reader.) You can't keep it from spreading for an unlimited time.
This property makes information behave in a way that to the naive observer may suggest that it "wants" to be free. (That was the joke.)
It also ensures that at one point it will be free, i.e., be available to those who care. (This assumes that the medium of information exchange keeps intact, and that the knowledge repositories are not destroyed by external influences)
You could at least honor the man and his work by reading what he actually wrote about the issue and his reasons.
/.
Then address his arguments, and if you think you are so right, try to destroy them. But fuck off with these stupid strawmans that you picked up on
RMS:
"It is possible to write good free software without thinking of GNU; much good work has been done in the name of Linux also."
"
"Insightful", my ass. If he would live in this fantasy land, he wouldn't be pissed off about unfree things. At least get your basic logic right!
Corollary: when someone mindlessly parrots what he thinks to be Godwin's Law, the thread is ended, and this person lost
Only on /. can the idea that obesity is somehow healthy get +5 Insightful.
Look, I don't argue the point that the BMI method may be flawed, and I don't doubt that the numbers may be fabricated.
I am convinced that the food industry has a terrible influence on our diet, and they probably fake the numbers as they like, depending on whether they currently would like to sell fat, antibiotic-poisoned meat, or so-called "light" products that are even worse.
We don't need to argue about the fact that some people are just heavier, and some are lighter than some artificial average, and as long as one feels ok and is healthy, there is no point in forcing oneself to have some artificial "ideal" weight.
But we are talking "obesity" here, which Merriam-Webster defines as "excessively fat". And you are not going to convince me that this is in any way healthy.
I give you a hint: check out people that do regular manual work in healthy conditions, and are relatively self-sufficient wrt to their food. Try to find some without US TV. Then check if they are obese. May tell you something
If you'd read more than the blurb of the article you linked to, you'd see that they qualify it in the 2nd sentence: Is it possible that urging the overweight or mildly obese to cut calories and lose weight may actually do more harm than good?
So, sure, if someone has 10 kg too much, forcing him to dieting will do more harm than good, if he does not actually like to do it. This is probably because he wil get into a gain-lose cycle which is frequently caused by the "diet-of-the-day" stupidities (grapefruit diet, hollywood diet and the like).
You are kidding yourself if you take this to mean that it suddenly has no effect to put twice the wheight on your intervertebral discs, flood your intestinal system with sugar, etc.
For the last 3 years I have been representing my company in a project to develop plugins for PowerPoint and Excel. The coding is done by a software shop independent from us. We have learned a great deal about those apps during this time.
On the one hand it's actually great that Office at least partially supports what we do. But it does so reluctantly, and I guess we spend more time programming around bugs in PPT and Excel than driving our own ideas forward. In truth they are a piece of shit internally.
We submit what we find to MS, but they just don't care. A colleague of mine from a totally unrelated department mentioned that we frequently run into bugs to a Microsoft guy she had there for an unrelated issue (but also from the Office group). He just shrugged, and said that we are on our own when we build a plugin.
Hey, we are trying to use their fucking APIs, and we are on our own? Great, thanks for letting the software shop pay for being a "Microsoft Partner".
We would have loved to be able to look at the Office code, and we would have fixed countless bugs over these years, if they would just let us. But no, we have to fix bugs by patching the MS binaries in RAM.
Mod parent up
I'd actually love to be able to hire a few MS guys for consulting here, who actually make the software work and tailor it to our needs.
Source?
It's only "largely the same result" if you ignore that in one case the original holder or owner is being deprived of the item in question, and in the other case he is not.
Regarding the "you have no need and therefore no right to it" you have advocated in this thread:
While I see where you are coming from, it's IMO not that easy.
You must have a right to understand the, and therefore a need to partake in, the culture of your country, popular and not. Even if you can't agree to the terms, esp. if they are as obviously disputable.
A "right to partake" could be derived from many poverty definitions that are used in Europe, because there the poverty threshold is often defined as being excluded from "taking part in activities which are an accepted part of daily life in that society". The US does not seem to recognize such a right as their poverty definition is "lacking the resources to meet the basic needs for healthy living; having insufficient income to provide the food, shelter and clothing needed to preserve health.".
Ironically, the media industry, along with the other parts of the ruling system, would benefit most from such a right. This is because they want and need their culture to be total.
As far as I am concerned, the media industry could be relegated to niche products for people who can afford to spend a few hundred dollars per month on DRM'ed media if they want to stay current on developments in even only one art. The art produced in these niches sucks anyway, and the people can get back to making their own thing, out of necessity and free from interference.
see thousands of americans go to cuba and pass out books, radios, dollars, etc to the black underclass of Cuba
Problem for Castro is that he knows (because he's seen it) that they would also immediately start to fuck the 8 to 18 year part of the cuban population (both sexes)
It may also be interesting to look into how often US aggression against a country that took its matter into its own hands, has significantly contributed to the new leaderships' (who very often started out with the very best intentions and were bright, educated people - Che/Castro and gang, the Sandinistas, etc.) problems and frequent eventual demise into dictatorship.
The US could have been friendly to those latin american nations, but instead they chose to raise tremendous pressure. Of course they also employ counterrevolutionary agents.
The new leadership, after having finally, against all odds, successfully gotten rid of an awful fascist (US-backed) dictatorship (Batista, Somoza, etc.), of course hangs on with its bare teeth and can easily slip into totalitarianism (some have resisted this slip, but are gone).
How different could those countries have developed with a little help. It's sad, really
I've been recently to Cuba. I won't get into an argument about political issues on /. so one thing must serve as an example: the country is poor, but poor handicapped old people have shiny new aluminium crutches.
I can say that I have seen much different in the rich "morally superior" US.
+ 1 Beautiful.
/. in threads like this.
My head spins. You found the missing third part of the perfect triangle, free speech - free love - free beer. This is so much more, um , complete. Now we can't NOT win.
Rest of the post +1 Insightful of course. Rare enough on
Another thing :)
I'm proud to annouce that I'm blessed with using the 2 clear leaders at dreckstool.de, Google translation
I have seen Notes only as used in our company, and I can only imagine that it's the mail template we use and not Notes as such, but (and dig this)
our Notes does not support mail threading
No, this is not 1972. Yes, my inbox and all other mail folders are fucking flat lists. No, I also don't know how I'm supposed to work like that when I get 100 mails a day. (Mind you, there is a "Thread View", but it's only available for a view of all mails, not in the individual folders I sort my mail into.)
Best thing is I complained several times to IT, and they didn't know what I'm talking about. I made screenshots of Evolution for them. I dunno, does Outlook not use mail threads? Shouldn't everbody just know how that works?
And why the fuck should I as a user care about which server a DB is on, manually switch to another replica when the my main server is down, and remember to switch back when it is up again? I swear, I did seriously think to learn Notes administration just to find out whether our IT dept. is a bunch of morons, or the Notes dev team is.
Wrt to the window managers, there are some that implement tabs, but I think this is too little. An advantage of tabs on the app level is that different tab behavior may be needed depending on app - or at least the app needs to interact with the tabs cleverly. What I'd really like is a Gnome-aware Ion wm (with individual desktops that can have overlapping windows for the odd gimp session)
I concede the point about Excel's tabs not being MDI tabs, but otherwise I don't think that your arguments are good:
First, even if Excel's tabs aren't MDI tabs, it's still different parts of the doc in a common container. Users (yes, even the proverbial stupid users I encounter daily) do get how that works, and I don't see a reason why they wouldn't get browser tabs.
Second, Notes is a bad example. I think that people are simply scared of Notes, tabs or no, because it is a piece of shit in more ways than I have time to describe. On the contrary, when Lotus/IBM tried to remove the tab/tile interface and replace it with a (shitty) bookmark system in R6, user pressure made them keep the tab/tile system. We have Notes in our company and while I see users fighting with nearly all parts of Notes all the time, the tabs are not a problem.
Third, none of the browsers that have tabs today "force" users to use them, and IE7 won't either, so this is a strawman.
All in all I think that tabs should be a part of the window manager, not implemented in individual apps
Thanks. Last thing I had read was that the only known use of the phone number had been the press conference call.
The other thing (McBride predicting the stuff from the article) still stands though, in a sense. Sure, it cold be that McBride just gave MOG ideas, but this seems not too convincing to me, and even if it's true it's not surprising that people get the idea MOG is a paid shill after her stunts.
Thanks a million
In any country I want to live in, anything that is against the law is not "fair game". Otherwise agreed
Where did he do a job explaining why? Let alone good? IMO part of explaining why MOG is no shill would include explaining
Where did she get PJ's phone number from? (Seems fishy to me that the same phone number was used by PJ to call into the SCO press conference a few weeks ago.
Why did McBride practically predict the article in said press conference?
And it's not as if this was the first article by MOG. How about checking out her trolling history? ("Linux kernel will be rewritten due to IP problems", ROFL)
No matter what, there's a difference between a posting of a hotheaded 14 year old on /. and a journalist's work (at least I still hope so)
You can't excuse e.g. the lying of a politician by pointing to the fact that some random person on some random website did it too
Why oh why does neither Firefox nor Epiphany support "open with last session by default", as Galeon does.