Actually denying internet access for life is equivalent to denying that a person can work at anything other than ditch digging...assuming that ditch diggers don't use cell phones over VOIP these days. You certainly can't go into sales, purchasing, or any other white collar or blue collar or pink collar jobs.
Other than in cases of arrest where there's a system to protect you or house arrest in cities where they have phone up home deliveries, I can't think of any case where denying internet access is valid.
It's actually worse than that. By changing the OLPC to fit a proprietary OS, they've: a) Increased the cost of the hardware because Windows XP just doesn't run with the same resources as a lighter OS like Linux...especially since Windows XP already has it's own GUI that needs exist under Sugar. b) Limited their ability to pick hardware, such as non-Intel chips, which Windows XP doesn't support. c) Tied themselves to security updates and the release cycle of a third party of a foreign country. d) Limited the ability of children to tinker. e) Limited their ability to to provide an integrated environment that will actually help children...Sugar on another OS would inevitably have an impedience mismatch. f) Alienated the community that was helping to build the OLPC project, thus reducing credibility and further contributions. g) Lost any differentiation between the OLPC and the competing Classmates project, since Sugar should be able to run on Classmates.
Points (a) to (e) go directly against the OLPC mission. Point (f) reduces that chance of OLPC's success. Point (g) splits funds from other projects. Since each project has a fixed administrative cost, and the design split delays deployment decisions (like the HDDVD vs Blueray war hurt DVD adoption), this reduces the funds that are actually used to help educate children.
I can think of no reason to change the OLPC's original constitution. If proprietary stuff like "Flash" is required and Gnash isn't up to snuff (yet), doesn't it make more sense to as Adobe for a Flash port rather than throw the education deprived baby out with the bath water? At least with this solution, there's some hope that Gnash will eventually be fully Flash compatible or Flash will be superseded.
Yes, but that's not the whole story. For many people, what you do has to matter.
I've been in IT since 1995 and had computers as a hobby since the 1970s. Back in the middle of the Dot.Com crash, I lost my job at a telco. I realized that my previous work, C/C++ enterprise software and before that C++ shrinkrap software wasn't what I needed for the future. It would burn me out if I stayed too long. I realized that my job loss was an opportunity to move to something that was more dynamic and innovative...writing intranet software in a Unix environment using open source (ideally). Even though I didn't have the skills, and even though it was virtually impossible to find a job then, I bit the bullet, and retrained myself and did serious leg work to find my next job. It took about a year and a half to find the job I wanted (which I still have and love). During that time, I had to turn down 4 job offers that weren't right for me, including one that started at $20K more than I had previously got (there was too much travel and I hate the BEA environment).
Although I've passed my previous salary now by $7K, I had to accept a $15K pay cut to get my current job. Everything comes at a cost, but if you choose the right job, it's more than worth it.
So ask yourself, what's most important for you? If it's family, then you need to get off pager duty and and jobs with overtime, and find a job that gives you plenty of family time -- even if you need to take a pay cut or do boring work. You're doing it for a purpose, and that's what you can look forward to each day.
Is it interacting with people? Then make any sacrifice but get a more people centric job. In IT, requirements gathering or documentation might be a good choice.
Is it being able to have your own time? You might have the makings of an entrepreneur, so you might go into consulting. Your multi-disciplinary background will help, although you'll have to get out of your comfort zone.
But don't go into management unless it's what you *really* want. The last thing the world needs is another manager that's just in it for the paycheck. There are whole Dilbert cartoons on this.
Talk to your wife. Find out how much risk your able to take. If you're frustrated at work, you're likely bringing it home with you, so you can't just brush it off.
You might have on golden hand cuffs, but is your soul so easily bought? Is that the lesson you want to teach your children?
Ask yourself if you really need all the luxuries in your life that you currently have or can you make due with less so that you can achieve a richer joy in your life? If so, then all you can do is look for better opportunities and try to find some gratitude in the little joys of your job. They exist, if you watch for them. Even taking out the trash can be "fun" if you have the right mindset.
If not, then do what you need to do to teach your children the lessons you yourself wish you knew when you were younger, and follow your dreams.
> I agree that everyone should have ideals, but I believe that the ultimate goal should be balance, not monoculture.
Is that the fundamentalism and monoculture you wish to uphold?
If so, you've already contradicted yourself. If not, you've already opened the door to cases where fundamentalism and monoculture are okay, including this fundamentalism.
Monocultures and fundamentalism aren't necessarily bad. If everyone was able to speak the same language (even if it were not their primary language) and agree on some fundamentals of resolving disagreements, there would be a lot fewer wars and misunderstandings. If we can get ourselves to commit to these fundamentals, we might actually get rid of war entirely.
If everyone settled on an internet protocol and hypertext format, call them TCP/IP and HTML, we'd be able to communicate with each other without writing tons of proprietary protocol-specific bridges. Wouldn't such a world be nice? Too bad non-one sticks to the fundamental of internet standards. (Thankfully they do for the most part).
The problem you're trying to express is that you've seen that some monocultures (e.g. the Microsoft Monopoly) and some fundamentalism (e.g. in the US) causes a lot of pain and suffering and close-mindedness.
That's true, but that's because those are the wrong sorts of monocultures and fundamentalisms, which is what I was trying to get at.
How do you know what the right monocultures and fundamentalisms are? That's an extremely tough question that humanity has never solved with 100% degree accuracy. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and accept the consequences of making a bad decision. Otherwise life would just be a game of Calvinball (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinball), where nothing at all could be counted on and any "crime" people or society does to you or the people you love is okay since all world views (including a twisted one) are equally valid.
Fundamentalism is only bad if you have the wrong fundamentals.
If your fundamentals include "Randomly hunting people for sport is wrong", it's hard to argue....unless you don't mind if you or the people you love are hunted for sport.
Similarly, if the whole point of the project is to: 1) Free the third world and developing world from dependency on the first world 2) Allow children to tinker with every part of the OS so that they can experiment and learn how OSes work so they can gain more than consumer skills. 3) Be free from vendor lock-in traps that could force the project to raise the prices simply because the monopoly created by the project would put the project at the mercy of the single vendor. 4) Allow the laptop to be as low cost as possible....not limited to the hardware requirements of a specific vendor.
Then open source is the only answer that can solve all these issues. If you give up on even one of these issues, there's no difference between the OLPC project and the Classmates project and the project might as well close down since it provides no value other than a non-standard GUI which could be ported to any environment....including Classmates. If you want to be pragmatic, then OLPC must die since it's a pointless diversion of resources that is harming the developing and third world.
If you want to be idealistic and stick to your fundamentals, you have a chance to change the world.
Actually, it's more the case of a French man complaining that an Irish man needs to speak French. Speaking French might be expected if you're in France, but if you're in Ireland, then perhaps the shoe is on the other foot.
OpenSolaris users choose OpenSolaris because they trust Sun, its track record. its binary backwards compatibility (Solaris 2.6 binaries still run unmodified on Solaris 2.10), its way of doing things, and its 10 year life cycle. If they didn't they would be using Linux. The binary compatibility that spans decades and long support cycles necessitate a slower development model and a more cautious community. It's not supposed to have massive change...its just supposed to give users more flexibility without sacrificing Solaris strengths.
Actually, his definition of "nobody" is pretty simple. Anyone who doesn't contribute to Microsoft's bottom line is a nobody. Ballmer has made that clear, by committing to the end of life for Windows XP even though, Vista in his words is "a work in progress". Moving everyone to Vista contributes to Microsoft's bottom line and nobody important (i.e. anyone outside of Microsoft that doesn't contribute to their bottom line) disagrees.
His example with the pharmaceutical companies points exactly to this mindset. Most of the new drugs created today are "lifestyle drugs" instead of drugs that actually cure your illness. In the former, you're on the hook for multiple payments for years. In the later, you just pay once. Universities or University Hospitals that actually focus on finding a cure tend to follow the collaboration model since reputation gives you tons of benefits, and it gives society tons of benefits. For profit pharmaceutical companies care more about lock-in to squeeze as much out of their clients as possible for as long as possible and use various techniques (like patenting a minor variation once the original patent expires) to extend the life of the patent. Without Generic Pharma, the "nobody"s of the world would be on the hook forever and without both them and University Hospitals, no actual improvement in the pharmaceuticals would happen because any improvement that lowers costs or reduces the need for the pharmaceuticals would hurt the bottom line, even though it would benefit society.
Similarly, no-one can improve Windows XP except for Microsoft. If Microsoft wants to kill Windows XP and move you to Vista and you have no choice but to use Windows. It sucks to be you. You or anyone other that Microsoft (e.g. Sun, Apple, IBM, etc) can improve Windows XP with any feature that you need from Vista (if there is such a thing) or Linux or Mac OSX.
Couldn't agree more. When a thief comes into your home and steals everything you have, it really doesn't make sense to do a cease fire. You take back what belongs to you....what Microsoft has stolen....
Now the thief may try to appeal for you to be reasonable by "splitting the difference" (i.e. respect ODF if OOXML is respected), but you're still getting a raw deal, even if the thief appears to be "generous" by giving you 80% and taking only 20%.
We need to call a spade a spade and this spade needs to be leveled on the head of the thief and all the thief's henchmen until they give the world back what it deserves.
Someone needs to Rickroll the ISO committee responsible.
That may be so, but there's more to it. It's only been recently fully implemented and a few years ago Stroustrup himself commented that he's constantly surprised that some things (e.g. template recursion) are even possible in C++.
The language is overly complex. The key advice any C++ expert is "restrict yourself to a specific subset of C++". That's the bulk of the difficulty. If C++ were simplified to include only that subset, you'd have a lot less need for training,
> But these are rules for how National Bodies Precisely. These are National Bodies, i.e. slow moving bureaucracies.
If you shorten the dates and in addition to that require extra lead time for written letters to arrive to all the right people, you've both dramatically shorted the review time and caused problems for any national body that scheduled their meeting late (so that maximum review was possible). If you think it's easy rescheduling a meeting of all these key people much earlier than what everyone agreed to *months* in advance, you've never held a meeting of any importance.
And by limiting decent to a single person, they've also increased the chance that the will of the national body could be thwarted by a bribe.
> If those groups, with their staffs and lawyers, can't figure out how to change their vote, and to use ISO procedural > rules to make sure their votes are properly counted, perhaps they shouldn't be able to change their votes. I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly rocket science...
Sorry, but that's BS. If I give you rules that are impossible to follow, no number of lawyers or staff can follow them any more than if I ask you to draw a Frobizoid without explaining what a Frobizoid is, or ask you to fill out form G in order to get Form F but in order to get form G you have to fill out form F.
And even if the rules are unambigious to an elite lawyer, the more complicated the rules, the more likely that votes can be thrown out because of procedural rather than technical issue. Given the mistrust in the process so far, I wouldn't be at all surprised if No to Yes transitions happen (because Microsoft knows the rules they wrote) but Yes/Abstain to No votes are rejected because of non-obvious procedural issues.
Ask yourself this question. Is ISO in place to be a place where lawyers must solve puzzles to get to the next level, or is it a place to create valuable world wide standards that have been proven technically?
I think you're missing something important. The document format should not store this information at all -- it's the job of the keyring password manager. The document may define an alias for the database connection string, but it shouldn't provide the actual connection details since that would be a security hole.
Look at it from another angle. Imagine that I need to connect to the database using the connection string, a@mycompany.com:mypass. I send you the document, but you're on another network. You don't see my database, but you do see a proxy database that maps to my database, so the proper connection string would be: b@proxyserver:mypass2. If we send each other the document, we'll be in an edit war. Every time you get the document, you'll want to change it to your password and every time I get it, I'll change it to mine. If however, we leave it up to the keyring manager, there's no problem.
> And, it would give Microsoft > developers, many of who are members of national bodies, > an important forum where Microsoft has > been shown to listen and respond to their concerns. > The conciliar tone of this response makes some fundamental errors:
1) The fallacy of lowering the bar: We could ensure that almost everyone has a medical degree by changing the medical degree exams to a potty training exam. Of course, if that were to happen, a medical degree wouldn't be worth the paper it was written on. Similarly, if a poorly documented, incomplete, sparsely reviewed (ODF's review took *years*), heavily manipulated standard proposal, is allowed to pass ISO, how credible would ISO standards be? If Patrick is sincere in wanting OOXML to pass as a proper standard, he'd propose that OOXML be sent back for a complete review.
2) The fallacy of appeasement to encourage reform: If Microsoft is unwilling to have OOXML go through at least as rigorous a review as ODF before standardization, then how on earth can Patrick expect that they'll hang around after standardization. One OOXML is standard, the pressure is off. If he *really* believes Microsoft is serious about standardizing OOXML, then disapproval would do nothing other than allow for OOXML to undergo a *real* review to iron out all the details.
3) The fallacy of "Let's just do this once...Never again, I promise": If you let Microsoft off the hook this time, how on earth can we turn them or any other major company down again?
4) The fallacy of assuming that OOXML is any good. Joel (a key former Microsoft developer) justified why OOXML is so complicated ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.htm l) and why no-one, even Microsoft is able to implement it from scratch (they use code from old versions of Windows). If OOXML is virtually impossible to implement, then what good is it?
5) The fallacy that OOXML solves any real need. There are virtually no OOXML documents out there (even if you include the various OOXML-like formats exported from MS-Office) so the "backwards compatibility" mandate. OOXML presents no other mandate other than getting the ISO stamp so Microsoft can get contracts that require ISO standards. If there's something legitimate missing in ODF, then it should be added to ODF, otherwise OOXML is pointless. And if "backwards compatibility" required, then DOC would make a *much* better thing to standardize for legacy data given that it's been frozen since Office 2000, it's been reverse engineered to death by OpenOffice and many other Office competitors, and most documents out there are (unfortunately) in the DOC format. Why isn't any effort spent on fixing a *real* need as opposed to a fake one?
Being "fair and balanced" is often the most popular position, but if a thief comes into your house and claims all your money, you'd be a fool or a wimp to settle on the "fair and balanced" approach of choose to splitting the difference. If ISO doesn't have the backbone to reject OOXML from fast track so it can be resubmitted for proper review at least as thorough as ODF, then ISO *will* be broken....which is just fine according to Microsoft since when you have no standards you can trust, defacto market standards win.
> It takes an unhealthy dose of willful ignorance to fail to make that determination on your own.
Don't Americans have free community centers? If so, I don't see how you could know that an open gym is for members only unless, at minimum, they explicitly put up signs everywhere that "Only paying users can use the gym -- we use the honour system so please only use the gym if you drop a dollar in the hat at the entrance and please don't steal the hat!".
In some communities, it's okay and even encouraged to walk into a house that has it's doors open (as long as you respect closed doors). It's called being neighbourly. In other communities, even entering into the front gate will get you shot. It's called respecting private properly.
In the internet, most unencrypted content is free. *That* is the community standard of the internet.
> Do you know what a courteous, respectful person does when the owner's intent is not clear? ASK!
Very true, but let's put it another way. You're in a country that allows you to go to the beach in western swimwear or you're near an ultraconservative commune where even showing your navel is forbidden. You see an empty beach, but there's no sign telling you if the beach a nude beach where clothing is forbidden or ultraconservative beach where victorian dress is the minimum. All you see is the beach. Do you: a) Go to the houses near the beach and ask them, thus taking people away from whatever they're doing for a pointless question the way door-to-door pollsters do? b) Use the beach the way you'd use any other clothing required beach, thus not bothering people with likely useless questions?
I personally don't know how the internet could work if you had to send an email every time you wanted to visit a site. I know *I'd* never put up a site if I received and had to respond to such spammed email for every potential visit of each of my web pages.
And I doubt your *really* believe this doctrine, because if you did, you'd never: a) Use and ad-blocker (which funds the web site) without first checking with the web site if it's okay b) Never skip over commercials (which funds the programs on TV) without first checking TV networks if it's okay
1) Microsoft's formats and protocols are so nonstandard that they can't just point to an existing standard and say "we implement that standard, with the following one or two exceptions because, hey, we're Microsoft and love to embrace and extend".
2) Microsoft's development is so disorganized that they don't have any documentation on hand for their formats and in order to keep compatibility with existing stuff they have to just keep hacking and testing until things appear to work.
3) Both (1) and (2) apply not only to old formats and protocols but also to newly created code such as Vista and.NET.
If what you're saying is true, why would *anyone* trust Microsoft software for *anything* beyond hobbyist uses?
As much as Slashdoters love to bash Microsoft's quality record, I have a really hard time believing that Microsoft is that bad. And *if* what you're saying is true, then Microsoft *at last* has the documentation it should have had from day one, so the EU has actually *saved* Microsoft a lot of development costs in random hacking. Microsoft thus owes the EU a big favour.
So basically, they can go after RedHat, Ubuntu, OpenSolaris, xBSD, and any other company-backed distributor of open source that wishes to inter-operate with Microsoft's formats or protocols unless they pay the Microsoft extortion tax. Any project that takes Microsoft up on the challenge faces the following issues:
1) If they use the information, then no commercial backed distribution will use any of their code (sort of DeCSS code and MP3 which are popular but problematic) unless they submit to Microsoft extortion -- thus helping to marginalize "good" distros or "good" formats like ODF.
2) If they don't use the information and use traditional techniques like reverse engineering and working around the patent, they will slow down their progress compared to competing tainted projects *and* commercial-backed distros that use their "clean" projects will have to justify that they aren't "tainted", This was a lot easier to do before (you could claim ignorance) than now (things are out in the open, so many open source developers will jump at the offer unless the project explicitly states it will refuse or work around any code with known Microsoft patents regardless of the promise ).
3) The promise covers current versions of Microsoft formats and protocols. There's no reason to believe it will cover anything not yet released, even if it's a point revision of the formats or protocols. Anyone with their guard down might assume something that's not true.
I agree with you in principle, however that isn't a one-size-fit all solution that fits all characters.
I met and married my wife (which I love dearly and is the perfect woman for me) using a personals website that matched my character best. I would never have met her otherwise, and even if I did, we wouldn't have clicked. Here's the problem:
1) Character: Most people see me as a perfect gentleman and most people think I'm already married (which is why married men and women and people much older than me are usually my best friends and unmarried rowdies tend not to have much in common with me). This has *always* been the case with me, even when I was in grade school. My wife is similar in this respect. We could have worked side by side and never have known. Shy people have a similar issue, and "diamonds in the rough" have exactly the opposite problem, especially if two diamonds in the rough get together (since they'd likely but put off by each other long before they discovered how right they were for each other).
2) Search Criteria: I'm very studious. If there's a non-fiction audiobook out there (especially if it's free), I've either "read" it, am "reading it", or will eventually get around to it. I tended to look for people who were similar, but the people I found tended to be worldly. Great people that are a joy to talk to, but although I can talk with sophistication when appropriate and love the city, I'm more a modest farmer at heart that doesn't like to travel, so no such match could ever last or extend beyond friendship. My wife is like me in heart, "studious enough", and has expanded my world in ways I didn't plan or knew I wanted.
3) Opportunity: If you're extremely busy or there are other life circumstances (e.g. being in an isolated community where you already know everybody) or there are no social groups in your area that you're interested in joining or the ones you are a interested in joining have no eligible people, you're out of luck.
*Good* dating sites allow you to get to know each other slowly and are more targeted to your character, so artificial barriers like (1) and (2) and (3) (at least people with little time) are greatly lowered. And (3) is lowered because you expand your horizons beyond what is possible in real life to allow you to meet people you would never have.
IMO, if you fit (1), (2), and (3), your chances aren't good, no matter much you socialize, unless you use the best dating site that suits your situation (don't just go for "what's popular" since you're likely going to attract the wrong people and have a hard time sifting through the mountain of incompatibles to find the one or two compatibles). Maybe other options exist, but I don't know them.
IMO, if none of (1), (2), and (3) apply or if only one does, then your best bet is to find a way to move beyond this barrier follow the parent poster's advice or just accept that you might be single all your life (or at least until the barriers are down) so you might as well accept it and plan your life accordingly.
In any case, as someone who married in my late thirties, I can say that my best chance for socializing was in university, so if you're in university now, keep your eyes open (even if (1), (2), and (3) are all true) since you won't likely get a better chance via socializing. And if you're long passed university, don't get caught in the "it's not the right time to date but it will be in a year" trap or the "I have plenty of time, so I might as well get to know a lot of people and easy into serious dating when I'm ready" trap. I've known too many people who have fallen into that trap and end up picking someone out of desperation later in life or remained single passed 40 in desperation. IMO, there are no good times to date (which is a plus since the person you're interested in will have an opportunity to know the real you and you'll get to know how the person reacts to the real you in a real situation), and quantity doesn't replace quality (after all you're going to marry one person,
You're correct for complex applications and operations, but the bulk of people out there only use the following in their OS: 1) Web browser 2) Music/Video player 3) Office software/PDF Viewer 4) Email 5) File sharing/organizing 6) Photo editing/organizing 7) Plug into IPods or similar music devices 8) Tax software (at least those that don't use spread sheets)
That's about it. What Linux provides in each of these areas (except for (8)) is virtually identical to how things are done on Windows XP, especially if you're using an operating system like Ubuntu. The key difference between Ubuntu and Windows XP is that Windows XP has a lot of knobs and complexity which get in the way if all you're interested in is 1-8, while Ubuntu gets rid of most of that cruft and lets you actually focus on 1-8.
I've had zero difficulty moving my wife from Windows XP to Ubuntu on a Dell 1520 laptop. Things just work as she expects and she doesn't need more than 1-7 (plus some bio-informatics software). While it is true that I had add "Nautilus menu actions" to give her the ability to rotate and resize pictures from Nautilus the way she could in Windows XP, and add VMWare with Windows 2000 so she could access some special features on one of her social networking site, she quickly got up to speed and manages her own system without my involvement.
BTW, I did look at Vista too in VirtualBox. Most of the things people complain about like "Confirm"/"Deny" badgering and slowness just weren't there (even under virtualization). The main problem with Vista is that it seems like Microsoft tried to remake the OS as a web application and things are a lot more bulky and confusing than they need to be. Things are gratuitously moved around from XP, there are more layers of menus to find things, and many parts of the OS are half baked. For instance, to turn off least user privileges, I needed to go to the "tools" section of the control panel (it took a while to find) and click on turn off least user privileges link. That popped up a DOS box for a second which actually performed the action on the command line. Why on earth did I need to *see* the DOS box in a production OS? The only reason I needed to turn off least user privileges was because I couldn't share files with my virtual machine. Windows XP worked like a charm. Granted it's more secure to turn off the file sharing service in Vista by default the same way Ubuntu does. But in Ubuntu, if you try to share files for the first time you get a dialog box that explains the default and asks you if you want to install Samba and open the port. With Vista all you get is silence and you don't have a clue what's gone wrong or how to find out how to fix it. I would have *loved* to keep least user privileges but I'm not a Vista guru and I couldn't figure out how to share files and keep least user privileges on.
I honestly don't see many people switching over Windows XP (which works for most people) to Vista (which wouldn't). If Microsoft forces users to go to Vista before it's fully baked, Linux has an enormous opportunity.
While I agree with you that he didn't want anyone to worship him since only God serves worship, his prohibition was on idolatry, not actual pictures.
Money, video games, statuses of Zeus, movies about Moses, and songs about Jesus are all okay as long as you don't worship *them* instead of the only thing that has any permanence, i.e. God.
It's a teaching that's common to all inspired religions and a form of it even exists for secular humanists.
Ironically, by prohibiting any and all pictures of Muhammad, people are violating the idolatry, commandment by making the obsession with pictures of a prophet more important that God.
Agreed. From a purely logical point of view: (1) The needs of the many outnumber the needs of the few. (2) Millions of people die from some diseases. If you could eliminate that disease forever by sacrificing one life, you'd actually be saving millions of lives. (3) Eugenics make perfect sense. After all, shouldn't our decendents be better off than us? Putting all these things together, it's logical to do truly horrific things in the name of science and the betterment of humanity.
If you research Josef Mengele ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele ) you'll see that he didn't see how his work was anything but beneficial because of logic such as the above.
Many experiments from the first half of the last century (such as the infamous "Prisoners versus captives" and "fake electric shock to test subject's willingness to obey authority" psyche experiments) which were done in non-German countries are simply not allowed any more because of the non-obvious damage they do on the test subjects. The results of that science *are* useful (just as the Nazi experiments). The fake electric shock test, for instance, explains a lot how far people (even scientists) are willing to go if authority says it's okay (NB: authority might not be a person. It could also be a societal norm, corporate culture, political or other affiliation or religion).
But it doesn't matter. Everything needs checks and balances, including science. Anyone in the medical world in Canada, the US, or Europe knows that all experiment (animal or human) needs to go through ethical review by a diverse community of reviewers (some peers, some lay people, etc). Fortunatly science in these countries are not free-for-alls, and it's as it should be.
Think of ethics and religion (which have more in common than the relativists and extremists would lead you to believe) as being part of the loyal opposition that's necessary for of any sane democracy.
Huh? If you're referring to Mono, then recognize that Mono is not GNOME and has no connection to GNOME other than Mono uses Gtk+ on Linux. Saying Mono is GNOME is like saying KDE is proprietary because some proprietary software is based off of Qt.
Since Miguel left GNOME for Mono, GNOME has been busy *removing* Microsoft inspired technologies like Bonobo in favour of Linux technologies like DBus which work *a lot* better.
If you want to accuse GNOME of incorporating anyone's tech, the Mac is a better target. The global title menu bar, button order, and spatial browsing all smell of the Mac.
> Hmmm... Ok so tell me how often are you going to be visiting the Microsoft website if you happen to be a Linux and Firefox user? > Probably 0...
Not really. Sympatico and many other ISPs have outsourced their email service to MSN, so if MSN is included in the redesign, users of these ISPs are in big trouble. Sympatico support at least refuses to acknowledge that anything other than Outlook is your email client, so if you don't have Outlook and there's an email client, you either have to install Outlook or lie and do the equivalent actions in Thunderbird or other mail clients.
Does anyone know if MSN is also going to be redone?
Even if MSN isn't redone, documents like the OOXML spec, C# spec, and "Get the facts" are on Microsoft's sites. If you get a reference to one of their docs, there wouldn't be a non-Silverlight way of refuting any claims in those docs or even browsing the Microsoft site to see what they're saying about Linux.
> What if someone discovers a vulnerability in ODF and they need to release a newer version of the format?
Two point: 1) There are no vulnerable file formats, only vulnerable implementations. If the old MS format were vulnerable, then they could at minimum sandbox the thing or take the easy way out and disable specific vulnerable implementation functions (which likely aren't used by anyone) unless the user verifies them and manually enables them. 2) No matter what ISO does, the spec is out and you are free to use any program that implements the current version. Since libraries and government institutions must have the original unconverted documents of all their archives (note, a single space or comma can change the meaning of many documents including the constitution), you can be sure that some viewer will always exist for "Older" versions.
I've just bought a pair of Dell Laptops and these seem to be fairly good quality and everything works flawlessly with Ubuntu (if you apt-get the backports).
As far as Linux goes, I'd recommend them. The main issue I see with Dell's isn't the the features, it's the anti-features like Media-Direct.
For those that don't know why this is an anti-feature, a brief explanation, if you press the Media Direct button when the laptop is *off*, it normally runs the Media player for Dell in the Media Direct partition. Sounds good, except if you reformat your drive to reclaim the 40-60GB Vista-mirror+Media-Direct+Dell Utility partitions and put Ubuntu or anything else there. If you do that, Media Direct dumbly messes up your partition table and randomly writes over your disk. Essentially, Media Direct is should be called Media Destruct if you don't follow the Gospel according to Dell. This wouldn't be so bad, except that there isn't even a BIOS feature to turn it off. The only "solutions" I've seen is to write 0s on the entire hard disk (so that the media direct button can't do anything other than display a splash screen) or manually disable the button by opening the case.
I'm not sure if other vendors have similar anti-features, but it is a big reason I won't even consider doing a BIOS upgrade for my Laptop or keep the Utility partition. The last thing I need is one of these anti-features reverting my machine back to "the button of death" configuration.
But when you serve it in *production* environments, especially external environments, it's not dog food. It's "using your users as Beta testers without their permission or knowledge". Production environments need to be on the conservative side since any critical flaw will affect your unwitting users, which is why people gravitate towards "the stable but old enterprise versions" of RedHat, Novell, Debian, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows rather than the "cutting edge but occasionally problematic but you can 95% of the time recover without too much pain" newer versions.
Failure to do so is either banking on the belief that your users either don't care about losing or corrupting their data or relying on a "hey we never promised that things actually works, be thankful that it does because legally you've let us have our way with you" EULA disclaimer.
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Actually denying internet access for life is equivalent to denying that a person can work at anything other than ditch digging...assuming that ditch diggers don't use cell phones over VOIP these days. You certainly can't go into sales, purchasing, or any other white collar or blue collar or pink collar jobs.
Other than in cases of arrest where there's a system to protect you or house arrest in cities where they have phone up home deliveries, I can't think of any case where denying internet access is valid.
It's actually worse than that. By changing the OLPC to fit a proprietary OS, they've:
a) Increased the cost of the hardware because Windows XP just doesn't run with the same resources as a lighter OS like Linux...especially since Windows XP already has it's own GUI that needs exist under Sugar.
b) Limited their ability to pick hardware, such as non-Intel chips, which Windows XP doesn't support.
c) Tied themselves to security updates and the release cycle of a third party of a foreign country.
d) Limited the ability of children to tinker.
e) Limited their ability to to provide an integrated environment that will actually help children...Sugar on another OS would inevitably have an impedience mismatch.
f) Alienated the community that was helping to build the OLPC project, thus reducing credibility and further contributions.
g) Lost any differentiation between the OLPC and the competing Classmates project, since Sugar should be able to run on Classmates.
Points (a) to (e) go directly against the OLPC mission. Point (f) reduces that chance of OLPC's success. Point (g) splits funds from other projects. Since each project has a fixed administrative cost, and the design split delays deployment decisions (like the HDDVD vs Blueray war hurt DVD adoption), this reduces the funds that are actually used to help educate children.
I can think of no reason to change the OLPC's original constitution. If proprietary stuff like "Flash" is required and Gnash isn't up to snuff (yet), doesn't it make more sense to as Adobe for a Flash port rather than throw the education deprived baby out with the bath water? At least with this solution, there's some hope that Gnash will eventually be fully Flash compatible or Flash will be superseded.
Yes, but that's not the whole story. For many people, what you do has to matter.
I've been in IT since 1995 and had computers as a hobby since the 1970s. Back in the middle of the Dot.Com crash, I lost my job at a telco. I realized that my previous work, C/C++ enterprise software and before that C++ shrinkrap software wasn't what I needed for the future. It would burn me out if I stayed too long. I realized that my job loss was an opportunity to move to something that was more dynamic and innovative...writing intranet software in a Unix environment using open source (ideally). Even though I didn't have the skills, and even though it was virtually impossible to find a job then, I bit the bullet, and retrained myself and did serious leg work to find my next job. It took about a year and a half to find the job I wanted (which I still have and love). During that time, I had to turn down 4 job offers that weren't right for me, including one that started at $20K more than I had previously got (there was too much travel and I hate the BEA environment).
Although I've passed my previous salary now by $7K, I had to accept a $15K pay cut to get my current job. Everything comes at a cost, but if you choose the right job, it's more than worth it.
So ask yourself, what's most important for you? If it's family, then you need to get off pager duty and and jobs with overtime, and find a job that gives you plenty of family time -- even if you need to take a pay cut or do boring work. You're doing it for a purpose, and that's what you can look forward to each day.
Is it interacting with people? Then make any sacrifice but get a more people centric job. In IT, requirements gathering or documentation might be a good choice.
Is it being able to have your own time? You might have the makings of an entrepreneur, so you might go into consulting. Your multi-disciplinary background will help, although you'll have to get out of your comfort zone.
But don't go into management unless it's what you *really* want. The last thing the world needs is another manager that's just in it for the paycheck. There are whole Dilbert cartoons on this.
Talk to your wife. Find out how much risk your able to take. If you're frustrated at work, you're likely bringing it home with you, so you can't just brush it off.
You might have on golden hand cuffs, but is your soul so easily bought? Is that the lesson you want to teach your children?
Ask yourself if you really need all the luxuries in your life that you currently have or can you make due with less so that you can achieve a richer joy in your life? If so, then all you can do is look for better opportunities and try to find some gratitude in the little joys of your job. They exist, if you watch for them. Even taking out the trash can be "fun" if you have the right mindset.
If not, then do what you need to do to teach your children the lessons you yourself wish you knew when you were younger, and follow your dreams.
> I agree that everyone should have ideals, but I believe that the ultimate goal should be balance, not monoculture.
Is that the fundamentalism and monoculture you wish to uphold?
If so, you've already contradicted yourself.
If not, you've already opened the door to cases where fundamentalism and monoculture are okay, including this fundamentalism.
Monocultures and fundamentalism aren't necessarily bad. If everyone was able to speak the same language (even if it were not their primary language) and agree on some fundamentals of resolving disagreements, there would be a lot fewer wars and misunderstandings. If we can get ourselves to commit to these fundamentals, we might actually get rid of war entirely.
If everyone settled on an internet protocol and hypertext format, call them TCP/IP and HTML, we'd be able to communicate with each other without writing tons of proprietary protocol-specific bridges. Wouldn't such a world be nice? Too bad non-one sticks to the fundamental of internet standards. (Thankfully they do for the most part).
The problem you're trying to express is that you've seen that some monocultures (e.g. the Microsoft Monopoly) and some fundamentalism (e.g. in the US) causes a lot of pain and suffering and close-mindedness.
That's true, but that's because those are the wrong sorts of monocultures and fundamentalisms, which is what I was trying to get at.
How do you know what the right monocultures and fundamentalisms are? That's an extremely tough question that humanity has never solved with 100% degree accuracy. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and accept the consequences of making a bad decision. Otherwise life would just be a game of Calvinball (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinball), where nothing at all could be counted on and any "crime" people or society does to you or the people you love is okay since all world views (including a twisted one) are equally valid.
Fundamentalism is only bad if you have the wrong fundamentals.
If your fundamentals include "Randomly hunting people for sport is wrong", it's hard to argue....unless you don't mind if you or the people you love are hunted for sport.
Similarly, if the whole point of the project is to:
1) Free the third world and developing world from dependency on the first world
2) Allow children to tinker with every part of the OS so that they can experiment and learn how OSes work so they can gain more than consumer skills.
3) Be free from vendor lock-in traps that could force the project to raise the prices simply because the monopoly created by the project would put the project at the mercy of the single vendor.
4) Allow the laptop to be as low cost as possible....not limited to the hardware requirements of a specific vendor.
Then open source is the only answer that can solve all these issues. If you give up on even one of these issues, there's no difference between the OLPC project and the Classmates project and the project might as well close down since it provides no value other than a non-standard GUI which could be ported to any environment....including Classmates. If you want to be pragmatic, then OLPC must die since it's a pointless diversion of resources that is harming the developing and third world.
If you want to be idealistic and stick to your fundamentals, you have a chance to change the world.
Actually, it's more the case of a French man complaining that an Irish man needs to speak French.
Speaking French might be expected if you're in France, but if you're in Ireland, then perhaps the shoe is on the other foot.
OpenSolaris users choose OpenSolaris because they trust Sun, its track record. its binary backwards compatibility (Solaris 2.6 binaries still run unmodified on Solaris 2.10), its way of doing things, and its 10 year life cycle. If they didn't they would be using Linux. The binary compatibility that spans decades and long support cycles necessitate a slower development model and a more cautious community. It's not supposed to have massive change...its just supposed to give users more flexibility without sacrificing Solaris strengths.
Actually, his definition of "nobody" is pretty simple. Anyone who doesn't contribute to Microsoft's bottom line is a nobody.
Ballmer has made that clear, by committing to the end of life for Windows XP even though, Vista in his words is "a work in progress". Moving everyone to Vista contributes to Microsoft's bottom line and nobody important (i.e. anyone outside of Microsoft that doesn't contribute to their bottom line) disagrees.
His example with the pharmaceutical companies points exactly to this mindset. Most of the new drugs created today are "lifestyle drugs" instead of drugs that actually cure your illness. In the former, you're on the hook for multiple payments for years. In the later, you just pay once. Universities or University Hospitals that actually focus on finding a cure tend to follow the collaboration model since reputation gives you tons of benefits, and it gives society tons of benefits. For profit pharmaceutical companies care more about lock-in to squeeze as much out of their clients as possible for as long as possible and use various techniques (like patenting a minor variation once the original patent expires) to extend the life of the patent. Without Generic Pharma, the "nobody"s of the world would be on the hook forever and without both them and University Hospitals, no actual improvement in the pharmaceuticals would happen because any improvement that lowers costs or reduces the need for the pharmaceuticals would hurt the bottom line, even though it would benefit society.
Similarly, no-one can improve Windows XP except for Microsoft. If Microsoft wants to kill Windows XP and move you to Vista and you have no choice but to use Windows. It sucks to be you. You or anyone other that Microsoft (e.g. Sun, Apple, IBM, etc) can improve Windows XP with any feature that you need from Vista (if there is such a thing) or Linux or Mac OSX.
> Obligatory: 122,000 errors should be enough for anybody.
Actually, it's more than enough. I have no idea how to handle even a 100th of them. Thanks the problem.
Couldn't agree more. When a thief comes into your home and steals everything you have, it really doesn't make sense to do a cease fire. You take back what belongs to you....what Microsoft has stolen....
Now the thief may try to appeal for you to be reasonable by "splitting the difference" (i.e. respect ODF if OOXML is respected), but you're still getting a raw deal, even if the thief appears to be "generous" by giving you 80% and taking only 20%.
We need to call a spade a spade and this spade needs to be leveled on the head of the thief and all the thief's henchmen until they give the world back what it deserves.
Someone needs to Rickroll the ISO committee responsible.
That may be so, but there's more to it. It's only been recently fully implemented and a few years ago Stroustrup himself commented that he's constantly surprised that some things (e.g. template recursion) are even possible in C++.
The language is overly complex. The key advice any C++ expert is "restrict yourself to a specific subset of C++". That's the bulk of the difficulty. If C++ were simplified to include only that subset, you'd have a lot less need for training,
> But these are rules for how National Bodies
Precisely. These are National Bodies, i.e. slow moving bureaucracies.
If you shorten the dates and in addition to that require extra lead time for written letters to arrive to all the right people, you've both dramatically shorted the review time and caused problems for any national body that scheduled their meeting late (so that maximum review was possible). If you think it's easy rescheduling a meeting of all these key people much earlier than what everyone agreed to *months* in advance, you've never held a meeting of any importance.
And by limiting decent to a single person, they've also increased the chance that the will of the national body could be thwarted by a bribe.
> If those groups, with their staffs and lawyers, can't figure out how to change their vote, and to use ISO procedural
> rules to make sure their votes are properly counted, perhaps they shouldn't be able to change their votes. I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly rocket science...
Sorry, but that's BS. If I give you rules that are impossible to follow, no number of lawyers or staff can follow them any more than if I ask you to draw a Frobizoid without explaining what a Frobizoid is, or ask you to fill out form G in order to get Form F but in order to get form G you have to fill out form F.
And even if the rules are unambigious to an elite lawyer, the more complicated the rules, the more likely that votes can be thrown out because of procedural rather than technical issue. Given the mistrust in the process so far, I wouldn't be at all surprised if No to Yes transitions happen (because Microsoft knows the rules they wrote) but Yes/Abstain to No votes are rejected because of non-obvious procedural issues.
Ask yourself this question. Is ISO in place to be a place where lawyers must solve puzzles to get to the next level, or is it a place to create valuable world wide standards that have been proven technically?
I think you're missing something important. The document format should not store this information at all -- it's the job of the keyring password manager. The document may define an alias for the database connection string, but it shouldn't provide the actual connection details since that would be a security hole.
Look at it from another angle. Imagine that I need to connect to the database using the connection string, a@mycompany.com:mypass. I send you the document, but you're on another network. You don't see my database, but you do see a proxy database that maps to my database, so the proper connection string would be: b@proxyserver:mypass2. If we send each other the document, we'll be in an edit war. Every time you get the document, you'll want to change it to your password and every time I get it, I'll change it to mine. If however, we leave it up to the keyring manager, there's no problem.
> And, it would give Microsoft
> developers, many of who are members of national bodies,
> an important forum where Microsoft has
> been shown to listen and respond to their concerns.
>
The conciliar tone of this response makes some fundamental errors:
1) The fallacy of lowering the bar: We could ensure that almost everyone has a medical degree by changing the medical degree exams to a potty training exam. Of course, if that were to happen, a medical degree wouldn't be worth the paper it was written on. Similarly, if a poorly documented, incomplete, sparsely reviewed (ODF's review took *years*), heavily manipulated standard proposal, is allowed to pass ISO, how credible would ISO standards be? If Patrick is sincere in wanting OOXML to pass as a proper standard, he'd propose that OOXML be sent back for a complete review.
2) The fallacy of appeasement to encourage reform: If Microsoft is unwilling to have OOXML go through at least as rigorous a review as ODF before standardization, then how on earth can Patrick expect that they'll hang around after standardization. One OOXML is standard, the pressure is off. If he *really* believes Microsoft is serious about standardizing OOXML, then disapproval would do nothing other than allow for OOXML to undergo a *real* review to iron out all the details.
3) The fallacy of "Let's just do this once...Never again, I promise": If you let Microsoft off the hook this time, how on earth can we turn them or any other major company down again?
4) The fallacy of assuming that OOXML is any good. Joel (a key former Microsoft developer) justified why OOXML is so complicated ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.htm l) and why no-one, even Microsoft is able to implement it from scratch (they use code from old versions of Windows). If OOXML is virtually impossible to implement, then what good is it?
5) The fallacy that OOXML solves any real need. There are virtually no OOXML documents out there (even if you include the various OOXML-like formats exported from MS-Office) so the "backwards compatibility" mandate. OOXML presents no other mandate other than getting the ISO stamp so Microsoft can get contracts that require ISO standards. If there's something legitimate missing in ODF, then it should be added to ODF, otherwise OOXML is pointless. And if "backwards compatibility" required, then DOC would make a *much* better thing to standardize for legacy data given that it's been frozen since Office 2000, it's been reverse engineered to death by OpenOffice and many other Office competitors, and most documents out there are (unfortunately) in the DOC format. Why isn't any effort spent on fixing a *real* need as opposed to a fake one?
Being "fair and balanced" is often the most popular position, but if a thief comes into your house and claims all your money, you'd be a fool or a wimp to settle on the "fair and balanced" approach of choose to splitting the difference. If ISO doesn't have the backbone to reject OOXML from fast track so it can be resubmitted for proper review at least as thorough as ODF, then ISO *will* be broken....which is just fine according to Microsoft since when you have no standards you can trust, defacto market standards win.
> It takes an unhealthy dose of willful ignorance to fail to make that determination on your own.
Don't Americans have free community centers? If so, I don't see how you could know that an open gym is for members only unless, at minimum, they explicitly put up signs everywhere that "Only paying users can use the gym -- we use the honour system so please only use the gym if you drop a dollar in the hat at the entrance and please don't steal the hat!".
In some communities, it's okay and even encouraged to walk into a house that has it's doors open (as long as you respect closed doors). It's called being neighbourly.
In other communities, even entering into the front gate will get you shot. It's called respecting private properly.
In the internet, most unencrypted content is free. *That* is the community standard of the internet.
> Do you know what a courteous, respectful person does when the owner's intent is not clear? ASK!
Very true, but let's put it another way. You're in a country that allows you to go to the beach in western swimwear or you're near an ultraconservative commune where even showing your navel is forbidden.
You see an empty beach, but there's no sign telling you if the beach a nude beach where clothing is forbidden or ultraconservative beach where victorian dress is the minimum.
All you see is the beach. Do you:
a) Go to the houses near the beach and ask them, thus taking people away from whatever they're doing for a pointless question the way door-to-door pollsters do?
b) Use the beach the way you'd use any other clothing required beach, thus not bothering people with likely useless questions?
I personally don't know how the internet could work if you had to send an email every time you wanted to visit a site.
I know *I'd* never put up a site if I received and had to respond to such spammed email for every potential visit of each of my web pages.
And I doubt your *really* believe this doctrine, because if you did, you'd never:
a) Use and ad-blocker (which funds the web site) without first checking with the web site if it's okay
b) Never skip over commercials (which funds the programs on TV) without first checking TV networks if it's okay
Let me translate what you've just said:
.NET.
1) Microsoft's formats and protocols are so nonstandard that they can't just point to an existing standard and say "we implement that standard, with the following one or two exceptions because, hey, we're Microsoft and love to embrace and extend".
2) Microsoft's development is so disorganized that they don't have any documentation on hand for their formats and in order to keep compatibility with existing stuff they have to just keep hacking and testing until things appear to work.
3) Both (1) and (2) apply not only to old formats and protocols but also to newly created code such as Vista and
If what you're saying is true, why would *anyone* trust Microsoft software for *anything* beyond hobbyist uses?
As much as Slashdoters love to bash Microsoft's quality record, I have a really hard time believing that Microsoft is that bad. And *if* what you're saying is true, then Microsoft *at last* has the documentation it should have had from day one, so the EU has actually *saved* Microsoft a lot of development costs in random hacking. Microsoft thus owes the EU a big favour.
So basically, they can go after RedHat, Ubuntu, OpenSolaris, xBSD, and any other company-backed distributor of open source that wishes to inter-operate with Microsoft's formats or protocols unless they pay the Microsoft extortion tax. Any project that takes Microsoft up on the challenge faces the following issues:
1) If they use the information, then no commercial backed distribution will use any of their code (sort of DeCSS code and MP3 which are popular but problematic) unless they submit to Microsoft extortion -- thus helping to marginalize "good" distros or "good" formats like ODF.
2) If they don't use the information and use traditional techniques like reverse engineering and working around the patent, they will slow down their progress compared to competing tainted projects *and* commercial-backed distros that use their "clean" projects will have to justify that they aren't "tainted", This was a lot easier to do before (you could claim ignorance) than now (things are out in the open, so many open source developers will jump at the offer unless the project explicitly states it will refuse or work around any code with known Microsoft patents regardless of the promise ).
3) The promise covers current versions of Microsoft formats and protocols. There's no reason to believe it will cover anything not yet released, even if it's a point revision of the formats or protocols. Anyone with their guard down might assume something that's not true.
I agree with you in principle, however that isn't a one-size-fit all solution that fits all characters.
I met and married my wife (which I love dearly and is the perfect woman for me) using a personals website that matched my character best. I would never have met her otherwise, and even if I did, we wouldn't have clicked. Here's the problem:
1) Character: Most people see me as a perfect gentleman and most people think I'm already married (which is why married men and women and people much older than me are usually my best friends and unmarried rowdies tend not to have much in common with me). This has *always* been the case with me, even when I was in grade school. My wife is similar in this respect. We could have worked side by side and never have known. Shy people have a similar issue, and "diamonds in the rough" have exactly the opposite problem, especially if two diamonds in the rough get together (since they'd likely but put off by each other long before they discovered how right they were for each other).
2) Search Criteria: I'm very studious. If there's a non-fiction audiobook out there (especially if it's free), I've either "read" it, am "reading it", or will eventually get around to it. I tended to look for people who were similar, but the people I found tended to be worldly. Great people that are a joy to talk to, but although I can talk with sophistication when appropriate and love the city, I'm more a modest farmer at heart that doesn't like to travel, so no such match could ever last or extend beyond friendship. My wife is like me in heart, "studious enough", and has expanded my world in ways I didn't plan or knew I wanted.
3) Opportunity: If you're extremely busy or there are other life circumstances (e.g. being in an isolated community where you already know everybody) or there are no social groups in your area that you're interested in joining or the ones you are a interested in joining have no eligible people, you're out of luck.
*Good* dating sites allow you to get to know each other slowly and are more targeted to your character, so artificial barriers like (1) and (2) and (3) (at least people with little time) are greatly lowered. And (3) is lowered because you expand your horizons beyond what is possible in real life to allow you to meet people you would never have.
IMO, if you fit (1), (2), and (3), your chances aren't good, no matter much you socialize, unless you use the best dating site that suits your situation (don't just go for "what's popular" since you're likely going to attract the wrong people and have a hard time sifting through the mountain of incompatibles to find the one or two compatibles). Maybe other options exist, but I don't know them.
IMO, if none of (1), (2), and (3) apply or if only one does, then your best bet is to find a way to move beyond this barrier follow the parent poster's advice or just accept that you might be single all your life (or at least until the barriers are down) so you might as well accept it and plan your life accordingly.
In any case, as someone who married in my late thirties, I can say that my best chance for socializing was in university, so if you're in university now, keep your eyes open (even if (1), (2), and (3) are all true) since you won't likely get a better chance via socializing. And if you're long passed university, don't get caught in the "it's not the right time to date but it will be in a year" trap or the "I have plenty of time, so I might as well get to know a lot of people and easy into serious dating when I'm ready" trap. I've known too many people who have fallen into that trap and end up picking someone out of desperation later in life or remained single passed 40 in desperation. IMO, there are no good times to date (which is a plus since the person you're interested in will have an opportunity to know the real you and you'll get to know how the person reacts to the real you in a real situation), and quantity doesn't replace quality (after all you're going to marry one person,
You're correct for complex applications and operations, but the bulk of people out there only use the following in their OS:
1) Web browser
2) Music/Video player
3) Office software/PDF Viewer
4) Email
5) File sharing/organizing
6) Photo editing/organizing
7) Plug into IPods or similar music devices
8) Tax software (at least those that don't use spread sheets)
That's about it. What Linux provides in each of these areas (except for (8)) is virtually identical to how things are done on Windows XP, especially if you're using an operating system like Ubuntu. The key difference between Ubuntu and Windows XP is that Windows XP has a lot of knobs and complexity which get in the way if all you're interested in is 1-8, while Ubuntu gets rid of most of that cruft and lets you actually focus on 1-8.
I've had zero difficulty moving my wife from Windows XP to Ubuntu on a Dell 1520 laptop. Things just work as she expects and she doesn't need more than 1-7 (plus some bio-informatics software). While it is true that I had add "Nautilus menu actions" to give her the ability to rotate and resize pictures from Nautilus the way she could in Windows XP, and add VMWare with Windows 2000 so she could access some special features on one of her social networking site, she quickly got up to speed and manages her own system without my involvement.
BTW, I did look at Vista too in VirtualBox. Most of the things people complain about like "Confirm"/"Deny" badgering and slowness just weren't there (even under virtualization). The main problem with Vista is that it seems like Microsoft tried to remake the OS as a web application and things are a lot more bulky and confusing than they need to be. Things are gratuitously moved around from XP, there are more layers of menus to find things, and many parts of the OS are half baked. For instance, to turn off least user privileges, I needed to go to the "tools" section of the control panel (it took a while to find) and click on turn off least user privileges link. That popped up a DOS box for a second which actually performed the action on the command line. Why on earth did I need to *see* the DOS box in a production OS? The only reason I needed to turn off least user privileges was because I couldn't share files with my virtual machine. Windows XP worked like a charm. Granted it's more secure to turn off the file sharing service in Vista by default the same way Ubuntu does. But in Ubuntu, if you try to share files for the first time you get a dialog box that explains the default and asks you if you want to install Samba and open the port. With Vista all you get is silence and you don't have a clue what's gone wrong or how to find out how to fix it. I would have *loved* to keep least user privileges but I'm not a Vista guru and I couldn't figure out how to share files and keep least user privileges on.
I honestly don't see many people switching over Windows XP (which works for most people) to Vista (which wouldn't). If Microsoft forces users to go to Vista before it's fully baked, Linux has an enormous opportunity.
While I agree with you that he didn't want anyone to worship him since only God serves worship, his prohibition was on idolatry, not actual pictures.
Money, video games, statuses of Zeus, movies about Moses, and songs about Jesus are all okay as long as you don't worship *them* instead of the only thing that has any permanence, i.e. God.
It's a teaching that's common to all inspired religions and a form of it even exists for secular humanists.
Ironically, by prohibiting any and all pictures of Muhammad, people are violating the idolatry, commandment by making the obsession with pictures of a prophet more important that God.
Agreed. From a purely logical point of view:
(1) The needs of the many outnumber the needs of the few.
(2) Millions of people die from some diseases. If you could eliminate that disease forever by sacrificing one life, you'd actually be saving millions of lives.
(3) Eugenics make perfect sense. After all, shouldn't our decendents be better off than us?
Putting all these things together, it's logical to do truly horrific things in the name of science and the betterment of humanity.
If you research Josef Mengele ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele ) you'll see that he didn't see how his work was anything but beneficial because of logic such as the above.
Many experiments from the first half of the last century (such as the infamous "Prisoners versus captives" and "fake electric shock to test subject's willingness to obey authority" psyche experiments) which were done in non-German countries are simply not allowed any more because of the non-obvious damage they do on the test subjects. The results of that science *are* useful (just as the Nazi experiments). The fake electric shock test, for instance, explains a lot how far people (even scientists) are willing to go if authority says it's okay (NB: authority might not be a person. It could also be a societal norm, corporate culture, political or other affiliation or religion).
But it doesn't matter. Everything needs checks and balances, including science. Anyone in the medical world in Canada, the US, or Europe knows that all experiment (animal or human) needs to go through ethical review by a diverse community of reviewers (some peers, some lay people, etc).
Fortunatly science in these countries are not free-for-alls, and it's as it should be.
Think of ethics and religion (which have more in common than the relativists and extremists would lead you to believe) as being part of the loyal opposition that's necessary for of any sane democracy.
Huh? If you're referring to Mono, then recognize that Mono is not GNOME and has no connection to GNOME other than Mono uses Gtk+ on Linux. Saying Mono is GNOME is like saying KDE is proprietary because some proprietary software is based off of Qt.
Since Miguel left GNOME for Mono, GNOME has been busy *removing* Microsoft inspired technologies like Bonobo in favour of Linux technologies like DBus which work *a lot* better.
If you want to accuse GNOME of incorporating anyone's tech, the Mac is a better target. The global title menu bar, button order, and spatial browsing all smell of the Mac.
> Hmmm... Ok so tell me how often are you going to be visiting the Microsoft website if you happen to be a Linux and Firefox user?
> Probably 0...
Not really. Sympatico and many other ISPs have outsourced their email service to MSN, so if MSN is included in the redesign, users of these ISPs are in big trouble. Sympatico support at least refuses to acknowledge that anything other than Outlook is your email client, so if you don't have Outlook and there's an email client, you either have to install Outlook or lie and do the equivalent actions in Thunderbird or other mail clients.
Does anyone know if MSN is also going to be redone?
Even if MSN isn't redone, documents like the OOXML spec, C# spec, and "Get the facts" are on Microsoft's sites. If you get a reference to one of their docs, there wouldn't be a non-Silverlight way of refuting any claims in those docs or even browsing the Microsoft site to see what they're saying about Linux.
> What if someone discovers a vulnerability in ODF and they need to release a newer version of the format?
Two point:
1) There are no vulnerable file formats, only vulnerable implementations. If the old MS format were vulnerable, then they could at minimum sandbox the thing or take the easy way out and disable specific vulnerable implementation functions (which likely aren't used by anyone) unless the user verifies them and manually enables them.
2) No matter what ISO does, the spec is out and you are free to use any program that implements the current version. Since libraries and government institutions must have the original unconverted documents of all their archives (note, a single space or comma can change the meaning of many documents including the constitution), you can be sure that some viewer will always exist for "Older" versions.
I've just bought a pair of Dell Laptops and these seem to be fairly good quality and everything works flawlessly with Ubuntu (if you apt-get the backports).
As far as Linux goes, I'd recommend them. The main issue I see with Dell's isn't the the features, it's the anti-features like Media-Direct.
For those that don't know why this is an anti-feature, a brief explanation, if you press the Media Direct button when the laptop is *off*, it normally runs the Media player for Dell in the Media Direct partition. Sounds good, except if you reformat your drive to reclaim the 40-60GB Vista-mirror+Media-Direct+Dell Utility partitions and put Ubuntu or anything else there. If you do that, Media Direct dumbly messes up your partition table and randomly writes over your disk. Essentially, Media Direct is should be called Media Destruct if you don't follow the Gospel according to Dell. This wouldn't be so bad, except that there isn't even a BIOS feature to turn it off. The only "solutions" I've seen is to write 0s on the entire hard disk (so that the media direct button can't do anything other than display a splash screen) or manually disable the button by opening the case.
I'm not sure if other vendors have similar anti-features, but it is a big reason I won't even consider doing a BIOS upgrade for my Laptop or keep the Utility partition. The last thing I need is one of these anti-features reverting my machine back to "the button of death" configuration.
I agree that eating your own dog food is good.
But when you serve it in *production* environments, especially external environments, it's not dog food. It's "using your users as Beta testers without their permission or knowledge". Production environments need to be on the conservative side since any critical flaw will affect your unwitting users, which is why people gravitate towards "the stable but old enterprise versions" of RedHat, Novell, Debian, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows rather than the "cutting edge but occasionally problematic but you can 95% of the time recover without too much pain" newer versions.
Failure to do so is either banking on the belief that your users either don't care about losing or corrupting their data or relying on a "hey we never promised that things actually works, be thankful that it does because legally you've let us have our way with you" EULA disclaimer.