it's one thing to throw your hat in the ring - how many people ran against schwarzeneger? - it's quite another to have a decent shot. just because one can register doesn't automatically mean one can campaign.
Alright, perhaps I shouldn't have made a blanket statement like that. Still, plenty of them don't do that.
Of course, if you're BSD licsensing soemthing, you're clearly willing to risk that, or you don't mind if it happens, and that's fine. but some of us want a little more assurance that our code will stay open. that's what the GPL is for. I'm not going to try to tell you which liscense you should use, just release the code under terms that you are comfortable with.
how many of the fortune 500 are paying off my local school board officials? that's not what we're bitching about. If I have an issue that the school board can solve, or the Zoning board, I do that. It's a different matter though to show up in washington and just sit in on a meeting of that level. If that were allowed, and people were that politically active, we would have a problem. Back in september, enough people who down to DC to protest the war that they essentially shut down all the traffic in the immediate area of the whitehouse, capital, etc. Those who organized it were telling people who hadn't yet started to march not to because the streets were clogged to the point where nobody could really move anyways. by the way, we're still in Iraq.
How often do you write a letter
they're not interested in individual letters and you know it. you get a petition going, get a bunch of letters, that's a different story, and I've participated in that. sometimes it does some good. sometimes not.
For those who really don't do shit, you've got a point. But for those of us who do our part - let us bitch.
and not enough payoff. yeah, that would be damn cool. streaming video to tons of people and still being able to use my internet connection for other stuff... but the ISP's don't give a crap about that. They want money. They don't like spending it without getting something back. not all of their current equipment already supports multicast. every last router has to for it to work. upgrading them costs money. a lot of it. and they don't gain so much by being able to do multicasting.
It's only the large, money hungry ISPs doing this.
And you know why, don't you? They're the only one's large enough to think that they might come out on top if ISP's were allowed to do this. You get big enough to not have to play fair, you lose some humility.
in theory, I like the GP's argument, but yeah, until someone competing with nvidia offers free drivers, it's not gonna happen. and ATI is actually worse - they don't actually offer proprietary ones either.
I'm actually notably more interested in seeing ATI Open source their windows drivers, because I could expect linux ones shortly theirafter, and because they work poorly enough that I've only made the mistake of buying an ATI card once in my life. black snow on planet hoth. random star-like bursts of light in the middle of industrial complexes. perhaps an extreme case, but dude. if for no other reason, Open source them so that more people will be willing to use your hardware. I imagine it's a much more noticeable segment than it would be for most products.
True, but I think the point he's trying to articulate has meerly been very poorly worded. the BSD liscense is essentially, give credit, don't pretend we endorse your stuff, and we're not liable for anything. couldn't be much more open than that.
the issue is that it doesn't stay that way, because when a company can change the terms of the liscense, they tend to do so, so that it benifits them. they will only conceed as much to the user as they must. In this way, you end up with more restriction later on. I think the sole reason that linux is so much more popular and well known than BSD, is because of the liscense, not because of any trait of the software. corporations have no problem investing in a tool that will help them even if they think it may help competitors as well, but they won't do that if they see than one of their competitors can just take all of their work, and sell it on their own terms without any input, and without giving anything back.
in any case, the choice of license depends on the scenario. I would favor the GPL myself, because though I don't have a problem with other people using my stuff, I don't want it to become part of an embrace-and-extend control mechanism. others may not care about that. yes, the GPL is more restrictive in and of itself, but in the long run, the BSD license results in more restritctions, because the license can change.
in an example like this I would agree that the GPL causes problems. if it were my software that something anologous to this happened with, I might talk to the guy about alternative liscensing, work out some terms for this particular case. after all, if I own the copyright, I can license it however I want.
it's a testement to the brokennesss of the patent system that no one thinks anything of someone patnenting something they don't actually know how to do. just think about that.
Wow. my school has their security measures too, but taping over usb ports? wow.
My school doesn't actually offer any real programming courses. we have andimation, photoshop, but no C or BASIC. the closest thing we have is web design. actually, the school district pretty much uses web design II as a web master. I redid 3 of the elemntary school pages myself. it's actually much more rewarding work than the other stuff you do in that class, like making an utterly pointless webpage about "Stem Cell Research," which has no information whatsoever, because by this time in the course I realize that the content has nothing to do with my grade. I like to know why I'm doing something.
the security measures aren't as bad as you mentioned, but we're not allowed to see the C: drive on the windows boxes, we can't right click on anything that comes with windows (just in flash and whatnot.) most students have 10 MB of space availible for their acounnt (you read that right.) if you take animation, you get 100 MB, and if something weird happens, which does sometimes the way the network is maintained, it did for me, you end up with 150. photoshop doesn't get this (or didn't used to, not sure about now,) even though most of the files you work with in that class end up being like 17MB. they don't need the extra space because "the macs can just save on the hard drive." enlighten me, why can't the windows boxes do that? The other thing is the tech department is pretty much mac-illterate, which is actually really nice where I stand, because just as a student in the mac lab, I can do their job better than they can most days, without an administrative account, and they haven't figured out how to put nazi-level security on them. here's an example. for some reason, the students have write acces to the photoshop executible. several of my classmates have had it "dissapear." I put dissapear in quotes not because I think that all of those kids would delete it on purpose (it's happened to me,) but because I know there has to be an explination, since I am more knowledgeable than most people who accpet antyhing you tell them about computers, because they don't know a single thing about them. in any case, the teacher knows I know what I'm doing, so she lets me just copy the identical file from another machine to theirs via a flash drive, and we're back in business. the tech department may do the same thing, or may reinstall the whole program (which consists of more than one file,) but they won't do it that day, or the next one if you're luck is particularly poor.
we have a computer club, it's new this year. one of our memebers has an administrative account (because the web design teacher got sick of dealing with the tech department, and trusts him,) which we used once when we wanted to get at the C: drive just for storage, not to do anything that was fundementally against the school rules. it's 4:30 in the morning and I just realized that's not really pertenant to the story I was about to tell, but I'll leave it in there. back in september, our plans for the day fell through, or we finished early or somehting, I forget exactly. in any case, someone had doom95 on their flash drive, so we all copied it to our user spaces or our own flash drives, and got in a half hour or so of gaming. six months later, I get to photoshop class, try to log in, and it tells me my account has been disabled. no warning, nothing. I had to use the machines earlier that day to finish and assignment, and if some idiot hadn't forgotten to log out, or if I had bothered to switch to my own account just to use a web browser, I would have been screwed. after the teacher yelled at them, and they said they would fix it right away, she came back to the class, told me they had said something about "doom," as the reason for it, and that they would fix it. so I gave them another minute, and then tried to log in. same deal. doesn't take that long to re-enable an account. half an hour later, after her going down the hall to yell at them a couple more times, and them telling h
I'm sorry, you botched that grammatically. it would either have to be:
When bypass the filters the young padawan can, then learned enough to see porn will he be.
-or-
When bypass the filters the young padawan can, then porn can he see.
I know it's a difficult rule, and we haven't really covered it, so I'm not going to take points off this time, but I will on the next quiz, because it is an integral part of Yodaspeak. It just sounds bad if you mess it up. You also misspelled padawan in case you missed that.
granted, but those people are not 97% of the population. no matter how fair the quiz is, some people are going to bomb it because some people doing know what the fuck they're doing. but if you make the quiz so rediculously biased that those of us who run servers at home just for fun don't do much better, you completely invalidate the results.
ha, they're using firefox themselves, and the only question where you can get hurt without downloading and installing something manually, is an Active X thing.
I got a 5 of 8, and that's cheating by having heard of kazaa and emule. I doubt few people would have seen through the "NO SPYWARE" label that was 2nd in size only to the word Kazaa, without prior knowledge, but I bet a lot more would have been able to figure it out from seeing the actual site, not a 798 x 600 screenshot (what a random number,) and I bet even more are smart enough to not touch it if they don't know what it is, but this quiz doesn't account for any of that, and it pics the kind of sites that are visited mostly by the segment of the population who ISN'T educated about this stuff. screen savers, smilies, and pretty much anything that says it's free, but doesn't say open source - stay away or be very freakin' cautious.
let's go through the quiz (if you want to see for yourself untainted, do so before reading this):
the first 4 questions have you determine which of two sites is safe, based on screen shots.
question 1: choose between two screen saver distrobution sites. like all the others, it's just a screenshot, and doesn't even show the whole front page, let alone users look at other pages. the only decernable difference is that the first one looks more professional, so heeding the remarks in the article that said most users seem to think that means it's safe, and "reading between the lines," I picked the other one, since there was no logical way to decide. I was wrong.
question 2: smilies. the one on the right looked more professional, and said "NO UNWANTED SOFTWARE" in a very easily spotted location, with big letters, and the other in regular sized font, in the bottom right, had a half cut off message that pretty clearly stated (even with incompete sentances) that it contained spyware, so I picked the one on the right, this time with some actual info to go on. I was right.
question 3: free games. the sites had no noticeable differences in professionalism, no warnings or advertising of spyware freeness either way, nothing to go on that really made any sense to actually use, so I decided that TotallyFunFreeStuff was trying to hard, and was probably hiding something, and picked the other. I was right.
question 4: Lyrics. important to note that this one used active X, so it's irrelevant to anyone who's not dumb enough to still regularly use IE anyways, which now that I mention it, I think I'll soon put a rant about McAffee and that that in my Journal (will be a first entry,) but it's to much of a tangent for this post. anyways, the one on the left looked more professional, and the one on the right had a "firefox blocked a popup" message on it, so I picked the left (entirely because of the message, I continue to mention the professionalism because the article made a stink about it.) I'd like to note that the thing I took as a tip off wouldn't be availible if I were seceptable to this at all, as it's a firefox message, which doesn't do active X. In any case, I was wrong.
the last 4 questions had you determine whether a file sharing program was safe based on the usual screenshot of the webpage.
Bearshare: site looks professional, there's a link for a "FREE Sponsored version," sponsored sets off a red flag in my mind, I say no. I'm right.
eMule: worst site design of the four astheticly, says it's open source, I've heard of it, I say yes. I'm right.
blubster: pretty sleek front page design, though it feels like a splash screen, so there's almost no information. nothing to go on really except that it says it's 100% free, which given the fact that OSS/Free software tends to advertize itself as such, and they didn't, probably meant add supported, but for some incomprehensible reason I still picked yes. I'm wrong.
Kazaa: slick page, big "NO SPYWARE" label on the font page, there's a main section for the privacy thing, which I bet a lot of people would have looked at if it were a page, not a picture, but instead just trusted it because the label was all they had to go on. I was familiar with the software though, so
No, freedom of the press is useful to most people because it provides them with information about the world that does not have to be government-approved, and so helps maintain and insure other freedoms
No, software freedom is useful to most people because it provides them with abilities about software that does not have to be software-company-approved, and so helps maintain and insure other software related freedoms.
See?
unfortunately, it doesn't quite translate. with software, you read the liscense, decide if it is worth having to abide by the terms in order to use it, if you decide it is, sign and start using it. if you decide it isn't, use something else. Freedom of the press is nessicary to keep those terms acceptable, since we can't just decide not to use our government. A liscense agreement is just that, an agreement. if both parties aren't on board, it is void. That's the key difference.
Was choice (if they even had it) of slaver a good thing for the slaves?
Of course it wasn't good for the slaves. but you know what? if they had had a choice, none of them would have gone along with it. in a free market, there is nothing wrong with my trying to sell scraps of cardboard, which are in no way special, and are advertized that way, for billions of dollars each. that is perfectly legal. But just because I can try to sell them for that much doesn't mean someone will buy them. If the slaves had been asked, "do you want to become our property, forever, without hope of ever being able to leave, being worked absurdly hard, whipped whenever you did anything wrong, or whenever I felt like it just to show you who's boss, etc..." Seriously, how many would have said yes? Zero. The only people crazy enough to go for that wouldn't survive in africa to adulthood, let alone an age where they were strong enough to be any use. Just because a choice is availible doesn't mean people will choose it. they only do so (ideally) when it is a good choice for them.
Choice is an inferior freedom than the 4 main freedoms. The 4 main freedoms ensure that there is choice. It doesn't make sense to choose a resctritive license that binds you to be a bad neighbour. What makes sense is choosing amongh technical features of several Free Software that does the same thing (GNOME vs KDE, etc...).
first, I'd like to point out that the only reason there even is an alternative to KDE is because some people were not happy with the liscence, (not a technical feature), and so someone came up with an alternative. Yet some people still used KDE, even before the liscensing issue was resolved, because they didn't care about not being able to modify Qt, and they liked KDE better. I'm sure if it were still an issue, many people would still be doing that. Something similar is likely to happen in any scenario where a noticeable group is unhappy with the current options. someone will come up with an alternative, one that meets these people's needs, and these people will use the alernative. now, this particular example involves two products that aren't made for the sake of profit, as things tend to be in free market theory, but it's the same idea. If through free market forces alone, all non-free software died out, I would be ok with that, because it would mean simply, that everyone prefers free software, and so you're not restricting anyone's choice really by taking that option away, since in this scenario, since no one would have chosen it anyways.
however, some people do seem to prefer certain proprietary software solutions to free ones, so I don't see that happening. plenty of people know about firefox and have used it, but still prefer Opera, because they like some of it's features, or just that it loads pages very quickly, and this is more important to them than it being Free/OSS. this may not be the case for you, but you don't have to use it. if Opera were to suddenly vanish, these people would not be more free, they would be less free. nothing was chaining the
Freedom of press is also utterly useless to most people because they're not journalists. Do you wish to remove Freedom of press?
No, freedom of the press is useful to most people because it provides them with information about the world that does not have to be government-approved, and so helps maintain and insure other freedoms.
Freedom of software only helps most people to the extent that the open source development model helps them - it makes better software. therefor, if someone can make a product that is still supiror to the Free/OSS alternative (liscensing and price included in this evaluation), so that people want to use it, then it accomplishes the same goal for them, and for them, it's just as good.
if we were to mandate that all software must be free (and I know you've said you're only advoacting it to people, but just work with me here for a moment.) then we would be restricting the choice of these people, who in spite of the liscensing, still would like to use the proprietary software. Is choice not what freedom is about? I would be staunchly opposed to any mechanism that forces people to use EITHER software.
But I'll tell you one case where it should be mandated: government. Government should choose to use only Free Software because Government has specific obligations to the citizens that are utterly incompatible with proprietary software.
Here I think you're right. As you said, transparency, etc.
Most of the time, Free Software and Open Souce means the same thing, but only technically. The focus of Free Software is freedom for users. The focus of Open Source is a better software development model.
you seem to have missed the whole point of that statement, which was in the half you cut off. My point was, that the software itself is the same thing. "only technically" is the actual software. the difference is the philosophy of the person talking about it, so whatever you call it, you're using the same actual software. Linus Torvalds is with the OSS camp, but Linux is just as easily described as free software as it is open source. RMS is with the FSF, but emacs is just as easly described as OSS as it is free software. At the risk of being redundant, the distinciton is about philosophy, and the software itself doesn't care.
Which do you think are more interesting to people?
is that at all relavent?
Great. So you don't know what Linux is, you're confusing it with a variant of GNU/Linux,
No, I know the distinciton, and I'm not confusing the two, I'm merely using a term that is frequently used to mean the OS as a whole, dispite technically just being the kernel, careless a term as it may be. if it were unclear which I was talking about, I would have clarified.
and you're confusing Operating System with Open Source,
In the part you quoted before this, I did in fact mean Operating System, and the monopoly I was reffering to was Windows, as a monopoly of the Operating System market, not a generic "software" monopoly by the proprietary liscensing scheme that doesn't actually exist - multpile entities can't have a monopoly on one thing, by definition. I you were reffering to the typo earlier in my post where I wrote OS instead of OSS - it was just that, a typo. sorry.
and you think WinZip doesn't have a monopoly over the source code of WinZip.
and by your apparent definition of a monopoly, Dell has a monopoly on Dell computers, HP has a monopoly on HP computers, Gateway has a monopoly on Gateway computers, etc.
you can't have a monopoly on a specific product, i.e. "GeForce 6800," for it to be a monopoly, you have to have a monopoly on a market, i.e. "graphics cards."
if WinZip were to have a monopoly on something it would have to be "Archiving Tools" or "Source Code to all Archiving Tools" not "WinZip" or "WinZip Source Code."
While I personally can appreciate the freedoms given to me by free software, I don't think they are fundemental inalienable rights.
first of all, the right to modify software is utterly useless to most people, because they don't have the skills. It's like telling a puppy that he has your permison to drive your car. It doesn't magically give him the ability. With most people, the reaction you will get will range from "well, it's a nice thought, but it doesn't really help me, sorry" to "Why can't you get it through your head that not everybody is comfortable with these machines!" to "wtf is source code?"
more people will be alienated by this sort of attitude than inspiried by it.
as another poster already mentioned, if you mandate that software be free, you are sacrificing the freedom of one group of people "developers" for the freedom of another "users."
if those "user" freedoms are important to you, then fine, use OS, (and before you jump at me for using the wrong term, I'd like to point out that they're exactly the same kind of software - free software is open source, and OSS is by definition free - the only thing that's different is the philosophy of the person reffering to it) but don't tell a professional publisher to use GIMP instead of photoshop when he's told you a thousand times that having the source code does nothing for him, and he needs some functionality that photoshop has and GIMP doesn't.
as I said before, I apprieciate the freedom that Free/OSS gives me, but I don't think of it as my right. I think of it as a feature of the software. it's one more thing that helps it compete. if I can only install something on one machine, and I can't modify it, and I can't distribute it, and it's still a better option than something I can do those things with, then I'll use it. You believe that all software should be free. here is what I believe:
Given no unusual circumstances (monopolies, vendor lockin, etc,) if a software, as a sum of it's price, licensing, and quality, is useful to someone, it should be allowed to exist. period. this means, that with a totally fair, free market, if microsoft can get its shit together and make a competitive operating system, that some people will still use in spite of the liscense and the price, and the well-known competition, then good for them. after all, at least the ability to modify the OS to the extent that you need the source code is useless to most people. I think open source makes better software, but the end user cares about the end result, not why it is the way it is (at least for the large part.) those of use who want to be able to excersize the freedoms we get by using free software, can just do so.
right now I'm advocating linux because I believe even to someone who can't program at all, it's a great option for an OS, and also because I do want more people using it, so that we can hopefully break the monopoly, and be closer to that ideal free market I mentioned.
Actually, my money is on user stupidity. RTFA, particularly the quotes at the end. (it's short) OH. MY. GOD.
That said, yeah, windows is annoying like that, but if what you're saying sounds as pathetic as those quotes, you probably shouldn't be messing with your bootloader, particularly not a beta, and dear god, if you're going to do it, RTFM.
when I've done that, it's worked great, but typically, I install windows how it likes it, and then install linux and put the bootloader on a floppy. this way, when I want to switch OS's, I can just pop the floppy in or take it out, and restart, so I don't have to be around for the boot, and can use the time to get a snack or use the bathroom or something. On a desktop, it's not difficult to keep track of the floppy; I just keep it in the drive all the time, and when I don't want to use it, I leave it sitting in the drive, but not locked in. it's a different story on a laptop though.
the software is no longer a problem at all, unless you're using slackware or LFS or something else crazy like that, (which I do on one of My machines) but that doesn't happen unless you're comfortable with it.
The hardware complaint is more legitamte:
you said you tested on an IBM. IBM works particularly well with linux. Try installing on something less friendly. this too is an extreme example, but I've had all of these issues on one machine:
no sound (support exists in the kernel, but no one has the driver ready by default ready, so you have to do a kernel compile)
Power management (same thing)
Wireless card (drivers exist, but not in the core kernel tree, have to do it yourself)
CD-drive (there's been an issue with the ATAPI CD-ROM drivers that's caused certain drives not to function since 2.4.21, still haven't sorted this one out, and getting it installed was trickey to say the least.)
I'll reiterate this, that's an extreme example too. if you go whitebox, you'll generally be fine, but machines from HP, Dell, and the like will often have a couple issues, you might have problems with bleeding-edge hardware, there's no ATI graphcis support, Power management is often an issue, and if something isn't supported out of the box, it tends to be a bit trickier to fix it.
that said, the hardware complaints do tend to be over exaggerated, and the situation really isnt' that bad.
I think that knowing they were using redhat on these things, we should have seen this coming.
the reason people use slackware isn't because it makes things easy for the newbies - it's because it makes things easy for the experienced user. and it does. the package managment system is seriously lacking, but the raw stability means if something goes wrong, it's most likely your fault, and the flexibility means it's easy to fix. the speed would make it ideal for a machine of that power, but not as someones first linux box, let alone first computer. Slackware is anything but idiot proof
perhpas, but not to the same extent as if you stole a CD from their factories (stealing from the store harms the store the same following way, but not the record company. it's still worse than dling, but doesn't affect the record labels.) in that scenario, not only are they not getting your money for their goods, they are less one CD to make money off of. when you download the CD off of the internet, they are minus one sale, but not minus one disc.
as the GP said, this doesn't make it right, but it does make it not quite as bad.
There's some merit to your argument, but people have already made counterpoints, and it's easier to show how what he's saying is a load of bull by agreeing with the comment by itself and showing how it's mind-bogglingly hipocritical in this context.
where did he grow up where they jailed him for two years for stealing a peice of gum? usually they just make you pay for the gum.
this isn't exactly the first time someone's instituted an out-of-proportion punishment for this offence, even in the U.S.:
steal a soda and get caught = pay for the soda.
steal a CD of 15 songs from a store = pay for the CD.
"steal" one song from said CD off of a p2p network = forfit your entire college fund (assuming you can afford MIT with no financial aid.)
Slashdot Mirror
True, but the point is still valid - widening the gap. More expensive types of storage don't hold more music per space.
it's one thing to throw your hat in the ring - how many people ran against schwarzeneger? - it's quite another to have a decent shot. just because one can register doesn't automatically mean one can campaign.
Of course, if you're BSD licsensing soemthing, you're clearly willing to risk that, or you don't mind if it happens, and that's fine. but some of us want a little more assurance that our code will stay open. that's what the GPL is for. I'm not going to try to tell you which liscense you should use, just release the code under terms that you are comfortable with.
for congress?
School board meetings?
how many of the fortune 500 are paying off my local school board officials? that's not what we're bitching about. If I have an issue that the school board can solve, or the Zoning board, I do that. It's a different matter though to show up in washington and just sit in on a meeting of that level. If that were allowed, and people were that politically active, we would have a problem. Back in september, enough people who down to DC to protest the war that they essentially shut down all the traffic in the immediate area of the whitehouse, capital, etc. Those who organized it were telling people who hadn't yet started to march not to because the streets were clogged to the point where nobody could really move anyways. by the way, we're still in Iraq.
How often do you write a letter
they're not interested in individual letters and you know it. you get a petition going, get a bunch of letters, that's a different story, and I've participated in that. sometimes it does some good. sometimes not.
For those who really don't do shit, you've got a point. But for those of us who do our part - let us bitch.
and not enough payoff. yeah, that would be damn cool. streaming video to tons of people and still being able to use my internet connection for other stuff... but the ISP's don't give a crap about that. They want money. They don't like spending it without getting something back. not all of their current equipment already supports multicast. every last router has to for it to work. upgrading them costs money. a lot of it. and they don't gain so much by being able to do multicasting.
And you know why, don't you? They're the only one's large enough to think that they might come out on top if ISP's were allowed to do this. You get big enough to not have to play fair, you lose some humility.
in theory, I like the GP's argument, but yeah, until someone competing with nvidia offers free drivers, it's not gonna happen. and ATI is actually worse - they don't actually offer proprietary ones either.
I'm actually notably more interested in seeing ATI Open source their windows drivers, because I could expect linux ones shortly theirafter, and because they work poorly enough that I've only made the mistake of buying an ATI card once in my life. black snow on planet hoth. random star-like bursts of light in the middle of industrial complexes. perhaps an extreme case, but dude. if for no other reason, Open source them so that more people will be willing to use your hardware. I imagine it's a much more noticeable segment than it would be for most products.
the issue is that it doesn't stay that way, because when a company can change the terms of the liscense, they tend to do so, so that it benifits them. they will only conceed as much to the user as they must. In this way, you end up with more restriction later on. I think the sole reason that linux is so much more popular and well known than BSD, is because of the liscense, not because of any trait of the software. corporations have no problem investing in a tool that will help them even if they think it may help competitors as well, but they won't do that if they see than one of their competitors can just take all of their work, and sell it on their own terms without any input, and without giving anything back.
in any case, the choice of license depends on the scenario. I would favor the GPL myself, because though I don't have a problem with other people using my stuff, I don't want it to become part of an embrace-and-extend control mechanism. others may not care about that. yes, the GPL is more restrictive in and of itself, but in the long run, the BSD license results in more restritctions, because the license can change.
in an example like this I would agree that the GPL causes problems. if it were my software that something anologous to this happened with, I might talk to the guy about alternative liscensing, work out some terms for this particular case. after all, if I own the copyright, I can license it however I want.
it's a testement to the brokennesss of the patent system that no one thinks anything of someone patnenting something they don't actually know how to do. just think about that.
you expected to be modded down for that? you must be new here.
My school doesn't actually offer any real programming courses. we have andimation, photoshop, but no C or BASIC. the closest thing we have is web design. actually, the school district pretty much uses web design II as a web master. I redid 3 of the elemntary school pages myself. it's actually much more rewarding work than the other stuff you do in that class, like making an utterly pointless webpage about "Stem Cell Research," which has no information whatsoever, because by this time in the course I realize that the content has nothing to do with my grade. I like to know why I'm doing something.
the security measures aren't as bad as you mentioned, but we're not allowed to see the C: drive on the windows boxes, we can't right click on anything that comes with windows (just in flash and whatnot.) most students have 10 MB of space availible for their acounnt (you read that right.) if you take animation, you get 100 MB, and if something weird happens, which does sometimes the way the network is maintained, it did for me, you end up with 150. photoshop doesn't get this (or didn't used to, not sure about now,) even though most of the files you work with in that class end up being like 17MB. they don't need the extra space because "the macs can just save on the hard drive." enlighten me, why can't the windows boxes do that? The other thing is the tech department is pretty much mac-illterate, which is actually really nice where I stand, because just as a student in the mac lab, I can do their job better than they can most days, without an administrative account, and they haven't figured out how to put nazi-level security on them. here's an example. for some reason, the students have write acces to the photoshop executible. several of my classmates have had it "dissapear." I put dissapear in quotes not because I think that all of those kids would delete it on purpose (it's happened to me,) but because I know there has to be an explination, since I am more knowledgeable than most people who accpet antyhing you tell them about computers, because they don't know a single thing about them. in any case, the teacher knows I know what I'm doing, so she lets me just copy the identical file from another machine to theirs via a flash drive, and we're back in business. the tech department may do the same thing, or may reinstall the whole program (which consists of more than one file,) but they won't do it that day, or the next one if you're luck is particularly poor.
we have a computer club, it's new this year. one of our memebers has an administrative account (because the web design teacher got sick of dealing with the tech department, and trusts him,) which we used once when we wanted to get at the C: drive just for storage, not to do anything that was fundementally against the school rules. it's 4:30 in the morning and I just realized that's not really pertenant to the story I was about to tell, but I'll leave it in there. back in september, our plans for the day fell through, or we finished early or somehting, I forget exactly. in any case, someone had doom95 on their flash drive, so we all copied it to our user spaces or our own flash drives, and got in a half hour or so of gaming. six months later, I get to photoshop class, try to log in, and it tells me my account has been disabled. no warning, nothing. I had to use the machines earlier that day to finish and assignment, and if some idiot hadn't forgotten to log out, or if I had bothered to switch to my own account just to use a web browser, I would have been screwed. after the teacher yelled at them, and they said they would fix it right away, she came back to the class, told me they had said something about "doom," as the reason for it, and that they would fix it. so I gave them another minute, and then tried to log in. same deal. doesn't take that long to re-enable an account. half an hour later, after her going down the hall to yell at them a couple more times, and them telling h
When bypass the filters the young padawan can, then learned enough to see porn will he be.
-or-
When bypass the filters the young padawan can, then porn can he see.
I know it's a difficult rule, and we haven't really covered it, so I'm not going to take points off this time, but I will on the next quiz, because it is an integral part of Yodaspeak. It just sounds bad if you mess it up. You also misspelled padawan in case you missed that.
Wii...? you gotta be fucking kidding me... nope. GOD DAMNIT, YOU WERE DOING SO WELL!!!
I kinda liked dolphin over gamecube a little bit, but we got use to gamecube. Wii is not quite the same as gamecube, however. jesus christ.
granted, but those people are not 97% of the population. no matter how fair the quiz is, some people are going to bomb it because some people doing know what the fuck they're doing. but if you make the quiz so rediculously biased that those of us who run servers at home just for fun don't do much better, you completely invalidate the results.
ha, they're using firefox themselves, and the only question where you can get hurt without downloading and installing something manually, is an Active X thing.
let's go through the quiz (if you want to see for yourself untainted, do so before reading this):
the first 4 questions have you determine which of two sites is safe, based on screen shots.
question 1: choose between two screen saver distrobution sites. like all the others, it's just a screenshot, and doesn't even show the whole front page, let alone users look at other pages. the only decernable difference is that the first one looks more professional, so heeding the remarks in the article that said most users seem to think that means it's safe, and "reading between the lines," I picked the other one, since there was no logical way to decide. I was wrong.
question 2: smilies. the one on the right looked more professional, and said "NO UNWANTED SOFTWARE" in a very easily spotted location, with big letters, and the other in regular sized font, in the bottom right, had a half cut off message that pretty clearly stated (even with incompete sentances) that it contained spyware, so I picked the one on the right, this time with some actual info to go on. I was right.
question 3: free games. the sites had no noticeable differences in professionalism, no warnings or advertising of spyware freeness either way, nothing to go on that really made any sense to actually use, so I decided that TotallyFunFreeStuff was trying to hard, and was probably hiding something, and picked the other. I was right.
question 4: Lyrics. important to note that this one used active X, so it's irrelevant to anyone who's not dumb enough to still regularly use IE anyways, which now that I mention it, I think I'll soon put a rant about McAffee and that that in my Journal (will be a first entry,) but it's to much of a tangent for this post. anyways, the one on the left looked more professional, and the one on the right had a "firefox blocked a popup" message on it, so I picked the left (entirely because of the message, I continue to mention the professionalism because the article made a stink about it.) I'd like to note that the thing I took as a tip off wouldn't be availible if I were seceptable to this at all, as it's a firefox message, which doesn't do active X. In any case, I was wrong.
the last 4 questions had you determine whether a file sharing program was safe based on the usual screenshot of the webpage.
Bearshare: site looks professional, there's a link for a "FREE Sponsored version," sponsored sets off a red flag in my mind, I say no. I'm right.
eMule: worst site design of the four astheticly, says it's open source, I've heard of it, I say yes. I'm right.
blubster: pretty sleek front page design, though it feels like a splash screen, so there's almost no information. nothing to go on really except that it says it's 100% free, which given the fact that OSS/Free software tends to advertize itself as such, and they didn't, probably meant add supported, but for some incomprehensible reason I still picked yes. I'm wrong.
Kazaa: slick page, big "NO SPYWARE" label on the font page, there's a main section for the privacy thing, which I bet a lot of people would have looked at if it were a page, not a picture, but instead just trusted it because the label was all they had to go on. I was familiar with the software though, so
No, software freedom is useful to most people because it provides them with abilities about software that does not have to be software-company-approved, and so helps maintain and insure other software related freedoms.
See?
unfortunately, it doesn't quite translate. with software, you read the liscense, decide if it is worth having to abide by the terms in order to use it, if you decide it is, sign and start using it. if you decide it isn't, use something else. Freedom of the press is nessicary to keep those terms acceptable, since we can't just decide not to use our government. A liscense agreement is just that, an agreement. if both parties aren't on board, it is void. That's the key difference.
Was choice (if they even had it) of slaver a good thing for the slaves?
Of course it wasn't good for the slaves. but you know what? if they had had a choice, none of them would have gone along with it. in a free market, there is nothing wrong with my trying to sell scraps of cardboard, which are in no way special, and are advertized that way, for billions of dollars each. that is perfectly legal. But just because I can try to sell them for that much doesn't mean someone will buy them. If the slaves had been asked, "do you want to become our property, forever, without hope of ever being able to leave, being worked absurdly hard, whipped whenever you did anything wrong, or whenever I felt like it just to show you who's boss, etc..." Seriously, how many would have said yes? Zero. The only people crazy enough to go for that wouldn't survive in africa to adulthood, let alone an age where they were strong enough to be any use. Just because a choice is availible doesn't mean people will choose it. they only do so (ideally) when it is a good choice for them.
Choice is an inferior freedom than the 4 main freedoms. The 4 main freedoms ensure that there is choice. It doesn't make sense to choose a resctritive license that binds you to be a bad neighbour. What makes sense is choosing amongh technical features of several Free Software that does the same thing (GNOME vs KDE, etc...).
first, I'd like to point out that the only reason there even is an alternative to KDE is because some people were not happy with the liscence, (not a technical feature), and so someone came up with an alternative. Yet some people still used KDE, even before the liscensing issue was resolved, because they didn't care about not being able to modify Qt, and they liked KDE better. I'm sure if it were still an issue, many people would still be doing that. Something similar is likely to happen in any scenario where a noticeable group is unhappy with the current options. someone will come up with an alternative, one that meets these people's needs, and these people will use the alernative. now, this particular example involves two products that aren't made for the sake of profit, as things tend to be in free market theory, but it's the same idea. If through free market forces alone, all non-free software died out, I would be ok with that, because it would mean simply, that everyone prefers free software, and so you're not restricting anyone's choice really by taking that option away, since in this scenario, since no one would have chosen it anyways.
however, some people do seem to prefer certain proprietary software solutions to free ones, so I don't see that happening. plenty of people know about firefox and have used it, but still prefer Opera, because they like some of it's features, or just that it loads pages very quickly, and this is more important to them than it being Free/OSS. this may not be the case for you, but you don't have to use it. if Opera were to suddenly vanish, these people would not be more free, they would be less free. nothing was chaining the
No, freedom of the press is useful to most people because it provides them with information about the world that does not have to be government-approved, and so helps maintain and insure other freedoms. Freedom of software only helps most people to the extent that the open source development model helps them - it makes better software. therefor, if someone can make a product that is still supiror to the Free/OSS alternative (liscensing and price included in this evaluation), so that people want to use it, then it accomplishes the same goal for them, and for them, it's just as good.
if we were to mandate that all software must be free (and I know you've said you're only advoacting it to people, but just work with me here for a moment.) then we would be restricting the choice of these people, who in spite of the liscensing, still would like to use the proprietary software. Is choice not what freedom is about? I would be staunchly opposed to any mechanism that forces people to use EITHER software.
But I'll tell you one case where it should be mandated: government. Government should choose to use only Free Software because Government has specific obligations to the citizens that are utterly incompatible with proprietary software.
Here I think you're right. As you said, transparency, etc.
Most of the time, Free Software and Open Souce means the same thing, but only technically. The focus of Free Software is freedom for users. The focus of Open Source is a better software development model.
you seem to have missed the whole point of that statement, which was in the half you cut off. My point was, that the software itself is the same thing. "only technically" is the actual software. the difference is the philosophy of the person talking about it, so whatever you call it, you're using the same actual software. Linus Torvalds is with the OSS camp, but Linux is just as easily described as free software as it is open source. RMS is with the FSF, but emacs is just as easly described as OSS as it is free software. At the risk of being redundant, the distinciton is about philosophy, and the software itself doesn't care.
Which do you think are more interesting to people?
is that at all relavent?
Great. So you don't know what Linux is, you're confusing it with a variant of GNU/Linux,
No, I know the distinciton, and I'm not confusing the two, I'm merely using a term that is frequently used to mean the OS as a whole, dispite technically just being the kernel, careless a term as it may be. if it were unclear which I was talking about, I would have clarified.
and you're confusing Operating System with Open Source,
In the part you quoted before this, I did in fact mean Operating System, and the monopoly I was reffering to was Windows, as a monopoly of the Operating System market, not a generic "software" monopoly by the proprietary liscensing scheme that doesn't actually exist - multpile entities can't have a monopoly on one thing, by definition. I you were reffering to the typo earlier in my post where I wrote OS instead of OSS - it was just that, a typo. sorry.
and you think WinZip doesn't have a monopoly over the source code of WinZip.
and by your apparent definition of a monopoly, Dell has a monopoly on Dell computers, HP has a monopoly on HP computers, Gateway has a monopoly on Gateway computers, etc.
you can't have a monopoly on a specific product, i.e. "GeForce 6800," for it to be a monopoly, you have to have a monopoly on a market, i.e. "graphics cards."
if WinZip were to have a monopoly on something it would have to be "Archiving Tools" or "Source Code to all Archiving Tools" not "WinZip" or "WinZip Source Code."
first of all, the right to modify software is utterly useless to most people, because they don't have the skills. It's like telling a puppy that he has your permison to drive your car. It doesn't magically give him the ability. With most people, the reaction you will get will range from "well, it's a nice thought, but it doesn't really help me, sorry" to "Why can't you get it through your head that not everybody is comfortable with these machines!" to "wtf is source code?"
more people will be alienated by this sort of attitude than inspiried by it.
as another poster already mentioned, if you mandate that software be free, you are sacrificing the freedom of one group of people "developers" for the freedom of another "users."
if those "user" freedoms are important to you, then fine, use OS, (and before you jump at me for using the wrong term, I'd like to point out that they're exactly the same kind of software - free software is open source, and OSS is by definition free - the only thing that's different is the philosophy of the person reffering to it) but don't tell a professional publisher to use GIMP instead of photoshop when he's told you a thousand times that having the source code does nothing for him, and he needs some functionality that photoshop has and GIMP doesn't.
as I said before, I apprieciate the freedom that Free/OSS gives me, but I don't think of it as my right. I think of it as a feature of the software. it's one more thing that helps it compete. if I can only install something on one machine, and I can't modify it, and I can't distribute it, and it's still a better option than something I can do those things with, then I'll use it. You believe that all software should be free. here is what I believe:
Given no unusual circumstances (monopolies, vendor lockin, etc,) if a software, as a sum of it's price, licensing, and quality, is useful to someone, it should be allowed to exist. period. this means, that with a totally fair, free market, if microsoft can get its shit together and make a competitive operating system, that some people will still use in spite of the liscense and the price, and the well-known competition, then good for them. after all, at least the ability to modify the OS to the extent that you need the source code is useless to most people. I think open source makes better software, but the end user cares about the end result, not why it is the way it is (at least for the large part.) those of use who want to be able to excersize the freedoms we get by using free software, can just do so.
right now I'm advocating linux because I believe even to someone who can't program at all, it's a great option for an OS, and also because I do want more people using it, so that we can hopefully break the monopoly, and be closer to that ideal free market I mentioned.
That said, yeah, windows is annoying like that, but if what you're saying sounds as pathetic as those quotes, you probably shouldn't be messing with your bootloader, particularly not a beta, and dear god, if you're going to do it, RTFM.
when I've done that, it's worked great, but typically, I install windows how it likes it, and then install linux and put the bootloader on a floppy. this way, when I want to switch OS's, I can just pop the floppy in or take it out, and restart, so I don't have to be around for the boot, and can use the time to get a snack or use the bathroom or something. On a desktop, it's not difficult to keep track of the floppy; I just keep it in the drive all the time, and when I don't want to use it, I leave it sitting in the drive, but not locked in. it's a different story on a laptop though.
the software is no longer a problem at all, unless you're using slackware or LFS or something else crazy like that, (which I do on one of My machines) but that doesn't happen unless you're comfortable with it.
The hardware complaint is more legitamte:
you said you tested on an IBM. IBM works particularly well with linux. Try installing on something less friendly. this too is an extreme example, but I've had all of these issues on one machine:
no sound (support exists in the kernel, but no one has the driver ready by default ready, so you have to do a kernel compile)
Power management (same thing)
Wireless card (drivers exist, but not in the core kernel tree, have to do it yourself)
CD-drive (there's been an issue with the ATAPI CD-ROM drivers that's caused certain drives not to function since 2.4.21, still haven't sorted this one out, and getting it installed was trickey to say the least.)
I'll reiterate this, that's an extreme example too. if you go whitebox, you'll generally be fine, but machines from HP, Dell, and the like will often have a couple issues, you might have problems with bleeding-edge hardware, there's no ATI graphcis support, Power management is often an issue, and if something isn't supported out of the box, it tends to be a bit trickier to fix it.
that said, the hardware complaints do tend to be over exaggerated, and the situation really isnt' that bad.
the reason people use slackware isn't because it makes things easy for the newbies - it's because it makes things easy for the experienced user. and it does. the package managment system is seriously lacking, but the raw stability means if something goes wrong, it's most likely your fault, and the flexibility means it's easy to fix. the speed would make it ideal for a machine of that power, but not as someones first linux box, let alone first computer. Slackware is anything but idiot proof
as the GP said, this doesn't make it right, but it does make it not quite as bad.
where did he grow up where they jailed him for two years for stealing a peice of gum? usually they just make you pay for the gum.
this isn't exactly the first time someone's instituted an out-of-proportion punishment for this offence, even in the U.S.:
steal a soda and get caught = pay for the soda.
steal a CD of 15 songs from a store = pay for the CD.
"steal" one song from said CD off of a p2p network = forfit your entire college fund (assuming you can afford MIT with no financial aid.)