Translating english into lawyerese often increases storage requirements by a couple orders of magnitude. Just look at the BSD license and how many words it takes to essentially say "do whatever you want with this, just don't bother me about it".
No, "the employed" would be the 95% of developers writing the 99% of code that never gets used outside of the entity that holds its copyright (ie, the company that hired them).
If you're part of the remaining 5%, well, sucks to be you.
The first, a moral argument that at the moment I don't have the patience to flesh out: Why do you _have_ to live from your job? Why is your probably-not-all-that-useful sort-of-contribution to society rewarded while theirs should not be?
We don't. The free market will determine whether our skills are valuable or not, and if they aren't we either adapt or die. No need to bring state-granted monopolies into the equation.
The second, a practical one: many forms of modern art are simply too labor- and time-intensive to be done for free. Do you really think Half-Life 2 will be made "as a hobby in [somebody's] free time"?
So? There's plenty of forms of both art and practical works that are simply too expensive to be done in a copyrighted world as well, but you don't seem to care about that. No decision is without consequences, and few have no downsides.
Besides, I don't see what's so special about Half-Life 2 that we need to ensure its existence even at the cost of our freedoms.
Windows is only developed by Microsoft, and Darwin if it has somebody other than Apple contributing code, I've never heard of him. Regardless, both are irrelevant, my comment was clearly aimed at the Free OS market, otherwise we could argue that since most of humanity doesn't own a computer, neither should we and so we must throw them out of the window.
And in the Free OS market, Linux is far, *far* bigger than all the BSDs combined. Explain that however you want to, but it does lead one to think that your previous employers' experiences were far from typical.
It seems like anyone that really values and supports F/OSS would prefer LGPL or BSD style licenses. Allowing derivative works to remain closed source isn't a detriment to the open components and it really does look better to closed source companies. This should lead to more people adopting and using F/OSS, both open and otherwise. That's good, isn't it?
In theory, yes. In practice, however, it seems volunteers and companies contribute a lot more to GPL'ed projects than to BSD'ed ones, otherwise we'd be arguing for the "Year of FreeBSD on the Desktop" instead of Linux.
Personally, I like the idea of a BSD kernel with LGPL libraries and GPL applications, it seems to me as the best balance between freedom and widespread usage I can see. However, if devs believe otherwise and GPL everything I have no problem with it, the market will decide which option is better and, so far, it seems they're right.
You do realize you can extract valuable data from the Bible without assuming it's flawless, right? so yeah, it has to do with the Bible, tangentially, it just that it has nothing to do with believing in the alleged "divine origin" of the Bible, or any of the baggage that comes with it.
And not only you're mistaken in that there's been different faiths centered around the figure of Jesus for a lot longer than 500 years, it has nothing to do with the point at hand: you *can* be a Christian without being a Catholic, and so your criticism with regards to the Bible's 6-day crap does not apply to all Christians.
Yeah, so? I only said that there's many Christians who believe the same as many Atheist, with the difference that the former believe he was the Son of God while the latter don't. I've never claimed there was such a thing as a "Christian Atheist", only that there is such a thing as a "non-Catholic Christian", which is not a contradiction by itself.
Wrong. Christianism's only core belief is that of Jesus being the Son of God, nothing to do with the Bible. In fact, there's plenty of Christians who believe the Bible is just a bunch of bullshit made up by the Jews plus a bunch of bullshit made up by the Catholics, who twisted Jesus' message of peace and love to justify their own superiority complex and their extortion schemes towards their own believers.
Which is, btw, exactly what many of us Atheists believe in, except for the whole "Son of God" part. Christianism != Catholicism, keep that in mind.
Perhaps none of these qualify as "proof", but they are evidence; which is all you asked for.
Circumstancial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very
straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may
find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely
different. -- Sherlock Holmes
some days, you should stop beating the drums of the evils of the west, and turn your moral and intellectual concerns outside your borders
Why? we're perfectly capable of being (and are) critical of both China and the US at the same time. And I'd argue that if *you* can't, then it's you who fails at having a truly human conscience.
Safari may be a bloated piece of turd that looks out of place at anything that's not OSX and bundled with some of the worst pieces of bloatware ever seen, but the engine itself is good, fast and secure, and you have the KDE devs to thank for that.
The correct procedure for website design, would be to test the site in FF, Opera, Safari, and/or any other standards compliant browser, and say you're done.
Actually, in a perfect world the correct procedure would be to test the site on the W3C validator and ship it if it passes. That we don't is a result of Firefox, Opera and WebKit *not* having 100% compliance, which is an unreasonable demand.
The problem of IE is just that it fails a lot more often than the others, and that the places where it fails are the most painful (your site doesn't display rounded corners in Opera? no biggie. Your site doesn't display at all because the MIME type makes IE go belly up? no good).
Agreed. For an example, Debian's popularity-contest package which sends Debian information about packages to determine which ones are included in the default install, but you have to explicitly install it and IIRC, it warns you about the "data mining" it does before finishing the initial config. Even so, they get a lot of users in it, myself included, just by asking politely.
C'mon Ubuntu, put it in an optional package, stick it in the repositories, then post a request on Slashdot and wherever else, you'd get most of the data with none of the complains.
YOU ARE DEFENDING SOMETHING THAT IS NOT AND COULD NEVER BE IN YOUR INTERESTS, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT FOR ANY REASON?!
Paying for software is not and could never be in my (short-term) interest either, but we recognize keeping the company afloat allows them to keep making products we like, so we defend the practice.
The problem, I believe, is in tying yourself to DRM. If my copy of Plants vs Zombies stops working due to DRM, I'm out of a copy of Plants vs Zombies. If my copy of Windows stops working due to DRM, I lose Windows, every Windows app I own, and the data in each and every one of them(1). There's a huge difference in severity between both scenarios, which is why I only accept DRM in low-priced, non-critical components such as Steam games and keep all my data in open, standardized formats on Linux partitions.
As for the iPhone, it depends. If you care about your phone, you should get one that's as open and unrestricted as you can get. If you don't care about it and don't need it for anything important, Apple's restrictions wouldn't mean much but, then again, if that's the case you'd likely be satisfied with a cheaper phone anyways.
(1) In reality I could rescue most if not all of it with Linux's NTFS driver but for illustrative purposes pretend it doesn't exist for a second.
Does Google advertise Internet Explorer on Youtube?
There are, likely, some videos promoting IE among all the crap in Youtube, but a closer match would be Google itself, where searching for the phrase "benefits of using Internet Explorer" and hitting "I'm feeling lucky" leads you to this, as expected, instead of Chrome's download page.
Ahhh, the good old "I had no issues with it so anyone who did is clearly an incompetent fool" argument. I thought only us, LaTeX fanboys used that one;)
I know there will be a lot of "haters" regarding this. However, if the hopes of smoothly transitioning users from MS Office to OpenOffice it will need to give an option to have a similar look and feel.
Yeah, but I'd rather have OpenOffice focus on making a good Office suite, rather than "smoothly transitioning" users from MS Office. Mistakes should *not* be copied, ever.
Besides, I wonder how much money was spent by Microsoft on usability studies to come up with this interface. How much money has been spent on usability studies for OpenOffice? Might turn out to be a better way to work in the long run. Just because it is MS does not necessarily mean it is sh*t. That just seems to be the default.
Wrong. Most Slashdotters, even those who prefer Eclipse such as myself, applaud the GUI Microsoft used for Visual Studio. It's simple enough not to be intimidating while being powerful enough not to get in your way when you're doing Real Work(tm). Office's Ribbon, however, is almost exactly the *opposite* of that, being so different it intimidates new users while being so simplified to be a pain in the ass for more 'advanced' ones.
Yeah, yeah, usability studies and all that. I'm sure Apple did theirs for the Finder, as Microsoft must've done for Bob, and they're still hated by most people who've dared used them. Studies can be useful, don't get me wrong, but relying on them blindly only leads to failures such as this.
Even with all the stories about how this or that app has been banned by Apple's app store, I still want an iPhone. Ahhh, the power of Apple's marketing department.
Of course, the first thing many users would download would be the "naughty words" module.
Err, no. The first thing that most users would download would be the "all of the above" module. The usefulness of a dictionary is directly proportional to the number of words it includes a good definition for, and I like my apps useful.
I was saying Microsoft does have products competitively priced. If you really want to think about it, using any other product but Microsoft is more expensive for the average person.
Which is exactly why you should've added $200 for Microsoft Office and $100 for Adobe Elements to the Mac as well, putting Apple straight back into "too fucking expensive" territory.
It encourages and helps people that are interested in recording music as a hobby but are put off by the price of hardware and software, and shows how to get something usable for cheap.
I'm no musician and have no interest in becoming one in the near future, but I know that if I felt I *had* to pay for Photoshop to be a successful photographer, I would've never touched a camera in my life.
is it just me or do QT4 and GTK applications just look... bigger/clunky/unpolished when compared to Windows / KDE3.5 applications?
It's just you.
Also, if you honestly didn't want to troll you should've left out the "train wreck" comment from your post, it wouldn't have changed its meaning while being much less inflammatory.
"Laughing" is a perfectly valid answer for those of us outside the US who remember similar idiocies committed by your country's pathetic law enforcement agencies in the name of multinational companies' profits, and marvel at how little things have changed since Dmitry Sklyarov's arrest 8 years ago.
"Sad" would be a more appropiate response if you live in the US, however, or are planning to visit it any time soon. "Terrified" would be another but its sadly absent from the poll, pity.
Slashdot Mirror
Translating english into lawyerese often increases storage requirements by a couple orders of magnitude. Just look at the BSD license and how many words it takes to essentially say "do whatever you want with this, just don't bother me about it".
No, "the employed" would be the 95% of developers writing the 99% of code that never gets used outside of the entity that holds its copyright (ie, the company that hired them).
If you're part of the remaining 5%, well, sucks to be you.
Yes, because the users get so much benefit from it being easier for developers and corporations to lock them down into their products.
The first, a moral argument that at the moment I don't have the patience to flesh out: Why do you _have_ to live from your job? Why is your probably-not-all-that-useful sort-of-contribution to society rewarded while theirs should not be?
We don't. The free market will determine whether our skills are valuable or not, and if they aren't we either adapt or die. No need to bring state-granted monopolies into the equation.
The second, a practical one: many forms of modern art are simply too labor- and time-intensive to be done for free. Do you really think Half-Life 2 will be made "as a hobby in [somebody's] free time"?
So? There's plenty of forms of both art and practical works that are simply too expensive to be done in a copyrighted world as well, but you don't seem to care about that. No decision is without consequences, and few have no downsides.
Besides, I don't see what's so special about Half-Life 2 that we need to ensure its existence even at the cost of our freedoms.
Ever heard of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"? It's not limited to Microsoft.
Windows is only developed by Microsoft, and Darwin if it has somebody other than Apple contributing code, I've never heard of him. Regardless, both are irrelevant, my comment was clearly aimed at the Free OS market, otherwise we could argue that since most of humanity doesn't own a computer, neither should we and so we must throw them out of the window.
And in the Free OS market, Linux is far, *far* bigger than all the BSDs combined. Explain that however you want to, but it does lead one to think that your previous employers' experiences were far from typical.
It seems like anyone that really values and supports F/OSS would prefer LGPL or BSD style licenses. Allowing derivative works to remain closed source isn't a detriment to the open components and it really does look better to closed source companies. This should lead to more people adopting and using F/OSS, both open and otherwise. That's good, isn't it?
In theory, yes. In practice, however, it seems volunteers and companies contribute a lot more to GPL'ed projects than to BSD'ed ones, otherwise we'd be arguing for the "Year of FreeBSD on the Desktop" instead of Linux.
Personally, I like the idea of a BSD kernel with LGPL libraries and GPL applications, it seems to me as the best balance between freedom and widespread usage I can see. However, if devs believe otherwise and GPL everything I have no problem with it, the market will decide which option is better and, so far, it seems they're right.
You do realize you can extract valuable data from the Bible without assuming it's flawless, right? so yeah, it has to do with the Bible, tangentially, it just that it has nothing to do with believing in the alleged "divine origin" of the Bible, or any of the baggage that comes with it.
And not only you're mistaken in that there's been different faiths centered around the figure of Jesus for a lot longer than 500 years, it has nothing to do with the point at hand: you *can* be a Christian without being a Catholic, and so your criticism with regards to the Bible's 6-day crap does not apply to all Christians.
Yeah, so? I only said that there's many Christians who believe the same as many Atheist, with the difference that the former believe he was the Son of God while the latter don't. I've never claimed there was such a thing as a "Christian Atheist", only that there is such a thing as a "non-Catholic Christian", which is not a contradiction by itself.
Wrong. Christianism's only core belief is that of Jesus being the Son of God, nothing to do with the Bible. In fact, there's plenty of Christians who believe the Bible is just a bunch of bullshit made up by the Jews plus a bunch of bullshit made up by the Catholics, who twisted Jesus' message of peace and love to justify their own superiority complex and their extortion schemes towards their own believers.
Which is, btw, exactly what many of us Atheists believe in, except for the whole "Son of God" part. Christianism != Catholicism, keep that in mind.
Perhaps none of these qualify as "proof", but they are evidence; which is all you asked for.
Circumstancial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different. -- Sherlock Holmes
some days, you should stop beating the drums of the evils of the west, and turn your moral and intellectual concerns outside your borders
Why? we're perfectly capable of being (and are) critical of both China and the US at the same time. And I'd argue that if *you* can't, then it's you who fails at having a truly human conscience.
Remember, the lesser of two evils is still evil.
Safari may be a bloated piece of turd that looks out of place at anything that's not OSX and bundled with some of the worst pieces of bloatware ever seen, but the engine itself is good, fast and secure, and you have the KDE devs to thank for that.
The correct procedure for website design, would be to test the site in FF, Opera, Safari, and/or any other standards compliant browser, and say you're done.
Actually, in a perfect world the correct procedure would be to test the site on the W3C validator and ship it if it passes. That we don't is a result of Firefox, Opera and WebKit *not* having 100% compliance, which is an unreasonable demand.
The problem of IE is just that it fails a lot more often than the others, and that the places where it fails are the most painful (your site doesn't display rounded corners in Opera? no biggie. Your site doesn't display at all because the MIME type makes IE go belly up? no good).
Agreed. For an example, Debian's popularity-contest package which sends Debian information about packages to determine which ones are included in the default install, but you have to explicitly install it and IIRC, it warns you about the "data mining" it does before finishing the initial config. Even so, they get a lot of users in it, myself included, just by asking politely.
C'mon Ubuntu, put it in an optional package, stick it in the repositories, then post a request on Slashdot and wherever else, you'd get most of the data with none of the complains.
YOU ARE DEFENDING SOMETHING THAT IS NOT AND COULD NEVER BE IN YOUR INTERESTS, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT FOR ANY REASON?!
Paying for software is not and could never be in my (short-term) interest either, but we recognize keeping the company afloat allows them to keep making products we like, so we defend the practice.
The problem, I believe, is in tying yourself to DRM. If my copy of Plants vs Zombies stops working due to DRM, I'm out of a copy of Plants vs Zombies. If my copy of Windows stops working due to DRM, I lose Windows, every Windows app I own, and the data in each and every one of them(1). There's a huge difference in severity between both scenarios, which is why I only accept DRM in low-priced, non-critical components such as Steam games and keep all my data in open, standardized formats on Linux partitions.
As for the iPhone, it depends. If you care about your phone, you should get one that's as open and unrestricted as you can get. If you don't care about it and don't need it for anything important, Apple's restrictions wouldn't mean much but, then again, if that's the case you'd likely be satisfied with a cheaper phone anyways.
(1) In reality I could rescue most if not all of it with Linux's NTFS driver but for illustrative purposes pretend it doesn't exist for a second.
Does Google advertise Internet Explorer on Youtube?
There are, likely, some videos promoting IE among all the crap in Youtube, but a closer match would be Google itself, where searching for the phrase "benefits of using Internet Explorer" and hitting "I'm feeling lucky" leads you to this, as expected, instead of Chrome's download page.
So no, not the same thing at all.
Ahhh, the good old "I had no issues with it so anyone who did is clearly an incompetent fool" argument. I thought only us, LaTeX fanboys used that one ;)
I know there will be a lot of "haters" regarding this. However, if the hopes of smoothly transitioning users from MS Office to OpenOffice it will need to give an option to have a similar look and feel.
Yeah, but I'd rather have OpenOffice focus on making a good Office suite, rather than "smoothly transitioning" users from MS Office. Mistakes should *not* be copied, ever.
Besides, I wonder how much money was spent by Microsoft on usability studies to come up with this interface. How much money has been spent on usability studies for OpenOffice? Might turn out to be a better way to work in the long run. Just because it is MS does not necessarily mean it is sh*t. That just seems to be the default.
Wrong. Most Slashdotters, even those who prefer Eclipse such as myself, applaud the GUI Microsoft used for Visual Studio. It's simple enough not to be intimidating while being powerful enough not to get in your way when you're doing Real Work(tm). Office's Ribbon, however, is almost exactly the *opposite* of that, being so different it intimidates new users while being so simplified to be a pain in the ass for more 'advanced' ones.
Yeah, yeah, usability studies and all that. I'm sure Apple did theirs for the Finder, as Microsoft must've done for Bob, and they're still hated by most people who've dared used them. Studies can be useful, don't get me wrong, but relying on them blindly only leads to failures such as this.
Even with all the stories about how this or that app has been banned by Apple's app store, I still want an iPhone. Ahhh, the power of Apple's marketing department.
Fixed that for you.
Of course, the first thing many users would download would be the "naughty words" module.
Err, no. The first thing that most users would download would be the "all of the above" module. The usefulness of a dictionary is directly proportional to the number of words it includes a good definition for, and I like my apps useful.
I was saying Microsoft does have products competitively priced. If you really want to think about it, using any other product but Microsoft is more expensive for the average person.
Which is exactly why you should've added $200 for Microsoft Office and $100 for Adobe Elements to the Mac as well, putting Apple straight back into "too fucking expensive" territory.
It encourages and helps people that are interested in recording music as a hobby but are put off by the price of hardware and software, and shows how to get something usable for cheap.
I'm no musician and have no interest in becoming one in the near future, but I know that if I felt I *had* to pay for Photoshop to be a successful photographer, I would've never touched a camera in my life.
is it just me or do QT4 and GTK applications just look ... bigger/clunky/unpolished when compared to Windows / KDE3.5 applications?
It's just you.
Also, if you honestly didn't want to troll you should've left out the "train wreck" comment from your post, it wouldn't have changed its meaning while being much less inflammatory.
"Laughing" is a perfectly valid answer for those of us outside the US who remember similar idiocies committed by your country's pathetic law enforcement agencies in the name of multinational companies' profits, and marvel at how little things have changed since Dmitry Sklyarov's arrest 8 years ago.
"Sad" would be a more appropiate response if you live in the US, however, or are planning to visit it any time soon. "Terrified" would be another but its sadly absent from the poll, pity.