If you include the "or later" you're already allowing the license creators (in this case, the FSF) the ability to arbitrarily relicense your work, it's just that in this case the FSF decided the CC group was a trustworthy enough bunch to take care of that one from now on.
Frankly, I see no reason why you'd trust the FSF but not CC, and if you didn't trust the FSF already you should've left out the "or later" part in the first place. So personally, I see this as nothing more than a convenient opportunity to leave some of the licensing cruft that comes with the GFDL out of Wikipedia et al, and that's a big win for everyone.
Of course, but a bit of bad publicity is also necessary for them to Get A Clue(tm). Otherwise, they may think people aren't buying it because it wasn't shiny enough instead.
Why should I find alternatives to the programs I use when the programs I use are the best out there.
And you know this how, exactly? besides, if you really *were* using the best out there you wouldn't need to seek alternatives. Pidgin runs perfectly on Linux, and so does Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, K3B, Gnumeric, LaTeX, Eclipse, GCC, even closed-source software like Oracle and Maple/MatLab have Linux versions available and they're all the best of their particular fields. It is a slight problem with photo manipulation (Lightroom vs Lightzone) and vector drawings (Illustrator vs Inkscape), but second-best ain't so bad either;)
Yes, in some ways we Linux users are "OS buffs", because unlike Windows users we tend to rely heavily on the UNIX-designed capabilities built in our OS to simplify our lives. That's why despite GCC being the same on both platforms we prefer to use it on Linux or Macs rather than Windows, because UNIX has thousands of little tools that make its use easier and faster. But the fact that Windows users don't take advantage of Windows' design unlike Mac and Linux users a flaw of themselves, not something to be praised.
This, gotten from the comments at TFA, has a bit more details on it.
Apparently it's a mix of both, a structural problem with the fact it needs to grant the Calendar class special priviledges to access ZoneInfo objects, and merely a common pitfall in that nobody had thought to limit those priviledges before to *just* accessing the calendar.
Beautiful stuff they used in the exploit, though, it's as if they actively tried to use every OOP-derived feature in Java on it at the same time;)
If you had read the very first paragraph of the summary, you'd know that it's "a vulnerability in Java that has been patched by everyone but Apple."
For all the other platforms, architectures and browsers the fix is "use a version of Java that's less than 6 months old". For OSX users, however, the only solution is to stop using it altogether.
Yeah, it's easier. The first time. The following thousand-and-one times, however, the little quick command takes the cake.
That's why you often see the instruction "press Ctrl+F" instead of "click on Edit, then Search", GUIs are more easily learnable, but are far, *far* slower than keyboard commands and shortcuts.
But proper typesetting is about far more than merely "use pretty fonts". Character width of individual lines, line breaks that make sense, *page* breaks that make sense, how many times have you used Word and began pressing Enter at random intervals or tweak the font size so a specific block of text would stay in a single page?
Yet all of that LaTeX does automagically. I write, I compile, I finish. I love it.
Among average users? sure. On math and engineering departments of universities around the world? far, *far* from it.
And in my university while Microsoft has a deal where it offers most of their software for free to the students (including Windows, Visual Studio and even SQL Server), Office is specifically absent from it.
So no, the chances of Word ever replacing TeX, as far as mathematicians and engineers are concerned, is pretty much zero.
Dunno, to me it sounds just like if you were asked whether you have experience dealing with ignorant, incompetent management and you answered "I work in IT".
Which, for the thickheaded among us, means the answer is "yes, every single day of my life".
I mean, after all everyone hates Vista so they should be kicking Microsoft's door in to have to opportunity to pay more for the next version, right?
Exactly. Vista sucks, XP64 is a turd, and 64-bit systems are quickly becoming the de-facto standard in the industry so people *will* be kicking Microsoft's door in to buy Windows 7, and if the choice is between that or the sightly cheaper but outdated as hell 32-bit version of XP I fully understand them.
Tell them to read the requirements printed on the box before buying software next time, most likely. That's what you get today if you call about wanting to play Call of Duty XXX on an Intel integrated chipset and fail.
If you want the Dells and Acers and the mom & pop shops all pushing Linux and supporting it, then you have got to step up to the plate. Make DAMNED SURE that everything in Walmart, Staples, Office Depo, and Best Buy "just works" PERIOD.
Neither OSX nor Vista support every piece of crap being sold at Wal-Mart, and I'm not hearing complains about the former while those about the latter are more related to the fact that it runs like a pig, rather than to its poor hardware support.
Hell it was easier to slap Win98 and sell them than it was to deal with a brand new Ubuntu. At least Win98 supports the damned printers at Walmart.
Now I know you're just talking out of your rear. Windows 98 supports such a miserable, minuscule percentage of currently-manufactured hardware you're better off getting a Hackintosh rather than that shit as far as hardware support goes, and I'm sure Dell ain't gonna be selling 10-years-old hardware.
Ok. Now I know that some of what I touched upon can be band-aided by using Wine and such, but come on. That's cheating. If the OS can't natively run the software, and has to do so in a virtual-Windows environment, why not just use Windows?
Because Windows' interface SUCKS ASS for doing real work. Try Ubuntu or OSX for a week then you'll understand. The rest of your points can be neatly summed up with a simple answer: buy better hardware next time.
And please stop pretending 'gamers' comprise a significant part of the population. They don't. I'm a 'gamer', I play TF2 almost daily and I likely own more games than your average person owns porn movies. But I have no illusions about the impact my hobby has on the desktop market at large, fact is for 90% of the world's population Solitaire is good enough, and 9% only need Minesweeper and Freecell on top of that to be happy.
MacOS has managed to make some inroads into the Windows desktop share, only because they can offer most of this. The software and hardware are a bit chancy, but mostly everything works with a Mac, and it's a big enough market share that hardware manufacturers make a point of showing they are Mac compatible if they are.
Well, manufacturers also make a point of showing they're Linux compatible if they are, my Samsung printer had it printed on the box on very large letters and all the latest network and sound cards I've bought have had a little penguin alongside the Windows flag and the Mac... face thing.
Want my take on the whole Linux-on-the-desktop thing? it'll happen the same way DOS' and Windows' domination came to be. Business start using it to save costs, employees believe (rightly or otherwise) that they can only do their work on it and no other OS will do, employees go to hell and back for a computer being sold with Linux pre-configured and voila! instant dominant market share.
In fact I've always said that's why Macs won't ever dominate the desktop market. As long as Windows dominates businesses, most users will refuse to run anything else at home.
What makes you think substituting meanings/definitions for terms isn't part of logic or proof? In doing a mathematical proof, substituting definitions/equivalent conditions is often half the battle.
Yes, but that's why one of the most important parts of a mathematical proof is that, when you replace something with something else, you *prove* both expressions are equivalent. He does not.
He's complaining that society has (partly by dismissing questions about what is right or moral or just or true or beautiful as "subjective") given up on understanding what is good but persists in priding itself in being "progressive."
No, we *have* defined what is good, in things such as human rights et al. When we call ourselves a progressive society, it is because we have improved in those areas, simple as that. Problem is, he's assuming (as you apparently are) that there's a separate, distinctive and universal definition of 'good' that we ought to find, to discover, instead of it being merely a term whose definition is made up by ourselves.
Nor should our goal be "satisfying a larger portion of the population" - nobody's interested in becoming a nation of lotus-eaters, nor would we think much of an artist who churned out filth because people were buying it.
If we define "good" as "satisfying a larger portion of the population", "good" means "satisfying a larger portion of the population". That's a tautology, to state otherwise is an inherent contradiction. And if we define it as such, then an artist whose work is being bought by people cannot, by definition, be "filth". You want to define "good" differently? suit yourself, but state it beforehand.
You ask "show me a work that is not, in fact, an improvement over something that has gone before" - but so many derivative works are obviously inferior to the original work that again I don't know what makes you ask that.
What? seriously, I: "all works are derivative until proven otherwise", you: "most are crap". Complete non sequitur. Still, if its inferiority is so obvious, I guess you won't have a problem producing an example complete with a formal proof of its alleged inferiority, right? lets see you do it without using the phrase "let us define good as" and still be correct.
Well, I meant changing the capabilities of humans rather than their habits. Fridges changed humans' lives tremendously, but their sole use is to preserve food and that's the only use anyone's ever gonna get out of it. Don't think I'll ever see a headline stating "European researchers discover new particle using fridges!" or something close to it;)
The internet, however, surprises me almost every day with the uses people are finding for it. Developing OSes with people all over the world, then distributing it free of charge to anyone who asks, building gigantic databases of people and their relationships so they can communicate with their friends more easily, even BitTorrent is in its own way something unique and interesting.
And computers, heck, if I'm not mistaken we're still waiting for a mathematical proof of the limits of what you can do with these suckers;)
The energy consumption is a problem, certainly, but if it were up to me I'd shut off a lot of other services that certainly aren't *generating* energy, before touching a single router. Or heck, pile up the CEOs of the RIAA and MPAA, the Sony guy of TFA included, and burn the suckers, that ought to give us a couple years at least.
Funny about the part in bold. It says it'll restate the same premise logically, yet I see no logic in it. No hypothesis, no proof of it or even of the equivalence between both sentences. Sounds like a writer rather than a philosopher or a mathematician, am I right?
He does, kinda, sorta, have a point. Art is subjective therefore there can be no universal 'better' therefore there can be no universal 'progress'. But if we define our goal as satisfying a larger portion of the population, therefore it stands to reason that the surest path towards that goal is to ensure the availability of the old works of art while doing our best not to prevent the creation of new ones, and it ought to be obvious that the internet (and file-sharing) helps tremendously with the former, though its contributions to the latter are debatable but I think YouTube, Flickr et al are strong signs that it is, also, a positive influence towards it.
As for the fact that "improving on what has gone before" is something we're automatically entitled to and cannot be prevented, show me a work that is not, in fact, an improvement over something that has gone before. Other than the wheel, perhaps, but it's likely even that had a rougher predecessor that we simply aren't aware of.
to call humanity's second greatest invention since Mathematics(*) itself useless. We're talking about a technology that allows Joe Average in the US to send a message to Juan Promedio in Spain in less time it took you to read this paragraph for a total cost of less than a cent. Think about that for a minute, and realize all the possibilities this opens up for humanity as a whole.
It may have some problems, yes, but anyone who says that nothing good has ever come out of it is either a complete idiot, someone with an agenda or as is probably the case here, both.
(*)If you're wondering what's on first place, you're reading this post on one.
Can you run your own, modified version on it? if so, then the Kindle may still hold some small interest for me. If not, whether it's based on Linux, FreeBSD or Haiku is completely and utterly irrelevant.
Well, yes. Guild Wars isn't a WoW clone so much as a much-improved Diablo II with a nicer lobby system. And that's probably why I love it so much, when I couldn't get into any other MMO I tried. The whole "waiting for cows to spawn to kill them for exp along with 30 other guys doing the same" thing made grinding feel *far* too much like, well, grinding.
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If you include the "or later" you're already allowing the license creators (in this case, the FSF) the ability to arbitrarily relicense your work, it's just that in this case the FSF decided the CC group was a trustworthy enough bunch to take care of that one from now on.
Frankly, I see no reason why you'd trust the FSF but not CC, and if you didn't trust the FSF already you should've left out the "or later" part in the first place. So personally, I see this as nothing more than a convenient opportunity to leave some of the licensing cruft that comes with the GFDL out of Wikipedia et al, and that's a big win for everyone.
Of course, but a bit of bad publicity is also necessary for them to Get A Clue(tm). Otherwise, they may think people aren't buying it because it wasn't shiny enough instead.
Whereas with Windows you can blame them for pushing you awake to ask you about an OS you otherwise wouldn't have used.
Biggest benefit of using Linux: you get to reply to anyone and everyone who wants free tech support from you with a nice "GTFO, idiot!".
Why should I find alternatives to the programs I use when the programs I use are the best out there.
And you know this how, exactly? besides, if you really *were* using the best out there you wouldn't need to seek alternatives. Pidgin runs perfectly on Linux, and so does Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, K3B, Gnumeric, LaTeX, Eclipse, GCC, even closed-source software like Oracle and Maple/MatLab have Linux versions available and they're all the best of their particular fields. It is a slight problem with photo manipulation (Lightroom vs Lightzone) and vector drawings (Illustrator vs Inkscape), but second-best ain't so bad either ;)
Yes, in some ways we Linux users are "OS buffs", because unlike Windows users we tend to rely heavily on the UNIX-designed capabilities built in our OS to simplify our lives. That's why despite GCC being the same on both platforms we prefer to use it on Linux or Macs rather than Windows, because UNIX has thousands of little tools that make its use easier and faster. But the fact that Windows users don't take advantage of Windows' design unlike Mac and Linux users a flaw of themselves, not something to be praised.
This, gotten from the comments at TFA, has a bit more details on it.
Apparently it's a mix of both, a structural problem with the fact it needs to grant the Calendar class special priviledges to access ZoneInfo objects, and merely a common pitfall in that nobody had thought to limit those priviledges before to *just* accessing the calendar.
Beautiful stuff they used in the exploit, though, it's as if they actively tried to use every OOP-derived feature in Java on it at the same time ;)
If you had read the very first paragraph of the summary, you'd know that it's "a vulnerability in Java that has been patched by everyone but Apple."
For all the other platforms, architectures and browsers the fix is "use a version of Java that's less than 6 months old". For OSX users, however, the only solution is to stop using it altogether.
While I'm curious as to what's the proper way to do it, my point is simply that with LaTeX I don't have to do it.
Yeah, it's easier. The first time. The following thousand-and-one times, however, the little quick command takes the cake.
That's why you often see the instruction "press Ctrl+F" instead of "click on Edit, then Search", GUIs are more easily learnable, but are far, *far* slower than keyboard commands and shortcuts.
But proper typesetting is about far more than merely "use pretty fonts". Character width of individual lines, line breaks that make sense, *page* breaks that make sense, how many times have you used Word and began pressing Enter at random intervals or tweak the font size so a specific block of text would stay in a single page?
Yet all of that LaTeX does automagically. I write, I compile, I finish. I love it.
Among average users? sure. On math and engineering departments of universities around the world? far, *far* from it.
And in my university while Microsoft has a deal where it offers most of their software for free to the students (including Windows, Visual Studio and even SQL Server), Office is specifically absent from it.
So no, the chances of Word ever replacing TeX, as far as mathematicians and engineers are concerned, is pretty much zero.
Dunno, to me it sounds just like if you were asked whether you have experience dealing with ignorant, incompetent management and you answered "I work in IT".
Which, for the thickheaded among us, means the answer is "yes, every single day of my life".
I mean, after all everyone hates Vista so they should be kicking Microsoft's door in to have to opportunity to pay more for the next version, right?
Exactly. Vista sucks, XP64 is a turd, and 64-bit systems are quickly becoming the de-facto standard in the industry so people *will* be kicking Microsoft's door in to buy Windows 7, and if the choice is between that or the sightly cheaper but outdated as hell 32-bit version of XP I fully understand them.
Thank God for Linux and students discounts.
have you tried running Linux PPC on it? Adobe doesn't have a version of Flash for it, but Gnash may work and at least you'd get an up-to-date system.
3.5 GBs ought to be enough for anybody!
or not.
Tell them to read the requirements printed on the box before buying software next time, most likely. That's what you get today if you call about wanting to play Call of Duty XXX on an Intel integrated chipset and fail.
If you want the Dells and Acers and the mom & pop shops all pushing Linux and supporting it, then you have got to step up to the plate. Make DAMNED SURE that everything in Walmart, Staples, Office Depo, and Best Buy "just works" PERIOD.
Neither OSX nor Vista support every piece of crap being sold at Wal-Mart, and I'm not hearing complains about the former while those about the latter are more related to the fact that it runs like a pig, rather than to its poor hardware support.
Hell it was easier to slap Win98 and sell them than it was to deal with a brand new Ubuntu. At least Win98 supports the damned printers at Walmart.
Now I know you're just talking out of your rear. Windows 98 supports such a miserable, minuscule percentage of currently-manufactured hardware you're better off getting a Hackintosh rather than that shit as far as hardware support goes, and I'm sure Dell ain't gonna be selling 10-years-old hardware.
Ok. Now I know that some of what I touched upon can be band-aided by using Wine and such, but come on. That's cheating. If the OS can't natively run the software, and has to do so in a virtual-Windows environment, why not just use Windows?
Because Windows' interface SUCKS ASS for doing real work. Try Ubuntu or OSX for a week then you'll understand. The rest of your points can be neatly summed up with a simple answer: buy better hardware next time.
And please stop pretending 'gamers' comprise a significant part of the population. They don't. I'm a 'gamer', I play TF2 almost daily and I likely own more games than your average person owns porn movies. But I have no illusions about the impact my hobby has on the desktop market at large, fact is for 90% of the world's population Solitaire is good enough, and 9% only need Minesweeper and Freecell on top of that to be happy.
MacOS has managed to make some inroads into the Windows desktop share, only because they can offer most of this. The software and hardware are a bit chancy, but mostly everything works with a Mac, and it's a big enough market share that hardware manufacturers make a point of showing they are Mac compatible if they are.
Well, manufacturers also make a point of showing they're Linux compatible if they are, my Samsung printer had it printed on the box on very large letters and all the latest network and sound cards I've bought have had a little penguin alongside the Windows flag and the Mac... face thing.
Want my take on the whole Linux-on-the-desktop thing? it'll happen the same way DOS' and Windows' domination came to be. Business start using it to save costs, employees believe (rightly or otherwise) that they can only do their work on it and no other OS will do, employees go to hell and back for a computer being sold with Linux pre-configured and voila! instant dominant market share.
In fact I've always said that's why Macs won't ever dominate the desktop market. As long as Windows dominates businesses, most users will refuse to run anything else at home.
Yeah, because gamers comprise such a large share of the desktop user base. Right.
What makes you think substituting meanings/definitions for terms isn't part of logic or proof? In doing a mathematical proof, substituting definitions/equivalent conditions is often half the battle.
Yes, but that's why one of the most important parts of a mathematical proof is that, when you replace something with something else, you *prove* both expressions are equivalent. He does not.
He's complaining that society has (partly by dismissing questions about what is right or moral or just or true or beautiful as "subjective") given up on understanding what is good but persists in priding itself in being "progressive."
No, we *have* defined what is good, in things such as human rights et al. When we call ourselves a progressive society, it is because we have improved in those areas, simple as that. Problem is, he's assuming (as you apparently are) that there's a separate, distinctive and universal definition of 'good' that we ought to find, to discover, instead of it being merely a term whose definition is made up by ourselves.
Nor should our goal be "satisfying a larger portion of the population" - nobody's interested in becoming a nation of lotus-eaters, nor would we think much of an artist who churned out filth because people were buying it.
If we define "good" as "satisfying a larger portion of the population", "good" means "satisfying a larger portion of the population". That's a tautology, to state otherwise is an inherent contradiction. And if we define it as such, then an artist whose work is being bought by people cannot, by definition, be "filth". You want to define "good" differently? suit yourself, but state it beforehand.
You ask "show me a work that is not, in fact, an improvement over something that has gone before" - but so many derivative works are obviously inferior to the original work that again I don't know what makes you ask that.
What? seriously, I: "all works are derivative until proven otherwise", you: "most are crap". Complete non sequitur. Still, if its inferiority is so obvious, I guess you won't have a problem producing an example complete with a formal proof of its alleged inferiority, right? lets see you do it without using the phrase "let us define good as" and still be correct.
Well, I meant changing the capabilities of humans rather than their habits. Fridges changed humans' lives tremendously, but their sole use is to preserve food and that's the only use anyone's ever gonna get out of it. Don't think I'll ever see a headline stating "European researchers discover new particle using fridges!" or something close to it ;)
The internet, however, surprises me almost every day with the uses people are finding for it. Developing OSes with people all over the world, then distributing it free of charge to anyone who asks, building gigantic databases of people and their relationships so they can communicate with their friends more easily, even BitTorrent is in its own way something unique and interesting.
And computers, heck, if I'm not mistaken we're still waiting for a mathematical proof of the limits of what you can do with these suckers ;)
The energy consumption is a problem, certainly, but if it were up to me I'd shut off a lot of other services that certainly aren't *generating* energy, before touching a single router. Or heck, pile up the CEOs of the RIAA and MPAA, the Sony guy of TFA included, and burn the suckers, that ought to give us a couple years at least.
Funny about the part in bold. It says it'll restate the same premise logically, yet I see no logic in it. No hypothesis, no proof of it or even of the equivalence between both sentences. Sounds like a writer rather than a philosopher or a mathematician, am I right?
He does, kinda, sorta, have a point. Art is subjective therefore there can be no universal 'better' therefore there can be no universal 'progress'. But if we define our goal as satisfying a larger portion of the population, therefore it stands to reason that the surest path towards that goal is to ensure the availability of the old works of art while doing our best not to prevent the creation of new ones, and it ought to be obvious that the internet (and file-sharing) helps tremendously with the former, though its contributions to the latter are debatable but I think YouTube, Flickr et al are strong signs that it is, also, a positive influence towards it.
As for the fact that "improving on what has gone before" is something we're automatically entitled to and cannot be prevented, show me a work that is not, in fact, an improvement over something that has gone before. Other than the wheel, perhaps, but it's likely even that had a rougher predecessor that we simply aren't aware of.
to call humanity's second greatest invention since Mathematics(*) itself useless. We're talking about a technology that allows Joe Average in the US to send a message to Juan Promedio in Spain in less time it took you to read this paragraph for a total cost of less than a cent. Think about that for a minute, and realize all the possibilities this opens up for humanity as a whole.
It may have some problems, yes, but anyone who says that nothing good has ever come out of it is either a complete idiot, someone with an agenda or as is probably the case here, both.
(*)If you're wondering what's on first place, you're reading this post on one.
Can you run your own, modified version on it? if so, then the Kindle may still hold some small interest for me. If not, whether it's based on Linux, FreeBSD or Haiku is completely and utterly irrelevant.
Well, yes. Guild Wars isn't a WoW clone so much as a much-improved Diablo II with a nicer lobby system. And that's probably why I love it so much, when I couldn't get into any other MMO I tried. The whole "waiting for cows to spawn to kill them for exp along with 30 other guys doing the same" thing made grinding feel *far* too much like, well, grinding.