as far as i'm concerned, if i'd just spent 200 dollars on the newest and best product from the largest and richest software company in the world i'd expect the thing to fucking well just work and work now.
although i've got modpoints atm, no one seems to have mentioned this, so i'll post something
political affiliation in america seems to be a religion. an example would be an american acquaintance of mine, who is disgusted by bush and his policies but still votes republican because he is a republican and will never vote democrat. policies are not important. voting for a different party is not an option for him. in his mind, entertaining the thought of voting for another party would be treason.
you can see this in the language. in american you can be a republican or democrat. in german, for example, "ich bin sozialdemokrat" or similar just sounds weird, unless you are a politician. can you be a labourite in british english? to me, it sounds weird. does a noun exist? however, in american english you can be a republican or a democrat. more likely, you are a 'proud republican'.
hang on, i've just read something truly unbelievable on the german wikipedia site:
Zudem muss ein Urheber, wenn er seine eigene Musik auf seiner Homepage zum Download anbieten möchte, GEMA-Vergütungen bezahlen und hierfür einen Meldebogen ausfüllen, obwohl die Tantiemen später ohnehin zu ihm zurück geführt werden.
additionally, if a copyright holder offers his own music for download on his own homepage he must pay the gema compensation and fill in a registration form, although the royalties can be traced to him afterwards anyway.
now i don't know anything about law, but it seems to be saying that if you offer your own music for free download on your internet page, you are required to give money to the gema. what's the situation like in america?
with classical music this is even wierder. you can get fined in germany for playing bach in public if you don't pay the gema (the german version of the riaa) lots of money. i mean bach? he died in 1750. apparently you have to pay if you're using or ever used sheetmusic printed by one of the companies which have signed up with the gema. so basically, if you start learning the piano at age 5 and have once looked at an edition peters printing of the piece you are now playing in public, you are liable to pay the gema money. as if the publishing houses don't get enough money by selling the music for ridiculous prices. and with this pointless urtext craze, it isn't as if the editions are any good, but that's another rant.
not quite. the microsoft trolls (and we know there are quite a few of them on slashdot) are complaining about how the discount isn't worth anything.
the way i see it, the ubuntu laptops from dell will have two main customers:
private people who already run linux and want a new machine with a minimum of hassle
companies which run linux but don't want to spend out on a workstation when a modern pc is probably already a lot more powerful than their older workstations
total sales? i dunno. i know that if dell started selling linux pcs in europe, i'd probably buy one as a way of being counted for spending my money on free software (at the moment i'm thinking of getting a sun ultra, so the ubuntu pc would be a lot cheaper).
i remember a story a friend of mine once told me. at that stage he was working in some supermarket in the north of england. the supermarket stocked at least 2 brands of pasta sauce, one of which was the brand which advertised nationally and another one of which was the shop's own brand. the shop's own brand was cheaper than the one which was advertised nationally. it sold badly, most customers choosing the brand which was advertised nationally, and piles of it grew in the store room gathering dust. at this point, a memo came through from headquarters requesting that the price of the shop's own brand be increased to more than the price of the band which was advertised nationally. the result was that most customers bought the shop's own brand. this somewhat reminds me of my own mother who while she was a housewife would shop around for the highest price on something she would buy so she could boast to her acquaintances about how rich she was.
the point is, choice in data formats is actually sometimes a bad thing. does it help if people are allowed to choose in a scientific context if they wish to express energy in joule or in calories? a standard exists in this case, it is the joule. document formats should be regarded similarly. a perfectly good standard existed so instead of implementing this standard, microsoft develops their own (which isn't even implementable, or so i'm told, and therefore does not qualify as a standard) just to muddy the water. so when it looks like they will have to compete on a level playing field, microsoft throws up their arms and shouts "the consumer needs choice". how about a choice of software to read/write the existing word-format? why not just release the specs on that? why go to the trouble of designing a whole new data format?
so because my old zx80 can't do a lot of things a modern pc can do, i shouldn't regard critical security problems in modern pcs as vulnerabilities?
if microsoft opens a door for exploits they have a vulnerability. if another system also has a similar capability is totally irrelevant, also from the point of view of a comparison. the question is, is windows more secure or less secure because of this feature?
of course. we know that only people born in the bastion of democracy called the great united states of america deserve education and health. everybody else can go fuck themselves. it was their choice not to want to get fat and invade other countries, killing their civilians and destroying their culture.
slightly ott of me, i know. but it's the thought that counts.
i, er, i mean a friend of mine doesn't live in england but wants to watch dr who without having to bother a friend or relative to record it and then send it to me, er, i mean, him. the simple answer is any one of a thousand torrent download sites.
on a different note, do you have to be a tax for having an internet connection in england? they tried to introduce something like that in germany starting this year, but i haven't yet met anybody who pays it.
that's the point. you can complain about it, but until microsoft opens up doc format etc. etc. all you can do is complain. many people can't actually take their business elsewhere because they're stuck. so what use is complaining if you have to buy their products anyway?
i remember when i used to use a umts card to get into the internet. my tarif had a home zone option, so i could get into the net cheaper when i was within a couple of kilometers of a certain point. there were a couple of problems with this:
the net was still being constructed and couldn't handle the load. my home zone moved about the place
the standard way of telling the user that he was not in his homezone was to send an sms to the umts card. linux at that stage however did not support sending/receiving sms at the same time as using the umts connection
(on the side: the windows driver for the card with a nice gui was about 80MB in size. i could use the card more stably under linux by configuring it as a modem) however, all was not lost. my provider also had an internet page where you could check if the current connection was from your home zone or not, so this page was my start page in my browser.
all went well until one day the page was replaced with an error page, so i called technical support. they had started changing one server to another server and had switched off this webpage and it would be back in about a week. had they told me? no. had they done load testing of the new configuration? no. had they bothered to read their own contract informing the customer of the services they were obliged to provide? no.
the moral of this story is, don't underestimate the laziness and stupidity of a large company.
how does the GPL vs 3 stop you developing microsoft products?
as a user, you can buy anything you want, i don't care. if all you do is use proprietary software, you aren't hurting other people unless you expect them to also read the data formats you produce.
as a developer you should be stopped from taking the work of others and changing it to enslave, particularly if the license does not permit this.
yes i am. i'm limiting your freedom to screw over everyone else. if you want to do that, go get microsoft or bsd stuff because i don't want to do business with you.
That's fine up to a point; the majority of businesses still use MS Office and windows and will want to see that experience, and if you completely replace everything with linux or other free alternatives you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad. first clause: yes, true.
second clause: no, false
free and open-source software is not a monoculture like individual pieces of proprietary software are. it is a flourishing biosystem.
Re:This is what I HATE most about FOSS
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 1
you're totally right here:
Despite the fact that the TiVo software license specifically says users *are* allowed to modify it... its GPL after all. and even more poignantly:
hardware that not only prevents you from modifying the software, but criminalizes you for modifying it
the freedom to tinker is one right the gpl grants. personally, i find enough software i can tinker with without going out of my way to find more, but there must be people who want to tinker with the software on the tivo and are prevented from doing so by the hardware.
for me, having the source code makes it more likely that many eyes can check it to see what's going on. not having the ability to change the code running the device does however tend to lessen interest in the device, so reducing the number of eyes checking for problems. how are you to know that the sourcecode distributed with tivo is the same code as that compiled on the device? what are the chances of being able to compile the software and install it and have the tivo run afterwards? the manufacturer could always say "we just compiled it with different flags and cut some of it out afterwards, so that's why you can't get it to work", at which point, there is no way in hell of knowing what the tivo actually does. that is the situation i personally find worrying and the point where i put my foot down: when a piece of equipment in my home is attached to the internet without me being able to know what it does.
on some days, the vision you describe does appear exageratedly apocalyptic to me. free software has made great strides in the past few years and what with dell going ubuntu, 2007 is the year of linux on the desktop. but then one reads about microsoft word xml format being fast-tracked for certification as a standard and microsoft practically giving away their software in the third world and you think "we're not out of the woods quite yet". losing the capability of doing whatever you want with the hardware you own is also worrying. the whole thing just makes me appreciate sun microsystems et al. more.
having said that, i don't see the huge threat from treacherous computing. maybe i'm an optimist here, but i think linux and the various bsds are now so important that corporations and government would have to be pretty stupid to switch this treacherous computing stuff on.
Re:This is what I HATE most about FOSS
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
i find it interesting that the community appeared to have little difficulty reaching a consensus on tivoisation. a possible view point would be that the hardware is broken. as long as the source code for the software is available, who cares? just don't buy the broken hardware. what would happen if motorola released the complete source code for their linux phones but without a means to flash the memory?
the addition of this clause to GPL3 seems to me to be broadening the scope of the original software license. did GPL2 deal with this? no. why not? because it wasn't thought of back then (one possible answer). my point is, the scope has now been broadened into hardware. now i'm all for free hardware (i quite enjoy playing around with openSparc), but is this a good move, seeing as the appreciation for free hardware is almost non-existent in the general population. there is a general idea that free hardware should come with schematics for the hardware, so you can theoretically figure out yourself what it does, but are there any common free hardware licenses? i don't know of a single one (sun uses the GPL2 for openSparc, but that's just for the microcode and auxiliary programs AFAIK)
it's not about how pretty the documents look. it's about if a citizen can legally receive the document the government distributes and read it.
you can best think of a document as a text written in a foreign language. with microsoft-word format, you are not allowed by law to learn this language and there are no legally available complete dictionaries or grammars. you have to hire a team of translators from microsoft who will tell you what the text says and, for a fee, allow you to translate your own language into theirs. with open document format, a complete dictonary and grammar are available for free and you can also get a team of translators from a number of sources for free. now which format allows easiest communication between the citizens and their government?
You still have a choice. If you are a person open to ideas beyond science, why don't you temporarily assume that wearing a tinfoil hat will stop the evil vena (waht was their name again) overlord from controlling your brain and ask your creator, l. ron hubbard, to reveal himself to you. Then, after a reasonable amount of time, if you don't truly experience an intelligent living God, then you go back to science to get your answers. What have you to loose?
there, fixed it for you.
what i have to lose? how about my intellectual honesty? look at the ridiculous loops you're jumping through! god now has a "nature". god created everything, including the things which were against "god's nature". god hates certain things for no apparent reason. strangely his creation, "human" does not inherit his nature, although you say that human "inherited identity, peronsonality and freewill pretty much like god". now "man" chose to do something which was presumably against "his nature" (whoever "his nature" may refer to, man or god) so separating himself from the creator (i though the creator was omni-present?). god at the same time lets it be known that if man does do something against "his nature" (whoever "his nature" may refer to), man will burn in hell for an eternity. this is however not an example of coercion and it is not a threat (?!). we have however from god been given a corrupted understanding of good and evil. good and evil are of course the true nature of god. we can see god's true nature in the way he tortured and killed his own son.
i think i got that right. now go away and think about it before replying again.
a few problems with this idea:
god defines what the right path and the wrong path is.
god would be free to install in us a different moral imperative more fitting to his definition of right.
god tries to coerce us into doing what he has defined as good by threatening us with hell.
i must unfortunately disagree for one reason.
children are first and foremost believe everything they are told by an authority figure. if a child's parents and all other adults are telling the child that creationism is correct and evolution is evil, the child will with a high probability believe that.
Slashdot Mirror
as far as i'm concerned, if i'd just spent 200 dollars on the newest and best product from the largest and richest software company in the world i'd expect the thing to fucking well just work and work now.
although i've got modpoints atm, no one seems to have mentioned this, so i'll post something
political affiliation in america seems to be a religion. an example would be an american acquaintance of mine, who is disgusted by bush and his policies but still votes republican because he is a republican and will never vote democrat. policies are not important. voting for a different party is not an option for him. in his mind, entertaining the thought of voting for another party would be treason.
you can see this in the language. in american you can be a republican or democrat. in german, for example, "ich bin sozialdemokrat" or similar just sounds weird, unless you are a politician. can you be a labourite in british english? to me, it sounds weird. does a noun exist? however, in american english you can be a republican or a democrat. more likely, you are a 'proud republican'.
Zudem muss ein Urheber, wenn er seine eigene Musik auf seiner Homepage zum Download anbieten möchte, GEMA-Vergütungen bezahlen und hierfür einen Meldebogen ausfüllen, obwohl die Tantiemen später ohnehin zu ihm zurück geführt werden.
additionally, if a copyright holder offers his own music for download on his own homepage he must pay the gema compensation and fill in a registration form, although the royalties can be traced to him afterwards anyway.
now i don't know anything about law, but it seems to be saying that if you offer your own music for free download on your internet page, you are required to give money to the gema. what's the situation like in america?
with classical music this is even wierder. you can get fined in germany for playing bach in public if you don't pay the gema (the german version of the riaa) lots of money. i mean bach? he died in 1750. apparently you have to pay if you're using or ever used sheetmusic printed by one of the companies which have signed up with the gema. so basically, if you start learning the piano at age 5 and have once looked at an edition peters printing of the piece you are now playing in public, you are liable to pay the gema money. as if the publishing houses don't get enough money by selling the music for ridiculous prices. and with this pointless urtext craze, it isn't as if the editions are any good, but that's another rant.
the way i see it, the ubuntu laptops from dell will have two main customers:
- private people who already run linux and want a new machine with a minimum of hassle
- companies which run linux but don't want to spend out on a workstation when a modern pc is probably already a lot more powerful than their older workstations
total sales? i dunno. i know that if dell started selling linux pcs in europe, i'd probably buy one as a way of being counted for spending my money on free software (at the moment i'm thinking of getting a sun ultra, so the ubuntu pc would be a lot cheaper).i remember a story a friend of mine once told me. at that stage he was working in some supermarket in the north of england. the supermarket stocked at least 2 brands of pasta sauce, one of which was the brand which advertised nationally and another one of which was the shop's own brand. the shop's own brand was cheaper than the one which was advertised nationally. it sold badly, most customers choosing the brand which was advertised nationally, and piles of it grew in the store room gathering dust. at this point, a memo came through from headquarters requesting that the price of the shop's own brand be increased to more than the price of the band which was advertised nationally. the result was that most customers bought the shop's own brand. this somewhat reminds me of my own mother who while she was a housewife would shop around for the highest price on something she would buy so she could boast to her acquaintances about how rich she was.
the point is, choice in data formats is actually sometimes a bad thing. does it help if people are allowed to choose in a scientific context if they wish to express energy in joule or in calories? a standard exists in this case, it is the joule. document formats should be regarded similarly. a perfectly good standard existed so instead of implementing this standard, microsoft develops their own (which isn't even implementable, or so i'm told, and therefore does not qualify as a standard) just to muddy the water. so when it looks like they will have to compete on a level playing field, microsoft throws up their arms and shouts "the consumer needs choice". how about a choice of software to read/write the existing word-format? why not just release the specs on that? why go to the trouble of designing a whole new data format?
(38:30) about bribery and corruption often present in legal decisions:
"i don't think anyone actually thought there was any point in offering stallman money"
...all we know is that a microsoft may be involved.
excuse me, sir... a what?
it's a bug count.
so because my old zx80 can't do a lot of things a modern pc can do, i shouldn't regard critical security problems in modern pcs as vulnerabilities?
if microsoft opens a door for exploits they have a vulnerability. if another system also has a similar capability is totally irrelevant, also from the point of view of a comparison. the question is, is windows more secure or less secure because of this feature?
of course. we know that only people born in the bastion of democracy called the great united states of america deserve education and health. everybody else can go fuck themselves. it was their choice not to want to get fat and invade other countries, killing their civilians and destroying their culture.
slightly ott of me, i know. but it's the thought that counts.
suddenly, everyone's favorite company doesn't look that bad after all.
i, er, i mean a friend of mine doesn't live in england but wants to watch dr who without having to bother a friend or relative to record it and then send it to me, er, i mean, him. the simple answer is any one of a thousand torrent download sites.
on a different note, do you have to be a tax for having an internet connection in england? they tried to introduce something like that in germany starting this year, but i haven't yet met anybody who pays it.
one is somewhat relieved that english fries don't exist, so they can't be renamed faith fries or similar.
that's the point. you can complain about it, but until microsoft opens up doc format etc. etc. all you can do is complain. many people can't actually take their business elsewhere because they're stuck. so what use is complaining if you have to buy their products anyway?
- the net was still being constructed and couldn't handle the load. my home zone moved about the place
- the standard way of telling the user that he was not in his homezone was to send an sms to the umts card. linux at that stage however did not support sending/receiving sms at the same time as using the umts connection
(on the side: the windows driver for the card with a nice gui was about 80MB in size. i could use the card more stably under linux by configuring it as a modem) however, all was not lost. my provider also had an internet page where you could check if the current connection was from your home zone or not, so this page was my start page in my browser.all went well until one day the page was replaced with an error page, so i called technical support. they had started changing one server to another server and had switched off this webpage and it would be back in about a week. had they told me? no. had they done load testing of the new configuration? no. had they bothered to read their own contract informing the customer of the services they were obliged to provide? no.
the moral of this story is, don't underestimate the laziness and stupidity of a large company.
how does the GPL vs 3 stop you developing microsoft products?
as a user, you can buy anything you want, i don't care. if all you do is use proprietary software, you aren't hurting other people unless you expect them to also read the data formats you produce.
as a developer you should be stopped from taking the work of others and changing it to enslave, particularly if the license does not permit this.
yes i am. i'm limiting your freedom to screw over everyone else. if you want to do that, go get microsoft or bsd stuff because i don't want to do business with you.
second clause: no, false
free and open-source software is not a monoculture like individual pieces of proprietary software are. it is a flourishing biosystem.
the freedom to tinker is one right the gpl grants. personally, i find enough software i can tinker with without going out of my way to find more, but there must be people who want to tinker with the software on the tivo and are prevented from doing so by the hardware.
for me, having the source code makes it more likely that many eyes can check it to see what's going on. not having the ability to change the code running the device does however tend to lessen interest in the device, so reducing the number of eyes checking for problems. how are you to know that the sourcecode distributed with tivo is the same code as that compiled on the device? what are the chances of being able to compile the software and install it and have the tivo run afterwards? the manufacturer could always say "we just compiled it with different flags and cut some of it out afterwards, so that's why you can't get it to work", at which point, there is no way in hell of knowing what the tivo actually does. that is the situation i personally find worrying and the point where i put my foot down: when a piece of equipment in my home is attached to the internet without me being able to know what it does.
on some days, the vision you describe does appear exageratedly apocalyptic to me. free software has made great strides in the past few years and what with dell going ubuntu, 2007 is the year of linux on the desktop. but then one reads about microsoft word xml format being fast-tracked for certification as a standard and microsoft practically giving away their software in the third world and you think "we're not out of the woods quite yet". losing the capability of doing whatever you want with the hardware you own is also worrying. the whole thing just makes me appreciate sun microsystems et al. more.
having said that, i don't see the huge threat from treacherous computing. maybe i'm an optimist here, but i think linux and the various bsds are now so important that corporations and government would have to be pretty stupid to switch this treacherous computing stuff on.
i find it interesting that the community appeared to have little difficulty reaching a consensus on tivoisation. a possible view point would be that the hardware is broken. as long as the source code for the software is available, who cares? just don't buy the broken hardware. what would happen if motorola released the complete source code for their linux phones but without a means to flash the memory?
the addition of this clause to GPL3 seems to me to be broadening the scope of the original software license. did GPL2 deal with this? no. why not? because it wasn't thought of back then (one possible answer). my point is, the scope has now been broadened into hardware. now i'm all for free hardware (i quite enjoy playing around with openSparc), but is this a good move, seeing as the appreciation for free hardware is almost non-existent in the general population. there is a general idea that free hardware should come with schematics for the hardware, so you can theoretically figure out yourself what it does, but are there any common free hardware licenses? i don't know of a single one (sun uses the GPL2 for openSparc, but that's just for the microcode and auxiliary programs AFAIK)
it's not about how pretty the documents look. it's about if a citizen can legally receive the document the government distributes and read it.
you can best think of a document as a text written in a foreign language. with microsoft-word format, you are not allowed by law to learn this language and there are no legally available complete dictionaries or grammars. you have to hire a team of translators from microsoft who will tell you what the text says and, for a fee, allow you to translate your own language into theirs. with open document format, a complete dictonary and grammar are available for free and you can also get a team of translators from a number of sources for free. now which format allows easiest communication between the citizens and their government?
You still have a choice. If you are a person open to ideas beyond science, why don't you temporarily assume that wearing a tinfoil hat will stop the evil vena (waht was their name again) overlord from controlling your brain and ask your creator, l. ron hubbard, to reveal himself to you. Then, after a reasonable amount of time, if you don't truly experience an intelligent living God, then you go back to science to get your answers. What have you to loose?
there, fixed it for you.
what i have to lose? how about my intellectual honesty? look at the ridiculous loops you're jumping through! god now has a "nature". god created everything, including the things which were against "god's nature". god hates certain things for no apparent reason. strangely his creation, "human" does not inherit his nature, although you say that human "inherited identity, peronsonality and freewill pretty much like god". now "man" chose to do something which was presumably against "his nature" (whoever "his nature" may refer to, man or god) so separating himself from the creator (i though the creator was omni-present?). god at the same time lets it be known that if man does do something against "his nature" (whoever "his nature" may refer to), man will burn in hell for an eternity. this is however not an example of coercion and it is not a threat (?!). we have however from god been given a corrupted understanding of good and evil. good and evil are of course the true nature of god. we can see god's true nature in the way he tortured and killed his own son.
i think i got that right. now go away and think about it before replying again.
a few problems with this idea:
god defines what the right path and the wrong path is.
god would be free to install in us a different moral imperative more fitting to his definition of right.
god tries to coerce us into doing what he has defined as good by threatening us with hell.
all in all, it's just one huge logical mess.
i must unfortunately disagree for one reason.
children are first and foremost believe everything they are told by an authority figure. if a child's parents and all other adults are telling the child that creationism is correct and evolution is evil, the child will with a high probability believe that.