NeoCon actually has a very old etymology going back to around 1921
The fact that the term was used first in 1921 doesn't tell you anything about what it means today. Today, it's a useful, descriptive term that is used both by conservatives and by their opponents. Whatever political baggage it has today has been created by the neo-conservatives and their heritage from Reagan onwards.
and has no basis other than political.
Yes, indeed: we're using political terminology to describe political concepts.
But you apparently subscribe to the typical neo-conservative view that "we're right, and everybody else is wrong and trying to get in our way with politics".
Proprietary software will always win out because it can have a single-minded purpose and direction.
Yeah, just like the Soviet Union always won because it could have a single-minded purpose and direction, right?
Anyone who thinks IceWeasel is a good idea has drunken too much of the open source Koolaid. [...] No matter who is responsible, the result is the same. Fragmentation where no fragmentation is necessary.
Of course, the consequences of having both the IceWeasel and Firefox trademarks around long-term would be bad--anybody who isn't a complete moron understands that. But there are two parties who can avert this problem: Debian can change or Firefox can change. It looks to me like at this point, Firefox has more to lose, so they may be changing their stance. And Debian really doesn't have a lot of room to maneuver--if they opened themselves up to this kind of control by other open source projects, they'd be in big trouble.
In any case, you're naive if you think this sort of shit isn't going on at Microsoft or other companies. At Microsoft, for example, this sort of thing happens both internally (competition among internal feature sets, naming, groups) and externally. In fact, Microsoft is infamous for doing their own in-house clone of something when a vendor annoys them. In comparison to closed source, this sort of thing happens remarkably rarely in the open source community.
Management that doesn't have any qualms about cheating their customers out of billions of dollars through monopolistic practices, FUD, and manipulation of IP laws won't have any qualms about bribing politicians either.
These kinds of monitors are probably not worth it. For the purposes of mammalian vision, high dynamic range is a nuisance that needs to be gotten rid of, and that's exactly what the human eye is doing. You still notice that a high dynamic range is present, but you don't really perceive it.
A little more dynamic range than what your average LCD monitor has would be nice, but aiming for reproducing anything resembling the full dynamic range of natural scenes is a waste of time and money.
As far as I can tell, all those observations are compatible with the main alternative hypotheses to black holes as well, so it's wrong to say "black hole observed".
90% of installers use drag-and-drop installation. Installations for things like drivers, system updates, or third-party system utilities, which put things into ~/Library or/Library come in packages(.pkg) which use Apple's installer program,
I just installed a new Mac, and basically, your statements are wishful thinking (or bullshit, if you like). There have been almost as many different ways of installing stuff as there have been packages. Plenty of third party apps come in things you manually need to drop elsewhere. Some come with non-standard installers, etc. I also just installed a new Ubuntu system, and it was up and running in minutes, with all packages installed and working together correctly. Macintosh software installations suck so badly compared to Linux, it's not even funny.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, but it doesn't seem even close to the way things work. In OS X, applications are actually folders, but don't appear that way to the user. [...] Removing one application won't cause another application to break because those other applications' dependencies are inside their respective applications/folders.
Indeed: because the Macintosh lacks decent dependency and update management, developers try to side-step the problem by putting duplicate copies into their applications. But apart from huge distributions, that just doesn't work logically: some services just need to be centralized and shared. Services like spell checking, notification (Growl), etc. Take Growl: not every version of Growl works with every application. So, if an application needs a new version of Growl, maybe it detects it or maybe it just crashes. And when I upgrade Growl, maybe that will break other applications.
The spell-checker is system-wide, and is available to every application whose developer chooses to use it. Only developers who are too lazy to learn how to do things correctly use their own spell-checker.
Correction: there is a system-wide spell checker, it's just not used by any application I care about. In any case the spell checker was not a good example because it's updated by Apple and has a fairly stable API to begin with. Growl is a better example for the bad dependency management on the Mac.
Again, it all comes down to this: maintaining the software on a Macintosh takes a lot of time, skill, and experience compared to Linux, and unnecessarily so. Linux makes software installations and updates easy, and so should the Mac.
In the case of closed source software, this is likely a financial incentive of the organization that sells the software. They will continue in order to make money. Money is a strong motivator.
You would think so. Unfortunately, real life works differently. When key developers disappear or companies change ownership, a lot of software products become unavailable because the cost of continuing to develop them is not justified by the revenue. And in many cases, companies even have a financial incentive for discontinuing a product, namely after acquiring a competitor. And when people pick up products like this, they are often small consulting houses that deliberately charge exorbitant prices to milk the remaning customers for all they are worth before discontinuing the product. And, finally, even when products nominally continue, they are often wildly incompatible (and often as a part of a company's business strategy).
While it is idealistic to say that open source is better here, it is not likely realistic. Money makes the world go around and software that was bringing money to someone stands a pretty good chance of continuance.
I've been in this business for more than a quarter of a century, and I have seen lots of companies come and go. Saying that open source software reduces the risk of leaving me stranded with an orphan product isn't "idealistic", it's reality based on lots of experience. Lousy experience with orphan software products is one of the reasons I'm so active in open source.
In the sense that you can make any combination of user id mapping, storage device, and authentication work, and that people do. One common example is things like Knoppix and flash drives.
Don't get me wrong: this feature makes sense for the Mac environment. But Apple didn't invent storing accounts on removable media, and their particular combination of features represents a policy choice, not a new invention.
Whether you synchronize and what uid you use are configuration choices. The usual UNIX thing to do is to require you to log into the machine as some existing user and then you switch over your home directory, that's all.
Apple may have made a different choice, for example by having the login process recognize an external storage device. But that's a configuration choice, not an invention.
"Adobe has threatened an antitrust suit against Microsoft, over PDF writing in Office 2007
So, (1) Adobe threatened but didn't actually succeed, and (2) it's an antitrust lawsuit, not a copyright or patent lawsuit. This lawsuit is a reflection of Microsoft's special status, not anything specific to PDF.
Microsoft could even face an antitrust lawsuit if they started shipping Linux, but that doesn't make Linux non-free. Microsoft might also face an anti-trust lawsuit if they don't ship PDF. Microsoft simply isn't free to act as they choose, while other companies are. That bugs the hell out of Ballmer, but given their history and market share, it's the way it should be.
Now we'll just have to wait and see if Adobe begins to sue everyone who wants this functionality in their application. A lot of people I talk to regard PDF as an 'open' standard when the only part that's free is the ability to decode it--not encode it.
I think this is Qualcomm's polite way of saying "we're discontinuing Eudora and recommend that you move to Thunderbird". Nevertheless, it is a nice way of transitioning users from proprietary software to open source, since this way, they will be providing help with the migration.
Are OSS projects that rely so heavily on a single person able to be trusted for widespread use?
Compared to a closed source project that relies so heavily on a single person, the open source project is a much safer bet.
Are concerns like this valid or is the community able to pick up where someone left off with minimal interruption to clients?
You should very much take those considerations into account. With open source, you have two advantages compared to the same project when it's closed: (1) you know who the project relies on, and (2) it is clear under what conditions the project can be continued.
You aren't paying attention. All I said was "it's a loophole from the point of view of the people who designed the GPL". How do I know? I asked them. And you can also look at the GPLv3 draft:
The Corresponding Source also includes any encryption or authorization keys necessary to install and/or execute modified versions from source code in the recommended or principal context of use, such that they can implement all the same functionality in the same range of circumstances. (For instance, if the work is a DVD player and can play certain DVDs, it must be possible for modified versions to play those DVDs. If the work communicates with an online service, it must be possible for modified versions to communicate with the same online service in the same way such that the service cannot distinguish.)
You have no implicit right to use any software you like on one-use hardware devices.
You have no implicit right to use anybody else's software anywhere. The rights you have are spelled out by the authors of the software in a license. The intent of the authors of the GPL has been clear, even for GPLv2. But the GPLv2 had some loopholes relative to the intent of its authors, and the GPLv3 fixes that.
Buy hardware that supports your freedoms if you want to, but it has nothing to do with the GPL.
We aren't talking about my wishes, we are talking about the wishes of the authors of the GPL, and they are clearly not what you claim they are.
If it only were that simple. In reality, on the Mac...
-- there are many different kinds of installers: drag and drop (in various different forms), Apple-style packages with install wizards, and haphazard third party installers; there is no standard, either in theory or in practice
-- there is no dependency management on the Mac: you can't tell what packages you need to download, and when you upgrade something, things that depend on it may break, or it may break because its dependencies aren't updated
-- every application has its own update mechanism, often involving connecting over the internet on every startup, followed by annoying dialog boxes in case of an update
The only reason it works as well as it does is because software authors stick to writing simple double-clickable, self-contained applications. But that's not a good solution. For example, I don't want to have a dozen different spell checkers on my system, each with their own dictionaries, but that's exactly what I get with Macintosh apps.
No, Windows software installation is awful compared to Linux and MacOS.
You mean to say that a average user will have the knowledage (or the patience) to download a tarball, untar, get the associated lib and all that shit to get something to work, just to find out, something else screwed up cause you installed this??
Sorry, but your understanding of Linux is about a decade out of date. On Linux, you just select "Install Software" from the System menu and click on the package(s) you want. That's it.
The process is completely automatic: download, verification, dependency management, software updates, configuration, etc. There is nothing even remotely as good on either Windows or Macintosh. (Macintosh is tedious in comparison, but unlike Windows, at least it's simple and transparent.)
Who is not "dubious"? Church-going Catholics? Mormons? Televangelists? Married businessmen? Prisoners in solitary confinement?
Sorry to get off topic there... I havn't made peace with Bayer for that.
Were they sloppy, or were good tests available already? AFAIK, the blood supply only started getting tested in the 1990's, and even then there has been a problem with a window period.
I find that most people can barely tell the difference between Windows, OS X, and Linux for day-to-day usage. Some of the applications are identical (OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbid, Gaim), and others are pretty similar (web browsers, chat programs, etc.). The biggest difference is in system management and software installation. Windows loses in that regard hands-down. Mac and Linux are comparable, with each having their own strengths and weaknesses.
First of all, as everybody else is pointing out, Microsoft Office works on the Mac.
But, perhaps more importantly, so does NeoOffice, which is a more than adequate replacement for most users. I have MS Office on my Mac and I still use NeoOffice anyway because it interoperates better with Linux and because I prefer the UI.
And for most people, Pages+Keynote is probably a better choice than either MS Office or NeoOffice anyway: less bloated and easier to learn.
So what? We dispose of far more toxic chemical waste more casually than we deal with nuclear waste. It's just the n-word that drives people bonkers.
Nuclear waste just is not like chemical waste:
* You cannot destroy nuclear waste except in a breeder reactor, and you can do that only for "pure" waste. * Any equipment you use to deal with high-level nuclear waste not only becomes contaminated, it becomes radioactive itself.
Those properties are basic physical constraints. In contrast, there are many effective ways of destroying even the most highly toxic chemical waste.
So, the reason people get concerned about nuclear waste when they are much less concerned about chemical waste is because it's rational to be more concerned about nuclear waste: nuclear waste really is completely different from chemical waste.
I suspect that plenty of spy agencies and police are using this approach, the Swiss are simply one of the few to acknowledge it.
Also, it doesn't really have to be "malware", in that it tries to install itself after the fact, these people can simply do on-the-wire replacement of software updates with software updates that have been modified specifically for their purposes (getting around signing is work, but feasible). Unfortunately, Linux is as susceptible to that as Windows and MacOS.
Most people don't understand that even over many years the actual volume of physical waste products is not that much.
That statement is nonsense. Nuclear waste comes in several categories, from vast amounts of low-level waste (much of the powerplant), to smaller amounts of high-level waste (just the spent fuel).
Each has its own risks. Neither of them can ever be rendered harmless by any practical process.
Although it is a good idea to figure out where to store it later, for now it is kept in a secure place on site at nuclear power plants.
It's a risky bet that we will ever figure out where to store it; there does not seem to be an acceptable, secure long-term storage site.
And there is no such thing as a "secure place on site". Nobody knows what political, social, and technological upheavals the US will undergo over the next decades and centuries. Are you naive enough to think that things will continue as stable and prosperous as they have for the last 50 years? The US will face massive problems sooner or later, and then we don't want to have vats of highly toxic waste sitting around "on site".
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NeoCon actually has a very old etymology going back to around 1921
The fact that the term was used first in 1921 doesn't tell you anything about what it means today. Today, it's a useful, descriptive term that is used both by conservatives and by their opponents. Whatever political baggage it has today has been created by the neo-conservatives and their heritage from Reagan onwards.
and has no basis other than political.
Yes, indeed: we're using political terminology to describe political concepts.
But you apparently subscribe to the typical neo-conservative view that "we're right, and everybody else is wrong and trying to get in our way with politics".
Proprietary software will always win out because it can have a single-minded purpose and direction.
Yeah, just like the Soviet Union always won because it could have a single-minded purpose and direction, right?
Anyone who thinks IceWeasel is a good idea has drunken too much of the open source Koolaid. [...] No matter who is responsible, the result is the same. Fragmentation where no fragmentation is necessary.
Of course, the consequences of having both the IceWeasel and Firefox trademarks around long-term would be bad--anybody who isn't a complete moron understands that. But there are two parties who can avert this problem: Debian can change or Firefox can change. It looks to me like at this point, Firefox has more to lose, so they may be changing their stance. And Debian really doesn't have a lot of room to maneuver--if they opened themselves up to this kind of control by other open source projects, they'd be in big trouble.
In any case, you're naive if you think this sort of shit isn't going on at Microsoft or other companies. At Microsoft, for example, this sort of thing happens both internally (competition among internal feature sets, naming, groups) and externally. In fact, Microsoft is infamous for doing their own in-house clone of something when a vendor annoys them. In comparison to closed source, this sort of thing happens remarkably rarely in the open source community.
Management that doesn't have any qualms about cheating their customers out of billions of dollars through monopolistic practices, FUD, and manipulation of IP laws won't have any qualms about bribing politicians either.
These kinds of monitors are probably not worth it. For the purposes of mammalian vision, high dynamic range is a nuisance that needs to be gotten rid of, and that's exactly what the human eye is doing. You still notice that a high dynamic range is present, but you don't really perceive it.
A little more dynamic range than what your average LCD monitor has would be nice, but aiming for reproducing anything resembling the full dynamic range of natural scenes is a waste of time and money.
As far as I can tell, all those observations are compatible with the main alternative hypotheses to black holes as well, so it's wrong to say "black hole observed".
90% of installers use drag-and-drop installation. Installations for things like drivers, system updates, or third-party system utilities, which put things into ~/Library or /Library come in packages(.pkg) which use Apple's installer program,
I just installed a new Mac, and basically, your statements are wishful thinking (or bullshit, if you like). There have been almost as many different ways of installing stuff as there have been packages. Plenty of third party apps come in things you manually need to drop elsewhere. Some come with non-standard installers, etc. I also just installed a new Ubuntu system, and it was up and running in minutes, with all packages installed and working together correctly. Macintosh software installations suck so badly compared to Linux, it's not even funny.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, but it doesn't seem even close to the way things work. In OS X, applications are actually folders, but don't appear that way to the user. [...] Removing one application won't cause another application to break because those other applications' dependencies are inside their respective applications/folders.
Indeed: because the Macintosh lacks decent dependency and update management, developers try to side-step the problem by putting duplicate copies into their applications. But apart from huge distributions, that just doesn't work logically: some services just need to be centralized and shared. Services like spell checking, notification (Growl), etc. Take Growl: not every version of Growl works with every application. So, if an application needs a new version of Growl, maybe it detects it or maybe it just crashes. And when I upgrade Growl, maybe that will break other applications.
The spell-checker is system-wide, and is available to every application whose developer chooses to use it. Only developers who are too lazy to learn how to do things correctly use their own spell-checker.
Correction: there is a system-wide spell checker, it's just not used by any application I care about. In any case the spell checker was not a good example because it's updated by Apple and has a fairly stable API to begin with. Growl is a better example for the bad dependency management on the Mac.
Again, it all comes down to this: maintaining the software on a Macintosh takes a lot of time, skill, and experience compared to Linux, and unnecessarily so. Linux makes software installations and updates easy, and so should the Mac.
In the case of closed source software, this is likely a financial incentive of the organization that sells the software. They will continue in order to make money. Money is a strong motivator.
You would think so. Unfortunately, real life works differently. When key developers disappear or companies change ownership, a lot of software products become unavailable because the cost of continuing to develop them is not justified by the revenue. And in many cases, companies even have a financial incentive for discontinuing a product, namely after acquiring a competitor. And when people pick up products like this, they are often small consulting houses that deliberately charge exorbitant prices to milk the remaning customers for all they are worth before discontinuing the product. And, finally, even when products nominally continue, they are often wildly incompatible (and often as a part of a company's business strategy).
While it is idealistic to say that open source is better here, it is not likely realistic. Money makes the world go around and software that was bringing money to someone stands a pretty good chance of continuance.
I've been in this business for more than a quarter of a century, and I have seen lots of companies come and go. Saying that open source software reduces the risk of leaving me stranded with an orphan product isn't "idealistic", it's reality based on lots of experience. Lousy experience with orphan software products is one of the reasons I'm so active in open source.
In the sense that you can make any combination of user id mapping, storage device, and authentication work, and that people do. One common example is things like Knoppix and flash drives.
Don't get me wrong: this feature makes sense for the Mac environment. But Apple didn't invent storing accounts on removable media, and their particular combination of features represents a policy choice, not a new invention.
Whether you synchronize and what uid you use are configuration choices. The usual UNIX thing to do is to require you to log into the machine as some existing user and then you switch over your home directory, that's all.
Apple may have made a different choice, for example by having the login process recognize an external storage device. But that's a configuration choice, not an invention.
Trouble is, Bell didn't develop the telephone. He did contribute something to its development, but he would probably have done that anyway.
So, (1) Adobe threatened but didn't actually succeed, and (2) it's an antitrust lawsuit, not a copyright or patent lawsuit. This lawsuit is a reflection of Microsoft's special status, not anything specific to PDF.
Microsoft could even face an antitrust lawsuit if they started shipping Linux, but that doesn't make Linux non-free. Microsoft might also face an anti-trust lawsuit if they don't ship PDF. Microsoft simply isn't free to act as they choose, while other companies are. That bugs the hell out of Ballmer, but given their history and market share, it's the way it should be.
Now we'll just have to wait and see if Adobe begins to sue everyone who wants this functionality in their application. A lot of people I talk to regard PDF as an 'open' standard when the only part that's free is the ability to decode it--not encode it.
That's pure FUD. The PDF format is open and free.
You need a decent LaTeX editing environment. Something like TeXShop (Mac) or TeXMaker (Linux, Windows). Tuning and fiddling is trivial in those.
I think this is Qualcomm's polite way of saying "we're discontinuing Eudora and recommend that you move to Thunderbird". Nevertheless, it is a nice way of transitioning users from proprietary software to open source, since this way, they will be providing help with the migration.
This feature has been available under UNIX for more than two decades. For Apple to patent this is really evil.
Are OSS projects that rely so heavily on a single person able to be trusted for widespread use?
Compared to a closed source project that relies so heavily on a single person, the open source project is a much safer bet.
Are concerns like this valid or is the community able to pick up where someone left off with minimal interruption to clients?
You should very much take those considerations into account. With open source, you have two advantages compared to the same project when it's closed: (1) you know who the project relies on, and (2) it is clear under what conditions the project can be continued.
You have no implicit right to use any software you like on one-use hardware devices.
You have no implicit right to use anybody else's software anywhere. The rights you have are spelled out by the authors of the software in a license. The intent of the authors of the GPL has been clear, even for GPLv2. But the GPLv2 had some loopholes relative to the intent of its authors, and the GPLv3 fixes that.
Buy hardware that supports your freedoms if you want to, but it has nothing to do with the GPL.
We aren't talking about my wishes, we are talking about the wishes of the authors of the GPL, and they are clearly not what you claim they are.
If it only were that simple. In reality, on the Mac...
-- there are many different kinds of installers: drag and drop (in various different forms), Apple-style packages with install wizards, and haphazard third party installers; there is no standard, either in theory or in practice
-- there is no dependency management on the Mac: you can't tell what packages you need to download, and when you upgrade something, things that depend on it may break, or it may break because its dependencies aren't updated
-- every application has its own update mechanism, often involving connecting over the internet on every startup, followed by annoying dialog boxes in case of an update
The only reason it works as well as it does is because software authors stick to writing simple double-clickable, self-contained applications. But that's not a good solution. For example, I don't want to have a dozen different spell checkers on my system, each with their own dictionaries, but that's exactly what I get with Macintosh apps.
you mean to say windows WINS hands down.
No, Windows software installation is awful compared to Linux and MacOS.
You mean to say that a average user will have the knowledage (or the patience) to download a tarball, untar, get the associated lib and all that shit to get something to work, just to find out, something else screwed up cause you installed this??
Sorry, but your understanding of Linux is about a decade out of date. On Linux, you just select "Install Software" from the System menu and click on the package(s) you want. That's it.
The process is completely automatic: download, verification, dependency management, software updates, configuration, etc. There is nothing even remotely as good on either Windows or Macintosh. (Macintosh is tedious in comparison, but unlike Windows, at least it's simple and transparent.)
I'm sorry to hear that. I'm curious, though...
that came from *dubious* sources.
Who is not "dubious"? Church-going Catholics? Mormons? Televangelists? Married businessmen? Prisoners in solitary confinement?
Sorry to get off topic there... I havn't made peace with Bayer for that.
Were they sloppy, or were good tests available already? AFAIK, the blood supply only started getting tested in the 1990's, and even then there has been a problem with a window period.
I find that most people can barely tell the difference between Windows, OS X, and Linux for day-to-day usage. Some of the applications are identical (OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbid, Gaim), and others are pretty similar (web browsers, chat programs, etc.). The biggest difference is in system management and software installation. Windows loses in that regard hands-down. Mac and Linux are comparable, with each having their own strengths and weaknesses.
First of all, as everybody else is pointing out, Microsoft Office works on the Mac.
But, perhaps more importantly, so does NeoOffice, which is a more than adequate replacement for most users. I have MS Office on my Mac and I still use NeoOffice anyway because it interoperates better with Linux and because I prefer the UI.
And for most people, Pages+Keynote is probably a better choice than either MS Office or NeoOffice anyway: less bloated and easier to learn.
No. They made it somewhat hard to move unprotected music around. They made it very easy to move music you bought.
So, you agree then that Apple "made it somewhat hard to move unprotected music around". That's all I claimed.
All your other useless, irrelevant verbiage is just the typical Mac zealotry: people like you give the Mac a bad name.
So what? We dispose of far more toxic chemical waste more casually than we deal with nuclear waste. It's just the n-word that drives people bonkers.
Nuclear waste just is not like chemical waste:
* You cannot destroy nuclear waste except in a breeder reactor, and you can do that only for "pure" waste.
* Any equipment you use to deal with high-level nuclear waste not only becomes contaminated, it becomes radioactive itself.
Those properties are basic physical constraints. In contrast, there are many effective ways of destroying even the most highly toxic chemical waste.
So, the reason people get concerned about nuclear waste when they are much less concerned about chemical waste is because it's rational to be more concerned about nuclear waste: nuclear waste really is completely different from chemical waste.
I suspect that plenty of spy agencies and police are using this approach, the Swiss are simply one of the few to acknowledge it.
Also, it doesn't really have to be "malware", in that it tries to install itself after the fact, these people can simply do on-the-wire replacement of software updates with software updates that have been modified specifically for their purposes (getting around signing is work, but feasible). Unfortunately, Linux is as susceptible to that as Windows and MacOS.
Most people don't understand that even over many years the actual volume of physical waste products is not that much.
That statement is nonsense. Nuclear waste comes in several categories, from vast amounts of low-level waste (much of the powerplant), to smaller amounts of high-level waste (just the spent fuel).
Each has its own risks. Neither of them can ever be rendered harmless by any practical process.
Although it is a good idea to figure out where to store it later, for now it is kept in a secure place on site at nuclear power plants.
It's a risky bet that we will ever figure out where to store it; there does not seem to be an acceptable, secure long-term storage site.
And there is no such thing as a "secure place on site". Nobody knows what political, social, and technological upheavals the US will undergo over the next decades and centuries. Are you naive enough to think that things will continue as stable and prosperous as they have for the last 50 years? The US will face massive problems sooner or later, and then we don't want to have vats of highly toxic waste sitting around "on site".