Posts by Martin Owens 428 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Aug 2006
Another closing of a great DNA based community for which the late great Douglas Adams gave his name to.
They better not come hunting for h2g2 or I can't be held responsible for the letters of complaint I write.
It's a shame because instead of thinking about community as a living beast that needs to be carefully transported from one habitat to another. One that needs feeding and careful maintenance. The BBC seems to regard online forums as so much roast beef.
I can appreciate Bill's generosity with regards to the poor, and I can criticise his bad choice in morals in business.
I don't need to pick sides to understand when he gives and when he takes. I'm more interested in his personal philosophy, does this man really think that nothing good can come about without business money? Inquiring minds want to know.
>> I'm mad at paying taxes. I think they are a silly thing and do little beyond support
>> the weakest links in civilization and pad the pockets of people who already live
>> in ivory towers.
Well so long as your happy then. Deary me, where has all the compassion gone, I won't event get into the idea of not having any social systems and programs and go strait for "you heartless bastard"
As for NY, an unthinking solution to a messy problem. I bet they thought it was clever but the only real solution is a rethink of that part of the tax system city to federal.
It's funny, you always hear how the Americans were a side theater in the world war in the UK; and in the American story you always get the impression that Britain was a silly little country that was save heroically by the US and never came up with anything useful: like Radar (Alexander Watt), the Jet Engine (Sir Frank Whittle) or computing (Alan Turing).
Weather it's flash or nvidia drivers; proprietary code is a security problem. It's all right when it works but I'd feel safer if all those who put these little black boxes in the linux platform would open source them or be replaced with things like gnash (when it's finished) and the nvidia nouvou driver.
Otherwise there will always be something you'll never be sure of security wise.
The attacks on the Linux machine are going to focus on skype, a proprietary application or driver is not easy to secure or to test for security problems. I find the very idea of having skype on the linux machine to be unfair.
the above post is right, all operating systems suck; the question is what the hell are you doing about it punk.
It's funny you should mention printers, I know the bloke working on the gutten print driver who deals with canon Pixma drivers. nice bloke. When I got my Canon iP5000 I had a Mac (Powerbook G4 17") Alas when I gave the powerbook away (no use for mac any more) the printer was a worry because I know Canon are complete tits at supporting linux.
I plugged it in, I went to File > Print and low and behold if the damn thing wasn't there ready to print from.
It's not even that easy on Mac OSX.
This isn't the vote it's self but the recommendation committee. Given the way the USA NB delegation was talking when they left Geneva I wouldn't be surprised if they changed their vote to "F*ck No!", no because of the standard just because civil servants don't like to be gamed and abused in such a glaringly obvious way.
If I was as pissed at Microsoft as most of those NB's I'd be changing my vote.
Besides the process should have stopped, the votes were tied 4-4 and a tied means failure in JTC-1 rules.
We all know that closed software is so crappy that it would make my dear ol' mum cry in her sleep. Why do'ya think it took so long to salvage Netscape code and turn it into firefox, or the mess that was StarOffice before it became OpenOffice?
No for the love of bob don't release any of your thoughtless code, Microsoft. The world will be a better place when you bury it under 37 meters of rocks and boulders followed by a steel cap and some guard dogs.
Is it me or are the people on this list to blame for economic problems? Surely it can't be good that a hand full of people own the economic production for a fair percentage of the world?
Maybe they think it's backed by gold instead of labour. oh well, sooner we balance this problem the better.
>> While this may be "immoral"
Great now that you know it's wrong why do you pretend like it's ok? It's WRONG. you remember right and wrong? those concepts you learn from your parents about how hurting people is bad and how helping people is good.
Sheesh you'd think to become a member of the capitalist party you have to have a frontal lobe removal. Microsoft are a monopoly, Microsoft are immoral, using Microsoft products is immoral. If you can deal with doing wrong then fine but I won;t.
>> Microsoft should not have to pander to every single request from any competitor wanting a slice of their market share.
Oh? why not? Microsoft are in a very special position called a monopoly, not just an application monopoly but an operating system monopoly. So just like black holes with space time, Microsoft distorts markets, industry and different market rules apply.
I know it hurts the old liberal capitalists hearts to think of an "honest" business being some how held accountable for being successful. But even Adam Smith would have dismantled Microsoft for hurting the market.
When you can install ubuntu and really cause chair shortages in Redmond.
Besides, 800Mhz, 512MB of RAM and the kind of GPU there for is just the kind of machine that runs ubuntu and compiz in a really nice and fast way. Although I'd still switch off auto indexing and save the extra second at boot time.
The problem is that the Copyright terms need to be balanced such that when the public and cultural interest is harmed by long copyright terms those works should be made available to the public domain sooner; If an artists publishes and lets face it is quite crap then he gets to keep his art work for 70 years good riddance.
So I suggest creating a "Culturally Significance Act" whos job would be to define how the Copyright rights to works change as they become culturally significant. For instance, the teletubies are so massively ingrained into our culture that the use of their image, clips of their show and so on should be public domain. The act should balance out on how widely distributed, how many sales of units, how many downloads etc and even how often it's cited in the news. An equation might be nice for working it out well.
I see no harm in having culturally significant works in the public domain. This would how ever put almost all Disneys films into public domain; which would see quite the smirk on my face I must admit.
10 years minimum, 70 years maximum, non linear scale.
Once again us poor friggin linux users are given the sharp boot in the nuts from business types who don't understand what _standards_ and free and open market places are. Now we have the option of hacking up iTunes store, downloading the shows illegally or just shunning everything coming out of the UK as complete trite anyway.
As far as I know I got a patch for my Ubuntu desktop's kernel yesterday; So it took less time to fix and distribute across several levels of community than it took for the hotfixing gunk to be made.
I have to laugh because it's pretty much a few lines change to fix. Though I was quite impressed following the issue how transparent the whole process was.
I mean as above you have the BSD guys who've been hacking away for years. but the whole open source movement only sprang to life out of the Free Software movement.
As much as OSS would hate to admit, the FSF has never had a problem with knowing where the line is and what they're trying to do. Better integrity sees the GPL well trusted and the OSI a trademark without a reason.
Is that our culture will have to offer suicide as a respectable solution to those sane of mind at any adult age, with or without illness. The logic says that because I am my own person the one thing I should always have control over is my life. And yet our culture and society doesn't even let people end their _own_ lives, how selfish is that.
Ah well another 50 years and we'll be forced into it anyway.
I agree Steve Roper, Those unthinking and naive pure and pure capitalists who don't give a toss about workers rights or even worse; trust corporations or the governments to protect workers rights.
It's only a pity we don't have a programmers and sys-admins union. Then at least we could have had a strike each time the uk government fucks up an IT project.
>> There are other opensource licenses than the dreaded, infectious, GPL
And no real world programmers would license their works as BSD unless they've been force fed the ray of sunshine, my little pony BDS cool aid. It's shame that such a trust will always be abused, but that's just what the BSD folks set themselves up for.
>> Hence, therefore, and ergo, MiYahoo will never be able to achieve the same
>> economies that (in part) fuel Google's success.
Yes well, Microsoft aren't known for having the most robust management, the amount of money they throw at problems is worrying. If Microsoft acquire Yahoo, yahoo will be dead. It won't be an acquisition, it'll be a slaughter.
I find it humorous that what Gates says is only slightly less daft than his mate Bloody Bonkers Balmer. I mean seriously why does Billy boy get a nice trip to No. 10 and yet Alan Cox never gets to hob nob?
There are serious issues in the UK about the governments software policies being set my Microsoft instead of common sense. And every time Bill Gates visits No. 10 the corruption is guaranteed.
To be honest the current over weight and obesity problem is not due to being more sedentary. It's got everything to do with the highly processed sugary crap that they sell in school cafeteria that causes hunger hormonal imbalance.
Yes it would be nice to get kids more active, but to be honest I think they'd be more active if they weren't so fat in the first place.
Trying to pull a canonical translator out of your arse should be interesting entertainment. The fact is though if your translating for a FOSS project at least you know that your work is your own. This just reeks of a misunderstanding about what a community project really IS. i.e it is not a way to get cheep information workers.
Imagen if that 54bn could be spend on getting something useful done for our economy than spending it on Microsoft, IBM, Novell and Adobe. I wonder if the BSA will ever point out that you could save twice that by switching people to open source and make piracy an irrelevance.
I also have to laugh at reports that think money will suddenly pop out of thin air, because that isn't how money works. Besides I'd rather over pay a team of uk employees to use Linux than send my money over sea's to prop up the USA.
There is a difference between FOSS and Folkware, Most of the time if a piece of free software is created for some use it will only be used heavily if it's technically good, this is where having the many eyes outside of a single organisation can weed out all the bad projects.
You never hear about the poor quality FOSS projects simply because they die quickly. It's like a rather extreme version of software evolution with stuffy technical IT staff acting as it's reaper.
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