Posts by h4rm0ny 4560 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2008
>>It'll all be fine after Torvalds. Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers can take over. Only they can make the "Open Source community [..] one happy place".
I know you're being sarcastic but that just made me shiver.
You know that Poettering would be the one driving the bus in the first place, yes? :/
>>"Er, its being given away for free?"
Er, that's a terrible response. When someone points out a bug in Linux we do not respond "Well it's free, what do you expect"? GNU/Linux powers half the Internet. Bad attitude is bad. Linux is not worse quality because it happens to be free nor should we expect it to be.
>>One of the client's sales execs (desk at the other end of an open plan office) asked for some sales data to be extracted from the database. About an hour later I had a nicely formatted report printed off for him and took it down to his desk. I asked someone nearby "where's xxxx". "He doesn't work here anymore."
You had a very narrow escape, by the sounds of it. Depending on the data Sales exec was probably aware of an incoming problem and had asked you for the hard copy so they could leave with a bunch of valuable data to reference once they were locked out of their email, CRM, etc.
It's possibly lucky for you that it did take you an hour. Not that it would have been fair to blame you so you'd probably be okay but still - not good for the company, either. I hope you mentioned to other people that you'd been asked by him to get him a hard copy of it all.
I'm perfectly able and willing to help pay for a site that I make use of and I would prefer to pay than the site go ad-supported (and all that comes with it). I've donated to Wikipedia a number of times in the past.
But I stopped when they tried to take the product of someone else's work on a technicality (the "Simian Selfie") and decided that not only did they not care about the individual who paid for the equipment, set everything up, spent many days slowly becoming accepted by the macaques and had specifically travelled around the world to photograph them and did all the post processing on the image - all on a legally untested contention of theirs; they also wanted to set themselves up as the moral arbitrators of right and wrong. The Wikipedia page on the subject is the smuggest little thing I've ever seen on there, dripping with fake objectiveness. Clued me in to the nature of some of the people there. Not impressed.
Presumably it rose with a moped on top of it, not well balanced, a man came up and started using the convenience - remember this is at night and I don't see floodlights on the top of this thing, and the moped toppled off and fell on him. Maybe he leant a hand on the thing which helped nudge the moped off (did you see it wobbling half-way through the video?) or some friends leant on the other side, waiting for him. Anyway, unless you routinely look up for falling vehicles every time you urinate, I don't think it's really fair to laugh at this. The man was apparently badly injured.
Some of the fallacious and loaded argument from the systemd camp winds me up. In particular that quote in the article about giving systemd a chance to mature before "throwing toys out". Apart from the patronizing language (very inappropriate - this is a core part of the distro we're discussing and they're trying to make it sound like throwing a tantrum over nothing), there is also the very simple fact that this is NOT a case of giving something a chance to mature before judging it - it's choosing a direction for development. Doing what they suggest is moving you ever further down that road to systemd and making it ever harder to back out.
Disingenuous and offensive.
I had been generally positive toward Uber just because it seemed the right time for such technology and a good shift in principle.
Based on those links I now see it's a case of right time, right place, wrong company to luck out and be there.
Deeply unpleasant culture.
Have we properly controlled against all those less rich and successful bands which stayed together or split up? Because most of the bands I know of that didn't get worldwide recognition still split up anyway. It's something that happens routinely. I think you can actually make a pretty good case that success more commonly keeps a band together than lack of success does.
>>"So I take it you don't disagree with his point about copyright being too long? This, I believe *is* his point."
I suggested that the most popular things being shared by far are recent / current media. Look on Pirate Bay and you're going to see Guardians of the Galaxy, not Forbidden Planet. The latter will be there, but way, way down. I know perfectly well what is point is, what I'm saying is that it's a separate argument not relevant as a counter-point to critics of piracy.
>>"So stop pissing and moaning about it and run yourselves like every other self employed business, and make your own money without delegating the non-exciting work to others."
Why should a talented musician have to also be an accountant or a publicist or recording specialist? Shouldn't a musician be able to delegate such things if they wish and focus on their music?
>>"Missing in all this loquacious outpouring is a reasoned argument why any artist or their descendant should be expected to be paid for anything that happend more than 40 years ago. Yes, that "punctuated equilibrium" should be changed. Better coypright for only 15 years, how is that?"
I would happily bet a considerable sum of money that if I survey the top 50 songs or movies from The Pirate Bay this month, that all of them were produced in the last fifteen years. Certainly for movies and if not all then very nearly all, for songs, as well.
Point being that what you have written is irrelevant for most piracy today.
>>"Until the 19th Century, the only source of a stable purple dye was a rare shellfish imported from the Middle East. Then a young chemist by the name of William Henry Perkin accidentally invented Artificial Mauve. Suddenly, everyone could afford to wear purple -- but the cash value of the shellfish that had been the sole source of purple dye plummeted."
Bad analogy is bad. You can't see the flaws in it yourself? Honestly? We're not talking about an alternative creator of music, we're talking about people taking the same creator's content but not paying them.
It amazes me how some people can focus solely on distribution costs and methods as if music, films and software were just a natural resource that arose to be harvested, and talked as if they were fighting some evil monopoly over the right to gather it themselves. Rather than taking the efforts of people who made it without compensation.
>>You know the companies I'm talking about. The ones who, faced with CentOS vs RHEL will always go for the latter because that way "we can call someone if things go wrong".
I don't know why you put that last part in quote marks. You can call RedHat if things go wrong - it's a major and good thing for the Enterprise customers.
>>This is about providing cross platform options for other niche OSs like OS-X and legacy UNIX type platforms and derivatives like Linux. So developers can for instance code / test on a Linux platform that provides the environment they might like to use for day to day coding, but then can be run in production on a standardised..."
I really don't think that is the case. For one, GNU/Linux is not a "niche" OS. It's hugely successful on the server side. And OSX is not a "niche" OS. It's hugely successful on the client side.
But to your main point, I don't think that makes sense at all. You develop on a system that is as close to your target environment as possible. Even minor differences can have drastic results. (In fact the minor ones can be the hardest to find and debug - from recent experience, alas).
I don't doubt that MS want to get as many people as possible using their platform but the above as a method doesn't make sense to me.
>>"Well .Net is faster and more efficient, easier to install and manage, has had a couple of orders of magnitude fewer security holes, and supports multiple programming languages....And it's not made / supported by Oracle."
Alright, alright. But apart from all that, what have the Redmonds ever done for us?
>>"What will you do if you have developed something, run in on Linux machines... and one day Microsoft decided not to support Linux any longer."
Well that's true of any language or framework, Open Source or otherwise - you have to hope there are enough others out there like you that it wont wither away and die. A couple of things with .NET are that (a) it's already pretty mature and widely-used so that's good. And following from that, even if MS abandon support for it on GNU/Linux, they'll continue to support .NET itself so the job of maintaining it on GNU/Linux is a lot simpler than if it were abandoned altogether. You're always going to have a sizeable community next door and that has knock-on effects - you essentially just have to re-implement any changes rather than come up with them yourself. And it massively enlarges the pool of available programmers too.
In fact, I'm surprised at this decision because of that last point. What this does is enable a lot of Windows programmers to [more] easily migrate to writing software on GNU/Linux.
I used to be a pretty big critic of Miguel. I'm pretty sure at one point I accused him of secretly working for Microsoft to trap GNU/Linux and that Mono was a cunning ploy to tie GNU/Linux to an environment that Microsoft controlled. I was a pretty fierce critic of Mono for that reason.
I may have been a little hard on him given today's news. Oops.
Lync is probably the best product MS make. Skype is quite possibly the worst (if we exclude historical things they no longer support). Everything is going backwards, today.
I LOATHE the "Skype look and feel", it's unprofessional, uneasy on the eye, and all round hideous to look at. And recently it got WORSE! The Skype interface can be summed up as "Apple done wrong".
The entirety of the Skype code base should be transferred to a single hard drive, have holy wafers stuffed in its SATA port and be buried with a magnet through its spindle.
And when I say "buried", I mean tossed into a volcano in Mordor by a hobbit.
I hate it. Genuinely despise it. It holds back and displaces so many better solutions and Could Have Been's. Technology would categorically be in a better place today if it had failed. And I detest that a worse technology (by far) is starting to subsume a better one. I'm going to fire up my Debian box and do everything I need from that instead of my Windows 8 one. I don't want to touch anything Microsoft, today.
>>"I guess you have never used the phone in anger then. Never seen a Windows Phone that's been capable of not dropping out audio when playing to a bluetooth speaker (or headphones), they all randomly reboot several times a week, the proximity sensors simply don't work. Don't expect to be able to phone banking with the key tones, you will end up throwing it in the trash, as it can't work out it's not next to your head any longers."
None of that has been true of my WP8 device which I have been using for quite a long time (over a year, at least). That's the problem with posts like yours - when there were very few WP devices around, you could get away with it because people didn't have direct experience. Now there are loads of us who know for a fact that what you say isn't true of our experiences. Why the hate and mud-slinging?
"As tempting as the price point is you're asking for trouble walking around with a bright orange phone with MICROSOFT written on the back. That'd be weeks of ammunition in some circles if you produced that on the table of the pub on a Friday night."
These circles you speak of, are they ones that one would want to find oneself in on your Friday night in the pub?
I've had a Lumia 820 for quite a while and have never understood this argument about lack of apps. It comes with pretty much everything I need already installed. Add a fitness app (plenty of those) and I'm pretty much covered. Apps developed because phones didn't have full browser functionality. The Windows Phone has that and consequently I need almost no specialist apps for any services - I just use their website.
The only group of people I see as suffering from a lack of apps are those who want to play lots of new games on their phone, that's it. I'm curious to know from one of the critics what large lack they see in apps on the Windows Phone. Perhaps someone here could enlighten us "mungnuts" which I assume is something like mungbeans, but really don't care to know.
>>"You might as well raise a flag over your location marked 'Monitor Me'."
Perhaps for now, but every single time someone does so, that flag gets a little bit smaller and the total number of flags increases by one. Five years ago, doing this was a big ugly wind-turbine sized flag, as you say. These days, it's more of a tree. And if Firefox go mainstream with this and it becomes the generic equivalent of "Private Mode", then it goes from tree to grass. To be honest, it looks like it's going that way anyway.
Now if we can just get the same effect with people using email encryption it's going to be that rare and marvellous thing: the people winning over the government. Communication all moving online was a windfall for the intelligence agencies. They'd never had things so good before. But that's a couple of decades and they managed before that. No solid reason this can't be a historical blip if we try.
Firefox was the best browser there was for a while. Then it slipped and went downhill a bit, but more recently became slimmer and more responsive again. They seem to be getting back on top of things (and contrary to some, the sight of rounded tabs doesn't send me into a frenzy of rage).
All the main browsers are pretty good right now. Privacy is a pretty good way to distinguish themselves and set themselves above the rest. Microsoft do some privacy measures to distinguish themselves from Google, but they'll stop short of integrating TOR which would be a bit extreme and non-corporate for them. Google [b]can't[/b] take measures that would have a widespread gain on privacy because knowing everything about you is their business model. That leaves a gap for Firefox to set itself up as THE private browser.
Good for them. This is an important issue.
>>"Their view of Europe is one where outside trade is rigorously excluded unless it follows their rules."
Well that's kind of the point of large trade blocs such as NAFTA, EU, Eurasian Economic Community and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. You band together and create double-standards that benefit you at the expense of smaller national entities that lack the economic or military might to trade with you as equals in your enlarged, multi-country state.
I.e. EU can negotiate as a powerful player against other large power blocks in a way that a small country on its own cannot. Also, I'm actually quite good with a lot of the EU rules on imported goods. We have better standards of drugs approval, food production standards, animal treatment, human rights in manufacturing, etc. These are all positives.
>>"The LHC is just a small scale test of an force field like dome... it worked ok, now they want to build another one around the whole of Europe"
Just tell UKIP's backers that it's an energy containment field for "Europeness" and they'll pay for the whole thing.
>>"I think that is quite obvious that we are talking about a fixed point in time and not over a period."
Not really. You talk about the distribution of wealth changing. Change is by definition NOT talking about a fixed point of time. Is it your contention that wealth and its distribution must be measured on vastly different time scales? That's absurd because there's no good reason for it. Indeed, you have it backwards. Wealth has been concentrated in the hands of an elite for most of the modern era but has increased massively in just this century alone. You wrote rubbish. Now you're trying to say you wrote something else or add contexts that don't match what you wrote. It was a stupid and easily refuted statement that you made. Even if I allowed that you were trying to say something else, that would simply render it irrelevant to the point you were originally making.
>>"Did you actually see something in the comment that stated "that wealth is a fixed constant". I think not,"
Yes, you wrote: "You can't really drain an economy, you can merely change the distribution of who takes which percentage, overall the entire sum remains a constant."
You said that only distribution of share in the economy changes, but that the entire sum of it is fixed. That is wrong.
>>"Who says you can't? Not having copyright protection doesn't mean that you can't sell the product directly"
Absence of copyright protection means a seller is competing with free for the same product. You have taken away whether or not there is a sale from being an agreement between producer and consumer, and made it wholly a choice on the part of the consumer. The producer of content has no say in whether or not their product is sold or taken. This impacts their ability to sell the product directly - obviously. Additionally the context of my reply was your proposal that producers receive their renumeration via some third-party arbitrator which determines how much they deserve. That undermines a sales model entirely. If someone is getting paid by the state to give me something, why would I buy it? Do you feel the need to pay your doctor extra when you go and see them? Or tip your civil servant? A mix of models doesn't work.
>>"Simple maybe, but look at the context here. Pirate Bay users aren't paying for what they want. It remains to be seen if someone can assemble the technical and legal machinery to put the piracy genie back in its bottle, but right now it's not looking good. If piracy can't be beaten, then a system that assures artists of some remuneration if they produce decent work is surely better than what they're earning from Pirate Bay users"
Such an argument cannot be used as an argument against piracy being harmful which is the position I am maintaining.
>>"Getting rid of copyright doesn't necessarily mean not remunerating artists. For example schemes such as a form of tax or levy, with revenue distributed to artists based on some measure of popularity (perhaps some formula involving number of downloads and ratings) have been mooted"
Ugh! Centralized funding of the arts by a state body. That always ends well! :/ Or of course it could be done by some centralized MPAA-like body that I'm sure would be all too happy to decide who and what gets paid and taking a big cut.
If I am a musician or a film maker or a software writer, why should I be forced to sell through some governing body that decides for me how much I am worth? Why can't I sell directly to the public just because my profession happens to be one of these instead of, say, a green grocer. You wouldn't track how many vegetables a farmer sells and then give them a percentage cut of the total number of marrows sold that year in the country! And for good reason - it's restrictive, bureaucratic and simplistic. Maybe my costs are different. Maybe I sell to a smaller but more affluent market. If it costs a lot to get an orchestra together but classical music lovers are more affluent on average, how would I be shoe-horned into a "X plays = Y pennies" model? If I make a specialist film that is not much interest to most, but highly valued by a certain group, who are you to say I can't sell to them directly?
Customer pays for what they want is vastly simpler than any centralized system, infinitely more reactive to actual desires and trends in what people want. Honestly, the only people such a mandatory model would appeal to are the RIAA / MPAA style bodies who would love that sort of power. And yes, it has to be mandatory if you're referring to it as an alternative to copyright.
And if your model is an alternative to copyright, how invasive would you have to be to actually guess what people are listening to / watching?
>>"Actually, if you want to put ethics to one side then piracy is probably a net positive for the Swedish economy, since most of the things being pirated would be American produced and not paying for it would mean more money staying in Sweden to be spent on other things, rather than going to US companies"
Well yes, but that brings us neatly to something popularly called the Tragedy of the Commons. You can only manage a certain level of freeloading. And you could make the case that it would still be bad for Sweden in that quality would be dragged down due to less money. There are other things than price which impact our satisfaction with the market.
>>"You can't really drain an economy, you can merely change the distribution of who takes which percentage, overall the entire sum remains a constant."
Where on Earth did you get such stupid idea that wealth is a fixed constant? Makes you wonder why we bothered coming down from the trees and making fire given that our wealth back then was exactly the same as our wealth now. Clearly it was just a very unequal distribution and one monkey kept all the yachts and villas to himself.
Piratebay has generated a LOT of revenue over the years through advertising. It's biggest costs have resulted from having to dodge and fight all the legal issues. Legality would allow it to minimize all sorts of costs (for example where it can host) and not do anything to stop it being a central place for file sharing. Financial outcome for the Piratebay if copyright was suspended would be a positive.
Well, until all the other nations of the world got sick of Sweden ripping off all the content generated by their citizens.
>>"Meanwhile, drug dealers, murderers, rapists and child molesters are already out dealing, murdering, raping and molesting."
Would it be fair to say that there are more drug dealers, murderers, rapists and child molesters in the Swedish prison system than there are people for piracy?
I'm pretty sure that there are lot of people who are engaged in piracy in Sweden and I'm also pretty certain that the percentage of these currently incarcerated is pretty bloody small. So unless you are arguing perhaps that conviction rates of pirates should be higher than the murders, et al., then your post makes little sense.
You should be grateful poor knowledge of statistics isn't a crime.
Does Sweden have much of a home-grown movie and music and games industry? Or let me provide a specific metric - if I were to check the top 100 pirated movies or music by Swedish residents each month, what proportion of that would be content produced in Sweden?
The reason I ask is because if this person wants to stand politically on a platform of abolishing copyright in his country, I want to know whether he expects the impact to be felt by Sweden or other nations.
Kind of agree. Well, do agree... but it is nice to see recognition of people who progress the species and our store of knowledge, instead of eternally ranked lower than someone who kicks a ball up and down a field. Not that celebrification of Science seems especially laudable to me but the occasional role-model other than a sports-person or singer is at least useful.
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