115 karma · joined January 20, 2013
Most non-free web services are equally happy giving away your data to the government. Apple, MS and all the other companies are no better than Google.
And Google is not the problem -- it is just a symptom. The problem is the government that does not respect the rights of people.
US was, and still is much more free country than Russia.
>BTW, I think modern day Russia is pretty epic to visit, and there are a lot of brilliant engineers there.
Unfortunately most of the engineers emigrated to US or other European countries after break up of Soviet Union. Right now, science in Russia is only remnants of the past glory. Russia has declined a lot since the break up of Soviet Union. During Soviet Union, life sucked but there was huge amounts of research, and Russian engineering, chess and mathematics were as good as US counterparts.
During Revolution, most Russian intelligentsia either escaped to the west or got shot. By providing free education, Soviet Union steadily re-build the class. But when Soviet Union fell apart there was a huge brain drain. All the good scientists moved to the West. In Russia, it is much more profitable to be a criminal and steal from the people instead of contributing anything something.
Before, Russia was a country run by crazy, paranoid government, and now it is a country run by criminals.
More Gimp users? ;)
But on a serious note, I completely agree with you. Perfect, law-following society will not have any social progress.
Laws are not perfect, and they will never be. But some people often treat them like they are. They prefer following laws instead of using their brain to decide what's wrong and what's right, and it's really dangerous to society.
Laws are based on morals, and what people think is right thing to do, not the other way around.
This sounds extremely common sense, but I've met too many people who do not seem to understand this.
Also, it's not really that hard to #define it yourself, instead of using includes.
Even more often ads don't use facts -- they just play on people's feelings.
In any case, the goal of advertising is to deceive the buyer, not not inform them. So I don't think anything should be expected from any company that needs to satisfy shareholders. I don't see how Apple's ads with a man asking stupid questions from kids, or Droid's ads with cool robots is morally better then what M$ is doing. But in this case, MS is just being stupid and ruins their image. They don't even pretend to be a company that tries to be morally good. If this becomes more popular with mainstream media, the ad will hurt MS much more then it benefits them, same as this piece of FUD that got to the frontpage of /r/linux:
https://www.microsoft.com/hk/windowsserver/compare/windows-s...
In my opinion, all ads should be banned. It's a huge useless industry of liers. Corporations that are good with ads are not necessarily good at making products, but they get unfair advantage. It also distracts the main effort of from making a good product.
Arch just takes too much configuration and time, and the dual-head is a pain. It also doesn't support fglrx drivers, because the X version they use is too high. It's more of AMD's fault, not Arch's, but it still requires too much work.
In general, I like Arch's minimalism, and it uses very little RAM, but I am sick and tired of wrestling with it. Ubuntu has a completely different vision of what an operating system should be, and it's probably more suitable for general public (but probably not me). It always worked great out of the box, and Unity is not that bad (even through I prefer tiling WMs). I just don't like the technical direction Canonical is heading (MIR, upstart). I wish there was more input from the community in this kind of decisions.
Kudos to Mark Shuttleworth for having such a strong vision of what an OS/computer/smartphone should be like, and going through with making it a reality. It takes a lot of determination to not yield to the critics, and follow your ideals. I just think it would be better if Ubuntu contributed back to Desktop Linux ecosystem, and not re-invented the wheel.
Also, a lot of criticism of Ubuntu is minor details, and short-sighted. Ubuntu is one of the most rapidly changing distros/OSes, so a lot of things are going through major changes. This causes it to often be buggy, unstable and crash-prone, but in the end it improves at a much faster pace than other OSes. I believe once they polish it, and get some OEMs for phone and computers, they have a real chance of competing with Apple/iOS, Android and Windows.
In my opinion, Unix is much nicer than BeOS. Also, BeOS uses C++, and not all programming languages work nicely with OO. In contrast it is easy to use all languages with C.
Also, why don't you complain when someone makes a program that only works for Windows? There percentage of Unix-only programs is really small compared to number of Windows-only programs.
Hurd is an example of mutually recursive acronym:
"The GNU Hurd project is named with a mutually recursive acronym: "Hurd" stands for "Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons", and "Hird" stands for "Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth.""
Also Dtrace & ZFS originally come from Solaries, so they are not FreeBSD projects. The only reason they do not work on Linux is because of license problems which Sun created.
I don't care how cute it is. If you want cuteness, go to /r/aww, not HN. I want meaningful, thought-provoking content.
>I don't see how there is anything wrong with that, and if it is on the front page, then others must agree as well.
Using your logic, we can conclude that there is nothing wrong with majority of content on Reddit. After all, people upvoted it, so there is nothing wrong with it! So far, the readers on HN have been more thoughtful, and I would hate for the quality of this website to go down.
If you want web to progress forward, then things are going to get broken. WebP is an efficient format, and face-book is doing a good thing by increasing it's adoption speed.
It would be much easier for those companies to contribute upstream, instead of abusing loopholes in GPL.
By using GPL, you sacrifice some of your personal freedom for the good of society.
But this is sometimes necessary for progress.
>A majority of companies have already decided that their product will be closed-source before they even started designing it.
Such a close-minded company does not deserve to benefit from FLOSS Software. If more organizations release their code under GPL, it will give this group of organizations an advantage over the once who prefer closed source license.
You can also just dual-license it, and give the companies that want to use your software in closed-source programs a chance to pay you money.
>If a closed-source company decides it could use some open-source code in its product, it will do one of two things (if the code is licensed under the GPL):
>1. Use the open-source code and not tell anybody
>2. Write their own code from scratch
If an essential library/framework this company wants to use is licensed under GPL, they may reconsider their decision to release software under closed-source license. And if they are so stubborn as to not even consider using FLOSS Software, then they do not deserve to exist. Newer, more innovative companies will take their place, leveraging the benefits of FLOSS.
I also think Linux's popularity over BSD kernels is a great example of why GPL is far better than all the permissive OSS licenses.
You mean the time when Apple tried to patent "0-length-swipe" and a shape of a box?
It is pointless to argue if it was bribery that caused Pellerin to do this, but it is obvious that she is mistaken.
>but Apple was OK with it being on their store, and approved updates, up until days before it was pulled, and they continue to allow similar apps to operate on their store.
Allowing it in the App Store in the first place is a bad decision, but there is no reason they should have not removed it now. They also removed similar apps several months ago.