the moral compass

Champ :

I'm with Ace on this one. It perfectly easy to put into words what's
going on in my head, e.g.: "Nothing much", "Slight annoyance at your
continued whining", "Mmmm, naked chick".

The only real problem is that 2/3rds of what's going on in my head is
considered 'impolite' or possibly even 'arrestable' by much of society.

 

I've been on the receiving end of 'educational psychiatrists' er.. more
than once. But the recent incident left me fuming at how someone so
obviously un-caring, dis-functional and unable to relate to people got a
job with 'power' over peoples' futures.

I do get pissed off at the media representation of "special educational
needs" as being due to poor parenting; hence the bite.

Course I'm a fucking awful parent but that's not the point.

 

Dealing hard drugs outside schools.

Oh, and flogging their arses.

True story (or at least *told* to me as true)...

A yob friend of my brothers got caught breaking into a car 20 something
years ago. He had a large sum of money on him (well 500 quid or
something like that, I forget). He was asked, in court to account for
the cash to avoid it being confiscated and he said "er.. this is
embarrassing... I flogged my arse".

 

Not at all, I'm not actually decrying linux just the concept of *free*
software, nor am I saying microsoft is the only way forward. It clearly
isn't, you've Linux, AIX, and Solaris for example, all of which fit
certain scenarios... keep reading.

Just thinking about that for one moment I've put together more systems
that rely on AIX and Solaris than any other OS during the last 2 years
so no, I'm not a microsoft sheep.

Anyhow, back to the concept of "free" software.

Take a look at Redhat's commercial business model[1], you'll notice
they're actually charging a lot of money for the licences to use their
commercial "enterprise" product.. You may not be familiar with the
reason people end up buying such an expensive verion of linux, but in
short the enterprise version is also the product they promise not to
change in any sudden way that may break third party apps, and the one
they release staged yearly upgrades, etc.. The same applies to SuSE's
enterprise product.

Then look at the software you'd run a business on, well good as it is
MySQL isn't in the same League as Oracle or DB2 for processing any large
scale databases, but you could run a suitable database on linux, or
another unix, or whatever.. Again that kind of software costs money.

So, if you want commercial software, applications that'll scale to deal
with thousands of transactions, and applications you can get proper
support for, and demand bugfixes, it won't be free. If you want a
maintained, well controlled operating system with regualar well tested
maintenance releases, or if you actually want someone to be able to
support the system when it goes wrong then you'll end up paying.

Why? Well look at it more simplisticly, have you as someone who
endorses free software devoted 35+ hours a week of your own time towards
writing a commercial appliaction in the last 12 months?

If you're doing things small scale, or bespoke where you'll maintain
everything in house[2], or you're a a hobbyist then sure, free software
can work.. it can all be done on a shoestring. Like the linux server I
have sat on this desk running HTTP, SMTP and the like... But that's
where it ends.

[1] and do dome reading up on how they plan to make money in the future.

[2] increasingly less likely, and often not commercially viable.

 

Muck :

In my considerable experience of software written by amateurs, it is
all - every single last line of code of it - utter shite. If most
software is free, then most software will be *dire*. Not just buggy, or
a bit difficult to use, but worthless.

Most free software is written by professionals & students; they are
using the s|<i11z they learnt from doing their job / comp sci degree
to write stuff in their spare time. Without paying software engineering
jobs, there would be neither the students nor the professionals, and
thus no Linux.

 

Mr Precision :

Nah, everybody will be too fat to hold a revolution.

 

:

My experience of 'educational psychologists' did not leave me impressed
by their... usefulness. Special needs teachers did at least seem to
care.

 

)) Heh...

--
Muck
Bandit 600n(With added ducktape); CG125(MSOHPR)
"I've got a CG125, and I'm not affraid to use it."
DS#1 ; DOMO#1 ; SH#2 ; ICQ: 166144431
Remove _TEETH_ to e-mail

 

<snip stuff>

Heh.. thought that would get your fingers tapping.

All these arguments have been done to death before all over the internet.
I'm not going to be a dull computer type **** on a bike newsgroup by
argueing with you about something that doesn't matter very much.

In the end, people don't much care about what's doing a job.. just that
the job gets done, as it seems to... judging by the fact that people all
use different stuff, which is a good thing in it's self.

So I'll stop being a dull computer **** if you will.

--
Muck
Bandit 600n(With added ducktape); CG125(MSOHPR)
"I've got a CG125, and I'm not affraid to use it."
DS#1 ; DOMO#1 ; SH#2 ; ICQ: 166144431
Remove _TEETH_ to e-mail

 

I'd agree with this although my experience of Special Needs Teachers has
been limited (meeting with ones assigned to my son FWIW)

 

Does that mean you've no response?

 

I can't promise that, but I've had enough of talking about computers.

 

Seriously, how do the 'free' distros make money? If you were to be part
of the openoffice team would you be paid?

Or is it *all* voluntary for the love of coding and the linux ethic?

 

Fair enough, but I still think there's an element of "this company
has made a tool that I like, and works, and also produces this
tool, which is a competitor to this (third) tool and I want something
that does what the latter two tools do".

<note to self: avoid stream of consciousness postings>

 

You tell a courier he's not going to get paid for that days' work
and see how quickly he goes home to bed.

 

That's why
i/ Linux and GNU have very tight control of the code that goes into
important things;
ii/ a Unix type OS is the way to go---bad programming doesn't bugger up
the whole system (unlike MS).

 

you're obviously not particularly familiar with modern MS OSs.

 

The last one I used extensively was NT (I had no choice in the
matter). On the other hand, two universities of my acquaintance have
banned standard issue XP from their networks because it has such
gaping security holes.

 

I guess academic part-time systems admins don't have time to apply the
necessary patches.

 

On university-owned machines, they do. On users' personal machines
(especially laptops), they don't.