The fallacy-pointing was just an explanation of why the poster above may be wrong. But if you look closely, there is a paragraph above the one with the fallacies. And, lo and behold, that paragraph contains arguments which are not of the "argument from fallacy" type.
Please review them, prove them wrong, and then we'll speak.
Well, 'beautiful' is to a certain extent a subjective quality. 'What makes a Mac Pro beautiful is X' can be interpreted as 'What makes a Mac Pro beautiful to me is X', and that's not really a statement that you can argue against.
But even so, the fallacies are either stretched or completely inapplicable. Both the 'no true scotsman' and 'special pleading' fallacies involve constantly shifting goalposts, but we've only ever seen Jormundir say that internal design is part of what makes the new Mac Pro beautiful. Where are the shifting goalposts?
Like, I don't think that the fact that it's not beautiful on the inside is relevant to the fact that it's a cool as hell mod; I think it's completely irrelevant. But throwing fallacies at the statement is just weird. I don't get how they apply at all.
Fallacies are irrelevant because there's no reasoning going on here -- the person you're responding to is making a subjective opinion statement, not a formal (or even informal) argument about aesthetics. Their statement doesn't even have a warrant or grounds, so to attack it with a fallacy is nonsensical.
Indeed, with today's $940 Bitcoin, a $1 Dogecoin would that the Dogecoin market would be worth over 5 times the current Bitcoin market.
I don't see it happening, and I don't even see the Dogecoin market cap even reaching the Bitcoin market cap, at least not unless Bitcoin itself becomes a major currency, and Dogecoin becomes the official joke currency.
Precisely. Keep proprietary software out of Linux. The main reason we can get people to switch to Linux is freedom. If it becomes as full of closed programs as Windows, we won't get anyone to switch because there's no reason to (and no benefit). It's FOSS or nothing.
I love linux. It's my operating system of choice. I think, all other things being equal, it's a superior operating system for just about any use case (other than really edge-case scenarios). I especially enjoy the freedom of the operating system, in every sense of the word as applied to software.
But understand this: the vast majority of the population just doesn't care about "freedom" when it comes to software. They care more about two other things, about in equal measure: 1) does it work well enough to do what I want; 2) can I hold somebody else accountable if/when it doesn't? The latter may be even more important at the "big enterprise" level, where generally "I need to make sure my ass is covered if something this thing touches breaks" outranks "I need to make sure this is a good solution for my company" on the list of priorities. The fact is that FOSS does a decent job of filling (1), but a really poor job of filling (2).
In light of this, the notion that people will switch to linux simply because of the free-ness is a bit, well, naive. Sure, it happens. It isn't happening in large numbers and, in my opinion, isn't likely to.
Why wouldn't they just run those same FOSS programs on Windows or OS X instead? It's not like Linux has a monopoly on running open source apps. In general, people use computers in order to use computers, not to make a political statement about how much they disapprove of ways in which everybody else uses computers.
If FOSS OSes have poor to non existent support for proprietary software, there is no way they will be able to compete with proprietary OSes like OSX and Windows that fully support running FOSS applications.
The ability to develop or run proprietary software, if I so choose, is a form of freedom.
Well, it seems to me like they have only been implementing closed mechanisms instead of standardizing stuff, using public resources and/or opening their code. I hope that I'm wrong and it's just my pessimism talking.
As a firm believer that overpopulation won't be solved by throwing money at it, and that the people who are having children are the ones who shouldn't, I see most of this as irrelevant. Of course money solves poverty in the short term, no one should be surprised by that. But notice how he keeps comparing one generation with only the previous, and never making long-term assertions.
Besides, I doubt Gates can go from the CEO of Bad Guys Corp. (among the companies with the most evil business practices in history, up there with Nestle) to Superman just because he has always been a modern Robin Hood, establishing an OS monopoly to give our money to the poorest. I'd expect some public guilt or something. I'll keep taking whatever his foul mouth says with an enormous grain of salt until he explains his post-MS enlightenment and endorses Linux.
Oh come on. Microsoft's "evil" amounted to giving the competition a few kicks in the ribs while they were down. It was nasty and unsporting but let's keep things in perspective.
The comparison with Nestle would only be reasonable if a Windows 95 BSOD killed one of your children.
Even (especially?) geniuses compartmentalize. I applaud life saving and misery reduction regardless of who does it, and I'm not going to make my approval contingent on an apology for past wrongs.
The Gates foundation seems to be doing the best they can to model as far into the future as feasible so as to make best use of their resources. Models that propose death and misery as their means are rightly viewed with skepticism.
Sorry, making Windows ubiquitous on our PC's by monopoly position shenanigans does not equate, evil-wise, to the abuse of workers rights, health and our environment that many blue chip companies have participated in over the past 60 or so years - e.g. oil companies, food giants, mining corps.
Closed source, no thanks. I'm going to follow their approach of "trust no one" and not trust them and warmly recommend everyone to do the same. If you actually mind about security, use GPG.
After the NSA leaks, the security community is scrambling to verify that widely-used, open-source software is free from backdoors. With dual_ec_drbg, we know at least one case where a cryptographic primitive itself was compromised. Furthermore, we know now that governments can and do force companies to compromise their own users, in secret, under gag orders.
Why anyone would use closed-source "security" software today is beyond me.
I've had three older folks just this week ask me how to permanently delete their Google+ profiles. One even insisted on deleting it even though he'd never actually gone past the initial sign-in page.
Well, the way I understand RMS's fomulation of the 4 basic freedoms is that the right to keep your code secret is a freedom of the individual, not of the software, because no one can enjoy software that they couldn't have had if that right hadn't been granted. On the other hand, removing this right "frees" the software. You see, the FSF is all about "free software", not free people. Only indirectly do the people benefit from the software being free.
More practically, history has shown us that the GPL is necessary in order to ensure that companies don't short the community, suddenly improve everything and leave us with 99% of people using the proprietary fork. To illustrate my point, the clearest example (and the only large one) is the free distributions of BSD, mainly used by companies developing proprietary forks for it and contributing back very little. On the other side is Linux, used by companies for its freedom, security and reliability. The companies using it contribute back because they have to, continually making it stronger and always remaining free (unlike BSD, which can have many proprietary and untrusted libraries which cannot be used with security or reliability in mind). Linux is therefore getting larger only thanks to the GPL and its strong enforcement.
And this example can be applied to the entire copyleft vs permissive license debate, showing how software being free benefits the people more than people being free.
While it doesn't really changes the conclusions, you're a bit off the mark.
The FSF is about free people. Free software is just a mean, and they will use whatever licenses they think promotes freedom the most. That's why the GNU C standard library is in LGPL: the GPL itself would have prevented GCC from becoming popular, resulting in less freedom for the people. Also, looking at the history of GCC and the Hurd kernel, you can see they don't limit themselves to licenses.
You seem to imply that the GPL forbids you to keep your code secret. It doesn't. The right for private modification is preserved by the GPL. Only public modifications must be distributed in source form.
Companies don't contribute back to Linux because they have to. First, it's often more cost-effective to push changes upstream than maintaining them yourself. Second, monetizing private changes with GPL software is very very hard when the main distribution channel is gratis. Third people like to be good citizen. If I do changes for my company, and my company cannot possibly monetize the secrecy of those changes, why not contribute back?
If people and companies were forced to contribute back changes, they probably wouldn't use the software in the first place.
Now yeah, Linux is indeed larger than BSD thanks to the GPL.
>Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS
Do I have to point out all the lame exploits and bugs which take so long to get fixed, the terrible design, the "things which should have been there years ago but we still don't have" like a decent file manager, task manager, copy utility? And AFAIK Windows made few major contribution to the theory of OSs (semaphores, threads, paging, scheduling and so on) so there's really nothing to be amazed at.
I'll spare you my opinions on Bing. Reinventing the wheel is not worth describing, no matter how beautiful that wheel is, although I'm happy for you to be a part of the team making that wheel. If only Bing had more ambition than just being a clone of Google Search, some people under 70 would actually consider migrating. But if you're happy with your default-search-engine-bundled-with-IE market share at 20%, good for you (eh, it does bring a lot of ad money). You may not call the shots at MS, but you can at least admit all the shortcomings.
You could point out all the lame exploits and bugs, but only if you want to spark a long argument that you will end up losing. There are a variety of things I don't like about Windows, and I avoid using it. But the idea that it's somehow less secure than other operating systems is for the most part a Linux advocacy myth. The fundamental security architecture of WinAPI is just not that different from that of Linux or OS X (which also has a legacy compat issue that complicates its security).
Fair enough, you know much more than me in that domain. :)
Are you going to argue about the famous general instability of Windows compared to its large competitors though? It seems like a good indicator of bad design in low level implementations.
What do you mean by famous general instability of Windows? Windows is perhaps my 3rd choice for OS, but almost all my clients use Windows and among the problems they deal with, instability is not one of them.
Hey devcpp, let me see if I have your points right.
* Windows actually sucks.
* Reinventing the wheel is not worth talking about no matter what.
* Bing sucks.
* I should admit the shortcomings of MS.
Regarding the last point, I'm kind of shocked that you think I'm a shill. I feel like I've been pretty honest about my feelings.
re: Windows sucks, that's sort of OT, but if you want to have the discussion, drop me a line. [email protected]
re: Bing sucks, I don't see what your point about market share or unoriginality is, I already conceded that we have a lot of work to do with search relevance. I'm sort of annoyed about the negativity of your post, as from my perspective I've been pretty candid about what I think our strengths and weaknesses are. :(
re: reinventing the wheel, I don't think this is going to be something that we agree on. The way in which engineers here pull together and simply build what needs to be built is nothing short of breathtaking. I don't see how building, e.g., Cosmos shouldn't be considered an accomplishment. Should Amazon's Dynamo? What about Yahoo's Hadoop? What about anything in OSS, for that matter? I think you're not being fair here.
Please review them, prove them wrong, and then we'll speak.