1) Proprietary garbage:
While definitely proprietary, "garbage" is at best subjective in most circumstances. However, their recent ham-fisted attempts at forcibly changing the desktop-oriented use pattern of user interaction has a huge steaming pile of market and consumer useability study data behind it to assert that it was "garbage." It was only after having this smeared in their faces that Microsoft has decided to relent, after initial obstinance. IIRC, Unity's and Gnome3's developers are still being obstinate. Microsoft is governed by money, and when people dont buy their stuff, they adapt to make sure people do. FOSS projects are primarily focused on ideological factors-- and when they refuse to accept realities like these, they just become irrelevant, such as they are now, with Mate, Cinnamon, and XFCE4 totally killing them.
2) Everything should be open source when possible:
It should be. By introducing novel or useful concepts and code samples to as wide an audience as possible, the rate of adoption is not hindered by political or financial pressures/constraints. This allows the general population of the planet to make beneficial use of those advances much more quickly, improving human living conditions more expediently.
3) See above; Getting linux kernel running on as many devices as possible increases the whitepaper knowledge base that is available at large, ensuring more developers can get involved with the lowest possible obstacle to entry into the market. See for instance, work being done with neauvou. Nvidia does not want to share information about its secret sauce-- FOSS developers for linux focus energy on MAKING it work, share the results. That work enables other developers wishing to tap the shader units on nVidia cards for computational purposes without having to rely on closed source binary apis, and can get closer to the raw metal as a consequence. Likewise, getting linux kernel running everywhere enables the unlocking of many consumer products that actually house general purpose processing systems so that they can be used in more novel and inventive ways-- see point 2 again.
4) Ubuntu Unity, Ribbon UI and Internet Explorer are crap.
These are all separate and discrete arguments. Not fair claim in one bullet-ed point. Internet Explorer is not a bad browser, per-se--- rather, it does the crime that all browser makers have been making-- Ignoring the W3C and going "lal la la la la la" while they break standards, in order to implement "special features" to make their browsers stand out. Internet explorer just has the financial might of Microsoft behind it, and is a leader in this kind of offense.
Ribbon UI tries to hide useful things under multiple layers of obfuscation to free up some screen real-estate. Functionally, this is little differe3nt from the old contextual menu system, which also relied on such obfuscation. The only difference in the logical sense is the specific method of that obfuscation. Real power users use the shortcut keys. In practice however, since there is no REAL advantage to the ribbon UI, is that it imposes a new barrier to learning and use to seasoned but non-power users of the products impacted, reducing their work performance.
I have already dealt with Unity. See point 1 above.
5) Piracy is good
This is incorrect. That's like saying "Getting angry is good". More, Piracy is the inevitable consequence of abusing the market to create an artificially imposed condition that disadvantages the consumer; the consumer will fight back with piracy. Piracy is neither good nor bad-- it simply is. Like the emotion known as "anger". Many science fiction stories have been penned about the dangers of trying to eradicate "anger" from the human population. It is important, and useful, yet it is neither good nor bad in and of itself. It provides an adrenaline rush and temporarily overrides the logical parts of human elective consciousness, to facilitate fight and flight responses, and provides the fuel to power political movements to end oppressive or onerous political regimes. Likewise, piracy represents an omnipresent factor in the digital marketplace, and it's increase represents not "lost sales", as the antipiracy mantra asserts, but rather the degree of disparity that is being forcibly injected into the transactions taking place in the market place. Piracy is a reference metric, not the bane of digital commerce. Some modest anti-piracy measures are useful and sensible, but draconian ones that promote protest-piracy (*cough* UBISOFT *cough*) are not. The actions of these latter groups is poisoning the market, which is threatening non-offender providers of digital wares. Piracy is not the cause, it is a market effect, that is dependent upon the degrading of good will between vendors and consumers. Piracy is not "Good", piracy is "Useful", and currently "Required". A good deal of market ingenuity and advancement is enabled by piracy of otherwise locked down and inaccessible wares.
6) DRM is always trash
I just covered this. Minimalist DRM, much like a lock on one's front door to deter casual thieves, is useful and acceptable. Insane DRM, designed to force repurchase, is more akin to your insurance company requiring you to install a lethal security system on your house to deter theft, that often times malfunctions and attacks the home owner, to which the insurance company tells you that you must instead buy a new house.
One is acceptable, the other is not. I dont care how profitable it is for the insurance companies to be able to force people to buy multiple insurance policies on multiple houses that they dont need nor want.
7) I love IPv6 and Bitcoin
Again, two entirely discreet subjects. IPv6 addresses a real and serious problem with address space depletion in the IPv4 pool. It isnt so much that "OMG, (*joygasm*) IPv6 is the bestest protocol EVAR!"--- it's "Oh hurray! We wont run out of addresses for a very long time if we can just get people to actually buy routers and devices that will use it before we hit the fucking wall!" Totally different things.
Bitcoin is a double edged sword, and I look at it in the same capacity as barter with a difficult to manufacture artificial substance as a means of currency. It relies exclusively on the scarcity of the bitcoin itself, because it becomes more and more computationally expensive to produce the coins. However, it does not actually have a useful component to it that barter would normally have, so it is inferior to barter. (Bartered goods still have the intrinsic value of that specific item that can be exploited-- EG, you buy a pig, you can get bacon out of it. Not so with a bitcoin. You expend hundreds of watts of energy to create a high information density unique signature-- but afterwards, there is not conceivable way to extract that energy from the bitcoin. A real good was lost in order to gain a product with no REAL use, only the applied and artificial use as a medium of exchange. If the cost of manufacture of a bitcoin exceeds the value it gets as a currency, you actually lose value by its creation! The use of bitcoin as a currency wastes real resources to create artificial and less useful ones in a non-reversible fashion.) In bitcoin's defense, paper money meets the same criteria. Coinage does not however-- You still have the utility of the metal used with coinage.A coin can be un-minted, and returned to useful metal. We use paper money because there is not enough useful metal to make enough currency to satisfy market needs, and because the real needs for those metals exceeds the value of the currency. We NEED copper to make electrical wiring for buildings, homes, and businesses much more than we need pennies. This is why pennies are now no longer made of solid copper.
Bitcoin does have a small redeeming quality to make up for its intrinsic bads involved however. Its purpose for existing is to create a decentralized and unregulated market free of the corruption and manipulation seen in existing fiat* money systems. *(I dont mean that term in a derogatory sense, but in the literal definition.) If another currency system comes along with lower intrinsic badness, that can perform this same function, bitcoin becomes irrational to use.
AC, you clearly are in need of a massive civics lesson.
Read these words, and meditate on them:
"I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."
When you start making it "OK" to silence people you disagree with or disapprove of, it opens the doors for people who disapprove of you, or disagree with your views to silence YOU.
We make the acts of discrimination illegal. Not the idea. People are entitled to their own beliefs, even if those beliefs cannot be substantiated with evidence. We counter this with being allowed to hold our own beliefs, which we attest are substantiated with evidence.
When you start telling people that they must believe the same way that you do, you are perpetrating the same crime that religious authority figures commit when they go on holy wars and crusades.
Resorting to hyperbole, like "only a racist would call this thing a scandal.", you are tit-for-tat in line with religious oppressors that claim things like "Only an infidel" or "Only a godless sinner" to justify their actions.
Do you want to be with that group?
To the people who modded this off topic, It seems that the IRS *REALLY DOES* use NetAPP storage controllers.
Here's a publicly disclosed bidding process document on the matter.
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=op...
It's dated at last year. I can't imagine that they would just scrap that hardware in under a year's time.
So, basically, your saying that they should just expect everybody to simply trust that what they're doing is entirely legal?
Where did I say or imply anything like that? I'm no more a fan of what NSA is doing than anyone else here. They are disliked throughout the rest of the intel community too, btw.
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.
