Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
As someone who uses a computer you must see the value in the correct combination of 1s and 0s. Without them your computer would not do anything. Is that not "worth" money to you? I assume you paid cash money for your PC and some if not most of the software which runs on it?
Also, being an engineer you must know that those combinations are not "magic" but engineered.
BOb
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I have a corporate notebook with XP, but I would have never bought it myself and would gladly return it never to use it again (no such luck I am afraid). My home PCs all run various flavors of linux and openBSD. I've given money to various of the open software groups, but I did not view that as paying for a product, they did not ask for it or expect it, and I did not expect anything in return. I viewed it more as supporting a certain way of looking at things rather than a customer/vendor transaction.
The hardware is a different matter, but if it would have been even remotely feasible I would have sourced it myself and stuck it together.
Aside from the latter part of the post being a half-joke, the infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters joke is turned into reality with the internet and computer ubiquity. Given that most of/all of Shakespeare's work in plain text amounts to some 5 Mb or so and much less when compressed, how often do you think parts (I'm not contending the whole) of his work have been accidentally replicated in all the memory banks, TCP/IP streams, and other data transfers that ever happened between and inside computers? And then we have cases like DeCSS - the
string of bits that was
illegal. I don't know if that weirded you out, but I thought it completely bizarre.