Funnily enough, this reminds me of something I once read, by Schneier:
"In Beyond Fear I wrote about ATM fraud; you can see the same mechanism at work:
'When ATM cardholders in the US complained about phantom withdrawals from their accounts, the courts generally held that the banks had to prove fraud. Hence, the banks' agenda was to improve security and keep fraud low, because they paid the costs of any fraud. In the UK, the reverse was true: The courts generally sided with the banks and assumed that any attempts to repudiate withdrawals were cardholder fraud, and the cardholder had to prove otherwise. This caused the banks to have the opposite agenda; they didn't care about improving security, because they were content to blame the problems on the customers and send them to jail for complaining. The result was that in the US, the banks improved ATM security to forestall additional losses--most of the fraud actually was not the cardholder's fault--while in the UK, the banks did nothing.'
The banks had the capability to improve security. In the US, they also had the interest. But in the UK, only the customer had the interest. It wasn't until the UK courts reversed themselves and aligned interest with capability that ATM security improved."
That meme needs to die. Now. We are well past the stage where anyone seriously thought that we could one day have more storage space than we could use up, which was the only justification for citing a spurious quote in the first place.
FF 3's lesser memory usage isn't the result of exercises in space/time tradeoffs (with a few exceptions where the caching was out of hand); it's better and more efficient code. (Reading the release notes and developer blogs is quite interesting.)
Sometimes, a mountain is just a mountain, and wasted memory is just wasted memory.
'Jezz Slashdot - I expected more from the worlds largest concentration of geek power.'
With geeks such as these...
Please don't put words into my mouth. When I said valuable, I did not mean valuable as in RMS could've trademarked, patented and copyrighted the hell out of Free Software and been RICH, RICH I TELLS YA! through the miracle of 'intellectual property'. Even Googling 'define:valuable' tells you that that a definition of valuable is 'having worth or merit or value; "a valuable friend"; "a good and worthful man"'. The tools are important, certainly.
And your last point is what I see as RMS's true genius. I'm sure there have been other coders of his caliber who have sought to advance the cause of Free-as-in-Freedom - the BSD evolutionary line alone must have several such - but he's the one who managed to start a culture/project/system which could survive the corporate and governmental onslaughts, and even thrive a little. Was it just the GPL and steadfast adherence copyleft and other Free principles? Was it dogged persistence combined with the Linux kernel? I don't really know, but the man did something right.
I don't think you quite follow. Free Software follows the 4 Freedoms http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
BSD and MIT stuff is as perfectly Free as something under the GPL - the difference is that they can be unFreed, while public GPL stuff must remain GPL.
Open Source is a superset of Free Software. Everything Free is Open Source, but not vice versa; to repeat, Open Source can be less Free than Free. This is why I describe it as dubious, because a corporation can easily open source their stuff in a useless way and thereby mislead people into thinking they support Free stuff. To quote Wikipedia again in this thread:
"An open source license is a copyright license for computer software that makes the source code available under terms that allow for modification and redistribution without having to pay the original author. Such licenses may have additional restrictions such as a requirement to preserve the name of the authors and the copyright statement within the code." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Open_source_license
So, it can have all sorts of noxious terms (did you hear the one about the license which forbade military use? or the one like MAME's that "forbids commercial use and redistribution"?), and still be open source. Open Source is less Free than Free Software.
I would go with the first; the OS (read: the Hurd) is pretty much vaporware/a failure, and the foundation was only created to further the GNU goals.
The important thing here are the ideas and goals, and not so much the tools created to acheive the goals (which is not to say the FSF hasn't done a lot of good - it has - just that that is irrelevant here).
After that, I think the publishing of the Manifesto, or the first publication of the GPL are the most sensible dates.
Hm, yes, it will go up, but not indefinitely, and I suspect not too much either. Why?
There is still a large supply out there, and the number of people who played the NES in its hey-day is obviously going to slowly go down. For those who *do* want to play the NES and its games, there is competition from emulators and ROMs: why clutter up your living room with an antique box when you could simply play it on your GameCube/Wii/computer (maybe even for free)? The experience might even be better than that of the original NES; you could use a controller which doesn't murder your hand with its tiny size and brutal edges, a system vastly more capable than the NES which makes possible all sorts of software enhancements, unreleased and new NES games etc.
He didn't claim any particular university - he described it in vague enough terms it could've been any of easily dozens of colleges/universities in the Northeast, as I recall some stalkers on Wikipedia Review frustratedly concluding (before the whole issue of which school became moot, obviously).
Actually, it's more like:
*limited resources/#-of-descendants-which-reproduce
*Descent with heredity (it's important to have heritable traits)
*The heritable traits affect reproductive success
If you leave out #1, then you don't really get any selection pressures (although taking the limit as the population increases to infinity is an interesting idea). Leave out #2, then descendants could logically not resemble ancestors whatsoever - which obviously fucks things up. And leave out #3, well, then there's no selection at all.
Yeah... it actually reminds me very strongly of Enron - because of their cult of talent, they had a similar program where the best and brightest were encouraged to transfer from disparate area to disparate area, regardless of how little competence they actually had in the new area. This Google program isn't identical to Enron, AFAIK, but I find myself wondering what other similarities there might be between the two companies.
What I find really fascinating here is that WikiLeaks was promising to begin releasing stuff around March or so, but all they've had for a while was that Somali report (which was interesting, sure, but not as impressive as their media coverage would justify); so this is an interesting report on its own merit but also because it's another and more major interesting thing.
Perhaps they've finally finished development and are producing the goods? That'd be good: it would be sad if they failed or were some sort of CIA puppet (or somesuchness).
We could ask for a lot of stuff, but let's face it, most of what is going to be suggested wouldn't really help and would have short-term benefits at best: Linux already has plenty of device drivers, those developers couldn't do much more than is already being done, and certainly not the several percent needed for a real shift; the various desktop environments are just not going to merge, let's face it, and so we're stuck with the horrors of diversity in our visual interfaces; new software certainly isn't desperately needed cf. all the people living perfectly happy with existing software; and so on.
What would be useful would be if those developers could go around and either:
figure out some way to make X not suck. There are better ways out there, guys; if X really is the best way to provide a GUI, then we might as well cut our wrists open now. Heck, X wasn't even the best solution back when they were first writing it in the '80s. A lot of our GUI and usability complaints can be either directly or indirectly traced back to the fact that X is so dominant. Let's have them write a better system (a Y, perhaps), add in a compatibility layer, and reap the benefits.
More radically, we could have them go around and try to persuade people to adopt a reasonable proposal: don't explicitly support any hardware created or software written before 1990. How much cruft has built up on the altar of backwards compatibility? How much disk space is taken up for APIs, programs, options etc that were deprecated back in the '90s? We should simplify and cleanup; should your pre-90s whatever still work, that's swell. But we need to move on! This is a radical proposal, I know, but the unseen weight of all that old shit is a hidden tax on every innovation and every process that occurs in the Linux world. A good long-term investment would be to try to pay off some of that debt, if you will. Clear out the rubble and build our modern stuff on a clean foundation.
Looking through WP:DUMP, there doesn't seem to be.
However, since the dumps are provided, someone else could easily set up a rsync server or something. The toolserver even provides RSS feeds, so that someone could also set up a script to automatically download, decompress, and run diff (or whatever).
So... to simplify operating systems, you would run them in - an operating system?
I hate to break it to you, but those are all things that current OSs can/should do.
If the message-passing microkernels are any guide, thunking on every kernel call could be very expensive unless you go to great lengths (like L4) to avoid it.
Not sure they *can* un-mothball them. Assuming they even still have the people around, I had heard that after the decommissioning, all the special molds and machinery and documentation were destroyed, so I doubt they'd even be able to make replacement parts, much less operate them effectively.
Uh, yeah. And that's why all my posts are higher than yours. Oh wait, that's right: just like I haven't been abusing those admin powers like you accuse me of doing because I don't *have* any, all my posts are at a score of 1 because we're orchestrating a massive campaign to systematically upmod people who toe the party line and punish those brave few souls who dare speak out.
Or maybe it's just that you're a troll. Seems to fit the evidence better, better than some made up IRC logs.
Are you ignorant, dumb, or just trolling? "Gwern" != "Gwernol". They're both Welsh, and that's about it. If you had bothered to look at either of the two account's contributions, and , you'd see both are pretty active and often simultaneously. It'd be like a fulltime job and extremely tedious to run both accounts!
Strange how disgruntled people like you screech in rage whenever you're accused of sockpuppetry but have no problem baselessly throwing it around against someone you don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
Funnily enough, this reminds me of something I once read, by Schneier:
"In Beyond Fear I wrote about ATM fraud; you can see the same mechanism at work:
'When ATM cardholders in the US complained about phantom withdrawals from their accounts, the courts generally held that the banks had to prove fraud. Hence, the banks' agenda was to improve security and keep fraud low, because they paid the costs of any fraud. In the UK, the reverse was true: The courts generally sided with the banks and assumed that any attempts to repudiate withdrawals were cardholder fraud, and the cardholder had to prove otherwise. This caused the banks to have the opposite agenda; they didn't care about improving security, because they were content to blame the problems on the customers and send them to jail for complaining. The result was that in the US, the banks improved ATM security to forestall additional losses--most of the fraud actually was not the cardholder's fault--while in the UK, the banks did nothing.'
The banks had the capability to improve security. In the US, they also had the interest. But in the UK, only the customer had the interest. It wasn't until the UK courts reversed themselves and aligned interest with capability that ATM security improved."
from http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/aligning_intere.html
That meme needs to die. Now. We are well past the stage where anyone seriously thought that we could one day have more storage space than we could use up, which was the only justification for citing a spurious quote in the first place.
FF 3's lesser memory usage isn't the result of exercises in space/time tradeoffs (with a few exceptions where the caching was out of hand); it's better and more efficient code. (Reading the release notes and developer blogs is quite interesting.) Sometimes, a mountain is just a mountain, and wasted memory is just wasted memory. 'Jezz Slashdot - I expected more from the worlds largest concentration of geek power.' With geeks such as these...
No, for an Apple story you just know someone would try to make an 'iVulerable' joke.
Please don't put words into my mouth. When I said valuable, I did not mean valuable as in RMS could've trademarked, patented and copyrighted the hell out of Free Software and been RICH, RICH I TELLS YA! through the miracle of 'intellectual property'. Even Googling 'define:valuable' tells you that that a definition of valuable is 'having worth or merit or value; "a valuable friend"; "a good and worthful man"'. The tools are important, certainly. And your last point is what I see as RMS's true genius. I'm sure there have been other coders of his caliber who have sought to advance the cause of Free-as-in-Freedom - the BSD evolutionary line alone must have several such - but he's the one who managed to start a culture/project/system which could survive the corporate and governmental onslaughts, and even thrive a little. Was it just the GPL and steadfast adherence copyleft and other Free principles? Was it dogged persistence combined with the Linux kernel? I don't really know, but the man did something right.
I don't think you quite follow. Free Software follows the 4 Freedoms http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html BSD and MIT stuff is as perfectly Free as something under the GPL - the difference is that they can be unFreed, while public GPL stuff must remain GPL. Open Source is a superset of Free Software. Everything Free is Open Source, but not vice versa; to repeat, Open Source can be less Free than Free. This is why I describe it as dubious, because a corporation can easily open source their stuff in a useless way and thereby mislead people into thinking they support Free stuff. To quote Wikipedia again in this thread: "An open source license is a copyright license for computer software that makes the source code available under terms that allow for modification and redistribution without having to pay the original author. Such licenses may have additional restrictions such as a requirement to preserve the name of the authors and the copyright statement within the code." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Open_source_license So, it can have all sorts of noxious terms (did you hear the one about the license which forbade military use? or the one like MAME's that "forbids commercial use and redistribution"?), and still be open source. Open Source is less Free than Free Software.
I would go with the first; the OS (read: the Hurd) is pretty much vaporware/a failure, and the foundation was only created to further the GNU goals. The important thing here are the ideas and goals, and not so much the tools created to acheive the goals (which is not to say the FSF hasn't done a lot of good - it has - just that that is irrelevant here). After that, I think the publishing of the Manifesto, or the first publication of the GPL are the most sensible dates.
I could care less about "Open Source"; it has done dubious good for us. Now, Free Software's anniversary I would care about quite a bit!
Hm, yes, it will go up, but not indefinitely, and I suspect not too much either. Why? There is still a large supply out there, and the number of people who played the NES in its hey-day is obviously going to slowly go down. For those who *do* want to play the NES and its games, there is competition from emulators and ROMs: why clutter up your living room with an antique box when you could simply play it on your GameCube/Wii/computer (maybe even for free)? The experience might even be better than that of the original NES; you could use a controller which doesn't murder your hand with its tiny size and brutal edges, a system vastly more capable than the NES which makes possible all sorts of software enhancements, unreleased and new NES games etc.
He didn't claim any particular university - he described it in vague enough terms it could've been any of easily dozens of colleges/universities in the Northeast, as I recall some stalkers on Wikipedia Review frustratedly concluding (before the whole issue of which school became moot, obviously).
Essjay never claimed to be a Harvard professor.
Actually, it's more like: *limited resources/#-of-descendants-which-reproduce *Descent with heredity (it's important to have heritable traits) *The heritable traits affect reproductive success If you leave out #1, then you don't really get any selection pressures (although taking the limit as the population increases to infinity is an interesting idea). Leave out #2, then descendants could logically not resemble ancestors whatsoever - which obviously fucks things up. And leave out #3, well, then there's no selection at all.
Yeah... it actually reminds me very strongly of Enron - because of their cult of talent, they had a similar program where the best and brightest were encouraged to transfer from disparate area to disparate area, regardless of how little competence they actually had in the new area. This Google program isn't identical to Enron, AFAIK, but I find myself wondering what other similarities there might be between the two companies.
How about the fellow hit by lightning 7 times? ,
If you graduated with honors, I would like to extend to you an invitation to join the Solid State Society.
It was always possible to do that; vandalfighters did it all the time. What WikiLeaks did was make it dead-easy and very clear.
What I find really fascinating here is that WikiLeaks was promising to begin releasing stuff around March or so, but all they've had for a while was that Somali report (which was interesting, sure, but not as impressive as their media coverage would justify); so this is an interesting report on its own merit but also because it's another and more major interesting thing. Perhaps they've finally finished development and are producing the goods? That'd be good: it would be sad if they failed or were some sort of CIA puppet (or somesuchness).
We could ask for a lot of stuff, but let's face it, most of what is going to be suggested wouldn't really help and would have short-term benefits at best: Linux already has plenty of device drivers, those developers couldn't do much more than is already being done, and certainly not the several percent needed for a real shift; the various desktop environments are just not going to merge, let's face it, and so we're stuck with the horrors of diversity in our visual interfaces; new software certainly isn't desperately needed cf. all the people living perfectly happy with existing software; and so on. What would be useful would be if those developers could go around and either: figure out some way to make X not suck. There are better ways out there, guys; if X really is the best way to provide a GUI, then we might as well cut our wrists open now. Heck, X wasn't even the best solution back when they were first writing it in the '80s. A lot of our GUI and usability complaints can be either directly or indirectly traced back to the fact that X is so dominant. Let's have them write a better system (a Y, perhaps), add in a compatibility layer, and reap the benefits. More radically, we could have them go around and try to persuade people to adopt a reasonable proposal: don't explicitly support any hardware created or software written before 1990. How much cruft has built up on the altar of backwards compatibility? How much disk space is taken up for APIs, programs, options etc that were deprecated back in the '90s? We should simplify and cleanup; should your pre-90s whatever still work, that's swell. But we need to move on! This is a radical proposal, I know, but the unseen weight of all that old shit is a hidden tax on every innovation and every process that occurs in the Linux world. A good long-term investment would be to try to pay off some of that debt, if you will. Clear out the rubble and build our modern stuff on a clean foundation.
Looking through WP:DUMP, there doesn't seem to be. However, since the dumps are provided, someone else could easily set up a rsync server or something. The toolserver even provides RSS feeds, so that someone could also set up a script to automatically download, decompress, and run diff (or whatever).
So... to simplify operating systems, you would run them in - an operating system? I hate to break it to you, but those are all things that current OSs can/should do.
If the message-passing microkernels are any guide, thunking on every kernel call could be very expensive unless you go to great lengths (like L4) to avoid it.
He's dead, Jim. Netcraft confirms it.
Not sure they *can* un-mothball them. Assuming they even still have the people around, I had heard that after the decommissioning, all the special molds and machinery and documentation were destroyed, so I doubt they'd even be able to make replacement parts, much less operate them effectively.
Uh, yeah. And that's why all my posts are higher than yours. Oh wait, that's right: just like I haven't been abusing those admin powers like you accuse me of doing because I don't *have* any, all my posts are at a score of 1 because we're orchestrating a massive campaign to systematically upmod people who toe the party line and punish those brave few souls who dare speak out. Or maybe it's just that you're a troll. Seems to fit the evidence better, better than some made up IRC logs.
Are you ignorant, dumb, or just trolling? "Gwern" != "Gwernol". They're both Welsh, and that's about it. If you had bothered to look at either of the two account's contributions, and , you'd see both are pretty active and often simultaneously. It'd be like a fulltime job and extremely tedious to run both accounts! Strange how disgruntled people like you screech in rage whenever you're accused of sockpuppetry but have no problem baselessly throwing it around against someone you don't like.