You don't add features and stability at the same time: + features = - stability.
I will wager that the 2.4.0 kernel will be less stable that 2.2.16. More secure, more feature-full, yes, but not more stable. When it gets to 2.4.16 it will be another matter.
My understanding of point-oh releases in the commercial software world is that a sufficiently large number of additional features are included to justify incrementing the major release number. I understand patch levels and minor release numbers to treat with matters of compatibility, stability and security. But this argument is moot. This is not commercial software. It may be for Bob, but its not for me and I can only assume you are not foolish enough to be paying for the *product* Bob Young and Co are peddling. If you are, let me know and I'll burn you an ISO. I'll even pay postage.
Your argument only applies if your releasing some kind of locked-out, bolted-down, black-box software. This is open-source and the standards are different. I am asking why anyone would upgrade their system across the board based on RH or anyone else's release schedule.
I'm an apt-getter, but there must be comparable utilities for RH. Why anyone would just re-up system-wide is beyond me.
I want to know what all these Linux users are doing upgrading with RH point-oh releases, or any other RH-official releases. I thought the point was not to be beholden to someone elses idea of a release schedule. Upgrade the packages you want when you want. The distro is just a foundation. After a few months everyone is rolling their own, right. Right. And if your a sys-admin, you know you should be waiting for point-two, don't you?
I'm not advocating that we "return" to anything. I am merely suggesting that it is not impossible to make choices about technology; to make decisions about what constitutes progress.
We can grow babies in bottles; should we?
We can eat bugs; do we?
As to a "return" to government by an elite, most nations are, and America arguably is ruled by an elite. While the rise of The Body Ventura might beggar that analysis, I think it merely demonstrates that we just cast our net wider.
The determinism of your viewpoint is upset by the fact that progress has, in fact, taken place; that is, social norms have evolved over time. Whereas, in the age of "75% child mortality" one could physically bully one's neighbor into submission and might made right, today such behavior on a personal level is almost universally criminalized with varying degrees of effectiveness. The organized arseholery of which you speak is currently only really viable on a level sanctified by national interest and, in consequence of the experiences of the 20th C., even that scale of terrorism is more and more untenable. We are far less likely to view the violence and demagogery of the organized arseholes as serving us in any way.
Far from arguing against progress, I am suggesting accelerated progress on the social front as an imperative in an age of rapid advance of technical knowledge.
While the current crop of readers doesn't handle the oebook spec, rest assured that they will. All the principal industry figures are participating in the specification. I can only assume that the lack of support is a result of the "rights management" issues currently occupying the time of the conferees.
In fact, the only feature of the oebook not supported is presumably the package format and "spine", the base of the spec is a simplified xhtml which should not break any current reader. Cleanliness of appearance is another matter, YMMV.
As to writing books to the spec, get yer data in XML, get Xalan and write a stylesheet. Don't get cheaper than that.
It is a mistake to regard technical progress as a tautology or beyond the control of social forces. The willful abandoning of a technical advance by a society is rare but not unheard of. Z.B.- 17th C. Japan giving up the gun.
This is something which should be given more consideration.
It's not about foreigners; it's not about immigration. It is very much about competition on a level playing field. Why should Sane Corp. pay top dollar, good benefits, limit OT when they can get the modern version of indentured servants.
Why train qualified support and operations staff formal programming skills when the company can buy the talent overseas? This thing butters the bread of the tech industry and nothing else--the robust American high-tech industry which needs duty-free shopping on the 'net, DARPA funded research and indentured foreign talent to *compete*!
The LoC has been digitizing their card catalogue, (that's right--card catalogue--room upon room of those funny cabinets with long, slim drawers) not their collection. They've been at it for 20+ years and the last time I checked (three years ago, I admit) they had worked their way back to items added to the collection since 1976. That is, they can barely keep up with digitizing the *indexing* of the material added each year.
Digitizing the collection itself is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. I daresay you can't hire enough monkeys to turn pages and fire the scanner no matter what you pay, let alone proofreading, which requires the more costly labor of homo sapiens sapiens.
One thing the ''print distribution nightmare'' gets you is a quality filter. Hrmmm, 2Tb filtered out of 2,000 years of production or 3Tb wiglomerated over 5 years?
HTML describes content not layout.... Nope, doesn't sound right to me.
This may have been true a few years ago, but the majority of markup available within HTML since 3.2 is descriptive of layout, a vast majority. A whole industry has grown up around the layout features of HTML, much to its detriment. Thus XML.
For a free copy of Stephen King's new book, name something Boswell wrote, other than the Life.
Boswell was a punter, here's a taste from the London Journals:
Indeed, in my mind, there cannot be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affection with an amiable woman. There he has a full indulgence of all the delicate feelings and pleasures both of body and mind, while at the same time in this enchanting union he exults with a consciousness that he is the superior person.
Turgid, pompous dreck, notwithstanding the absurd chauvinism, exagerated even for his enlightened era.
This beggars the question who would pay a thin dime for the drivel dripping from King's pen.
...he's going to announce that the experiment has failed and then either drop the novel, or keep writing it out of the kindness of his heart.
This cuts right to the "heart" of the matter, doesn't it? What sort of idiot would write a novel out of the "kindness of their heart," for the sake of their art, to achieve a great start, release sacred farts?
What kind of fools would create a free operating system?
Quashing the marketplace of ideas is the first step to eliminating poetasters and punters like King and the pin-striped remoras that swim with him. The mercifully brief era of the professional writer is dead, long live the amateur!
Depends upon what you read a bible for. The KJV is a tremendous artifact of literature and a thoroughly enjoyable read. I would find it difficult to quibble with the accuracy of such a colossal fiction at any rate. As a codification of a thousand years of history and culture, transmitted over two thousand years of kulcher, one can hardly speak of error.
...tough to say whether or not it would work in real life.
Software development is real life, Bob; it's how I feed my baby. The heuristics of the coordination and direction of group effort has a broad theoretical foundation and has been generalized with some success. The OSS/FSM is a new model which happens to implement the dusty, 200 year-old interface known as anarchy.
I get the impression from the litany of bone-head judicial rulings that there is a fundamental disconnect at work. Parody is a perfectly legal basis of fair use. I think the judges are stuck on mistaken notion of a fundamental difference between traditional media and the web WRT IP. Indeed the "web as real estate" analogy would suggest that this is a competely discrete location, in fact it is. Are the courts going to rule that I must give up my street address because Gonzo Corp. has the same address with a slightly different zip code? Is it really the business of the federal courts to mediate the net equivalent of the occasional errant pizza delivery?!
You are absolutely on the mark and Ebary is an outstanding example of the problem. I notice they have the temerity to trumpet their praise for public libraries and generously offer to share 5% of the revenue generated from co-branded Ebary terminals placed with such institutions. No doubt this will merely protract their death throes.
I'm quite confident we'll soon hear of publishers refusing to sell to public libraries, as they are known to be conducive to copyright piracy.
The banner on their site says it all: find, interact, understand, acquire.
...and I think most of us are aware of that fact. I fail to see the significance of your remark to the current discussion. I haven't encountered a serious post advocating the abolition of copyright and I hardly think that a sensible restoration of Lessig's "intellectual commons" represents the demise of the software industry; quite the contrary, as evinced many times in this thread.
Gosh, your right, prior to the development of mercantile capitalism and the elaboration of english common law vis intellectual property, ART DIDN'T EXIST!!
Beware the neo-platonism inherent in modern economics. "Enlightened self-interest" is as slippery a slope as "benevolent dictator."
In fact, it might be nice if the people out there creating just to make a buck would get out of the game entirely. It would minimize the amount of cultural, intellectual and material dreck we're flooded with.
Believe it or not, some of us stubborn SOB's create because we are compelled to; called to produce something true, beautiful, efficient, powerful by our lights.
Throw the marketplace of ideas out of the temple of knowledge! We don't want the invisible hand of the market, we want the goddam scientific method!
Don't confuse anarchy with chaos. Break it down: an - particle meaning not or the absence of; arche - primacy, power, sovereignty; also, empire, magistracy, authorities, command (of a body of troops). The point is to eliminate the hierarchy which was formerly required to organize the efforts of large groups of humans into effective units. The need for such organizational entities grows dramatically smaller with each passing day.
It is not the absence of direction, it is the organization of mankind in the smallest possible groups. In this light, a goodly proportion of the structures of social culture as we know it are complicit and must be reified.
The free software movement as described by ESR is an excellent example of functional anarchy: the smallest possible functional units; self-organizing to achieve a common goal; dissolving and reforming based on the needs of the participants. ESR hasn't even begun to imagine the implications of this new social model.
Yes and no. Your joke analogy for haiku is a little contrived and reductive. A proper haiku requires the use of a keireji or "breaking word" which jars the sensibilities of the reader and establishes, like a verbal slap, an emotional shift within the poem. Given the constraints of the form, it just may be possible to develop an extensive set of pairs between words possibly appearing within the metadata and a selection of quality keireji, dropping out to a random selection in the absence of a match. It may be possible to get closer to "half-fast" haiku than it would seem at first blush. The aporia and semantic leaps required to achieve a proper sense of evanescence and engàgement also take up a good bit of slack.
Just to set the record straight, I've been reading a bit too much late-19th C. Russian literature--post emancipation and pre-revolution--and was struck by the parallels, as I always am by historical artifacts. I was voicing a character from Doestoievsky's The Adolescent (a truly great novel, BTW) named Vasin, mouthed by a thirty-something, self-styled "professional anarchist" flack interviewed after the Seattle protests and whose name escapes me. I guess I spilled the beans.
I once styled myself similarly, convinced of the necessity of leading the herd to redemption and freedom. I have since learned a profound distrust of those who purport to "know better." I remain an athiest and anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist really, but my sphere of activity is limited to the personal arena: friends, relatives; I boycott when necessary. I'm boring at parties and my wife often bans political speech.
At any rate, you got the gist. I just wanted to distance myself from the crack I made above. Democracy is the agua prima, but an uninformed democracy is as good as none at all. And you can quote me on that.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't add features and stability at the same time: + features = - stability.
I will wager that the 2.4.0 kernel will be less stable that 2.2.16. More secure, more feature-full, yes, but not more stable. When it gets to 2.4.16 it will be another matter.
My understanding of point-oh releases in the commercial software world is that a sufficiently large number of additional features are included to justify incrementing the major release number. I understand patch levels and minor release numbers to treat with matters of compatibility, stability and security. But this argument is moot. This is not commercial software. It may be for Bob, but its not for me and I can only assume you are not foolish enough to be paying for the *product* Bob Young and Co are peddling. If you are, let me know and I'll burn you an ISO. I'll even pay postage.
Your argument only applies if your releasing some kind of locked-out, bolted-down, black-box software. This is open-source and the standards are different. I am asking why anyone would upgrade their system across the board based on RH or anyone else's release schedule.
I'm an apt-getter, but there must be comparable utilities for RH. Why anyone would just re-up system-wide is beyond me.
I want to know what all these Linux users are doing upgrading with RH point-oh releases, or any other RH-official releases. I thought the point was not to be beholden to someone elses idea of a release schedule. Upgrade the packages you want when you want. The distro is just a foundation. After a few months everyone is rolling their own, right. Right. And if your a sys-admin, you know you should be waiting for point-two, don't you?
A company called Synthesis does the same thing for financial document preparation.
You're in denial, sweetpea.
...not a problem.
I've recently dug myself out of the ditch you're digging. Snap out of it. You are lying to yourself. Your chemistry is no different than anyone elses.
I'm not advocating that we "return" to anything. I am merely suggesting that it is not impossible to make choices about technology; to make decisions about what constitutes progress.
We can grow babies in bottles; should we?
We can eat bugs; do we?
As to a "return" to government by an elite, most nations are, and America arguably is ruled by an elite. While the rise of The Body Ventura might beggar that analysis, I think it merely demonstrates that we just cast our net wider.
The determinism of your viewpoint is upset by the fact that progress has, in fact, taken place; that is, social norms have evolved over time. Whereas, in the age of "75% child mortality" one could physically bully one's neighbor into submission and might made right, today such behavior on a personal level is almost universally criminalized with varying degrees of effectiveness. The organized arseholery of which you speak is currently only really viable on a level sanctified by national interest and, in consequence of the experiences of the 20th C., even that scale of terrorism is more and more untenable. We are far less likely to view the violence and demagogery of the organized arseholes as serving us in any way.
Far from arguing against progress, I am suggesting accelerated progress on the social front as an imperative in an age of rapid advance of technical knowledge.
While the current crop of readers doesn't handle the oebook spec, rest assured that they will. All the principal industry figures are participating in the specification. I can only assume that the lack of support is a result of the "rights management" issues currently occupying the time of the conferees.
In fact, the only feature of the oebook not supported is presumably the package format and "spine", the base of the spec is a simplified xhtml which should not break any current reader. Cleanliness of appearance is another matter, YMMV.
As to writing books to the spec, get yer data in XML, get Xalan and write a stylesheet. Don't get cheaper than that.
It is a mistake to regard technical progress as a tautology or beyond the control of social forces. The willful abandoning of a technical advance by a society is rare but not unheard of. Z.B.- 17th C. Japan giving up the gun.
This is something which should be given more consideration.
It's not about foreigners; it's not about immigration. It is very much about competition on a level playing field. Why should Sane Corp. pay top dollar, good benefits, limit OT when they can get the modern version of indentured servants.
Why train qualified support and operations staff formal programming skills when the company can buy the talent overseas? This thing butters the bread of the tech industry and nothing else--the robust American high-tech industry which needs duty-free shopping on the 'net, DARPA funded research and indentured foreign talent to *compete*!
Hornswoggle.
The LoC has been digitizing their card catalogue, (that's right--card catalogue--room upon room of those funny cabinets with long, slim drawers) not their collection. They've been at it for 20+ years and the last time I checked (three years ago, I admit) they had worked their way back to items added to the collection since 1976. That is, they can barely keep up with digitizing the *indexing* of the material added each year.
Digitizing the collection itself is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. I daresay you can't hire enough monkeys to turn pages and fire the scanner no matter what you pay, let alone proofreading, which requires the more costly labor of homo sapiens sapiens.
One thing the ''print distribution nightmare'' gets you is a quality filter. Hrmmm, 2Tb filtered out of 2,000 years of production or 3Tb wiglomerated over 5 years?
HTML describes content not layout.... Nope, doesn't sound right to me.
This may have been true a few years ago, but the majority of markup available within HTML since 3.2 is descriptive of layout, a vast majority. A whole industry has grown up around the layout features of HTML, much to its detriment. Thus XML.
As good an arguement for not dual-booting as I've heard in a while.
For a free copy of Stephen King's new book, name something Boswell wrote, other than the Life.
Boswell was a punter, here's a taste from the London Journals:
Indeed, in my mind, there cannot be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affection with an amiable woman. There he has a full indulgence of all the delicate feelings and pleasures both of body and mind, while at the same time in this enchanting union he exults with a consciousness that he is the superior person.
Turgid, pompous dreck, notwithstanding the absurd chauvinism, exagerated even for his enlightened era.
Only a self-important fop writes for money.
This beggars the question who would pay a thin dime for the drivel dripping from King's pen.
...he's going to announce that the experiment has failed and then either drop the novel, or keep writing it out of the kindness of his heart.
This cuts right to the "heart" of the matter, doesn't it? What sort of idiot would write a novel out of the "kindness of their heart," for the sake of their art, to achieve a great start, release sacred farts?
What kind of fools would create a free operating system?
Quashing the marketplace of ideas is the first step to eliminating poetasters and punters like King and the pin-striped remoras that swim with him. The mercifully brief era of the professional writer is dead, long live the amateur!
Depends upon what you read a bible for. The KJV is a tremendous artifact of literature and a thoroughly enjoyable read. I would find it difficult to quibble with the accuracy of such a colossal fiction at any rate. As a codification of a thousand years of history and culture, transmitted over two thousand years of kulcher, one can hardly speak of error.
...tough to say whether or not it would work in real life.
Software development is real life, Bob; it's how I feed my baby. The heuristics of the coordination and direction of group effort has a broad theoretical foundation and has been generalized with some success. The OSS/FSM is a new model which happens to implement the dusty, 200 year-old interface known as anarchy.
I get the impression from the litany of bone-head judicial rulings that there is a fundamental disconnect at work. Parody is a perfectly legal basis of fair use. I think the judges are stuck on mistaken notion of a fundamental difference between traditional media and the web WRT IP. Indeed the "web as real estate" analogy would suggest that this is a competely discrete location, in fact it is. Are the courts going to rule that I must give up my street address because Gonzo Corp. has the same address with a slightly different zip code? Is it really the business of the federal courts to mediate the net equivalent of the occasional errant pizza delivery?!
You are absolutely on the mark and Ebary is an outstanding example of the problem. I notice they have the temerity to trumpet their praise for public libraries and generously offer to share 5% of the revenue generated from co-branded Ebary terminals placed with such institutions. No doubt this will merely protract their death throes.
I'm quite confident we'll soon hear of publishers refusing to sell to public libraries, as they are known to be conducive to copyright piracy.
The banner on their site says it all: find, interact, understand, acquire.
...and I think most of us are aware of that fact. I fail to see the significance of your remark to the current discussion. I haven't encountered a serious post advocating the abolition of copyright and I hardly think that a sensible restoration of Lessig's "intellectual commons" represents the demise of the software industry; quite the contrary, as evinced many times in this thread.
Gosh, your right, prior to the development of mercantile capitalism and the elaboration of english common law vis intellectual property, ART DIDN'T EXIST!!
Beware the neo-platonism inherent in modern economics. "Enlightened self-interest" is as slippery a slope as "benevolent dictator."
In fact, it might be nice if the people out there creating just to make a buck would get out of the game entirely. It would minimize the amount of cultural, intellectual and material dreck we're flooded with.
Believe it or not, some of us stubborn SOB's create because we are compelled to; called to produce something true, beautiful, efficient, powerful by our lights.
Throw the marketplace of ideas out of the temple of knowledge! We don't want the invisible hand of the market, we want the goddam scientific method!
Don't confuse anarchy with chaos. Break it down: an - particle meaning not or the absence of; arche - primacy, power, sovereignty; also, empire, magistracy, authorities, command (of a body of troops). The point is to eliminate the hierarchy which was formerly required to organize the efforts of large groups of humans into effective units. The need for such organizational entities grows dramatically smaller with each passing day.
It is not the absence of direction, it is the organization of mankind in the smallest possible groups. In this light, a goodly proportion of the structures of social culture as we know it are complicit and must be reified.
The free software movement as described by ESR is an excellent example of functional anarchy: the smallest possible functional units; self-organizing to achieve a common goal; dissolving and reforming based on the needs of the participants. ESR hasn't even begun to imagine the implications of this new social model.
Can we get this moderated down? Despite its obvious humor value, it is obviously not intended a joke. This is a troll.
Right on, brother!
Down with Republicrats and Communazis!!
Yes and no. Your joke analogy for haiku is a little contrived and reductive. A proper haiku requires the use of a keireji or "breaking word" which jars the sensibilities of the reader and establishes, like a verbal slap, an emotional shift within the poem. Given the constraints of the form, it just may be possible to develop an extensive set of pairs between words possibly appearing within the metadata and a selection of quality keireji, dropping out to a random selection in the absence of a match. It may be possible to get closer to "half-fast" haiku than it would seem at first blush. The aporia and semantic leaps required to achieve a proper sense of evanescence and engàgement also take up a good bit of slack.
You flatter me.
Just to set the record straight, I've been reading a bit too much late-19th C. Russian literature--post emancipation and pre-revolution--and was struck by the parallels, as I always am by historical artifacts. I was voicing a character from Doestoievsky's The Adolescent (a truly great novel, BTW) named Vasin, mouthed by a thirty-something, self-styled "professional anarchist" flack interviewed after the Seattle protests and whose name escapes me. I guess I spilled the beans.
I once styled myself similarly, convinced of the necessity of leading the herd to redemption and freedom. I have since learned a profound distrust of those who purport to "know better." I remain an athiest and anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist really, but my sphere of activity is limited to the personal arena: friends, relatives; I boycott when necessary. I'm boring at parties and my wife often bans political speech.
At any rate, you got the gist. I just wanted to distance myself from the crack I made above. Democracy is the agua prima, but an uninformed democracy is as good as none at all. And you can quote me on that.