How about writing a letter to Red Hat (or your distribution vendor... you're in trouble if you use Debian, I guess) asking for a license to use the software. Explain in the letter that you understand how ridiculous this request is, but that management requires it. Ask if they can, perhaps, simply print a letter on their corporate paper stating that [yourcompany] is hereby granted a sitewide license to use an unlimited number of copies of [theirdistribution] on an unlimited number of processors on an unlimited number of boxen, and that you have paid $0.33 for the privilege. Include a stamped, envelope and explain that you used the $0.33 to buy the stamp;)
First, get a recent nightly. The install process used by the NS6 skins was not completely supported in M18, I believe.
Second, save the install page to disk, and hack the javascript client sniffer to remove the check for Netscape (and change the filenames to absolute if they are relative).
Third, browse to your local copy of the install page and click the links there.
I don't know anyone who has actually done this, but this was the suggestion I saw posted in a mozilla newsgroup.
electionmethods.org
has a good mathematical analysis of a bunch of different election methods: Plurality (the current system), IRV, Approval and Concordet. They conclude, essentially, that:
Plurality sucks (fails all but 2 criteria)
The only thing that sucks worse is IRV (fails ALL criteria, including the basic requirement that voting for a candidate shouldn't hurt them. Yes, that's right, in IRV you can actually make someone lose by giving them your vote!)
Approval is the best simple/easily-comprehensible system out there, passing 2 criteria that Plurality fails)
Concordet is the best system out there, passing all the criteria except for one (and I believe it's been proven that you can never meet all of them). However, it may be too complicated for most voters to understand.
PLEASE, if you are going to advocate electoral reform, encorage people to promote Approval, Concordet or Borda (Borda isn't analyzed on that site so I don't know how it fares... but I guarantee it's better than IRV). Please, don't let's make a bad system worse.
I actually had a friend who ran DOS debug on his BIOS and noted that it *did* actually test every one of the X86's registers during boot - obviously this didn't get printed in the boot sequence (because if it had, the message would flash up for about 8 clock cycles) but it actually did a sequence like:
put arbitrary number in first register
copy first register to second register
...
copy second-last register to last register
compare last register to first register
if (different) HALT
(I have a feeling it did this twice, with 01010... and then with 10101...)
He thought this was quite clever until he realized that a bad bit in the first register would still pass the test (and also negate the test of that bit on all the other registers)...
1 quick google search later, it appears that the ruling wasn't quite as broad as I had thought it was; it relates mostly to first amendment (free speech) and the 14th amendment.
The link I found is from May 1998 and is here./p&g t;
But methinks I do detect an undertone of seriosity beneath thy persiflage [1] so here's my answer:
Frankly, I don't care what Bush or Gore answer because there's no way in hell I'm voting for either of them (and does anyone seriously think they're going to respond to this in person anyway?). I believe that some of the other candidates, Nader in particular, *are* actually capable of giving a straight answer. So I'd like to see what it is:)
Stuart.
[1] spot the reference...? (If you can I'm impressed, because I can't even remember what it comes from myself:) )
Do you believe that the Supreme Court made a mistake when it ruled that corporations are individuals, with all the inalienable rights thereof? If so, what would you do to correct this mistake?
There are a few issues that repeatedly come up on forums (fora?) like SlashDot. I am curious to know your positions on these issues; in the form of a simple "pro" or "con".
1) Software Patents
2) UCITA - the Uniform Computer Information and Transactions Act
3) DMCA - the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
4) The illegalization of DeCSS (open source software for watching DVDs - often mischaracterized as DVD copying software)
5) Extension of copyrights from 14yrs to lifetime and more
6) The antitrust case against Microsoft
For any items which you answered "con", please indidcate briefly what you will do to work against these, since all of them are currently happening.
(Note - as far as I can tell as a regular reader here, the only item on this list which is controversial on SlashDot is number 6; the first 5 are (almost) universally opposed here.)
1) Download software.
2) Attempt to hack it.
3) Regardless of whether you succeed or not, pick a number between 0 and 9 at random. If you picked 0, make an announcement that you have succeeded, but that you will not release the extracted key or how it was obtained, in protest of the fact that they want to use SDMI to undermine fair use rights.
4) If you really did succeed, publish the correct key through some anonymous channel, such as freenet. Do not associate your name with this in any way; try to find a truly anonymous way to let other hackers know about it.
5) Once someone has found the key, do not stop trying to break it (they may close the hole that was used, even if nobody tells them about it), but you can add an extra piece to step 3: pick another number between 0 and 10, and if you pick 0 include the key in your announcement, or better yet, mail the key directly to the contest organizers and announce that you have done so. They have no way to tell whether you legitimately cracked it or not, and if enough people do this, they don't even know who to go after to find the person who really did crack it.
I disagree. Many people in the Mozilla development community consider Netscape's first Beta release to have been a huge mistake - the program wasn't ready for public consumption yet. Promoting it would have simply made a much larger group of people be disillusioned with the possibility of Netscape *ever* coming out with a good browser.
Beta 2, due in a month or two, will be MUCH improved (you can already tell that from the nightlies). And it supports the "classic" netscape look and feel in addition to Netscape's butt-ugly bluegreen thing, including almost-perfect windows/mac/gtk widgets.
Even then, I don't think that promoting it actively will be a good idea, because the stability/performance push won't happen until Beta 3. Netscape engineers have been quoted as saking that B3 will be the first usable public release.
So I have to disagree about AOL's commitment. I think they are very wise in trying not to hype it too hard before it's ready.
RMS has traditionally been opposed to the LSB because they are not called the "GNU/Linux Standard Base". Now they are the "Free Standards Group", I wonder if he can now bring himself to endorse them?
Admittedly, their press release was full of "Linux" with no "GNU", but that's a press release and they're traditionally full of s**t anyway:)
Moderators: Please do not moderate this up; it's not a question to Metallica but to the previous poster.
[[ Not me, I have a new policy: I pirate the CD's and then send the artist $5, far more than they get per CD from their label. ]]
I have a question for you then: How do you manage to send the artist $5? I've often thought that doing this would be the best way for music to be distributed in the future, and that I would love to do exactly that. So... how do you find out the address or whatever of the artist to send the $5 to? And do you really think that it goes straight to them and not to their bank of publicists who filter all their fanmail and probably pocket the $5?
Do you think there is a market for a website that would serve no purpose other than taking a credit card number, allow for selection from a database of bands, and send $5 from that credit card to the band you specify?
[On a note related to the post that this is in reply to...]
How about a system where listeners got the song for free, but after downloading it, could *choose* to pay $1-$2 straight to you (not your label or lawyers or anything) if they liked the music? No obligation except the desire to support the musicians whose music they love?
If your answer is that you would not support this, why not? Do you think that all your fans are so lacking in morals that they wouldn't pay?
[[ There's not only the fine Collections package, but also JDBC for easy database connectivity, ]] ... [[ I disagree though that you cannot achive subtle hackery in Java - I think that between the language features like Reflection and the many packages availiable that you can actually achive things at a higher level as you are not so often bogged down in the mechanics of whatever trickery you are trying to attempt! ]]
Much as I love Java (I consider it my first language, closely followed by Perl) I do have to disagree and say that there are some situations where Java could *really* use some more syntactic sugar to do some "subtle hackery". Your example of JDBC gives me a very easy example to use here - this is a scenario that actually came up in a project I am working on at this minute.
If I want to use a stored procedure that has both in and out parameters, I have to do stuff like:
Now, this is obviously clumsy, so I wanted to wrap it in a nice simple-to-call function. Wrapping in the general case of >1 in parameter and >1 out parameter is clearly impossible (if you disagree, I challenge you to try it... and post code of both the implementation *and an example use of your API*). But it turns out that even wrapping a *single* case is hard if there are >1 out parameters, because it's all-but-impossible to return more than one value from a Java method (again, an exercise for the reader on how to do this; I have code which makes it only 3 lines for the caller, but the implementor has to work quite hard for *every* procedure call).
There are other cases like this. I love Java for its simplicity and elegance, but there are some cases I'd dearly love some extra syntactic sugar. The simple, elegant language seems to cover about 90-95% of what I want to do, and I have to jump through clumsy hoops for the other 5%.
Actually, yes they are already in beta. The first beta was forked to make Netscape 6 PR1, the second beta is upcoming.
Actually, no they aren't. See Mozilla.org's plans for beta, which are very distinct from Netscape's. The "beta1" stuff in bugzilla referred to the Netscape beta. Mozilla does not have a beta yet and it's not clear whether they will call any release a "beta" as such, due to confusion about what the word actually means.
You are widely perceived as a person who stands up for what you believe and never, ever back down. Has there been any case where you have changed your position on something that you had previously considered to be a matter of principle? In other words, has anyone ever convinced you that a position you took was wrong? If so, what was the position, and what was the argument that convinced you?
2) The ethical/free-software question:
The GPL, for all its merits, has a disadvantage (in my view) that it is incompatible with almost every other free software license. If someone could come up with a license that would offer most of the protections of the GPL, but offer compatibility with other free software licenses -- something in between the GPL and the LGPL that allowed linking with anything so long as it was under an approved free software license, for example -- would you endorse or support such a license? If not, why not (especially considering that you do endorse the LGPL, albeit not very enthusiastically)?
Seamonkey is the project to ship a commercial browser based on the mozilla source. Hence the information on the milestone "M" releases is in a projects/seamonkey/ directory on mozilla.org. Similarly, the beta-stopper-bug-count-page is at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/mileston es/progress-2-beta.html
You claim that if patent law is removed, companies will just keep their algorithms and technologies secret, with just as much (or more) harm to society and innovation. While it is certainly true that companies will try hard to do exactly that, it is far from clear to me that *any* combination of other technologies could stifle innovation the way that a patent could, even if it were reduced to a 1-year term.
As an example, remember Microsoft's "patented" ClearType technology for LCD displays? This technique turned out to already have been covered by expired Apple patents that were over 20 years old, but even had it not been...
It took about a week for someone to read Microsoft's advertising blurb and figure out what they were doing, and present evidence that it was based on 20-year old technology. Now, having read the advertising blurb myself, it was far from obvious what they were talking about. If someone could figure it out from just the blurb in a week, imagine how quickly it would have been figured out from an actual released product! And since you could figure it out just by looking at an LCD screen in low resolution and seeing how letters were being represented, you wouldn't be subject to any kind of copyright license to prevent you implementing your own version.
If something is worth doing, people will quickly figure out how it is done and produce a separate implementation. If nobody can figure it out... then it must be a *really* good innovation, and I'd suggest that a company that does that *deserves* to be able to keep a monopoly on it; it's so rare that I can't think of a *single* technology that couldn't be figured out by smart Open Source developers or a smart competitor.
This is why software patents should be abolished; because disclosure gains you essentially nothing. A smart person looking at _what_ has been done can almost always figure out _how_, or alternatively a better way to do the same thing.
Are McDonalds fries better than Burger King fries because companies with two arches as a logo make better fries? Or is it because Burger King hasn't had a chance to update its logo yet? (actually I prefer BK, but you get the point...)
Faster databases are faster databases; whether or not they are open source is pretty much orthogonal to this issue. If you're referring to the claim that open source software is faster, better and more stable, you should be aware that this is a statement about generalities, not specific software. For example, Microsoft Office is indisputably more feature-complete than AbiWord. Now this isn't bashing AbiWord - it just hasn't got to the point of being complete yet. The point is that claims about the superior performance of open-source solutions can only be made in general; if you try to claim that it is true in *every* specific case, there will always be counterexamples (although they will be increasingly hard to find as more open source projects get more and more complete).
"The Chrysalids" has been one of my all-time favorite novels for some time now. It deals with difficult and important moral and ethical issues, but it manages to do so without ever failing to be a great *story*.
From just reading this review you might come away with the impression that this book is somewhat dry, and the story is secondary to the points that the book is intended to make. Fortunately, this is not the case. Every character in the book is well developed and you really identify with all of them -- you feel their fear, their sadness, their joy -- especially but not exclusively the narrator. Even the one character with whom you aren't supposed to identify (not mentioning any names to avoid spoilers, but it should become obvious reasonably early into the book) is well developed and completely believable.
There are moments that will shock and horrify you, and other moments that will fill you with feel-good fuzzies. There are even some points where you're on the edge of your seat hoping that a disaster can be averted. The story proceeds at a good speed making the book completely un-put-downable.
I agree with the reviewer that the book deals well with tough ethical issues. But don't forget to mention that it's a really good read for its own sake too!
I have - Debian. It has an update-menus tool which is used by the package manager; any X utility or application that is installed will automatically install itself into the menu system in a consistent location (there is a policy which specifies which applications should go where). Not only that, but it is windowmanager-independent so that the same applications are available in the same places regardless of whether your users use GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment-without-GNOME, fvwm2, windowmaker, or any other windowmanager that provides for application menus.
This is all automatic and transparent and happens whenever a new application gets installed.
If the GNOME and KDE people want to provide their own mechanisms for doing this sort of thing, that's great, so long as they don't mess with a system that has been working wonderfully for several years now (since well before GNOME or KDE ever existed).
Slashdot Mirror
How about writing a letter to Red Hat (or your distribution vendor... you're in trouble if you use Debian, I guess) asking for a license to use the software. Explain in the letter that you understand how ridiculous this request is, but that management requires it. Ask if they can, perhaps, simply print a letter on their corporate paper stating that [yourcompany] is hereby granted a sitewide license to use an unlimited number of copies of [theirdistribution] on an unlimited number of processors on an unlimited number of boxen, and that you have paid $0.33 for the privilege. Include a stamped, envelope and explain that you used the $0.33 to buy the stamp ;)
Stuart.
First, get a recent nightly. The install process used by the NS6 skins was not completely supported in M18, I believe.
Second, save the install page to disk, and hack the javascript client sniffer to remove the check for Netscape (and change the filenames to absolute if they are relative).
Third, browse to your local copy of the install page and click the links there.
I don't know anyone who has actually done this, but this was the suggestion I saw posted in a mozilla newsgroup.
Stuart.
electionmethods.org has a good mathematical analysis of a bunch of different election methods: Plurality (the current system), IRV, Approval and Concordet. They conclude, essentially, that:
PLEASE, if you are going to advocate electoral reform, encorage people to promote Approval, Concordet or Borda (Borda isn't analyzed on that site so I don't know how it fares... but I guarantee it's better than IRV). Please, don't let's make a bad system worse.
Stuart.
I actually had a friend who ran DOS debug on his BIOS and noted that it *did* actually test every one of the X86's registers during boot - obviously this didn't get printed in the boot sequence (because if it had, the message would flash up for about 8 clock cycles) but it actually did a sequence like:
put arbitrary number in first register
copy first register to second register
...
copy second-last register to last register
compare last register to first register
if (different) HALT
(I have a feeling it did this twice, with 01010... and then with 10101...)
He thought this was quite clever until he realized that a bad bit in the first register would still pass the test (and also negate the test of that bit on all the other registers)...
1 quick google search later, it appears that the ruling wasn't quite as broad as I had thought it was; it relates mostly to first amendment (free speech) and the 14th amendment.
The link I found is from May 1998 and is here./p&g t;
+1, Funny :)
:)
:) )
But methinks I do detect an undertone of seriosity beneath thy persiflage [1] so here's my answer:
Frankly, I don't care what Bush or Gore answer because there's no way in hell I'm voting for either of them (and does anyone seriously think they're going to respond to this in person anyway?). I believe that some of the other candidates, Nader in particular, *are* actually capable of giving a straight answer. So I'd like to see what it is
Stuart.
[1] spot the reference...? (If you can I'm impressed, because I can't even remember what it comes from myself
Do you believe that the Supreme Court made a mistake when it ruled that corporations are individuals, with all the inalienable rights thereof? If so, what would you do to correct this mistake?
There are a few issues that repeatedly come up on forums (fora?) like SlashDot. I am curious to know your positions on these issues; in the form of a simple "pro" or "con".
1) Software Patents
2) UCITA - the Uniform Computer Information and Transactions Act
3) DMCA - the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
4) The illegalization of DeCSS (open source software for watching DVDs - often mischaracterized as DVD copying software)
5) Extension of copyrights from 14yrs to lifetime and more
6) The antitrust case against Microsoft
For any items which you answered "con", please indidcate briefly what you will do to work against these, since all of them are currently happening.
(Note - as far as I can tell as a regular reader here, the only item on this list which is controversial on SlashDot is number 6; the first 5 are (almost) universally opposed here.)
(/bin, /usr, and tmp aren't too bad, but after two years in Linux I still haven't figured out what /etc stands for)
:)
/etc stands for "etc" as in "Et Cetera". The same word used in the company name of "Mailboxes etc.", etc.
Hope that helps!
Made all sorts of buggy products in fact...
>
Made all sorts of buggy products, in fact...
1) Download software.
2) Attempt to hack it.
3) Regardless of whether you succeed or not, pick a number between 0 and 9 at random. If you picked 0, make an announcement that you have succeeded, but that you will not release the extracted key or how it was obtained, in protest of the fact that they want to use SDMI to undermine fair use rights.
4) If you really did succeed, publish the correct key through some anonymous channel, such as freenet. Do not associate your name with this in any way; try to find a truly anonymous way to let other hackers know about it.
5) Once someone has found the key, do not stop trying to break it (they may close the hole that was used, even if nobody tells them about it), but you can add an extra piece to step 3: pick another number between 0 and 10, and if you pick 0 include the key in your announcement, or better yet, mail the key directly to the contest organizers and announce that you have done so. They have no way to tell whether you legitimately cracked it or not, and if enough people do this, they don't even know who to go after to find the person who really did crack it.
How's that?
Stuart.
I disagree. Many people in the Mozilla development community consider Netscape's first Beta release to have been a huge mistake - the program wasn't ready for public consumption yet. Promoting it would have simply made a much larger group of people be disillusioned with the possibility of Netscape *ever* coming out with a good browser.
Beta 2, due in a month or two, will be MUCH improved (you can already tell that from the nightlies). And it supports the "classic" netscape look and feel in addition to Netscape's butt-ugly bluegreen thing, including almost-perfect windows/mac/gtk widgets.
Even then, I don't think that promoting it actively will be a good idea, because the stability/performance push won't happen until Beta 3. Netscape engineers have been quoted as saking that B3 will be the first usable public release.
So I have to disagree about AOL's commitment. I think they are very wise in trying not to hype it too hard before it's ready.
Stuart.
RMS has traditionally been opposed to the LSB because they are not called the "GNU/Linux Standard Base". Now they are the "Free Standards Group", I wonder if he can now bring himself to endorse them?
:)
Admittedly, their press release was full of "Linux" with no "GNU", but that's a press release and they're traditionally full of s**t anyway
Stuart.
Moderators: Please do not moderate this up; it's not a question to Metallica but to the previous poster.
[[ Not me, I have a new policy: I pirate the CD's and then send the artist $5, far more than they get per CD from their label. ]]
I have a question for you then: How do you manage to send the artist $5? I've often thought that doing this would be the best way for music to be distributed in the future, and that I would love to do exactly that. So... how do you find out the address or whatever of the artist to send the $5 to? And do you really think that it goes straight to them and not to their bank of publicists who filter all their fanmail and probably pocket the $5?
Do you think there is a market for a website that would serve no purpose other than taking a credit card number, allow for selection from a database of bands, and send $5 from that credit card to the band you specify?
Stuart.
[On a note related to the post that this is in reply to...]
How about a system where listeners got the song for free, but after downloading it, could *choose* to pay $1-$2 straight to you (not your label or lawyers or anything) if they liked the music? No obligation except the desire to support the musicians whose music they love?
If your answer is that you would not support this, why not? Do you think that all your fans are so lacking in morals that they wouldn't pay?
[[ There's not only the fine Collections package, but also JDBC for easy database connectivity, ]]
...
[[ I disagree though that you cannot achive subtle hackery in Java - I think that between the language features like Reflection and the many packages availiable that you can actually achive things at a higher level as you are not so often bogged down in the mechanics of whatever trickery you are trying to attempt! ]]
Much as I love Java (I consider it my first language, closely followed by Perl) I do have to disagree and say that there are some situations where Java could *really* use some more syntactic sugar to do some "subtle hackery". Your example of JDBC gives me a very easy example to use here - this is a scenario that actually came up in a project I am working on at this minute.
If I want to use a stored procedure that has both in and out parameters, I have to do stuff like:
Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(...);
CallableStatement cs = conn.prepareCall("{myProc(?, ?, ?)}");
cs.setString(1, myArg);
cs.registerOutParameter(2, Types.VARCHAR);
cs.registerOutParameter(3, Types.INTEGER);
cs.executeUpdate();
myResult = cs.getString(2);
myResult2 = cs.getInt(3);
Now, this is obviously clumsy, so I wanted to wrap it in a nice simple-to-call function. Wrapping in the general case of >1 in parameter and >1 out parameter is clearly impossible (if you disagree, I challenge you to try it... and post code of both the implementation *and an example use of your API*). But it turns out that even wrapping a *single* case is hard if there are >1 out parameters, because it's all-but-impossible to return more than one value from a Java method (again, an exercise for the reader on how to do this; I have code which makes it only 3 lines for the caller, but the implementor has to work quite hard for *every* procedure call).
There are other cases like this. I love Java for its simplicity and elegance, but there are some cases I'd dearly love some extra syntactic sugar. The simple, elegant language seems to cover about 90-95% of what I want to do, and I have to jump through clumsy hoops for the other 5%.
Stuart.
Actually, no they aren't. See Mozilla.org's plans for beta, which are very distinct from Netscape's. The "beta1" stuff in bugzilla referred to the Netscape beta. Mozilla does not have a beta yet and it's not clear whether they will call any release a "beta" as such, due to confusion about what the word actually means.
Stuart.
1) The personal question:
You are widely perceived as a person who stands up for what you believe and never, ever back down. Has there been any case where you have changed your position on something that you had previously considered to be a matter of principle? In other words, has anyone ever convinced you that a position you took was wrong? If so, what was the position, and what was the argument that convinced you?
2) The ethical/free-software question:
The GPL, for all its merits, has a disadvantage (in my view) that it is incompatible with almost every other free software license. If someone could come up with a license that would offer most of the protections of the GPL, but offer compatibility with other free software licenses -- something in between the GPL and the LGPL that allowed linking with anything so long as it was under an approved free software license, for example -- would you endorse or support such a license? If not, why not (especially considering that you do endorse the LGPL, albeit not very enthusiastically)?
Stuart.
>
n es/progress-2-beta.html
Seamonkey is the project to ship a commercial browser based on the mozilla source. Hence the information on the milestone "M" releases is in a projects/seamonkey/ directory on mozilla.org. Similarly, the beta-stopper-bug-count-page is at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/milesto
HTH,
Stuart.
You claim that if patent law is removed, companies will just keep their algorithms and technologies secret, with just as much (or more) harm to society and innovation. While it is certainly true that companies will try hard to do exactly that, it is far from clear to me that *any* combination of other technologies could stifle innovation the way that a patent could, even if it were reduced to a 1-year term.
.4 nickels,
As an example, remember Microsoft's "patented" ClearType technology for LCD displays? This technique turned out to already have been covered by expired Apple patents that were over 20 years old, but even had it not been...
It took about a week for someone to read Microsoft's advertising blurb and figure out what they were doing, and present evidence that it was based on 20-year old technology. Now, having read the advertising blurb myself, it was far from obvious what they were talking about. If someone could figure it out from just the blurb in a week, imagine how quickly it would have been figured out from an actual released product! And since you could figure it out just by looking at an LCD screen in low resolution and seeing how letters were being represented, you wouldn't be subject to any kind of copyright license to prevent you implementing your own version.
If something is worth doing, people will quickly figure out how it is done and produce a separate implementation. If nobody can figure it out... then it must be a *really* good innovation, and I'd suggest that a company that does that *deserves* to be able to keep a monopoly on it; it's so rare that I can't think of a *single* technology that couldn't be figured out by smart Open Source developers or a smart competitor.
This is why software patents should be abolished; because disclosure gains you essentially nothing. A smart person looking at _what_ has been done can almost always figure out _how_, or alternatively a better way to do the same thing.
Just my
Stuart.
Are McDonalds fries better than Burger King fries because companies with two arches as a logo make better fries? Or is it because Burger King hasn't had a chance to update its logo yet? (actually I prefer BK, but you get the point...)
Faster databases are faster databases; whether or not they are open source is pretty much orthogonal to this issue. If you're referring to the claim that open source software is faster, better and more stable, you should be aware that this is a statement about generalities, not specific software. For example, Microsoft Office is indisputably more feature-complete than AbiWord. Now this isn't bashing AbiWord - it just hasn't got to the point of being complete yet. The point is that claims about the superior performance of open-source solutions can only be made in general; if you try to claim that it is true in *every* specific case, there will always be counterexamples (although they will be increasingly hard to find as more open source projects get more and more complete).
Stuart.
"The Chrysalids" has been one of my all-time favorite novels for some time now. It deals with difficult and important moral and ethical issues, but it manages to do so without ever failing to be a great *story*.
From just reading this review you might come away with the impression that this book is somewhat dry, and the story is secondary to the points that the book is intended to make. Fortunately, this is not the case. Every character in the book is well developed and you really identify with all of them -- you feel their fear, their sadness, their joy -- especially but not exclusively the narrator. Even the one character with whom you aren't supposed to identify (not mentioning any names to avoid spoilers, but it should become obvious reasonably early into the book) is well developed and completely believable.
There are moments that will shock and horrify you, and other moments that will fill you with feel-good fuzzies. There are even some points where you're on the edge of your seat hoping that a disaster can be averted. The story proceeds at a good speed making the book completely un-put-downable.
I agree with the reviewer that the book deals well with tough ethical issues. But don't forget to mention that it's a really good read for its own sake too!
Stuart.
>
I have - Debian. It has an update-menus tool which is used by the package manager; any X utility or application that is installed will automatically install itself into the menu system in a consistent location (there is a policy which specifies which applications should go where). Not only that, but it is windowmanager-independent so that the same applications are available in the same places regardless of whether your users use GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment-without-GNOME, fvwm2, windowmaker, or any other windowmanager that provides for application menus.
This is all automatic and transparent and happens whenever a new application gets installed.
If the GNOME and KDE people want to provide their own mechanisms for doing this sort of thing, that's great, so long as they don't mess with a system that has been working wonderfully for several years now (since well before GNOME or KDE ever existed).
Stuart.
Last time I heard, Red Hat Linux was available free to *anyone*. Does this mean they're going to start charging everyone money *except* UK schools?