Considering
that most people won't even change to a resolution above 640x480x60Hz on a brand new 19' monitor,
ABC's site will never see a hit except by a few geeks.
Most non-geeks point their machines at their ISP's nameservers. That's where the pointers to the 'root' servers exist.
The actual change needs to take place at ISP name servers... Very few non-geeks actually run their own nameservers.
This is actually looking more and more doable as time goes on. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
It took decades and sometimes centuriesfor the constitutions of each
of the United States to be adopted,and before then, you could have made
the same argument about squatting rulers.
Give them more time. You mightbe pleasantly surprised by how well the
democratic process can work when allowed.
I think that precisely the point is that the democratic process is
not being allowed to word. It looks to me like they got spooked
by the fact that, when democratic elections were allowed, their 'ringers'
didn't win...
This bodes ill for them
keeping their positions when offered for election.
Yeah, I know, this is getting into the domain of consipiracy theory.
________
I think that a two-pronged approach to this issue is worthwhile.
One prong is the public demonstrations. Make sure that these people
understand that we the people are not interested in lifetime
appointments to the icann -- especially unelected appointments.
The other prong should be the development of realistic alternatives to
the (currently) established system. It is doable, but it's going to
take some work. With the pending implementation of IP6, there's actually
some room to manouver in.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Alternative root servers are not the answer as they always have to
mesh with the existing servers and the control issue appears all over again. But perhaps there is no
solution that is backwards-compatible with the current DNS.
Alternative root servers are VERY possible. You can basically treat them the same as you would internal network rootservers. If they don't have the proper answer, then send the query to the ICANN root servers. Job done.
Once you start to get some respect for the new system, though, it can start to be a problem when the icann servers start passing recursive lookups to you.. You need a way to recognize that a recursed domain isn't in either 'root' server set.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Well given that Microsoft is suing Oracle over simply talking about how badly MS-SQL sucks, My guess is the the movie legal team decided that using a Microsoft Product on Screen was a dangerous practice:-)
Besides, Using a Linux/BSD OS means that you've got a system that is reasonably easily reconfigurable to look like almost anything, and is stable like a ROCK.
This means that you can use 'live' work on camera, rather than fixed screen shots, without having to worry about the system blue=screening on you in the middle of your performance (like happened to Mr. Bill a few years ago)..
As mentioned elsewhere, you also get a nice-looking display that most of the public is just going to see as 'different', 'futuristic' and (hopefully) high-tech.
For the 2% of the marked that eats, sleeps and breaths window managers, it's simply gonna be a neat piece of trivia, possibly leading to a bit of free PR for the show. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
How about a warning next time?
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 2
Please, please, PLEASE warn us next time yo link to a Quicktime/ Sorenson movie. I don't know if you noticed (:-)) but some of us run our machines on Linux and don't have the ability to view the Sorenson Codec.
( 4 minutes to download a 26Meg video, just to find out that I can't play the stinking thing!. )
--------
As for boycotting Time/Warner: that's where the rubber hits the road. It's easy enough for me to boycott something that I wouldn't see anyways. (whoop de doo). It's not a boycott unless you don't purchase/see things that you would if it weren't for the boycott. Either shit or get off the pot (or get off your high horse if all you're going to do is shit us).
It's somewhat like when Ghandi started asking people to boycott the British Textile mills and start wearing homespun. It's not like people liked homespun. What they liked was the idea of getting the british off their backs. To do that, they took (cool-looking and often better made) british cloth off of their backs.
If you're going to take on the fight, you've got to be willing to take the hit.
Those who aren't willing to fight for their freedom don't deserve it.
Malcom X
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Re:Sigh... what are you kids thinking?
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 2
It looks like it's a genuine, honestly held belief.
You may disagree with it, but that's not the point of moderation.
I can't count.
It's led to some serious discussion, but most people are now missing the source of the discussion by default.
The issue of free speech gets it's real test when you have someone honestly speaking something you viciously disagree with.
Don't you wish that book-burning christian sites would allow the geek reply in their space?? Well, here's a chance to live by example.
I defend to the death your right to speak your stupid opinion (and my right to respond). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Re:We both know there is more to D & D than that..
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 2
Somebody goes out and shoots the guy that's been teasing him for the last 2 years and, when they find out that he's played D&D, they try and ban D&D.
Another guy goes into the military, gets demolitions training, then comes out and blows up a couple hundred Oklahoma civilians. Do you see them trying to ban the military???
A good chaotic evil character (that's good ias in interesting, not good as in.... You know what I mean), would probably sneak into the theatre, lock the doors in the middle of the first reel, and then start throwing molatov coctails into the theatre from the projectionist boot, where he could safely watch people panic when they realize that they're about to burn to death.
Then he'd steal the movie. (wouldn't want to miss it, whould he?) `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
It might be worthwhile to check with some of the people who contributed. It's quite possible that all the contributors weren't asked for permission. Those who weren't asked for permission might be able to sue the dead tree publisher as a method of pressuring them to drop their suite.
More than anything, I think that we need a good bit more info on the CRC lawsuit. "Existence of a threatened lawsuit" isn't a whole lot of information to work off of, and that's all I can get from the appology at the wolfram site.
ominous rumblings
If, as some people have said, the wolfram site didn't have any pointers to the CRC site, I would expect to find that this problem has been brewing for quite some time. I mean, what author wouldn't provide pointers to his (supposedly) royalty-generating publisher from his very popular web site? There needs to be a reason for this, and I doubt that it's going to be pretty.
If we're going to respond intelligently to this incident, it would be valuable to have some more info on the real history of this dispute. It's much easier to ride a horse if you know which way it's pointed. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Well, as I understand it in the US, and canada, Child pornography is pretty much anything that depicts someone who is, or porports to be under the age of 18 having sex...
By that, I think you could Throw Shakespeare in Jail for Romeo and Juliete -- but you'd have to dig his bones up, first. Personally, I think that it'd just be easier to shut down the Stratford Festival.
If we took the time to do some research, I think we could get The Bible banned on the similar grounds.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Let's play with this for a minute. Presume that it's actually really CHEAP to make Model Ts.
Proprietary Closed source (MS license) would be that you didn't
actually buy the car.. You paid for the right to use the car. You
might be able to paint it a different color, but that would be borderline
(remember, you're painting someone else's car).
Proprietary available source would be: you can paint it and play
with the engine a bit, but it still belongs to someone else. You can't
make your own. You DEFINITELY can't give one to a friend.
Open source is: You can tinker with it. You can change
it. You can even make copies for friends, but if someone sells you
one with proprietary wheels on the car, you can only make your own
copy without wheels. This might not seem like a big problem until the
people selling the semi-proprietary version start jacking the price, or
you want a tracked version.
At that point, the original (open) wheel assembly might not fit anymore
(embrace and extend -- it's a bitch).
If you really want a fully-reconfigurable vehicle,
you have to check real close to make sure there are no proprietary
parts on it before you buy it.
Free source says that you can attach proprietary wheels onto
your car, but you can't distribute one like that. You can sell the wheels
separately, and people can attach them when they get home.
This creates an innate disincentive to hijacking an open
source version by attaching proprietary parts to it...
This also means that if people don't want the proprietary wheels,
they can still start with the basic model (the only kind that can be
distributed) and modify the wheels the hard way (and then give away that,
if they want).
Also note that, if you created the original, you can still make money
off of it. Remember that, if someone looks under the hood, all of the
parts have your name stamped on them. If I need improvements to my
car, who do you think I'd rather trust: some random joe, or
the person who made the original? Besides: some people are willing to
pay an extra $500 for the trademark-ed seat-covers that say "I got this
straight from The {Wo,}Man!"
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Freedom is not without cost. Freedom comes from choosing specific constraints which allow new paths. The US Revolutionary cry: "I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees" was a choice of freedoms. They were free to live on their knees. Many of them had made good money under the British monarchy.
Anybody unwilling to fight for their freedom doesn't deserve it
Malcom X
They chose the restrictions that come from joining a revolutionary war. It was difficult. It was dangerous. It placed hardships on them. They felt that it was worth the inconvenience -- including possible death -- to build something for the future that would not have otherwise been.
Once they won, they placed restrictions on what the government could do -- because they felt that those restrictions created a greater freedom overall. Restrictions, like the inability to cut off free speech mean that you can't censor a neo-nazi, but you do have the freedom to respond to one -- even if they control the government.
The GPL is a restriction, but it's a restriction with an intended future. If you don't like what the GPL is up to, you don't have to abide by it... Just don't use any of MY GPLed code to create your proprietary solution. Remember: If it wasn't for the GPL you wouldn't have had access to the code to begin with, so it's not like you're losing anything.
_____________________________
Gates wants 'his' software to control the world. He doesn't really care about how, as long as you continue to pay him your money. He lures you with flashy graphics and gaudy PR. If that doesn't work, he threatens to throw you in jail.
"Do exactly as we say and nobody will get hurt." His freedom, our restrictions. As long as we're willing to live on our knees in this manner, nobody will get hurt.
Stallman wants his principles to control the world. He doesn't care as long as we have maximal freedom to share. He lures us with talk of freedom and principles. He lives by example. He creates software, gives it away, and invites us to do the same.
Nasty dictatorship, that.
He asks people to accept a restriction for a purpose. He tries to convince us that the restriction generates greater freedom overall. I think that the results, so far, have proven the point.
He planted the seeds about 20 years ago. We are now (many years later) starting to see the results of his work. Now he's asking us to continue planting our own seeds, and slowly pulling the closed-source 'weeds' in the garden. If we do that, then the long-term result will (hopefully) be a diverse forest.
If not, then we run the risk of letting the closed-source 'weeds' take over the shade created by his first trees. In time, his trees will die prematurely, choked by the weeds.
It's all about choice. Which freedom would you rather have? `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
It'd be GREAT -- until you actually got a reasonable number of people using it. At that point, you'd have to deal with thousands (millions?) of people trying to fly over manhattan at rush hour. Without some kind of controlled laneways, I'd expect the death rate to be FAR above ground traffic for a similar volume. Consider that the probable end result of a 'fender bender' would
be a 150' fall. Then, of course, you've got to deal with the people on the ground that you fall on.
Then you'd have to deal with the problem of landing... Not a big deal when you're going home, but can you imagine 14,000 people trying to land on top of the World Trade building at 8:30am??? It would be MAYHEM. People fighting over their place in the landing queue; running out of fuel (at 1200 feet) and landing in the middle of rush-hour (ground) traffic. -- or worse yet, going through 3 other people's rotors on the way down.
Yep, I'd love to have one of those, but I would NOT be using it for commuting once they became popular. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
One amp-hour???? The (large) battery pack I use for my cellphone can do better than that (of course, it only provides 12 volts... 1Ahr@1200 volts would be impressive).
In any event, 1Ahr doesn't make sense in the context. I'd be more inclined to think that the Angstrom character was meant to be something else, like a 1/2 symbol, that got mangled in the translation to the web. unfortunately, this would require figuring out which font/character set was used for creating the original. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If Excel were open or Free source, and experienced a fork, it would be possible for both groups to get together at a later date and reconcile their formats and capabilities.
If they were open source, people who wanted to make it work for other systems would be able to do so.
Right now, MS can 'fork' their code anytime they want to. Take, for example, when word '97 (I think) came out. It was incompatible with earlier versions, and they (willfully, I think) didn't have a module that allowed users to save in the old format. As a result any company which bought the newest version for any of their machines was forced to buy it for all of their machines. If it were open source, people would have just fixed the problem and released it.
This might have created a fork, but it would have been a more usable fork. Users would have then had a choice.
As it is, with closed source, it's like Mr. Ford's "freedom" with respect to the Model T.
"You can have any color you want, as long as it's black:
I think that Stallman's attitude could be summerized as:
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
If Tyberghein had refused to release the NDA driver, somebody else might have been called to reverse engineer the API. Once that was done, people would have been able to create a completely free piece of software. It would have also made it easier to do similar work on other console systems.
--------------------------------------
I'd like to point out here that the Open Source road was blazed by Free Source. If there was no committment to Free Source, there would have been no reason for the Gnu Project. -- I mean, why re-invent the wheel?? C compilers, grep, awk the shell, syslogd et. al. already existed. You could even get the source! All you had to do was pay $20K and sign an NDA with AT&T.
Luckily, there were some radicals out there who insisted that the source code should be Free, so when Linus wrote his kernel, he had access to the rest of a Unix look-alike.
As he said
in the C't interview
Torvalds: I do not believe that there is a special point there. It's never been an individual
project. Right at the start, for example, I was provided with all of the [[Gnu]] applications.
Beyond my additional work on the Kernel - I already had parts of [[like?]] the shell, the compiler and the libraries......
It should also be noted that, although Stallman believes that OS proponents are wrong/misguided, he doesn't say that they should all go to programmer's hell. He simply gives his opinion and makes sure to make the distinction clear. There is a method to his madness, and he wants to be sure that people have an understanding of both the method and the madness when they make a choice between FS and OS.
I think that his biggest peeve is when people (try to) blurr the distinctions between the two.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Putting them in a live Quake arena and railgunning them would be nice.
Hanging them by their toenails, beating them with an organic carrot, and training my ex-girlfriend's psychotic kitty to flay them alive would be being nasty.
Like the one rap song went:
I hope you can't
sleep and you dream about it
and I hope when you dream you can't sleep and you scream about it
I hope your conscience eats at you and you can't breathe 'cause of it.
.....
The people who drew up those laws knew that they were trashing consumer rights. If they wanted to preserve consumer rights, they would have either outlawed or severely limited what a click-through license could force a consumer to agree to.
Instead, the're trying to lock down the rights of the company to put consumers into a straight-jacket, and possibly outlaw aspects of the GPL.
Yeah, right. Something to be nice about!
I hope you know, this means war. Bugs Bunny.
Spleen vent complete. please return to your normal programming.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Glitz may win customers for a Developer, but it's not necessarily going to win customers for the bank. Lots of people still use modems. Something which loads fast and runs stable is going to be well liked.
If you can make it look good too, that's a big bonus, but not the necessity.
Ultimately, however, this pigheadedness is going to cost them. Bank of Montreal has announced wireless support... What's tha chance that you're really gonna want to run JavaScript on a Palm, or your cellphone??
Sooner or later they'll figure out that simple, portable code is the way to support everything that's going to be out there, a few years from now. Then they'll have to play catchup with the banks that did proper design work from the start. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If you think you know the problem, can you point them to a fix??? This might make it more likely that they'll do something about the problem. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Slashdot Mirror
This is actually looking more and more doable as time goes on.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Yeah, I know, this is getting into the domain of consipiracy theory.
________
I think that a two-pronged approach to this issue is worthwhile.
One prong is the public demonstrations. Make sure that these people understand that we the people are not interested in lifetime appointments to the icann -- especially unelected appointments.
The other prong should be the development of realistic alternatives to the (currently) established system. It is doable, but it's going to take some work. With the pending implementation of IP6, there's actually some room to manouver in.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Once you start to get some respect for the new system, though, it can start to be a problem when the icann servers start passing recursive lookups to you.. You need a way to recognize that a recursed domain isn't in either 'root' server set.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Besides, Using a Linux/BSD OS means that you've got a system that is reasonably easily reconfigurable to look like almost anything, and is stable like a ROCK.
This means that you can use 'live' work on camera, rather than fixed screen shots, without having to worry about the system blue=screening on you in the middle of your performance (like happened to Mr. Bill a few years ago)..
As mentioned elsewhere, you also get a nice-looking display that most of the public is just going to see as 'different', 'futuristic' and (hopefully) high-tech.
For the 2% of the marked that eats, sleeps and breaths window managers, it's simply gonna be a neat piece of trivia, possibly leading to a bit of free PR for the show.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
( 4 minutes to download a 26Meg video, just to find out that I can't play the stinking thing!. )
--------
As for boycotting Time/Warner: that's where the rubber hits the road. It's easy enough for me to boycott something that I wouldn't see anyways. (whoop de doo). It's not a boycott unless you don't purchase/see things that you would if it weren't for the boycott. Either shit or get off the pot (or get off your high horse if all you're going to do is shit us).
It's somewhat like when Ghandi started asking people to boycott the British Textile mills and start wearing homespun. It's not like people liked homespun. What they liked was the idea of getting the british off their backs. To do that, they took (cool-looking and often better made) british cloth off of their backs.
If you're going to take on the fight, you've got to be willing to take the hit.
Those who aren't willing to fight for their freedom don't deserve it.
Malcom X
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
-
It looks like it's a genuine, honestly held belief.
- You may disagree with it, but that's not the point of moderation.
- I can't count.
- It's led to some serious discussion, but most people are now missing the source of the discussion by default.
- The issue of free speech gets it's real test when you have someone honestly speaking something you viciously disagree with.
- Don't you wish that book-burning christian sites would allow the geek reply in their space?? Well, here's a chance to live by example.
I defend to the death your right to speak your stupid opinion (and my right to respond).`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Another guy goes into the military, gets demolitions training, then comes out and blows up a couple hundred Oklahoma civilians. Do you see them trying to ban the military???
NOOOOOO!!!!!!
Now, that's hypocracy for you.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Then he'd steal the movie. (wouldn't want to miss it, whould he?)
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Well, just make sure that you don't use DeCss when you rip it... Easy enough to do, and all the better to confound the MPAA's lawsuit.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
All you really have to pay for is the auction fees on the $15K sale. In return, you get $15M worth of PR when it makes the evening news.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
With his cute jibe, in the last paragraph, about how "that argument flies with the all the grace of a penguin."
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
More than anything, I think that we need a good bit more info on the CRC lawsuit. "Existence of a threatened lawsuit" isn't a whole lot of information to work off of, and that's all I can get from the appology at the wolfram site.
ominous rumblings
If, as some people have said, the wolfram site didn't have any pointers to the CRC site, I would expect to find that this problem has been brewing for quite some time. I mean, what author wouldn't provide pointers to his (supposedly) royalty-generating publisher from his very popular web site? There needs to be a reason for this, and I doubt that it's going to be pretty.
If we're going to respond intelligently to this incident, it would be valuable to have some more info on the real history of this dispute. It's much easier to ride a horse if you know which way it's pointed.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Firewall??? WHO NEEDS IT? I've got 140feet of water!
It's sitting at the bottom of the Georgia Straight. in the trunk of (what used to be) my car.
Stinkin' ferry corp....
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
By that, I think you could Throw Shakespeare in Jail for Romeo and Juliete -- but you'd have to dig his bones up, first. Personally, I think that it'd just be easier to shut down the Stratford Festival.
If we took the time to do some research, I think we could get The Bible banned on the similar grounds.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
or "Death From Above!"
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Proprietary Closed source (MS license) would be that you didn't actually buy the car.. You paid for the right to use the car. You might be able to paint it a different color, but that would be borderline (remember, you're painting someone else's car).
Proprietary available source would be: you can paint it and play with the engine a bit, but it still belongs to someone else. You can't make your own. You DEFINITELY can't give one to a friend.
Open source is: You can tinker with it. You can change it. You can even make copies for friends, but if someone sells you one with proprietary wheels on the car, you can only make your own copy without wheels. This might not seem like a big problem until the people selling the semi-proprietary version start jacking the price, or you want a tracked version. At that point, the original (open) wheel assembly might not fit anymore (embrace and extend -- it's a bitch). If you really want a fully-reconfigurable vehicle, you have to check real close to make sure there are no proprietary parts on it before you buy it.
Free source says that you can attach proprietary wheels onto your car, but you can't distribute one like that. You can sell the wheels separately, and people can attach them when they get home.
This creates an innate disincentive to hijacking an open source version by attaching proprietary parts to it... This also means that if people don't want the proprietary wheels, they can still start with the basic model (the only kind that can be distributed) and modify the wheels the hard way (and then give away that, if they want).
Also note that, if you created the original, you can still make money off of it. Remember that, if someone looks under the hood, all of the parts have your name stamped on them. If I need improvements to my car, who do you think I'd rather trust: some random joe, or the person who made the original? Besides: some people are willing to pay an extra $500 for the trademark-ed seat-covers that say "I got this straight from The {Wo,}Man!"
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Anybody unwilling to fight for their freedom doesn't deserve it
Malcom X
They chose the restrictions that come from joining a revolutionary war. It was difficult. It was dangerous. It placed hardships on them. They felt that it was worth the inconvenience -- including possible death -- to build something for the future that would not have otherwise been.
Once they won, they placed restrictions on what the government could do -- because they felt that those restrictions created a greater freedom overall. Restrictions, like the inability to cut off free speech mean that you can't censor a neo-nazi, but you do have the freedom to respond to one -- even if they control the government.
The GPL is a restriction, but it's a restriction with an intended future. If you don't like what the GPL is up to, you don't have to abide by it... Just don't use any of MY GPLed code to create your proprietary solution. Remember: If it wasn't for the GPL you wouldn't have had access to the code to begin with, so it's not like you're losing anything.
_____________________________
Gates wants 'his' software to control the world. He doesn't really care about how, as long as you continue to pay him your money. He lures you with flashy graphics and gaudy PR. If that doesn't work, he threatens to throw you in jail. "Do exactly as we say and nobody will get hurt." His freedom, our restrictions. As long as we're willing to live on our knees in this manner, nobody will get hurt.
Stallman wants his principles to control the world. He doesn't care as long as we have maximal freedom to share. He lures us with talk of freedom and principles. He lives by example. He creates software, gives it away, and invites us to do the same.
Nasty dictatorship, that.
He asks people to accept a restriction for a purpose. He tries to convince us that the restriction generates greater freedom overall. I think that the results, so far, have proven the point.
He planted the seeds about 20 years ago. We are now (many years later) starting to see the results of his work. Now he's asking us to continue planting our own seeds, and slowly pulling the closed-source 'weeds' in the garden. If we do that, then the long-term result will (hopefully) be a diverse forest.
If not, then we run the risk of letting the closed-source 'weeds' take over the shade created by his first trees. In time, his trees will die prematurely, choked by the weeds.
It's all about choice. Which freedom would you rather have?
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
* 17.8816
That's more like a 50 foot drop. (like you'll care when you hit bottom). Now you know why a seat-belt is considered such a good idea.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Then you'd have to deal with the problem of landing... Not a big deal when you're going home, but can you imagine 14,000 people trying to land on top of the World Trade building at 8:30am??? It would be MAYHEM. People fighting over their place in the landing queue; running out of fuel (at 1200 feet) and landing in the middle of rush-hour (ground) traffic. -- or worse yet, going through 3 other people's rotors on the way down.
Yep, I'd love to have one of those, but I would NOT be using it for commuting once they became popular.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
In any event, 1Ahr doesn't make sense in the context. I'd be more inclined to think that the Angstrom character was meant to be something else, like a 1/2 symbol, that got mangled in the translation to the web. unfortunately, this would require figuring out which font/character set was used for creating the original.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If they were open source, people who wanted to make it work for other systems would be able to do so.
Right now, MS can 'fork' their code anytime they want to. Take, for example, when word '97 (I think) came out. It was incompatible with earlier versions, and they (willfully, I think) didn't have a module that allowed users to save in the old format. As a result any company which bought the newest version for any of their machines was forced to buy it for all of their machines. If it were open source, people would have just fixed the problem and released it.
This might have created a fork, but it would have been a more usable fork. Users would have then had a choice.
As it is, with closed source, it's like Mr. Ford's "freedom" with respect to the Model T.
"You can have any color you want, as long as it's black:
I think that Stallman's attitude could be summerized as:
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
If Tyberghein had refused to release the NDA driver, somebody else might have been called to reverse engineer the API. Once that was done, people would have been able to create a completely free piece of software. It would have also made it easier to do similar work on other console systems.
--------------------------------------
I'd like to point out here that the Open Source road was blazed by Free Source. If there was no committment to Free Source, there would have been no reason for the Gnu Project. -- I mean, why re-invent the wheel?? C compilers, grep, awk the shell, syslogd et. al. already existed. You could even get the source! All you had to do was pay $20K and sign an NDA with AT&T.
Luckily, there were some radicals out there who insisted that the source code should be Free, so when Linus wrote his kernel, he had access to the rest of a Unix look-alike.
It should also be noted that, although Stallman believes that OS proponents are wrong/misguided, he doesn't say that they should all go to programmer's hell. He simply gives his opinion and makes sure to make the distinction clear. There is a method to his madness, and he wants to be sure that people have an understanding of both the method and the madness when they make a choice between FS and OS.I think that his biggest peeve is when people (try to) blurr the distinctions between the two.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Be NICE
Putting them in a live Quake arena and railgunning them would be nice. Hanging them by their toenails, beating them with an organic carrot, and training my ex-girlfriend's psychotic kitty to flay them alive would be being nasty.
Like the one rap song went:
The people who drew up those laws knew that they were trashing consumer rights. If they wanted to preserve consumer rights, they would have either outlawed or severely limited what a click-through license could force a consumer to agree to.Instead, the're trying to lock down the rights of the company to put consumers into a straight-jacket, and possibly outlaw aspects of the GPL.
Yeah, right. Something to be nice about!
I hope you know, this means war.
Bugs Bunny.
Spleen vent complete. please return to your normal programming.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If you can make it look good too, that's a big bonus, but not the necessity.
Ultimately, however, this pigheadedness is going to cost them. Bank of Montreal has announced wireless support ... What's tha chance that you're really gonna want to run JavaScript on a Palm, or your cellphone??
Sooner or later they'll figure out that simple, portable code is the way to support everything that's going to be out there, a few years from now. Then they'll have to play catchup with the banks that did proper design work from the start.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If you think you know the problem, can you point them to a fix??? This might make it more likely that they'll do something about the problem.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!