These agreements give Microsoft a little legal clout in the short term, but if they mean that LG and other companies feel safe using Linux now, that's a big problem for Microsoft: even if Microsoft actually had valid patents that impact Linux, they run out in an average of a decade, and any Windows customer they have lost to Linux by then is a problem for them.
In fact, these agreements are so obviously bad for Microsoft that I really wonder when the other shoe will drop.
It's silly to think that one license fits all. For something like the Linux kernel, a license like GPLv3 makes sense. For projects sponsored by companies, Apache 2 is a better choice (in fact, I consider Sun's use of GPL+commercial for Sun Java to be bad). What Stein's specific beef with the GPLv3 is, I don't get, since GPLv3 is largely GPLv2 with the Apache v2 patent provisions.
In any case, people like Hurley shouldn't spend time worrying about the future of the FSF. The FSF has been in this business for two decades and they know what they are doing.
Re:Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore Pet
on
The Apple II At 30
·
· Score: 1
Claim is indisputably correct
At issue isn't the claim that the Apple II could be programmed in machine code (it clearly could), at issue is the claim that the Apple II was the only one of the three that could be programmed in machine code. In fact, all three could be programmed in machine code.
Clearly you hate today's Apple, but don't confuse Woz's groundbreaking machine with today's company.
I don't "hate" Apple. What I hate is overblown claims of innovation. The Apple II wasn't a "groundbreaking" personal computer technologically. What it was was a typical Apple product: a premium-priced consumer product that liberally borrowed ideas from others, did a lot of things well, and had some infuriating and unnecessary limitations.
Re:Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore Pet
on
The Apple II At 30
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The Apple II was the only of the three consumer computers that year that 1) supported color 2) had addressable pixels 3) could be programmed in machine language and 4) could be hooked up to your color TV.
Claim 3 is wrong. Claims 1, 2, and 4 amount to the same thing, and they don't make the Apple II "more advanced", they just make it different. The simple fact that the TRS-80 had a 16x64 display, a better keyboard, and a more powerful processor made it so much more useful for real-world applications.
Woz mentions in his book that he felt they were simply cheap knock offs of the Apple I which didn't bother him a whit since he had the Apple II up his sleeve
Well, of course: Apple knows how to make machines that sell well. That's not the same as making the technically most advanced machines. In fact, time and again, Apple has beaten technically superior systems.
Whether it's "enough" is not the issue. The issue is that Jobs is lying through his teeth when he claims that any limitations that iPhone may have in terms of programmability are necessitated by network or carrier issues.
Furthermore, it's not about me writing applications. I have never written any applications for my Palm, but I am using about a dozen freeware and shareware apps on the Palm. In contrast, the iPod applications market, which is similarly restricted courtesy of Apple, is pretty pathetic. Many users benefit from the ability to develop and deploy on such a platform freely.
If you want Dashboard-like widgets for your phone, there's WidSets. They're designed from the ground up for cell phone usage, including cell phone screen sizes and keyboards, and they work on many different cell phones.
Windows Mobile, Palm, Linux, and Nokia's Symbian devices all are fully programmable and let you make arbitrary network connections. Nokia gives you Python and C for Symbian. Heck, talk about "programmable devices on the cellular network", I'm writing this through the cellular network from a MacBook Pro. And if your carrier doesn't offer the phone you want, you can use an unlocked phone on any of the GSM carriers (AT&T/Cingular being one of them). If the carrier wants to limit your network connections, they don't have to limit the phone, they do it like any sensible network admin--by configuring their routers.
Steve Jobs's attempts to present himself as the champion of consumers against monopolistic cell phone companies are bullshit. The iPhone can't be any more programmable or any less restricted than many other devices because many other devices are fully programmable, down to hacking the OS. If the iPhone delivers anything short of a full OS X programming environment, it's simply not in the same league as other smart phones. Dashboard Widgets won't do.
The technologies that are likely to wipe out civilization are not particle accelerators or the occasional nuke, but the internal combustion engine, coal-fired power plants, air travel, and biological weapons. Massive climate change and flooding are almost inevitable, as are worldwide epidemics that will kill off a large part of humanity.
Those will not wipe out humans altogether, but they may take us back into a pre-technological stage, and whether the technological revolution is going to happen again and at some point avoid those pitfalls is an open question.
Happy 30th Birthday to all of them, because all of them were introduced the same year. I think the only reason to single out the Apple II is that Apple is still around, since the TRS-80 and Commodore Pet were technically at least as good as the Apple II.
Yes, why wait for demonstrated need to spur investment by the private sector into new technologies when/. science dilettantes like you clearly know exactly what technologies will be needed and when, and are willing to force everyone else to fund your wet dream vision of the future? Splendid.
I have no particular opinion on whether space elevators themselves are a reasonable place to spend research funds.
I do know that the private sector is incapable of doing this, both because mainstream economics tells us so (research is a public good), and because pretty much all the technologies we are using today have only become commercially viable because of extensive public support. Without extensive public funding, there would be no Internet, no integrated circuits, no air travel, no automobiles, and almost no drugs.
Public funding isn't about funding "my wet dream", it's there to fund our societal "wet dreams", as worked out by our elected representatives. Welcome to a modern democracy.
Don't the BSD and LGPL people always say that they don't care if people "take their code proprietary" as it were, and that "the code is still there even if someone else improves it and doesn't share back?"
I have released under BSD, GPL, and LGPL. When I picked BSD, I did so for practical reasons, like to encourage companies to use the code with less fear. Nevertheless, I strongly prefer for those companies to contribute back. Legally, I have no way to force them, but I'll certainly tell people in no uncertain terms what I think of them if they don't. Likewise, when I pick the BSD, I do so for good reasons, and relicensing the code under the GPL undermines those reasons, which is why I certainly will tell people who do that in no uncertain terms what I think of them.
In different words...
The BSD license is a license that relies on people to behave reasonably voluntarily; if they don't, you have every right to complain, even if you can't do anything legally about it.
The GPL license is a license that tries to force people to behave reasonably through legal obligations; if they don't, you don't just complain, you go to court.
My wife had to switch to **brrrr** Microsoft Office on her powerbook because OO.org on the Mac just didn't work for her, being unstable and what have you.
NeoOffice works like a charm; I use it for all my presentations, spreadsheet, and word processing on Macintosh and Linux. It also reads and writes MS Office files without problems.
I'd like to teach some graphic design and web production skills to my coworkers in the marketing department, and realize that most of them can't afford $2500 to buy Adobe's premium suite and, frankly, shouldn't need to because there should be competitive products on the market.
There used to be nice alternative to Adobe's suite, but the graphic arts community decided to hand Adobe a monopoly, not because those tools were particularly good, but simply out of laziness and ignorance. Now, they have to pay the price: $2500. That's what happens when you buy and standardize on proprietary software without thinking of the long term (keep in mind that Photoshop started out as a cheap toy program).
There are no simple quick fixes. If people want a cheap alternative in the long term, they have to switch to something else now, no matter how painful it may seem to them. Start using the Gimp, Inkscape, and/or any of the other open source programs, and start contributing to them through bug reports, feature suggestions, documentation, scripts, and (if you're capable of that) code.
If you wait for someone to hand you a free alternative on a silver platter, you'll be waiting forever. Either roll up your sleeves and contribute, or keep paying Adobe.
Whatever supposed legal advantage Microsoft is getting from these licenses is likely to be negligible. But every Windows user that switches to Linux is a loss to Microsoft and a win for the entire Linux community: these people are going to want drivers, pre-installs, etc.
So, on balance, I think these deals really work for Linux, not against it. But I have no problem torpedoing these deals with the GPLv3 either.
A government effort would get it done but it would cost several orders of magnitude more than what the free market could do it for.
That's just the usual government-hating drivel. In fact, almost all the technology you are using has been developed with government funds.
The difference is that the free market will do it when the technology is made available and it becomes economical, neither of which is currently the case.
It will never become economical if the public doesn't pay for driving the cost down.
Unfortunately, despite Ayn Randian fantasies and libertarian and free market blabber, something like a space elevator still requires a publicly funded, government-run effort. Sadly, before we can get there, we also need to get rid of the current, corrupt government and replace them with one that makes education and research a top priority again.
CVS popularized concurrent versioning and many other ideas that we are taking for granted, and there have been distributed versions of it, too. Linus may think that git does everything different from CVS, but git owes a lot of its functionality to CVS.
As for Subversion, it does support distributed development via svk, and I suspect that's going to get integrated into Subversion.
Linus suffers from a common misconception: if something doesn't work the way he wants it to, he assumes that it's no good. And if he adds a feature that he finds useful, he can't understand why other people might object.
Fortunately, Linus's opinions on version control systems don't matter: there are lots of version control systems to choose from, and users just choose what works for them. I bet that's a lot more Subversion than git.
That's the idea: to prevent the Tivoization of Linux.
And I won't be losing any sleep if Tivo gets in trouble over this; while their products have been pretty good, their patent claims have been outrageous (for the latest example, see here).
This is the upgrade of the MMC standard to beyond 8G. That was "planned obsolescence" in the sense that everybody knew that eventually, we'd need a new standard for that. But every other flash standard has done the same because it didn't make sense to design a standard for 4G+ cards in the days of 8M and 16M cards.
"Backwards compatibility" means that you can use your old cards in new devices conforming with the new standard. They also gave you a small card format and direct USB compatibility. Those are nice features; if they didn't care about backwards compatibility, they could just have chosen a new, small format that was incompatible with all your old cards.
It's quite common for people developing FOSS to share documentation and code non-publicly before a public release. There is nothing wrong with that, and it's an important part of FOSS. If the software falls under the (L)GPL, the recipient can, of course, redistribute it, but can choose not to. Under Apache or BSD, the developer can impose additional restrictions and prevent the recipient from redistributing the code.
You're making an assumption that's as bad as the one you're arguing against.
I'm making no assumptions at all.
You have no idea what the mechanism behind this effect is. It's perfectly possible that it's attracting immune cells to the site. Electric currents are known to do that elsewhere in the body. I also don't remember anything in the study about killing cells -- all they showed was that patients treated with the electric fields tended to live longer.
Will you get it through your thick head that I'm NOT arguing that this shows that non-ionizing radiation is dangerous?
What I am pointing out is that people have made the argument in the past that non-ionizing radiation can't have a significant biological effect in principle, and these results show otherwise.
As I said, LOTS of those careful experiments have been done. They've shown non-ionizing EM radiation at reasonable levels such as in cell phones is safe. Note that this study is no exception -- they found no negative side effects.
If this study shows anything about safety, it shows that the effects of non-ionizing radiation can be highly specific. That means that you can't generalize across different frequencies, and maybe not even across modulation patterns within a single band.
Furthermore, cell phones in general, and the high frequency bands in particular, haven't been in use long enough even to be able to conclude anything from usage. Mesothelioma, for example, is caused by a chemically harmless substance 20-50 years after exposure.
I use cell phones and don't worry about them; if there is a health risk, it's probably only a public health concern, not an individual concern. The proper claim is that for those frequencies and exposures that have been studied, no significant adverse effects have been observed over the time spans covered by those studies. How much you can generalize that to new frequencies and exposure patterns is anybody's guess. Claims that cell phones have been shown to be "safe" are junk science.
In light of that, in absence of new evidence, claiming cell phones present a cancer risk is scare mongering.
Well, then you should complain to people who are making such claims; I am not.
I'm just pointing out that this result shows that anybody who claimed that non-ionizing radiation is inherently safe (other than heating effects or electrocution) is full of shit: any kind of radiation that has the ability to kill specific cell types is potentially dangerous, and we can determine whether it is safe only through careful experiments.
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These agreements give Microsoft a little legal clout in the short term, but if they mean that LG and other companies feel safe using Linux now, that's a big problem for Microsoft: even if Microsoft actually had valid patents that impact Linux, they run out in an average of a decade, and any Windows customer they have lost to Linux by then is a problem for them.
In fact, these agreements are so obviously bad for Microsoft that I really wonder when the other shoe will drop.
It's silly to think that one license fits all. For something like the Linux kernel, a license like GPLv3 makes sense. For projects sponsored by companies, Apache 2 is a better choice (in fact, I consider Sun's use of GPL+commercial for Sun Java to be bad). What Stein's specific beef with the GPLv3 is, I don't get, since GPLv3 is largely GPLv2 with the Apache v2 patent provisions.
In any case, people like Hurley shouldn't spend time worrying about the future of the FSF. The FSF has been in this business for two decades and they know what they are doing.
Claim is indisputably correct
At issue isn't the claim that the Apple II could be programmed in machine code (it clearly could), at issue is the claim that the Apple II was the only one of the three that could be programmed in machine code. In fact, all three could be programmed in machine code.
Clearly you hate today's Apple, but don't confuse Woz's groundbreaking machine with today's company.
I don't "hate" Apple. What I hate is overblown claims of innovation. The Apple II wasn't a "groundbreaking" personal computer technologically. What it was was a typical Apple product: a premium-priced consumer product that liberally borrowed ideas from others, did a lot of things well, and had some infuriating and unnecessary limitations.
The Apple II was the only of the three consumer computers that year that 1) supported color 2) had addressable pixels 3) could be programmed in machine language and 4) could be hooked up to your color TV.
Claim 3 is wrong. Claims 1, 2, and 4 amount to the same thing, and they don't make the Apple II "more advanced", they just make it different. The simple fact that the TRS-80 had a 16x64 display, a better keyboard, and a more powerful processor made it so much more useful for real-world applications.
Woz mentions in his book that he felt they were simply cheap knock offs of the Apple I which didn't bother him a whit since he had the Apple II up his sleeve
Well, of course: Apple knows how to make machines that sell well. That's not the same as making the technically most advanced machines. In fact, time and again, Apple has beaten technically superior systems.
Whether it's "enough" is not the issue. The issue is that Jobs is lying through his teeth when he claims that any limitations that iPhone may have in terms of programmability are necessitated by network or carrier issues.
Furthermore, it's not about me writing applications. I have never written any applications for my Palm, but I am using about a dozen freeware and shareware apps on the Palm. In contrast, the iPod applications market, which is similarly restricted courtesy of Apple, is pretty pathetic. Many users benefit from the ability to develop and deploy on such a platform freely.
Use valgrind.
If you want Dashboard-like widgets for your phone, there's WidSets. They're designed from the ground up for cell phone usage, including cell phone screen sizes and keyboards, and they work on many different cell phones.
Windows Mobile, Palm, Linux, and Nokia's Symbian devices all are fully programmable and let you make arbitrary network connections. Nokia gives you Python and C for Symbian. Heck, talk about "programmable devices on the cellular network", I'm writing this through the cellular network from a MacBook Pro. And if your carrier doesn't offer the phone you want, you can use an unlocked phone on any of the GSM carriers (AT&T/Cingular being one of them). If the carrier wants to limit your network connections, they don't have to limit the phone, they do it like any sensible network admin--by configuring their routers.
Steve Jobs's attempts to present himself as the champion of consumers against monopolistic cell phone companies are bullshit. The iPhone can't be any more programmable or any less restricted than many other devices because many other devices are fully programmable, down to hacking the OS. If the iPhone delivers anything short of a full OS X programming environment, it's simply not in the same league as other smart phones. Dashboard Widgets won't do.
The technologies that are likely to wipe out civilization are not particle accelerators or the occasional nuke, but the internal combustion engine, coal-fired power plants, air travel, and biological weapons. Massive climate change and flooding are almost inevitable, as are worldwide epidemics that will kill off a large part of humanity.
Those will not wipe out humans altogether, but they may take us back into a pre-technological stage, and whether the technological revolution is going to happen again and at some point avoid those pitfalls is an open question.
Happy 30th Birthday to all of them, because all of them were introduced the same year. I think the only reason to single out the Apple II is that Apple is still around, since the TRS-80 and Commodore Pet were technically at least as good as the Apple II.
Yes, why wait for demonstrated need to spur investment by the private sector into new technologies when /. science dilettantes like you clearly know exactly what technologies will be needed and when, and are willing to force everyone else to fund your wet dream vision of the future? Splendid.
I have no particular opinion on whether space elevators themselves are a reasonable place to spend research funds.
I do know that the private sector is incapable of doing this, both because mainstream economics tells us so (research is a public good), and because pretty much all the technologies we are using today have only become commercially viable because of extensive public support. Without extensive public funding, there would be no Internet, no integrated circuits, no air travel, no automobiles, and almost no drugs.
Public funding isn't about funding "my wet dream", it's there to fund our societal "wet dreams", as worked out by our elected representatives. Welcome to a modern democracy.
Don't the BSD and LGPL people always say that they don't care if people "take their code proprietary" as it were, and that "the code is still there even if someone else improves it and doesn't share back?"
I have released under BSD, GPL, and LGPL. When I picked BSD, I did so for practical reasons, like to encourage companies to use the code with less fear. Nevertheless, I strongly prefer for those companies to contribute back. Legally, I have no way to force them, but I'll certainly tell people in no uncertain terms what I think of them if they don't. Likewise, when I pick the BSD, I do so for good reasons, and relicensing the code under the GPL undermines those reasons, which is why I certainly will tell people who do that in no uncertain terms what I think of them.
In different words...
The BSD license is a license that relies on people to behave reasonably voluntarily; if they don't, you have every right to complain, even if you can't do anything legally about it.
The GPL license is a license that tries to force people to behave reasonably through legal obligations; if they don't, you don't just complain, you go to court.
My wife had to switch to **brrrr** Microsoft Office on her powerbook because OO.org on the Mac just didn't work for her, being unstable and what have you.
NeoOffice works like a charm; I use it for all my presentations, spreadsheet, and word processing on Macintosh and Linux. It also reads and writes MS Office files without problems.
I'd like to teach some graphic design and web production skills to my coworkers in the marketing department, and realize that most of them can't afford $2500 to buy Adobe's premium suite and, frankly, shouldn't need to because there should be competitive products on the market.
There used to be nice alternative to Adobe's suite, but the graphic arts community decided to hand Adobe a monopoly, not because those tools were particularly good, but simply out of laziness and ignorance. Now, they have to pay the price: $2500. That's what happens when you buy and standardize on proprietary software without thinking of the long term (keep in mind that Photoshop started out as a cheap toy program).
There are no simple quick fixes. If people want a cheap alternative in the long term, they have to switch to something else now, no matter how painful it may seem to them. Start using the Gimp, Inkscape, and/or any of the other open source programs, and start contributing to them through bug reports, feature suggestions, documentation, scripts, and (if you're capable of that) code.
If you wait for someone to hand you a free alternative on a silver platter, you'll be waiting forever. Either roll up your sleeves and contribute, or keep paying Adobe.
Whatever supposed legal advantage Microsoft is getting from these licenses is likely to be negligible. But every Windows user that switches to Linux is a loss to Microsoft and a win for the entire Linux community: these people are going to want drivers, pre-installs, etc.
So, on balance, I think these deals really work for Linux, not against it. But I have no problem torpedoing these deals with the GPLv3 either.
Quantum "teleportation" is an interesting phenomenon, but it has little to do with Start Trek style transporters.
A government effort would get it done but it would cost several orders of magnitude more than what the free market could do it for.
That's just the usual government-hating drivel. In fact, almost all the technology you are using has been developed with government funds.
The difference is that the free market will do it when the technology is made available and it becomes economical, neither of which is currently the case.
It will never become economical if the public doesn't pay for driving the cost down.
Unfortunately, despite Ayn Randian fantasies and libertarian and free market blabber, something like a space elevator still requires a publicly funded, government-run effort. Sadly, before we can get there, we also need to get rid of the current, corrupt government and replace them with one that makes education and research a top priority again.
CVS popularized concurrent versioning and many other ideas that we are taking for granted, and there have been distributed versions of it, too. Linus may think that git does everything different from CVS, but git owes a lot of its functionality to CVS.
As for Subversion, it does support distributed development via svk, and I suspect that's going to get integrated into Subversion.
Linus suffers from a common misconception: if something doesn't work the way he wants it to, he assumes that it's no good. And if he adds a feature that he finds useful, he can't understand why other people might object.
Fortunately, Linus's opinions on version control systems don't matter: there are lots of version control systems to choose from, and users just choose what works for them. I bet that's a lot more Subversion than git.
That's the idea: to prevent the Tivoization of Linux.
And I won't be losing any sleep if Tivo gets in trouble over this; while their products have been pretty good, their patent claims have been outrageous (for the latest example, see here).
This is the upgrade of the MMC standard to beyond 8G. That was "planned obsolescence" in the sense that everybody knew that eventually, we'd need a new standard for that. But every other flash standard has done the same because it didn't make sense to design a standard for 4G+ cards in the days of 8M and 16M cards.
"Backwards compatibility" means that you can use your old cards in new devices conforming with the new standard. They also gave you a small card format and direct USB compatibility. Those are nice features; if they didn't care about backwards compatibility, they could just have chosen a new, small format that was incompatible with all your old cards.
It's quite common for people developing FOSS to share documentation and code non-publicly before a public release. There is nothing wrong with that, and it's an important part of FOSS. If the software falls under the (L)GPL, the recipient can, of course, redistribute it, but can choose not to. Under Apache or BSD, the developer can impose additional restrictions and prevent the recipient from redistributing the code.
You're making an assumption that's as bad as the one you're arguing against.
I'm making no assumptions at all.
You have no idea what the mechanism behind this effect is. It's perfectly possible that it's attracting immune cells to the site. Electric currents are known to do that elsewhere in the body. I also don't remember anything in the study about killing cells -- all they showed was that patients treated with the electric fields tended to live longer.
Will you get it through your thick head that I'm NOT arguing that this shows that non-ionizing radiation is dangerous?
What I am pointing out is that people have made the argument in the past that non-ionizing radiation can't have a significant biological effect in principle, and these results show otherwise.
As I said, LOTS of those careful experiments have been done. They've shown non-ionizing EM radiation at reasonable levels such as in cell phones is safe. Note that this study is no exception -- they found no negative side effects.
If this study shows anything about safety, it shows that the effects of non-ionizing radiation can be highly specific. That means that you can't generalize across different frequencies, and maybe not even across modulation patterns within a single band.
Furthermore, cell phones in general, and the high frequency bands in particular, haven't been in use long enough even to be able to conclude anything from usage. Mesothelioma, for example, is caused by a chemically harmless substance 20-50 years after exposure.
I use cell phones and don't worry about them; if there is a health risk, it's probably only a public health concern, not an individual concern. The proper claim is that for those frequencies and exposures that have been studied, no significant adverse effects have been observed over the time spans covered by those studies. How much you can generalize that to new frequencies and exposure patterns is anybody's guess. Claims that cell phones have been shown to be "safe" are junk science.
In light of that, in absence of new evidence, claiming cell phones present a cancer risk is scare mongering.
Well, then you should complain to people who are making such claims; I am not.
I'm just pointing out that this result shows that anybody who claimed that non-ionizing radiation is inherently safe (other than heating effects or electrocution) is full of shit: any kind of radiation that has the ability to kill specific cell types is potentially dangerous, and we can determine whether it is safe only through careful experiments.