I'm not sure if it's QNX or one of the other quasi-embedded operating systems that advertises it can do just this (I don't feel like tracking down my old Dr. Frobs' right now). They included comments from some users about how QNX had *never* crashed on them, and didn't even need to be taken out of service when OS components needed to be upgraded. But it did sound like it was a quasi-microkernel, and it certainly would be easier to do something like that on a microkernel than on a monolithic kernel.
It's not an entirely far-fetched idea, although it seems like an extremely specialized need. Something that would be of much more general value would be the ability to add more hardware on the fly. For servers in particular, being able to add more mass storage would be very useful indeed.
About the only buildings that anyone ever referred to by name at the 'tute were Tech Square (NE43, although there's another numbered building there), the Student Center (W20), the athletic buildings (don't know the numbers), the chapel (ditto), the dorms (generally ditto), the Green Building (54), and the Media Lab (officially the Wiesner Building or E15, sometimes referred to as the bathroom because of the tile on the outside). So no, nobody's ever going to refer to it by name.
Amazing that I've been out of there for 12 years now and I'm still working practically within funnelator range...
Given where it is, it will probably be numbered in the low 40's or so. Heaven help us if it's numbered 42.
I do think this AOL thing is silly, but keep in mind that there's an important difference here: the AOL folks entered into a formal agreement with AOL, and were required to spend a certain amount of time performing certain tasks in exchange for value (free accounts).
Slashdot's a completely different ball of wax. Nobody enters into a formal agreement with Rob (much less in exchange for any value). I suppose one might argue that moderation counts as value, but that's a stretch. If moderators were required to spend a certain amount of time reading Slashdot, and in return received through Slashdot discounts on computers, that might be a different issue.
People writing free software would seem to be in a similar position: except for people such as Alan Cox who receive compensation in exchange for working on Linux (and he's formally employed by Red Hat, so there's no fuzzy issue here) and employees of the Free Software Foundation (likewise, they're formally employed), few if any people who write free software receive compensation in exchange for their services. While they may receive benefits (such as better employment prospects due to reputations won), they're not receiving compensation from the "owner" of the project. In other words, people who write Gimp plugins are not given compensation by the Gimp crew in exchange for providing a certain amount of their time.
(Although I did have an email conversation from someone who claimed to be an attorney who was very upset that authors of free software are not paid and who believes that Red Hat is taking unfair advantage of everyone who contributes to Linux. I was unable to convince him that free software authors are truly volunteering, and my comparisons with both volunteer and pro bono work fell on deaf ears. But he did not claim that there was any violation of labor laws.)
Question: is it possible to create a simple question tree (expert system) to decide whether a license is Open Source [with capital letters], or GNU [well, GNU-like], etc. ?
Why do we still have judges and juries?
It's clear that two people can read the same license and come to entirely different conclusions about whether a given license meets the standards that do exist. So for one thing, designing that kind of expert system would be problematic. Not to mention that implementing the kind of free text recognition needed to create the semantic information needed to do the evaluation.
Let's not forget that despite our differences that our goals are *much* more in line than they ever could be with, say, Microsoft. We're arguing over fine details here. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's remember that our disagreements are fundamentally friendly, even when the tone isn't.
ESR, Bruce Perens, and RMS are all on the side of free source. Their motivations differ, as does precise details of what they consider appropriate, but their overall positions are still clustered quite tightly.
This doesn't sound like it will be an attempt to allow only certain specific licenses, but rather to evaluate each proposed license to determine whether it meets Open Source standards. So it's more in line with, say, Underwriters Laboratories, which evaluates consumer electrical products to determine that they're safe.
People who want to use licenses that don't meet the requirements are free to do so, but they shouldn't call them Open Source.
Another example of a similar use of trademark that in practice works well is the way foods are marked kosher (acceptable under Jewish law). There are a number of symbols that are used, the most common one being a "U" inside an "O". The Orthodox Union monitors/supervises the production processes for foods to determine if the meet spec, and if they do, they allow the manufacturer to place the "OU" tag on the food. Manufacturers who use the OU symbol that are not under supervision get hauled into court. So the symbol indicates that an independent body has evaluated the food and determined that it meets the requirements.
This, BTW, is why trademarks are one form of "intellectual property" that I consider good in certain circumstances, because it allows people trusted by the community to set standards and evaluate products against those standards.
In the spirit of free source (my "neutral" term), it sounds like the process will be an open one.
So assuming that they actually follow through with this, it looks like they'll actually be trying to compete against Linux by offering something better suited for their target market than what they're currently offering.
It sounds like fairly steep money for what's basically an embedded server, and there should be plenty of room for Cobalt et al to knock down the price point. NT's still a heavyweight operating system, and it will be interesting to see how much they can actually excise from it while still maintaining the necessary functionality. My money has it that it's easy to build a much lighter weight server based on Linux than around NT. And while disks and RAM are cheap, the low end's a savage place where $10 savings on disk and $20 on RAM and $50 or whatever Microsoft's going to charge for the OS can add up fast.
The big issue for any vendor of such a system is competing with the big guys on volume, methinks.
While it's likely that all the hoopla over the APSL triggered this rewrite, it was a long time coming, and provides a useful framework for discussion of any particular licensing terms. Nothing I saw in it indicated an attempt to rule out the APSL per se; it all fit logically into the free software framework. The issue of restrictive laws (e. g. export controls) was handled sensibly; there is no good reason for any free software license to specifically incorporate these laws, since all contracts are implicitly governed by law.
The issue of forbidding a user from modifying a program for strictly private use (with no distribution) isn't quite what it looks. While it sounds like it should be in the spirit of free software to require even private modifications to be made publicly available, it would contravene the spirit of personal privacy that's necessary in any free society. Furthermore, it would be impossible to implement in practice.
At what point would the modifications have to be made public? As soon as the user has made any change at all? Taken to extremes, that would require that the user use a text editor that immediately modified the backing copy, and that the user always keep the source in a publicly available location (e. g. an anonymous ftp server). So one might then take a different tack, and say that it's as soon as the modified code "works". What's the definition of "work" here (remember, this is a license that binds as strictly as any other kind of license, and terms must be precisely defined)? That's not too hard for someone to get around; simply break something else and don't attempt to fix it.
This pedantry aside, the importance of a zone of privacy (which includes one's computing) is essential to a free society. The only issue is when software is distributed.
So what's the difference between free software competing with commercial software and commercial software competing with commercial software? The vast majority of companies started fail before ever producing a profit. Investing time and talent into developing a product doesn't guarantee any return.
Maybe freemware will fail, maybe VMWare will decide to go open source, who knows what will happen. But why should VMWare be free from competition?
Just to make things absolutely clear: free software does not mean that people are not allowed to charge for it. Free speech, not free beer.
If free software then wins the competition with proprietary software, that's life. Vendors of proprietary software do not have any right to prohibit others from competing with them (patent issues aside, but let's stay out of that hairball).
Since nobody can agree on the name or why, let's just invent a new one that's politically neutral. FreD stands for FREeDom. It doesn't contain GNU. It doesn't contain X. It doesn't contain BSD. It doesn't contain Linux.
Obviously, there's all sorts of stuff involving retries, tail ends, and so forth that I've left out, but the upshot is that most of the data never actually makes it into user space. mmap simply does the mapping; the data doesn't fault in until someone actually requests it, and if the user program never touches it, it doesn't get copied into user space.
However, there are things that could be done at the kernel level to strip away even this kind of overhead. The fd>fd copy (with retries done at the kernel level, rather than the user level) is one possibility. Another possibility is a system call to actually copy a file to a file descriptor, thus avoiding the user-space open(). This seems a bit of a stretch.
However, there's another approach that might yield a big payoff, which is actually to embed some knowledge of the http protocol in a kernel module. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds; NFS servers have been doing this for well over a decade, explicitly for performance reasons. While http is a stream-oriented protocol, it's actually quite a simple protocol indeed, and completely stateless. Even the keepalive option introduces no state beyond a persistent socket; each http transaction is logically independent of anything else.
So the basic idea here is that the user-space http daemon registers mappings between URI's and filesystem locations, and the kernel-space http daemon intercepts these requests and processes them without involving the user-space daemon at all.
This is very schematic, and doesn't address issues such as cookies, filesystem permissions, and such. But it's certainly a possible architecture for this kind of beast.
I haven't heard RMS speak on the topic, but if he's disappointed, it's more likely (IMHO) to be because Linus credits gcc more than the GPL. I certainly don't think that RMS expects everyone to like emacs -- it's just an application, after all -- and certainly the utilities could have been written by someone else, but the free, well-ported compiler is the linchpin of the whole enterprise.
And note that Linus said "...are for Linux insignificant IN COMPARISON." That's a long way from saying that they're truly insignificant.
For consumer versions of Windows, this makes sense. For something intended as a server platform, this is a bad decision, in my view.
Servers don't normally need good GUI performance; they're not trying to do complex rendering or animation, and most of the time nobody's anywhere near their consoles. What's important is that they're robust and reliable, have the necessary administrative capability, and have good I/O and sometimes computational performance. If the GUI preempts disk or network activities to update some flashy widget, the server's ability to do its job is compromised. If a bug in the display driver (and display drivers tend to be complex) locks up or crashes the system, likewise. If some alert box pops up and the system can't do anything until someone manually dismisses it, it's also not very good.
This suggests that NT Workstation (where graphics performance actually may be important for some applications) and NT Server should have different design goals, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
The current difference between anonymous and signed postings (1) is arbitrary, and different individuals may have different notions of an appropriate differential. Some people may prefer no differential at all, while others may prefer anonymous postings to have to meet a higher standard.
IMHO (and _only_ my opinion),/. is almost unreadable when it's flooded by anonymous abuse, and unfortunately all too many anonymous postings are abusive or otherwise uninteresting to me. Nonetheless, some people have a valid reason for posting anonymously. The problem with the one point difference is that if someone moderates a signed article down by one point I'll miss it if I set my score to 1, but if I set it to 0 I get all of the anonymous posts.
What I think I'd rather do is set a differential of perhaps 3-5, and a threshold of perhaps -1. This will enable me to see the vast majority of signed postings while skipping all but the most highly rated anonymous ones. But I want to emphasize that that is *my* preference, and that people should be free to set whatever they want.
This is clearly moving in the direction of a kill file, which would probably be a real hassle to set up on the server side (simply because of the amount of processing that would have to take place on each article). I don't know the structure of the internal slashdot code, but this would seem like a stable intermediate point.
This looks like a very interesting system of moderation, and it will be most interesting to see how it plays out.
The problem is precisely that its use is not voluntary in this situation. Private individuals may use whatever filtering strikes their fancy. When the government gets into the act (in the form of a public library, or requirements on a public library), though, there is a First Amendment issue at stake. It's not relevant that the software is not produced by the government; in essence, the government has granted a private entity a franchise to regulate free speech of the general public.
Why should children "simply not be allowed to view certain things"? Suppose, for example, that a high school student is writing a term paper on propaganda for a history class, and wishes to use contemporary neo-Nazi sites for examples?
Saying that children categorically should not be exposed to certain things is neither effective nor desirable. They'll either find other sources for the same information, or find ways around the filters. It's much preferable for them to be exposed to this material under mature supervision than to see it in secrecy with their peers, who probably don't understand the harm at all (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not), or who think that it's cool to kill people, and gee, isn't it neat that this web site advocates killing people and tells us how to go about it?
Since it's contraband, it will not be possible to use this for educational purposes. It will not be possible to discuss Nazi propaganda and explain the harm caused by it, and point to examples on the net for classroom discussion. It will be that much harder to teach children how to think critically and thereby avoid the same mistakes in the future. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it (Santayana), and children are better learners than adults.
To address the issue of adult usage: libraries are not intended solely for purposes of scholarly research. Most libraries contain works of entertainment (novels and such). Certainly if one individual is tying up resources to the exclusion of other library patrons the library can enforce reasonable time, place, and manner regulations; libraries routinely restrict how many books one individual may have checked out at any one time, and impose fines for late return.
Furthermore, even by the definition of scholarly research, individuals may not want others to know what they're accessing. It may be that someone wishes to research something unpopular and does not wish to be exposed to the opprobrium of the surrounding community (consider someone who wants to study the ACLU or Planned Parenthood in a conservative community -- or the NRA in certain other communities). It may be for other reasons of secrecy, such as a desire to be the first author of a given piece of research, for preservation of patent rights (as distasteful as that may be to many of us), a nondisclosure agreement that someone may believe he is in violation of if others can see what's on his screen, and so forth.
So no, I cannot agree that censorship is good in certain circumstances. I'm Jewish, and for that reason I would want my children to have access at a relatively early age to hate sites, in order that I could teach them the dangers of hatred and how to recognize it.
I'd like to set my threshold lower, but it's an unfortunate fact of life that I have finite time to read. Rob's suggestion that moderators set their threshold low is a good one, however, so I'm afraid that I won't be doing much moderating.
What I'd really like (and I hope I just missed it) is an option to filter all AC posts ONLY. Another option that might come in handy as an alternative would be a personal preference for the anonymous "penalty" (which currently is 1 point). Setting it to 3-5 points would allow filtering most of them out. It's a bit parasitic, to be sure, but it's an unfortunate fact of life that anonymous posts tend to be a lot less content-intensive than signed comments.
10% code, but more than 10% motivation ? Yes!
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The FSF has still contributed the largest single share. And I suspect that if one looks at the core --/bin,/usr/bin, libc, and such -- the fraction is much higher.
More to the point, though, the FSF provided the real impetus behind the free (speech, as opposed to beer) software movement, and devised the framework (GPL) in which free software could be created and be guaranteed to remain free. Whether someone else would have had the same insight is anyone's guess, but it's certainly not obvious that that would have happened. This, to me, is more important than any piece of software, other than gcc, libc, and to a lesser extent emacs.
Finally, the Demon Penguin gang really shouldn't talk about using egcs if their intent is to produce an FSF-free Linux distribution. egcs is quite directly based on gcc, even if it has diverged. The egcs team quite openly acknowledges that fact through the name (Experimental GNU Compiler Suite).
GNU/Linux may be an awkward name, and names may not always be fair, and Richard Stallman may be very annoying, but that does not make his point invalid. Eric Raymond, who is no particular friend of the FSF's position (he's generally regarded as a, if not the, leader in what I refer to as the "pragmatic" camp of the free source movement), took pains to acknowledge that fact at Linux World.
With this kind of thing, perhaps they could now remove the multiplier lock and allow hackers to play around with the multiplier to their hearts' content.
I'm happy with Star Office, when I actually need one of those silly things, which is infrequent.
I don't understand how "switch[ing] between StarOffice and other apps for several times" would have any effect. There's no notion of a currently active app in Linux or any other version of Linux. There is the notion of a window having focus, but that's rather trivial in nature. When I use StarOffice, I put it in its own virtual desktop so it doesn't clutter (or hide) everything else I have running, and so I switch to that desktop (or page, or whatever Enlightenment calls it). I frequently switch back and forth rapidly between it and another virtual desktop with no ill effects.
Yes, I've had a few SO5 crashes, but as other people have stated, I've never lost any work. I'm none too thrilled about that anyway, but it has no effect on the OS.
Performance-wise, it's just fine, although admittedly it's easier to deal with on a Celeron 300/450A and 128 MB than a K6-233 and 64 MB. And in terms of integration between modules, it blows Office (95, at least; I haven't used anything more recent) clean out of the water.
It's probably at least as fast, or faster, than a pair of Pentium 233's. The problem is that doubling the number of processors doesn't double the memory bandwidth. Furthermore, the BH6 runs memory at 100 MHz rather than 66 MHz, which helps a lot.
If the SMP board has 128-bit wide main memory you'd see an improvement, though. Also, depending upon your application the bigger (but much slower) L2 cache might help.
And Red Hat and Corel shall lead us all...
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Slackware and Debian have no apparent interest in the corporate market. However, they can lead the market in experimenting with new things that will eventually filter down into other distributions. And don't forget that Red Hat is contributing a lot (in the form of subsidizing Gnome, gtk+, and so forth.
Indeed. Coding skills won't help you solve a problem (beyond an immediate "how do I get around this stupid language bogosity?"), but good problem solving skills in general are portable to most any situation.
The fact that it seems to be necessary for any large scale C++ project to have a C++ guru on staff is testimony to the problems with the language. And if the C++ guru actually knows what s/he is doing, that person is very well aware of the problems with the language.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if it's QNX or one of the other quasi-embedded operating systems that advertises it can do just this (I don't feel like tracking down my old Dr. Frobs' right now). They included comments from some users about how QNX had *never* crashed on them, and didn't even need to be taken out of service when OS components needed to be upgraded. But it did sound like it was a quasi-microkernel, and it certainly would be easier to do something like that on a microkernel than on a monolithic kernel.
It's not an entirely far-fetched idea, although it seems like an extremely specialized need. Something that would be of much more general value would be the ability to add more hardware on the fly. For servers in particular, being able to add more mass storage would be very useful indeed.
About the only buildings that anyone ever referred to by name at the 'tute were Tech Square (NE43, although there's another numbered building there), the Student Center (W20), the athletic buildings (don't know the numbers), the chapel (ditto), the dorms (generally ditto), the Green Building (54), and the Media Lab (officially the Wiesner Building or E15, sometimes referred to as the bathroom because of the tile on the outside). So no, nobody's ever going to refer to it by name.
Amazing that I've been out of there for 12 years now and I'm still working practically within funnelator range...
Given where it is, it will probably be numbered in the low 40's or so. Heaven help us if it's numbered 42.
I do think this AOL thing is silly, but keep in mind that there's an important difference here: the AOL folks entered into a formal agreement with AOL, and were required to spend a certain amount of time performing certain tasks in exchange for value (free accounts).
/usr/include/std/disclaimer
Slashdot's a completely different ball of wax. Nobody enters into a formal agreement with Rob (much less in exchange for any value). I suppose one might argue that moderation counts as value, but that's a stretch. If moderators were required to spend a certain amount of time reading Slashdot, and in return received through Slashdot discounts on computers, that might be a different issue.
People writing free software would seem to be in a similar position: except for people such as Alan Cox who receive compensation in exchange for working on Linux (and he's formally employed by Red Hat, so there's no fuzzy issue here) and employees of the Free Software Foundation (likewise, they're formally employed), few if any people who write free software receive compensation in exchange for their services. While they may receive benefits (such as better employment prospects due to reputations won), they're not receiving compensation from the "owner" of the project. In other words, people who write Gimp plugins are not given compensation by the Gimp crew in exchange for providing a certain amount of their time.
(Although I did have an email conversation from someone who claimed to be an attorney who was very upset that authors of free software are not paid and who believes that Red Hat is taking unfair advantage of everyone who contributes to Linux. I was unable to convince him that free software authors are truly volunteering, and my comparisons with both volunteer and pro bono work fell on deaf ears. But he did not claim that there was any violation of labor laws.)
#include
#line 1
I'm not a lawyer, and I don't watch them on TV.
Why do we still have judges and juries?
It's clear that two people can read the same license and come to entirely different conclusions about whether a given license meets the standards that do exist. So for one thing, designing that kind of expert system would be problematic. Not to mention that implementing the kind of free text recognition needed to create the semantic information needed to do the evaluation.
Let's not forget that despite our differences that our goals are *much* more in line than they ever could be with, say, Microsoft. We're arguing over fine details here. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's remember that our disagreements are fundamentally friendly, even when the tone isn't.
ESR, Bruce Perens, and RMS are all on the side of free source. Their motivations differ, as does precise details of what they consider appropriate, but their overall positions are still clustered quite tightly.
This doesn't sound like it will be an attempt to allow only certain specific licenses, but rather to evaluate each proposed license to determine whether it meets Open Source standards. So it's more in line with, say, Underwriters Laboratories, which evaluates consumer electrical products to determine that they're safe.
People who want to use licenses that don't meet the requirements are free to do so, but they shouldn't call them Open Source.
Another example of a similar use of trademark that in practice works well is the way foods are marked kosher (acceptable under Jewish law). There are a number of symbols that are used, the most common one being a "U" inside an "O". The Orthodox Union monitors/supervises the production processes for foods to determine if the meet spec, and if they do, they allow the manufacturer to place the "OU" tag on the food. Manufacturers who use the OU symbol that are not under supervision get hauled into court. So the symbol indicates that an independent body has evaluated the food and determined that it meets the requirements.
This, BTW, is why trademarks are one form of "intellectual property" that I consider good in certain circumstances, because it allows people trusted by the community to set standards and evaluate products against those standards.
In the spirit of free source (my "neutral" term), it sounds like the process will be an open one.
So assuming that they actually follow through with this, it looks like they'll actually be trying to compete against Linux by offering something better suited for their target market than what they're currently offering.
It sounds like fairly steep money for what's basically an embedded server, and there should be plenty of room for Cobalt et al to knock down the price point. NT's still a heavyweight operating system, and it will be interesting to see how much they can actually excise from it while still maintaining the necessary functionality. My money has it that it's easy to build a much lighter weight server based on Linux than around NT. And while disks and RAM are cheap, the low end's a savage place where $10 savings on disk and $20 on RAM and $50 or whatever Microsoft's going to charge for the OS can add up fast.
The big issue for any vendor of such a system is competing with the big guys on volume, methinks.
While it's likely that all the hoopla over the APSL triggered this rewrite, it was a long time coming, and provides a useful framework for discussion of any particular licensing terms. Nothing I saw in it indicated an attempt to rule out the APSL per se; it all fit logically into the free software framework. The issue of restrictive laws (e. g. export controls) was handled sensibly; there is no good reason for any free software license to specifically incorporate these laws, since all contracts are implicitly governed by law.
The issue of forbidding a user from modifying a program for strictly private use (with no distribution) isn't quite what it looks. While it sounds like it should be in the spirit of free software to require even private modifications to be made publicly available, it would contravene the spirit of personal privacy that's necessary in any free society. Furthermore, it would be impossible to implement in practice.
At what point would the modifications have to be made public? As soon as the user has made any change at all? Taken to extremes, that would require that the user use a text editor that immediately modified the backing copy, and that the user always keep the source in a publicly available location (e. g. an anonymous ftp server). So one might then take a different tack, and say that it's as soon as the modified code "works". What's the definition of "work" here (remember, this is a license that binds as strictly as any other kind of license, and terms must be precisely defined)? That's not too hard for someone to get around; simply break something else and don't attempt to fix it.
This pedantry aside, the importance of a zone of privacy (which includes one's computing) is essential to a free society. The only issue is when software is distributed.
I imagine that if Compaq gets enough feedback from the community they may well reconsider their decision about the compiler. But we'll see.
So what's the difference between free software competing with commercial software and commercial software competing with commercial software? The vast majority of companies started fail before ever producing a profit. Investing time and talent into developing a product doesn't guarantee any return.
Maybe freemware will fail, maybe VMWare will decide to go open source, who knows what will happen. But why should VMWare be free from competition?
Just to make things absolutely clear: free software does not mean that people are not allowed to charge for it. Free speech, not free beer.
If free software then wins the competition with proprietary software, that's life. Vendors of proprietary software do not have any right to prohibit others from competing with them (patent issues aside, but let's stay out of that hairball).
Since nobody can agree on the name or why, let's just invent a new one that's politically neutral. FreD stands for FREeDom. It doesn't contain GNU. It doesn't contain X. It doesn't contain BSD. It doesn't contain Linux.
:-) :-) :-)
Just to avoid any confusion, this is
:-)
As it stands now, the user space code can come awfully close to it:
fd = open(translated_URI, O_RDONLY);
addr = mmap(fd, random_mmap_args);
write(socket, addr, whatever);
Obviously, there's all sorts of stuff involving retries, tail ends, and so forth that I've left out, but the upshot is that most of the data never actually makes it into user space. mmap simply does the mapping; the data doesn't fault in until someone actually requests it, and if the user program never touches it, it doesn't get copied into user space.
However, there are things that could be done at the kernel level to strip away even this kind of overhead. The fd>fd copy (with retries done at the kernel level, rather than the user level) is one possibility. Another possibility is a system call to actually copy a file to a file descriptor, thus avoiding the user-space open(). This seems a bit of a stretch.
However, there's another approach that might yield a big payoff, which is actually to embed some knowledge of the http protocol in a kernel module. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds; NFS servers have been doing this for well over a decade, explicitly for performance reasons. While http is a stream-oriented protocol, it's actually quite a simple protocol indeed, and completely stateless. Even the keepalive option introduces no state beyond a persistent socket; each http transaction is logically independent of anything else.
So the basic idea here is that the user-space http daemon registers mappings between URI's and filesystem locations, and the kernel-space http daemon intercepts these requests and processes them without involving the user-space daemon at all.
This is very schematic, and doesn't address issues such as cookies, filesystem permissions, and such. But it's certainly a possible architecture for this kind of beast.
I haven't heard RMS speak on the topic, but if he's disappointed, it's more likely (IMHO) to be because Linus credits gcc more than the GPL. I certainly don't think that RMS expects everyone to like emacs -- it's just an application, after all -- and certainly the utilities could have been written by someone else, but the free, well-ported compiler is the linchpin of the whole enterprise.
And note that Linus said "...are for Linux insignificant IN COMPARISON." That's a long way from saying that they're truly insignificant.
For consumer versions of Windows, this makes sense. For something intended as a server platform, this is a bad decision, in my view.
Servers don't normally need good GUI performance; they're not trying to do complex rendering or animation, and most of the time nobody's anywhere near their consoles. What's important is that they're robust and reliable, have the necessary administrative capability, and have good I/O and sometimes computational performance. If the GUI preempts disk or network activities to update some flashy widget, the server's ability to do its job is compromised. If a bug in the display driver (and display drivers tend to be complex) locks up or crashes the system, likewise. If some alert box pops up and the system can't do anything until someone manually dismisses it, it's also not very good.
This suggests that NT Workstation (where graphics performance actually may be important for some applications) and NT Server should have different design goals, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
The current difference between anonymous and signed postings (1) is arbitrary, and different individuals may have different notions of an appropriate differential. Some people may prefer no differential at all, while others may prefer anonymous postings to have to meet a higher standard.
/. is almost unreadable when it's flooded by anonymous abuse, and unfortunately all too many anonymous postings are abusive or otherwise uninteresting to me. Nonetheless, some people have a valid reason for posting anonymously. The problem with the one point difference is that if someone moderates a signed article down by one point I'll miss it if I set my score to 1, but if I set it to 0 I get all of the anonymous posts.
IMHO (and _only_ my opinion),
What I think I'd rather do is set a differential of perhaps 3-5, and a threshold of perhaps -1. This will enable me to see the vast majority of signed postings while skipping all but the most highly rated anonymous ones. But I want to emphasize that that is *my* preference, and that people should be free to set whatever they want.
This is clearly moving in the direction of a kill file, which would probably be a real hassle to set up on the server side (simply because of the amount of processing that would have to take place on each article). I don't know the structure of the internal slashdot code, but this would seem like a stable intermediate point.
This looks like a very interesting system of moderation, and it will be most interesting to see how it plays out.
The problem is precisely that its use is not voluntary in this situation. Private individuals may use whatever filtering strikes their fancy. When the government gets into the act (in the form of a public library, or requirements on a public library), though, there is a First Amendment issue at stake. It's not relevant that the software is not produced by the government; in essence, the government has granted a private entity a franchise to regulate free speech of the general public.
Why should children "simply not be allowed to view certain things"? Suppose, for example, that a high school student is writing a term paper on propaganda for a history class, and wishes to use contemporary neo-Nazi sites for examples?
Saying that children categorically should not be exposed to certain things is neither effective nor desirable. They'll either find other sources for the same information, or find ways around the filters. It's much preferable for them to be exposed to this material under mature supervision than to see it in secrecy with their peers, who probably don't understand the harm at all (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not), or who think that it's cool to kill people, and gee, isn't it neat that this web site advocates killing people and tells us how to go about it?
Since it's contraband, it will not be possible to use this for educational purposes. It will not be possible to discuss Nazi propaganda and explain the harm caused by it, and point to examples on the net for classroom discussion. It will be that much harder to teach children how to think critically and thereby avoid the same mistakes in the future. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it (Santayana), and children are better learners than adults.
To address the issue of adult usage: libraries are not intended solely for purposes of scholarly research. Most libraries contain works of entertainment (novels and such). Certainly if one individual is tying up resources to the exclusion of other library patrons the library can enforce reasonable time, place, and manner regulations; libraries routinely restrict how many books one individual may have checked out at any one time, and impose fines for late return.
Furthermore, even by the definition of scholarly research, individuals may not want others to know what they're accessing. It may be that someone wishes to research something unpopular and does not wish to be exposed to the opprobrium of the surrounding community (consider someone who wants to study the ACLU or Planned Parenthood in a conservative community -- or the NRA in certain other communities). It may be for other reasons of secrecy, such as a desire to be the first author of a given piece of research, for preservation of patent rights (as distasteful as that may be to many of us), a nondisclosure agreement that someone may believe he is in violation of if others can see what's on his screen, and so forth.
So no, I cannot agree that censorship is good in certain circumstances. I'm Jewish, and for that reason I would want my children to have access at a relatively early age to hate sites, in order that I could teach them the dangers of hatred and how to recognize it.
I'd like to set my threshold lower, but it's an unfortunate fact of life that I have finite time to read. Rob's suggestion that moderators set their threshold low is a good one, however, so I'm afraid that I won't be doing much moderating.
What I'd really like (and I hope I just missed it) is an option to filter all AC posts ONLY. Another option that might come in handy as an alternative would be a personal preference for the anonymous "penalty" (which currently is 1 point). Setting it to 3-5 points would allow filtering most of them out. It's a bit parasitic, to be sure, but it's an unfortunate fact of life that anonymous posts tend to be a lot less content-intensive than signed comments.
The FSF has still contributed the largest single share. And I suspect that if one looks at the core -- /bin, /usr/bin, libc, and such -- the fraction is much higher.
More to the point, though, the FSF provided the real impetus behind the free (speech, as opposed to beer) software movement, and devised the framework (GPL) in which free software could be created and be guaranteed to remain free. Whether someone else would have had the same insight is anyone's guess, but it's certainly not obvious that that would have happened. This, to me, is more important than any piece of software, other than gcc, libc, and to a lesser extent emacs.
Finally, the Demon Penguin gang really shouldn't talk about using egcs if their intent is to produce an FSF-free Linux distribution. egcs is quite directly based on gcc, even if it has diverged. The egcs team quite openly acknowledges that fact through the name (Experimental GNU Compiler Suite).
GNU/Linux may be an awkward name, and names may not always be fair, and Richard Stallman may be very annoying, but that does not make his point invalid. Eric Raymond, who is no particular friend of the FSF's position (he's generally regarded as a, if not the, leader in what I refer to as the "pragmatic" camp of the free source movement), took pains to acknowledge that fact at Linux World.
With this kind of thing, perhaps they could now remove the multiplier lock and allow hackers to play around with the multiplier to their hearts' content.
I'm happy with Star Office, when I actually need one of those silly things, which is infrequent.
I don't understand how "switch[ing] between StarOffice and other apps for several times" would have any effect. There's no notion of a currently active app in Linux or any other version of Linux. There is the notion of a window having focus, but that's rather trivial in nature. When I use StarOffice, I put it in its own virtual desktop so it doesn't clutter (or hide) everything else I have running, and so I switch to that desktop (or page, or whatever Enlightenment calls it). I frequently switch back and forth rapidly between it and another virtual desktop with no ill effects.
Yes, I've had a few SO5 crashes, but as other people have stated, I've never lost any work. I'm none too thrilled about that anyway, but it has no effect on the OS.
Performance-wise, it's just fine, although admittedly it's easier to deal with on a Celeron 300/450A and 128 MB than a K6-233 and 64 MB. And in terms of integration between modules, it blows Office (95, at least; I haven't used anything more recent) clean out of the water.
It's probably at least as fast, or faster, than a pair of Pentium 233's. The problem is that doubling the number of processors doesn't double the memory bandwidth. Furthermore, the BH6 runs memory at 100 MHz rather than 66 MHz, which helps a lot.
If the SMP board has 128-bit wide main memory you'd see an improvement, though. Also, depending upon your application the bigger (but much slower) L2 cache might help.
Slackware and Debian have no apparent interest in the corporate market. However, they can lead the market in experimenting with new things that will eventually filter down into other distributions. And don't forget that Red Hat is contributing a lot (in the form of subsidizing Gnome, gtk+, and so forth.
Indeed. Coding skills won't help you solve a problem (beyond an immediate "how do I get around this stupid language bogosity?"), but good problem solving skills in general are portable to most any situation.
The fact that it seems to be necessary for any large scale C++ project to have a C++ guru on staff is testimony to the problems with the language. And if the C++ guru actually knows what s/he is doing, that person is very well aware of the problems with the language.