It is kinda scary what they're doing. Everyone knows that Microsoft WILL do something evil. They already are by saying that only SuSE customers are safe. But they have a rug they're just waiting to pull out from under Novell. Novell is making a deal with the devil, and they're going to pay for it.
I agree that appearance is important. Humans function better when they have pleasant environments. It's also true that Linux distros often really suck when it comes to basics of HCI and even simple artistic elements that would make things a lot more pleasant and usable.
But it really bugs me when people talk about aesthetics while the internal structure isn't sound. I'm happily using Dapper Drake, but it wasn't trivial to setup correctly with some of the hardware I wanted to use. But there's the recent slashdot article that mentions the upgrade nightmare when going from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft. And there are even more fundamental problems with Linux. The graphics system in Linux is held together with duct tape. It's just WAY too easy to break, and there is no kind of structure to it. There should be APIs and standard mechanisms for handling graphics devices in a general, but they just don't exist (and don't tell me about DRI -- it's only one step in the right direction). I'm told that there are many other facilities, like networking, that aren't a whole lot better.
Look at it this way: If Microsoft had gotten their shit together in the beginning and written a decent operating system, rather than cobbling DOS and some other crap together and sticking a GUI on top, then more of us would be using Windows. Instead, they shipped us crap, we figured that out, and we moved on to other systems. For a very long time, Mac OS (9 and before) was all surface, with an embarrassing OS under the hood. One of the few operating systems that was actually ENGINEERED well from the ground up was BeOS, but that didn't fair well against Microsoft's marketing.
The fact is, "Linux" lacks coherency. It's not "Linux." It's a Linux kernel, some GNU tools over there, X11 bolded on over here, GTK or Qt slapped on over yonder... No two groups actually get together and decide to come up with an elegant system. Instead, they compete with each other, end up working around each other's mistakes, and then leave it up to the distros to try to make it all work together. Ha.
I'll just tell you a dirty little secret from my experience with writing device drivers: The NT kernel's interfaces for handling devices like graphics cards, network devices, printers, and pretty much anything else you want to use, they put Linux to shame. NT may not perform as well, be as stable, or be as secure as Linux, but it's engineered with vastly more coherent internal structure. Linux is good code with poorly-designed interfaces, while Windows is lousy code with well-designed interfaces (actually, POSIX rocks, but I'm talking about kernel structure and device management).
I had posted a few ideas to the Firefox 3.0 brainstorming wiki with some suggestions that would improve general stability. But this other guy went to town and really did a good job of explaining some really needed changes:
Gentoo was an even bigger nightmare of manual updating of configuration scripts and bizarre breakages whenever I would do updates. Don't even get me started.
In a couple of weeks, Adia and all of their employees are going to mysteriously disappear, after DeBeers cronies receive secret orders. There will be no evidence left to tell us who really caused their disappearances.
OpenGL has become a standard in graphics. You cannot reasonably do OpenGL without floating point operations in your rasterizer (Trust me, I've tried to find a way around it). OpenGL is an "open standard" that was pushed by SGI. So SGI wants others to use OpenGL. But, given the patents, they DON'T want others to use OpenGL, at least not without everyone paying them lots of money.
It just me, or does it seem to be that SGI are pulling a Rambus on us here?
Also, given the OpenGL spec, everyone doing 3D graphics (ATI, nVidia, Matrox, 3DLabs, S3, etc., etc., etc.) is violating this patent. No?
In reality, for most desktop use, the difference between an open graphics card (based on their design specs) and a high-end nVidia card is how much time the GPU spends idle. Most X11 apps just aren't the least bit taxing on the GPU. Only if you throw a high-end game at it will you notice any difference. Keeping in mind that the FPGA version of the OGP memory controller is already spec'd to run at 200Mhz (DDR400 x 128 bits = 6.4GiB/sec), when they go to ASIC, they'll have phenominal performance.
Too bad this is all hot air. Intel haven't released full specs, just partial specs under NDA to a handful of people. They play no other part in the development of the drivers (for liability reasons, they got volunteers to do the drivers for them). And some important features require a binary blob.
Ok, security is never "minor," but it kinda washes out in the context of all of the stability and compatibility problems they've had as compared to FOSS drivers for cards whose manufacturers do publish specs. nVidia simply don't do a good job at writing their drivers. They violate all sorts of rules about how you're supposed to write Linux drivers. But being closed source, no one is ever allowed to fix the problems, and nVidia doesn't put enough people on it to keep up.
What we need is a graphics vendor who publishes full specs for their graphics chips! If nVidia won't do it, find someone who will.
You have a good point. Perhaps "document" is the wrong word. How about "DOM tree"? If I load mail.yahoo.com in one tab and slashdot.org in another tab, they should be in separate processes, regardless of how they work internally.
I don't think you've fully thought through the suggestion.
Just because the document is being handled by a separate process doesn't mean its UI is slow. SOME UI stuff will have to go through IPC, but for most activity, the worker process will communicate directly with the window system. In X11, for instance, the UI process would create a window and then hand the resource ID of that window over to the worker process that uses the window directly. Windows has a similar system of window object handles that can be shared between processes.
The result of this would be a MUCH more responsive application, because the CPU will be shared more fairly between documents, and hanging documents won't hurt non-hanging ones.
Also, don't you know that all rendering via X11 is handled via IPC? X11 apps run over a 100Megabit network (application is on one machine, X server is on another), the reduction in responsiveness is often hard to notice. Windows is architected in a comparable way, as is MacOS X.
Good thinking. Some people agree with you, adding this to the wiki:
Plugins
Run plugins as a independent process, that talks with firefox via a socket or something like this. If a plugin crash it doesn't take firefox with it. It also allow one to kill a locked or high load plugins and keep surfing.
Run plugins as a independent process, so that when they leak memory, that memory will be freed when the tab or window is closed.
Run plugins as a independent process, so that when a plugin refuses to shut down (like acroread), the browser can forcibly kill it.
Stability and resource-utilization improvements Put each document into an independent process (not thread: separate forked process) so that:
When a document causes Firefox to crash, the whole browser won't be taken with it.
When a bug in Firefox stomps on memory it doesn't own, other documents in memory are not corrupted.
When a document causes Firefox to leak massive amounts of memory, closing that tab or window will free up the wasted memory.
When a bug in Firefox or a script on the page locks up (infinite loop or whatnot), the whole browser will not hang up, just the one document. Closing the tab or window kills the aberrant process. This is also an issue for DNS lookup; the browser always freezes completely during DNS lookup. Make this affect only the document being loaded.
Obviously, this also means that the Firefox main UI should also be in a separate process, and you should use IPC and sharing of window-system resource IDs and handles to communicate between UI and document processes.
When the UI crashes, restarting the UI can sweep up documents that find themselves unattached and re-present them undisturbed.
Cross-site scripting and buffer overflow exploits have a much harder time hacking into information for other documents, because they are inaccessible in separate processes.
Iraq is an example of overly-aggressive proactive invasion. We did have some reason to believe that Iraq might be a threat. What we found were parts and building materials that could be used for making WMDs but no actual assembled WMDs. Hussein kinda screwed himself on that one by refusing to let UN inspectors inspect. Want a better way to raise suspicion? Bush took advantage of that situation to try to bolster his image. Unfortunately for him, he didn't have the same level of threat to deal with as his dad did.
The problem we have here wrt the "Protect America" attitude, is that the Republicans will jump at the slightest perceived threat (like a small dog that barks at a falling leaf), while the Democrats would withhold action for far too long and allow the threat to come to us, threatening Americans on our own soil. And as much as I like much of Libertarian philosophy, don't even get me started on how they would botch this if they were in charge.
For Americans, being too ready to act certainly works... for Americans. And that's why so many people here don't care about the damage we caused in Iraq. They also want to point out the fact that it's all nice and democratic there now. Great! But these are people who have no ability to consider that a democracy may not ALWAYS be the best way to govern. (I think democracy is best when you have enough social infrastructure to support it, but I'm willing to entertain other notions.) Perhaps, for those people over there who survived, life will be better. But that doesn't excuse the deaths that are on our hands.
In a UK court, Spamhaus should sue ICANN for unjustifiably removing their domain name. They could argue that ICANN removed their domain for reasons that do not legally apply to Spamhaus, on top of the fact that the Illinois court has not actually ruled against Spamhaus on anything (IIRC, the spammer was granted a temporary injunction prior to a final ruling). I'm an American who believes that having a single domain name registrar under a single government is really stupid and a great way for the US government (or agents thereof) to screw other countries. I believe that Americans should have power over America and over non-Americans who are a threat to personal liberties of Americans. Controlling ICANN and screwing with Spamhaus steps outside of those bounds. Perhaps after this, people will realize that it's necessary to liberalize ICANN.
This is a power play by Spamhaus, but it's a totally justified power play. And I applaud them for not giving in to the demands of a stupid court that has no jurisdiction over them or any reason in the first place to pass an injunction against them. If their domain name is removed, then the fallout from all of the additional SPAM will be cause a great deal of trouble.
I've been using Linux since 1995, and I have spent a lot of time learning system administration of Linux boxes. Before I switched to Ubuntu, I was using Gentoo, so I've compiled my share of apps and kernels. After a while, though, the novelty of manually editing configuration files wore off. Professionally, I am an X11 driver developer and graphics chip designer. Academically, I've done web programming, AI, high-performance computing, and many other things. There's nothing wrong with wanting to manually configure your Linux box, but my interests and needs have shifted to where what I need and want to do has nothing to do with Linux system admin. If I want to install an OS, I want to just install it. If I want a new app, I want to just install it. I do lots of coding, but little of it has anything to do with hacking other people's open source software. So I have chosen Ubuntu so that I can get the system to do all of the low-level stuff for me so I can think about other things.
The question is whether or not Google is violating copyright by indexing books without author permission. The answer is that any author that doesn't want their book indexed is an idiot or is afraid of people finding out that their book isn't any good before someone buys it.
If I were Google, I'd let natural selection do its thing. If someone doesn't want their book indexed, then don't index it. Then they'll get fewer sales than the smart people who did want their books indexed. Google plays it safe and lets stupid people screw themselves. It's all good.
It's amazing to me how many people think bullying and mass-emailing is going to get a krufty old-school company like Intel to do ANYTHING. Even IBM isn't much of an exception, because they keep their proprietary and open source stuff carefully separated, and Sun's OpenSparc was already an open standard before they release the source code. These companies have markets much larger than open source users that don't care at all about open source!
In my opinion, the only way we're ever going to have truly open hardware is for us to develop it ourselves. In case you weren't paying attention, the Open Graphics Project already has hardware!!!
Yes, it's an early step in the process, but when volunteer open source development meets up with expensive hardware production, things tend to go a bit slowly. But engineering samples are currently undergoing tests, and the project members are working on test benches for it.
I want to slap anyone who even bothers to call Intel. It's a total waste of energy that they could be spending on a real organization that is really producing open source hardware, with schematics and source code online. Oh, and we're not talking about just releasing documentation on how their hardware works. Their entire hardware development process is out in the open and open source. Not only can you read about how this stuff works, but you can look at every level of detail, down to how the hardware is wired.
The only way we're ever going to get good graphics hardware for open source is to make it ourselves!
First of all, I am a student of AI. I'm currently working on my Ph.D. in AI, studying, among other things, knowledge-based reasoning, machine learning, agent systems, and HCI. Also, I believe that strong AI is _possible_, in the sense that I believe humans are machines that function according to the laws of physics, so theoretically, a fast-enough computer could too. (Indeed, computation speed is the least of our problems.)
The problem is that people who want to build strong AI are trying to do in decades what took nature billions of years. Certainly, directly engineering something is usually faster than evolving it, but even orders of magnitude speed up won't have strong AI systems any time soon.
Since the dawn of computing, people have been assuming that once computers got fast enough, the AI problems would just solve themselves. The problem is that we're talking about very hard problems. Things that are easy for us (walking, visually recognizing objects, etc.) are hard for computers. Things that are hard for us (math, data processing, etc.) are easy for computers. Why? To do things that are hard for us, humans have developed, over thousands of years, detailed and exacting formalisms. Math has axioms, a syntax, and a set of mechanical processes to carry about. Even complicated proofs involve an extraordinary amount of simple symbol-pushing that a computer could do easily. Computers are based on exactly those same formalisms, so it makes sense that it would be easy to program a computer to do those things. Computers are NOT, however, built anything like how the human brain works, and that's why AI researchers use neural nets and genetic algorithms for so many things.
Long before we're plagued by computers thinking for themselves, demanding rights, and taking over the world, we'll simply continue to be plagued more and more by increasingly catastrophic bugs introduced into increasingly more complex applications. Far from having autonomy, our bug-ridden software does exactly what it was coded to do, right or wrong, and we'll suffer from it. And all along the way, the blame for the problems will fall squarely on the human engineers who made the mistakes in the first place.
Personally, I think companies that rely exclusively on Windows are shooting themselves in the foot. These days, there are numerous technologies people can use to make portable applications, including Java, C# (yes), Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk, WxWidgets, Qt, GTK, PHP and other web technologies, etc.
Portability isn't everything, but relying on a single, unreliable vendor is lunacy.
It's amazing how many IT people I've met who have "heard" or Linux. All they've ever known is Windows. Perhaps Microsoft's failures will encourage developers to investigate alternative platforms. Windows is important, and you should support that platform, but when Windows fails you, you really need to have a backup plan.
Compromising what makes Linux Linux is not a compromise at all. It's taking the very thing that makes it great and throwing it completely out of the window. Maybe not right away, but there's that slippery slope. Eventually, Linux would make itself irrelevant.
In my opinion, the real solution is for us to start designing our own hardware.
www.opencores.org is a repository of open source hardware designs. www.opencollector.org is another. The Open Graphics Project is about to release real open hardware. They're focusing on graphics right now, but they have aspirations toward other kinds of hardware.
Rather than giving up control of the software just to get the hardware, take control of the hardware!
(BTW, I'm much less concerned about proprietary apps than closed-source drivers. Drivers are a major source of potential system instability. They need to be open source. Applications are isolated to their own process spaces and can't crash the system when they crash. I think a closed-source iTunes for Linux would be wonderful!)
You know there are a lot of well-meaning people who end up getting the shaft when people in authority abuse power. The problem is that if you don't follow orders, you're likely to be arrested. Imagine being a soldier protesting orders on the grounds that they were unethical... in some countries, any such people were quickly removed from the gene pool. My fellow slashdotters, we in the U.S. live in a police state. If the police tell you to do something, you damn well better do it, or you're not going to see the sun shine for a long time after some court somewhere decides that you were told to commit an illegal act. And being, as you are, an "idiot citizen," the government doesn't afford you the right to judge right vs. wrong for yourself.
So you're damned it you don't (they'll arrest you right away if you refuse), and you're damned if you do (you'll be up on civil or criminal charges later when it's determined that you were asked to do an illegal thing). In this system, you can't win.
Mind you, companies like AT&T have a lot of lawyers and a lot of power. But even they can't refuse completely. If you refuse to do what the NSA says, they will find a judge to issue an order to close down your business a LOT quicker than you can find another judge to rule their orders illegal. Oh, and then there are the various appeals processes that draw it out, leaving you in legal limbo for years.
Up until the moment that your orders are found illegal, refusing to follow those orders is the only thing illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone were to switch to buying CDs and ripping them, then people would stop buying from iTunes, and that would be good for Microsoft.
It is kinda scary what they're doing. Everyone knows that Microsoft WILL do something evil. They already are by saying that only SuSE customers are safe. But they have a rug they're just waiting to pull out from under Novell. Novell is making a deal with the devil, and they're going to pay for it.
I agree that appearance is important. Humans function better when they have pleasant environments. It's also true that Linux distros often really suck when it comes to basics of HCI and even simple artistic elements that would make things a lot more pleasant and usable.
But it really bugs me when people talk about aesthetics while the internal structure isn't sound. I'm happily using Dapper Drake, but it wasn't trivial to setup correctly with some of the hardware I wanted to use. But there's the recent slashdot article that mentions the upgrade nightmare when going from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft. And there are even more fundamental problems with Linux. The graphics system in Linux is held together with duct tape. It's just WAY too easy to break, and there is no kind of structure to it. There should be APIs and standard mechanisms for handling graphics devices in a general, but they just don't exist (and don't tell me about DRI -- it's only one step in the right direction). I'm told that there are many other facilities, like networking, that aren't a whole lot better.
Look at it this way: If Microsoft had gotten their shit together in the beginning and written a decent operating system, rather than cobbling DOS and some other crap together and sticking a GUI on top, then more of us would be using Windows. Instead, they shipped us crap, we figured that out, and we moved on to other systems. For a very long time, Mac OS (9 and before) was all surface, with an embarrassing OS under the hood. One of the few operating systems that was actually ENGINEERED well from the ground up was BeOS, but that didn't fair well against Microsoft's marketing.
The fact is, "Linux" lacks coherency. It's not "Linux." It's a Linux kernel, some GNU tools over there, X11 bolded on over here, GTK or Qt slapped on over yonder... No two groups actually get together and decide to come up with an elegant system. Instead, they compete with each other, end up working around each other's mistakes, and then leave it up to the distros to try to make it all work together. Ha.
I'll just tell you a dirty little secret from my experience with writing device drivers: The NT kernel's interfaces for handling devices like graphics cards, network devices, printers, and pretty much anything else you want to use, they put Linux to shame. NT may not perform as well, be as stable, or be as secure as Linux, but it's engineered with vastly more coherent internal structure. Linux is good code with poorly-designed interfaces, while Windows is lousy code with well-designed interfaces (actually, POSIX rocks, but I'm talking about kernel structure and device management).
I had posted a few ideas to the Firefox 3.0 brainstorming wiki with some suggestions that would improve general stability. But this other guy went to town and really did a good job of explaining some really needed changes:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Csreis
Gentoo was an even bigger nightmare of manual updating of configuration scripts and bizarre breakages whenever I would do updates. Don't even get me started.
Looks like if you have software RAID, you should think twice before upgrading. Look here: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=28606 6
In a couple of weeks, Adia and all of their employees are going to mysteriously disappear, after DeBeers cronies receive secret orders. There will be no evidence left to tell us who really caused their disappearances.
OpenGL has become a standard in graphics. You cannot reasonably do OpenGL without floating point operations in your rasterizer (Trust me, I've tried to find a way around it). OpenGL is an "open standard" that was pushed by SGI. So SGI wants others to use OpenGL. But, given the patents, they DON'T want others to use OpenGL, at least not without everyone paying them lots of money.
It just me, or does it seem to be that SGI are pulling a Rambus on us here?
Also, given the OpenGL spec, everyone doing 3D graphics (ATI, nVidia, Matrox, 3DLabs, S3, etc., etc., etc.) is violating this patent. No?
Well, you're mostly right.
See this: http://kerneltrap.org/node/7184
Still, you don't really know how much they're holding back. How many features are they not using in the open source driver?
But at least they have the security...
In reality, for most desktop use, the difference between an open graphics card (based on their design specs) and a high-end nVidia card is how much time the GPU spends idle. Most X11 apps just aren't the least bit taxing on the GPU. Only if you throw a high-end game at it will you notice any difference. Keeping in mind that the FPGA version of the OGP memory controller is already spec'd to run at 200Mhz (DDR400 x 128 bits = 6.4GiB/sec), when they go to ASIC, they'll have phenominal performance.
Too bad this is all hot air. Intel haven't released full specs, just partial specs under NDA to a handful of people. They play no other part in the development of the drivers (for liability reasons, they got volunteers to do the drivers for them). And some important features require a binary blob.
Intel does not have FOSS drivers.
Ok, security is never "minor," but it kinda washes out in the context of all of the stability and compatibility problems they've had as compared to FOSS drivers for cards whose manufacturers do publish specs. nVidia simply don't do a good job at writing their drivers. They violate all sorts of rules about how you're supposed to write Linux drivers. But being closed source, no one is ever allowed to fix the problems, and nVidia doesn't put enough people on it to keep up.
What we need is a graphics vendor who publishes full specs for their graphics chips! If nVidia won't do it, find someone who will.
You have a good point. Perhaps "document" is the wrong word. How about "DOM tree"? If I load mail.yahoo.com in one tab and slashdot.org in another tab, they should be in separate processes, regardless of how they work internally.
I don't think you've fully thought through the suggestion.
Just because the document is being handled by a separate process doesn't mean its UI is slow. SOME UI stuff will have to go through IPC, but for most activity, the worker process will communicate directly with the window system. In X11, for instance, the UI process would create a window and then hand the resource ID of that window over to the worker process that uses the window directly. Windows has a similar system of window object handles that can be shared between processes.
The result of this would be a MUCH more responsive application, because the CPU will be shared more fairly between documents, and hanging documents won't hurt non-hanging ones.
Also, don't you know that all rendering via X11 is handled via IPC? X11 apps run over a 100Megabit network (application is on one machine, X server is on another), the reduction in responsiveness is often hard to notice. Windows is architected in a comparable way, as is MacOS X.
Good thinking. Some people agree with you, adding this to the wiki:
Plugins
Run plugins as a independent process, that talks with firefox via a socket or something like this. If a plugin crash it doesn't take firefox with it. It also allow one to kill a locked or high load plugins and keep surfing.
Run plugins as a independent process, so that when they leak memory, that memory will be freed when the tab or window is closed.
Run plugins as a independent process, so that when a plugin refuses to shut down (like acroread), the browser can forcibly kill it.
Stability and resource-utilization improvements
Put each document into an independent process (not thread: separate forked process) so that:
When a document causes Firefox to crash, the whole browser won't be taken with it.
When a bug in Firefox stomps on memory it doesn't own, other documents in memory are not corrupted.
When a document causes Firefox to leak massive amounts of memory, closing that tab or window will free up the wasted memory.
When a bug in Firefox or a script on the page locks up (infinite loop or whatnot), the whole browser will not hang up, just the one document. Closing the tab or window kills the aberrant process. This is also an issue for DNS lookup; the browser always freezes completely during DNS lookup. Make this affect only the document being loaded.
Obviously, this also means that the Firefox main UI should also be in a separate process, and you should use IPC and sharing of window-system resource IDs and handles to communicate between UI and document processes.
When the UI crashes, restarting the UI can sweep up documents that find themselves unattached and re-present them undisturbed.
Cross-site scripting and buffer overflow exploits have a much harder time hacking into information for other documents, because they are inaccessible in separate processes.
Iraq is an example of overly-aggressive proactive invasion. We did have some reason to believe that Iraq might be a threat. What we found were parts and building materials that could be used for making WMDs but no actual assembled WMDs. Hussein kinda screwed himself on that one by refusing to let UN inspectors inspect. Want a better way to raise suspicion? Bush took advantage of that situation to try to bolster his image. Unfortunately for him, he didn't have the same level of threat to deal with as his dad did.
The problem we have here wrt the "Protect America" attitude, is that the Republicans will jump at the slightest perceived threat (like a small dog that barks at a falling leaf), while the Democrats would withhold action for far too long and allow the threat to come to us, threatening Americans on our own soil. And as much as I like much of Libertarian philosophy, don't even get me started on how they would botch this if they were in charge.
For Americans, being too ready to act certainly works... for Americans. And that's why so many people here don't care about the damage we caused in Iraq. They also want to point out the fact that it's all nice and democratic there now. Great! But these are people who have no ability to consider that a democracy may not ALWAYS be the best way to govern. (I think democracy is best when you have enough social infrastructure to support it, but I'm willing to entertain other notions.) Perhaps, for those people over there who survived, life will be better. But that doesn't excuse the deaths that are on our hands.
In a UK court, Spamhaus should sue ICANN for unjustifiably removing their domain name. They could argue that ICANN removed their domain for reasons that do not legally apply to Spamhaus, on top of the fact that the Illinois court has not actually ruled against Spamhaus on anything (IIRC, the spammer was granted a temporary injunction prior to a final ruling). I'm an American who believes that having a single domain name registrar under a single government is really stupid and a great way for the US government (or agents thereof) to screw other countries. I believe that Americans should have power over America and over non-Americans who are a threat to personal liberties of Americans. Controlling ICANN and screwing with Spamhaus steps outside of those bounds. Perhaps after this, people will realize that it's necessary to liberalize ICANN.
This is a power play by Spamhaus, but it's a totally justified power play. And I applaud them for not giving in to the demands of a stupid court that has no jurisdiction over them or any reason in the first place to pass an injunction against them. If their domain name is removed, then the fallout from all of the additional SPAM will be cause a great deal of trouble.
I've been using Linux since 1995, and I have spent a lot of time learning system administration of Linux boxes. Before I switched to Ubuntu, I was using Gentoo, so I've compiled my share of apps and kernels. After a while, though, the novelty of manually editing configuration files wore off. Professionally, I am an X11 driver developer and graphics chip designer. Academically, I've done web programming, AI, high-performance computing, and many other things. There's nothing wrong with wanting to manually configure your Linux box, but my interests and needs have shifted to where what I need and want to do has nothing to do with Linux system admin. If I want to install an OS, I want to just install it. If I want a new app, I want to just install it. I do lots of coding, but little of it has anything to do with hacking other people's open source software. So I have chosen Ubuntu so that I can get the system to do all of the low-level stuff for me so I can think about other things.
The question is whether or not Google is violating copyright by indexing books without author permission. The answer is that any author that doesn't want their book indexed is an idiot or is afraid of people finding out that their book isn't any good before someone buys it.
If I were Google, I'd let natural selection do its thing. If someone doesn't want their book indexed, then don't index it. Then they'll get fewer sales than the smart people who did want their books indexed. Google plays it safe and lets stupid people screw themselves. It's all good.
It's amazing to me how many people think bullying and mass-emailing is going to get a krufty old-school company like Intel to do ANYTHING. Even IBM isn't much of an exception, because they keep their proprietary and open source stuff carefully separated, and Sun's OpenSparc was already an open standard before they release the source code. These companies have markets much larger than open source users that don't care at all about open source!
In my opinion, the only way we're ever going to have truly open hardware is for us to develop it ourselves. In case you weren't paying attention, the Open Graphics Project already has hardware!!!
Yes, it's an early step in the process, but when volunteer open source development meets up with expensive hardware production, things tend to go a bit slowly. But engineering samples are currently undergoing tests, and the project members are working on test benches for it.
I want to slap anyone who even bothers to call Intel. It's a total waste of energy that they could be spending on a real organization that is really producing open source hardware, with schematics and source code online. Oh, and we're not talking about just releasing documentation on how their hardware works. Their entire hardware development process is out in the open and open source. Not only can you read about how this stuff works, but you can look at every level of detail, down to how the hardware is wired.
The only way we're ever going to get good graphics hardware for open source is to make it ourselves!
First of all, I am a student of AI. I'm currently working on my Ph.D. in AI, studying, among other things, knowledge-based reasoning, machine learning, agent systems, and HCI. Also, I believe that strong AI is _possible_, in the sense that I believe humans are machines that function according to the laws of physics, so theoretically, a fast-enough computer could too. (Indeed, computation speed is the least of our problems.)
The problem is that people who want to build strong AI are trying to do in decades what took nature billions of years. Certainly, directly engineering something is usually faster than evolving it, but even orders of magnitude speed up won't have strong AI systems any time soon.
Since the dawn of computing, people have been assuming that once computers got fast enough, the AI problems would just solve themselves. The problem is that we're talking about very hard problems. Things that are easy for us (walking, visually recognizing objects, etc.) are hard for computers. Things that are hard for us (math, data processing, etc.) are easy for computers. Why? To do things that are hard for us, humans have developed, over thousands of years, detailed and exacting formalisms. Math has axioms, a syntax, and a set of mechanical processes to carry about. Even complicated proofs involve an extraordinary amount of simple symbol-pushing that a computer could do easily. Computers are based on exactly those same formalisms, so it makes sense that it would be easy to program a computer to do those things. Computers are NOT, however, built anything like how the human brain works, and that's why AI researchers use neural nets and genetic algorithms for so many things.
Long before we're plagued by computers thinking for themselves, demanding rights, and taking over the world, we'll simply continue to be plagued more and more by increasingly catastrophic bugs introduced into increasingly more complex applications. Far from having autonomy, our bug-ridden software does exactly what it was coded to do, right or wrong, and we'll suffer from it. And all along the way, the blame for the problems will fall squarely on the human engineers who made the mistakes in the first place.
Personally, I think companies that rely exclusively on Windows are shooting themselves in the foot. These days, there are numerous technologies people can use to make portable applications, including Java, C# (yes), Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk, WxWidgets, Qt, GTK, PHP and other web technologies, etc.
Portability isn't everything, but relying on a single, unreliable vendor is lunacy.
It's amazing how many IT people I've met who have "heard" or Linux. All they've ever known is Windows. Perhaps Microsoft's failures will encourage developers to investigate alternative platforms. Windows is important, and you should support that platform, but when Windows fails you, you really need to have a backup plan.
Yes, you're right. Perhaps that'll teach AT&T to demand a warrant.
In my opinion, the real solution is for us to start designing our own hardware.
www.opencores.org is a repository of open source hardware designs.
www.opencollector.org is another.
The Open Graphics Project is about to release real open hardware. They're focusing on graphics right now, but they have aspirations toward other kinds of hardware.
Rather than giving up control of the software just to get the hardware, take control of the hardware!
(BTW, I'm much less concerned about proprietary apps than closed-source drivers. Drivers are a major source of potential system instability. They need to be open source. Applications are isolated to their own process spaces and can't crash the system when they crash. I think a closed-source iTunes for Linux would be wonderful!)
You know there are a lot of well-meaning people who end up getting the shaft when people in authority abuse power. The problem is that if you don't follow orders, you're likely to be arrested. Imagine being a soldier protesting orders on the grounds that they were unethical... in some countries, any such people were quickly removed from the gene pool. My fellow slashdotters, we in the U.S. live in a police state. If the police tell you to do something, you damn well better do it, or you're not going to see the sun shine for a long time after some court somewhere decides that you were told to commit an illegal act. And being, as you are, an "idiot citizen," the government doesn't afford you the right to judge right vs. wrong for yourself.
So you're damned it you don't (they'll arrest you right away if you refuse), and you're damned if you do (you'll be up on civil or criminal charges later when it's determined that you were asked to do an illegal thing). In this system, you can't win.
Mind you, companies like AT&T have a lot of lawyers and a lot of power. But even they can't refuse completely. If you refuse to do what the NSA says, they will find a judge to issue an order to close down your business a LOT quicker than you can find another judge to rule their orders illegal. Oh, and then there are the various appeals processes that draw it out, leaving you in legal limbo for years.
Up until the moment that your orders are found illegal, refusing to follow those orders is the only thing illegal.