I, for one, applaud Debian for sticking to their guns in this matter. They set out for a completely free distro, and they're not going to fool around with KDE if Qt ain't free.
I agree with their stand that KDE shouldn't be included. I have but one question. How is it different really if all you need to do to install KDE is race up to the KDE website and grab the debs, and install them. If you really want to use KDE and Debian, then do that, but don't try to move Debian away from it's stated goals.
The company I work for has a large MOTIF-based application that's been in constant development for years. If we were able to get the source code for MOTIF for the platforms we use (Sadly, Linux isn't among them, principally we use SGI.), then we would be able to know what we're running and be able to find and fix MOTIF bugs. That is a much better state of affairs than depending on SGI (or any other closed vendor) for that.
Is MOTIF dead for new software? Probably. Is MOTIF dead? No. Actually, it might just go for a walk!:)
I'm hate to say it, but I think that ESR has gone a bit too far with this one, particularly with his views on antitrust law. There *are* cases where sheer inertia in markets cause monopolies to continue. How many companies are there out there buying Win2000 not because it's the best thing out there, but because it's the easiest way forward from their current NT platform?
The government has stepped in and broken up monopolies at least twice before, with AT&T and Standard Oil, both times with tremendous benefit to consumers. (There are probably others, I just don't know of them!)
ESR's anarchist views threaten to alienate the Free/Open Software movement from the populous at large, who believes that the government can in fact help in some situations.
ESR, please either hold your tounge, or don't try to speak for all of us who believe in Free Software with those anarchist ideas, as it seems that you are trying to.
Without question, public schools do in some areas push a particular point of view on their students. When you have a matter that is open to interpretation, such as history or literature, these things will happen because you have humans teaching. That's just the way it is.
However, there are some things that are fact no matter how you look at them and are important that kids should learn in public school. Things like reading, writing, and arithmetic, and more importantly, how to learn. That's the key thing. If that is accomplished, then it almost doesn't matter how effective they are at imparting basic knowledge. I'd much rather see my child graduate from high school knowing how to work at learning, than have coasted through doing and saying exactly what the teacher wanted to hear, knowing the material but not how to learn.
The indoctrination you speak of is nearly unavoidable in places, but you're missing the point of public school.
Yes, people need to be educated. That is obvious. What is also obvious (at this point, to anyone who's paying attention) is that the method of education we have chosen does not succeed in its stated goals.
I don't think that that is obvious at all. Public education has been around for at least 100 years, and granted it could be accused of lagging behind the times, but we've come this far with this system, and I don't think we've done that badly..
Of course, there are areas to improve. There are many initiatives to inprove public education out there, from teacher testing (which I support), to handing kids laptops (which I don't support).
I agree that homeschooling generally does better than public schooling, because parents know their children better than their teachers. However, in our society, it is very often just not practical to expect parents to homeschool, due to economic and social factors.
Throwing out the system is counterproductive in the short run, without guarantees of large gains in the long run.
While you're at it, why not throw out the whole judicial system. Tracking down criminals and proving they're guilty is pretty hard too, not to mention employing representatives of the people to make the laws!
Come on. Just because a job is hard, doesn't mean it's not necessary. The basic foundation to *any* industrial society is educating the population. If the children don't get the basic knowledge they need to do work on things people will buy, then the whole economy will eventually collapse, or not grow, because there won't be any valuable goods generated.
Applying this sort of logic from the start would have broken civilization.
I was actually thinking of a car-based MP3 player.. Shove a small HDD (a gig or two) on that puppy, get a headphone jack to tape adapter, and you're rolling with hours and hours of cd quality music! With a little inginuity, I bet I could plug that thing right into the car battery too! I bet the sucker would be *cheap* too!:)
Anything they can do, we can do better, right? How about Free Software users/developers donating money (or using FSF or some other organizations cash) to hire our own darn lobbyist(s)? We can't let the enemy take advantage of us in the political system, can we?
Can you imagine the privacy issues that would go along with wide use of this technology? The potential is there for any script kiddie (or the government if you like conspiracies) to literally read your thoughts! It sounds like 1984!
Another crazy idea is that someone could use something like this to create a group of people sort of like the Borg on Star Trek. All it would take is a wireless connection to some large database.
Computer software is going through growing pains in terms of security. The more we can learn from viruses now, the better prepared we'll be in the future in terms of what not to do. I'd rather have a temporary problem now and learn how to prevent them from happening in the future. The discipline of CS has had to fight off larger problems before, and this one will be solved too.
I have had the same problems using Linux (and other unices as well like HP, SGI etc.) Netscape is rather unstable (though it is getting better), and you just don't have the plugins to do some of the cool stuff that you can with Windows.
Linux will not lose the long term war over this short term battle. This problem is largely a desktop market problem not a server market problem. I don't think that there are too many arguements against the fact that Linux just isn't ready for the desktop yet.
Hopefully sometime in the future that will start to be less true, and then and only then should we even *expect* plugin companies to develop for Linux.
Mozilla as I understand it is progressing, and if it turns out not to be vaporware, should go a long way to giving Linux a stable browser.
In short, this is just a symptom of the larger problem of Linux not being ready for the desktop. Never fear. This will resolve itself.
Here where I work, most of the names of the machines are names of different brands of junk food (although some have gone to brands of beer). For instance my machine is Swissroll, the file server is Twinkie, and we have other machines like Twizzler, Blowpop, Jolt, Pretzels and so on.
In another part of the company they started naming machines after planets, which was okay until they got to Uranus... It leads to questions like: "Where's Pluto? -- Over by Uranus!";-)
And I suppose the next thing is magazines and newspapers needing to register as PACs because the cost of their printing hardware is over some magical figure. If it costs more than $1000 to publish a politically motivated book do I have to register? The internet in its essence as it presently stands is mostly a way of sharing information in the same way as publishing. So it should be regulated as such. No two ways about it.
Just one man's opinion. Flames redirected to/dev/null.
One thing to remember here. From a strict conservation standpoint, the internet is probably saving the world millions of trees every year by people not needing a book that contains each piece of information that they need. Even though people print things out off the internet, for every person who does it, there are probably thousands that don't.
As an example, if I had a cable modem or some other kind of dedicated internet connection at my home, I wouldn't really need a phone book anymore because I could just walk over to the computer load up a site and search the phone book over the net. I've just reduced the demand for phone books. The fewer phone books that need to be printed, the fewer trees that meet their untimely demise!
This works better for reference books than books that you are learning new information from, because like people have said, it's easier to curl up with a dismembered tree than a large CRT. (Though I'm still waiting for those LCD monitor prices to come down...:)
Just remember that when you see people printing stuff out that they would have needed to have the information on paper without the internet and most people don't print out every website that they look at!
I have a friend who has an Imac, which will say customizable random things for different error conditions. I almost fell off my chair when I heard it say:
"Well, at least it's not the dreaded Blue Screen of Death..."
That is why I said that if the GPL has no provision for the limited distribution of beta software then it should. Why is it necessary for untested software to be unleashed on every member of the community? Doesn't it make sense that the developers should have the ability to make limited distributions of their software to catch the big bugs before they release it to the unwashed masses, to prevent mass chaos?
I guess what I'm saying is that if a limited distribution of beta-level software is against the GPL then the GPL needs fixing not Corel's license.
How is what Corel is doing different than you sending something you have written to a few of your fellow developers with the spoken or unspoken understanding that the software is not ready for prime time yet, and thus is not ready for a wide distribution?
This happens all the bloody time! Corel has simply written a license to that effect to formalize that understanding so everybody is on the same page.
I disagree that there is no flexability. If the software is not ready for release then it's not ready for release. It's not the community's decision, but Corel's, in the same way that you decide when your software is ready for a wide testing distribution.
So Corel doesn't want every single newbie out there banging on their beta. So what? Sure, this may violate the letter of the GPL, but as long as they do eventually release it with the GPL, what difference does it make? It just means that they will get a managable number of bug reports rather than a bloody flood. Isn't that *good* for the community, not bad?
I haven't read the GPL all the way through in a while, but if it doesn't have a provision for limited scope betas, it should!
Perhaps (a) and (b) are true, but I still don't think that they're that much of an issue. Privacy "experts" would *really* have a field day if either of those were really true.
I don't think that (c) is an issue at all though. Let me ask you this: How is a keyboard sniffer different than a wire tap on a phone?
Why is this any different than the Feds coming in and pulling apart your house with a warrant? They still have to go through the process of convincing a judge that they have probable cause to pull things apart trying to find stuff. The whole warrant system is designed to protect people's privacy, and I haven't heard of many cases where the warrant system is abused, so what's wrong with using the same system on people's computers? I understand that it's just one more place the gov't can come in to your little world, but still, the police have a right to investigate crime under certain restrictions, and as long as those restrictions are followed here I don't understand what's wrong.
Putting a slow, buggy TCP/IP as the documented version in Win2K would be tantamount to shooting themselves in the foot, because it would not only slow down Apache, but all other third party products. Even if the user community accepted this, it would undoubtedly spawn more antitrust cases against MS, which I doubt even they can afford right now..
Slashdot Mirror
I, for one, applaud Debian for sticking to their guns in this matter. They set out for a completely free distro, and they're not going to fool around with KDE if Qt ain't free.
I agree with their stand that KDE shouldn't be included. I have but one question. How is it different really if all you need to do to install KDE is race up to the KDE website and grab the debs, and install them. If you really want to use KDE and Debian, then do that, but don't try to move Debian away from it's stated goals.
Ben
Not in the least!
:)
The company I work for has a large MOTIF-based application that's been in constant development for years. If we were able to get the source code for MOTIF for the platforms we use (Sadly, Linux isn't among them, principally we use SGI.), then we would be able to know what we're running and be able to find and fix MOTIF bugs. That is a much better state of affairs than depending on SGI (or any other closed vendor) for that.
Is MOTIF dead for new software? Probably. Is MOTIF dead? No. Actually, it might just go for a walk!
Ben
I'm hate to say it, but I think that ESR has gone a bit too far with this one, particularly with his views on antitrust law. There *are* cases where sheer inertia in markets cause monopolies to continue. How many companies are there out there buying Win2000 not because it's the best thing out there, but because it's the easiest way forward from their current NT platform?
The government has stepped in and broken up monopolies at least twice before, with AT&T and Standard Oil, both times with tremendous benefit to consumers. (There are probably others, I just don't know of them!)
ESR's anarchist views threaten to alienate the Free/Open Software movement from the populous at large, who believes that the government can in fact help in some situations.
ESR, please either hold your tounge, or don't try to speak for all of us who believe in Free Software with those anarchist ideas, as it seems that you are trying to.
Ben
Without question, public schools do in some areas push a particular point of view on their students. When you have a matter that is open to interpretation, such as history or literature, these things will happen because you have humans teaching. That's just the way it is.
However, there are some things that are fact no matter how you look at them and are important that kids should learn in public school. Things like reading, writing, and arithmetic, and more importantly, how to learn. That's the key thing. If that is accomplished, then it almost doesn't matter how effective they are at imparting basic knowledge. I'd much rather see my child graduate from high school knowing how to work at learning, than have coasted through doing and saying exactly what the teacher wanted to hear, knowing the material but not how to learn.
The indoctrination you speak of is nearly unavoidable in places, but you're missing the point of public school.
Ben
I don't think that that is obvious at all. Public education has been around for at least 100 years, and granted it could be accused of lagging behind the times, but we've come this far with this system, and I don't think we've done that badly..
Of course, there are areas to improve. There are many initiatives to inprove public education out there, from teacher testing (which I support), to handing kids laptops (which I don't support).
I agree that homeschooling generally does better than public schooling, because parents know their children better than their teachers. However, in our society, it is very often just not practical to expect parents to homeschool, due to economic and social factors.
Throwing out the system is counterproductive in the short run, without guarantees of large gains in the long run.
Ben
While you're at it, why not throw out the whole judicial system. Tracking down criminals and proving they're guilty is pretty hard too, not to mention employing representatives of the people to make the laws!
Come on. Just because a job is hard, doesn't mean it's not necessary. The basic foundation to *any* industrial society is educating the population. If the children don't get the basic knowledge they need to do work on things people will buy, then the whole economy will eventually collapse, or not grow, because there won't be any valuable goods generated.
Applying this sort of logic from the start would have broken civilization.
Ben
I was actually thinking of a car-based MP3 player.. Shove a small HDD (a gig or two) on that puppy, get a headphone jack to tape adapter, and you're rolling with hours and hours of cd quality music! With a little inginuity, I bet I could plug that thing right into the car battery too! :)
I bet the sucker would be *cheap* too!
hehehe
Ben
Anything they can do, we can do better, right? How about Free Software users/developers donating money (or using FSF or some other organizations cash) to hire our own darn lobbyist(s)? We can't let the enemy take advantage of us in the political system, can we?
Ben
I'd like to introduce the execs of BAe to someone.. a Brit in fact... A fellow by the name of ISAAC NEWTON!!!! ;-)
:)
(Granted, he's a bit old now, but still..)
Ben
Has there been any word from SGI on the possibility of open-sourcing Open Inventor?
I tried the wu-tang thing and my name came out to be:
:-)
Ol' Filthy Sweaty Bastard
I don't know whether that's good or bad..
Ben
Not to mention the fact that his name sounds quite like GNUth... :)
Ben
Can you imagine the privacy issues that would go along with wide use of this technology? The potential is there for any script kiddie (or the government if you like conspiracies) to literally read your thoughts! It sounds like 1984!
:)
Another crazy idea is that someone could use something like this to create a group of people sort of like the Borg on Star Trek. All it would take is a wireless connection to some large database.
Beware -- You will be assimilated!
Ben
Computer software is going through growing pains in terms of security. The more we can learn from viruses now, the better prepared we'll be in the future in terms of what not to do. I'd rather have a temporary problem now and learn how to prevent them from happening in the future. The discipline of CS has had to fight off larger problems before, and this one will be solved too.
I have had the same problems using Linux (and other unices as well like HP, SGI etc.) Netscape is rather unstable (though it is getting better), and you just don't have the plugins to do some of the cool stuff that you can with Windows.
Linux will not lose the long term war over this short term battle. This problem is largely a desktop market problem not a server market problem. I don't think that there are too many arguements against the fact that Linux just isn't ready for the desktop yet.
Hopefully sometime in the future that will start to be less true, and then and only then should we even *expect* plugin companies to develop for Linux.
Mozilla as I understand it is progressing, and if it turns out not to be vaporware, should go a long way to giving Linux a stable browser.
In short, this is just a symptom of the larger problem of Linux not being ready for the desktop. Never fear. This will resolve itself.
Ben
Here where I work, most of the names of the machines are names of different brands of junk food (although some have gone to brands of beer). For instance my machine is Swissroll, the file server is Twinkie, and we have other machines like Twizzler, Blowpop, Jolt, Pretzels and so on.
;-)
In another part of the company they started naming machines after planets, which was okay until they got to Uranus... It leads to questions like: "Where's Pluto? -- Over by Uranus!"
hehehe
And I suppose the next thing is magazines and newspapers needing to register as PACs because the cost of their printing hardware is over some magical figure. If it costs more than $1000 to publish a politically motivated book do I have to register? The internet in its essence as it presently stands is mostly a way of sharing information in the same way as publishing. So it should be regulated as such. No two ways about it.
/dev/null.
Just one man's opinion. Flames redirected to
Ben
One thing to remember here. From a strict conservation standpoint, the internet is probably
:)
saving the world millions of trees every year by people not needing a book that contains each piece of information that they need. Even though people print things out off the internet, for every person who does it, there are probably thousands that don't.
As an example, if I had a cable modem or some other kind of dedicated internet connection at my home, I wouldn't really need a phone book anymore because I could just walk over to the computer load up a site and search the phone book over the net. I've just reduced the demand for phone books. The fewer phone books that need to be printed, the fewer trees that meet their untimely demise!
This works better for reference books than books that you are learning new information from, because like people have said, it's easier to curl up with a dismembered tree than a large CRT. (Though I'm still waiting for those LCD monitor prices to come down...
Just remember that when you see people printing stuff out that they would have needed to have the information on paper without the internet and most people don't print out every website that they look at!
Along those same sorts of lines..
I have a friend who has an Imac, which will say customizable random things for different error conditions. I almost fell off my chair when I heard it say:
"Well, at least it's not the dreaded Blue Screen of Death..."
hehehe
Ben
That is why I said that if the GPL has no provision for the limited distribution of beta software then it should. Why is it necessary for untested software to be unleashed on every member of the community? Doesn't it make sense that the developers should have the ability to make limited distributions of their software to catch the big bugs before they release it to the unwashed masses, to prevent mass chaos?
I guess what I'm saying is that if a limited distribution of beta-level software is against the GPL then the GPL needs fixing not Corel's license.
Ben
Ben
Let me ask you a question then:
How is what Corel is doing different than you sending something you have written to a few of your fellow developers with the spoken or unspoken understanding that the software is not ready for prime time yet, and thus is not ready for a wide distribution?
This happens all the bloody time! Corel has simply written a license to that effect to formalize that understanding so everybody is on the same page.
I disagree that there is no flexability. If the software is not ready for release then it's not ready for release. It's not the community's decision, but Corel's, in the same way that you decide when your software is ready for a wide testing distribution.
Is that so wrong?
Ben
So Corel doesn't want every single newbie out there banging on their beta. So what? Sure, this may violate the letter of the GPL, but as long as they do eventually release it with the GPL, what difference does it make? It just means that they will get a managable number of bug reports rather than a bloody flood. Isn't that *good* for the community, not bad?
I haven't read the GPL all the way through in a while, but if it doesn't have a provision for limited scope betas, it should!
Ben
Perhaps (a) and (b) are true, but I still don't think that they're that much of an issue. Privacy "experts" would *really* have a field day if either of those were really true.
I don't think that (c) is an issue at all though. Let me ask you this: How is a keyboard sniffer different than a wire tap on a phone?
Ben
I'm not sure I get why this is a big deal..
Why is this any different than the Feds coming in and pulling apart your house with a warrant? They still have to go through the process of convincing a judge that they have probable cause to pull things apart trying to find stuff. The whole warrant system is designed to protect people's privacy, and I haven't heard of many cases where the warrant system is abused, so what's wrong with using the same system on people's computers? I understand that it's just one more place the gov't can come in to your little world, but still, the police have a right to investigate crime under certain restrictions, and as long as those restrictions are followed here I don't understand what's wrong.
Can anybody help me?
Ben
Putting a slow, buggy TCP/IP as the documented version in Win2K would be tantamount to shooting themselves in the foot, because it would not only slow down Apache, but all other third party products. Even if the user community accepted this, it would undoubtedly spawn more antitrust cases against MS, which I doubt even they can afford right now..
Ben