Again, trolls without any understanding of history.
The entire concept of an inalienable right dates back at least as far as the Greeks, and quite probably much farther than that, as a lot of tribal cultures have certain rights as well as responsiblities encoded into their tribal customs that appear to go back many tens of thousands of years at least.
The notion that the state, or the church, could limit information is a relatively new idea, going back perhaps as far as the Egyptions, if that. In comparison to 3 million years of human existence those kinds of restrictions are almost as new as the copyright laws designed to propogate them into the age of the printing press.
Your confusion of basic property rights with the artificial, and largely arbitrary, concept of "intellectual property" such as patents and, in the context of this duscussion copyright, and your confusion of basic property rights with basic human rights, underscores your ayndroidian myopia in viewing everything in economic terms, when clearly economic issues are only one small part of the overall human experience. I do not expect to be able to heal you of your myopia in one post, but perhaps my rebuttal will protect another from being taken in by such fallacious arguments (and yes, I have read Ayn Rand's works, so I do know what I'm talking about WRT her myopia, which is echoed by the Libertarians and indeed constitutes one of their most fatal philosophical as well as practical flaws).
The constitution recognizes copyright in no small part because a concentrated interest, in the form of several publishers, pushed the concept through. Just as the constitution's recongnition of slavery involved a compromise with a corrupt element of the founding colonies, so too copyright represents an equally corrupt, if certainly much less horrific, compromise between publishers who excersized undue influence on the writing of the constitution, and the rest of the founding fathers who, at the time, had much bigger fish to fry.
How is this any more absurd than the notion that a creator is obligated to distribute no only the information, but any source material used to create that information?
Said creator is only obligated to do so if he or she uses a GPLed work within his or her own work, in which case the creator has chosen to accept such a requirement consciously and knowingly. This is in contrast to the incredibly onerous restrictions copyright places on our freedom to use and disseminate information, which is forced down our throats with absolutely no input, or choice, on our part. Indeed, it is a direct result of that very coercion under copyright law that the GNU project felt it necessary to impose any defensive and protective requirements in the GPL at all.
Finally, plagorism has nothing to do with copyright and is yet another strawman you have created with no particular relevance to the discussion at hand. Taking another person's work and claiming credit for it is entirely orthogonal to restrictions in copying that work and disseminating it as is (or even with annotated modifications), and is addressed by numerous academic and legal standards that have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright.
As for your claim that fair use allows one to disseminate information, you clearly know that to be untrue, as evidenced by your very next sentance in which you correctly point out that we do not have the freedom to copy information verbatim, which is in fact the definition of what it means to disseminate information.
This asserts the existance of unalienable rights to copy, modify and disseminate the information created by others.
No, it points out that this freedom existed for most of the 3 million years humans have been around, and was only abridged in the last few centuries. Obviously the right is "alienable," as we have had it denied us all our lives.
What is absurd is the notion that the creator of some information has the right to limit is spread through ceorcive legislation, fining or imprisoning others who make use of it or pass it along.
The whole private diary argument is nonsensical, and has nothing to do with copyright anyway. It is more akin to corporate secrets, which are protected by law against espionage, but not against that corporation willingly disseminating said information. If you are foolish enough to give someone your diary you have essentially divulged your secrets to that person, and shouldn't be all that surprised if that person passes them along (unless they are a closely trusted friend who has sworn an oath not to pass them along, but, once again, even that has absolutely nothing to do with copyright, and even less to do with GNU).
This in no way justifies the mass limitation of freedom to use and disseminate information that is copyright... indeed copyright has nothing to do with the protection of secrets, even if it was originally created by the British Crown for the sole purpose of censorship.
That's the premise that GNU is founded on, but I have not seen to date any justification for it.
Nonsense. The premise GNU is founded upon is that copyright is inappropriate when applied to software (and that application certainly is not what the founding fathers had in mind when they passed copyright legislation in the United States), and that a society that doesn't impose such restrictions would be measurably better off.
And, interestingly enough, the success of the GNU project, and of free software in general, more than vindicates that premise.
That makes no sense at all. One of the recent feature requests on the mailing list was support for CVS, so that daring, bleeding-edgers could use portage to install CVS versions of their software.
To my knowledge portage does not support downloading sources from CVS at all, so your comment makes no sense to me.
As for stability, I have found Gentoo to be at least as stable as Debian Unstable/Testing, and Source Mage to be even more stable than that. And I say this as a former Debian user and fan (Debian is IMHO the best binary-based distro around), one who, having tried source-based distros, will never go back.
OTOH if you happened to try Gentoo out during the week when their server got overloaded and they had to roll out their round-robin dns mirrors prematurely because of the load, I can understand your impression (things broke for a day or two, and required hand-edits to/etc/make.conf to point to the new round-robin DNS alias before 'emerge rsync' would work again). That however was a very unusual circumstance that resulted from a very sudden spike in Gentoo's popularity for which their infrastructure was unprepared.
And that wouldn't have been instability in the system, just a broken 'upgrade' capability that required one small hand-edit to fix. You are the only person I've ever seen claim that Debian Unstable is more stable than Gentoo... and there are a whole bunch of us ex-debian users using Gentoo these days. Indeed, this sounds a little more like Debian advocacy than anything else... which is fine, as those of us who prefer Gentoo (and/or Source Mage) advocate our favorite distros as well. But your accusations of instability sure don't fit the usual experience most of us are having.
Now, I am not in complete disagreement with RMS's stance. But IMHO, this trivializes the word "freedom" and misrepresents what the FSF stands for, by making it seem much more grandiose than it really is. Lightheartedly calling the free-software people "Stallmanists" is a far less extreme statement than the term "free software" itself.
I must take rather strong exception to this assertion.
We live in a society that (in terms of copyright law) basically says:
You as the original author, by default, shall automatically deprive everyone else on the planet from any basic freedom they might otherwise have to use, copy, modify, or disseminate what you happened to create (freedoms which the species happened to enjoy some 3 million odd years previously, btw). What is more, because of the peculiarities in how digital systems function, you can impose whatever onerous restrictions above and beyond the removal of those freedoms you wish to, as a price for granting anyone the privelege of using what you created, and in fact you are encouraged to do so.
In this context the free software foundation has said simply "If you include our work in your own work, you must agree not to go around restricting other peoples freedoms in this manner, and you may not impose additional onerous restrictions on other people."
Lacking the "freedom" to imprison other people in your cellar hardly makes you less free, indeed quite the contrary as such a restriction protects you from being incarcerated in turn by another third party.
This entire argument that the GPL's built in protections of the software freedom it grants, and its innoculation against abuse by unscrupulous third parties (cf. "tragedy of the commons") is IMHO quite nonsensical, as the above metaphor should help to illuminate.
Even were that not so, using a more specific (or even incorrect) definition for the word freedom (as the U.S. government frequently does, for example) is a far cry from villianizing someone not through logical argument, but through the coining of clever phrases that equates a foundation's founder with a bloodthirsty dictator who murdered millions. To imply the two are equal is absurd. To imply the deliberate and systematic villianization of a man is less extreme than the alleged misuse of the word freedom (which, as I already pointed out, isn't being misused at all), is IMHO nonsense of the lowest form.
Re:He deserves praise either way despite his arrog
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Wolframania
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"Arguably better" how? The "team of PhDs" were Wolfram's employees, and beholden to him. Real peer review means independent peer review, sans the conflict of interest inherent in checking the boss' work....
Because one of the real weaknesses in the current scientific establishment is the orthodoxy that often plagues scientific publications, in which 'peer review' often amounts to a single colleague, sometimes for reasons more personal and political than scientific, prevents a work from ever seeing the wider light of day.
Peer review doesn't necessarilly have to occur prior to publication. Indeed, it is arguably better that work be published widely, and then either vindicated or rebutted publicly, rather than this happening in the quiet of a magazine's editorial office. That too is peer review (public acceptance or condemnation of a work, public vindiciaton or rebutting of its arguments, data, and/or interpretation), and that is precisely what Wolfram's work will be subjected to, now that it has been published.
It will either stand or fall on its own merits. Wolfram's team of PhDs provided sanity checks on his work, and as I understand it were given fairly wide latitude in pointing out any errors or inconsitencies that might have arisen. That is typically what the purpose of peer review prior to publication is supposed to accomplish, to insure that the work not have any glaring and emberrassing errors prior to publication.
Unfortunately it is often used as a means of enforcing orthodoxy, which is inappropriate and antithetical to what science is supposed to be about. History is repleat with scientific work that went unpublished for years, until the scientific orthodoxy in the discipline shifted and the work suddenly became "acceptable," despite having been chanced or "corrected" in no way whatsoever. Wolfram wisely avoided this nonsense entirely, and whether his theories turn out to be correct or not, they are sufficiently revolutionary that his approach was probably quite justified.
As for the insinuation that Wolfram would pressure his people not to do what he hired them to do... review his work and check it in minute detail for accuracy, I would submit that, while such is possible, it is extremely unlikely and would be incredibly self-defeating (as he would then open himself up widely to public ridicule once his unchecked work was published).
I think the gist of my father's message is a good one for people, and perhaps a happier one then originally came across.
That is indeed a happier and fundamentally more healthy approach than your original post described, and a stance I think most of us (myself included) would agree on.
Of course, this gets back to the question of why your father would suggest you turn a hobby you enjoy doing into a mundane job that would almost certainly rob you of a significant portion of that enjoyment. I somehow don't see parents doing the same for other acts (e.g. the sexual example I brought up earlier)... and that generation's fascination with greed (I've seen it in my own family) has had some rather unpleasant consiquences for our culture, and our world.
Time may have intrinsic value, but if so that value is (for the most part) intangible, just as the intrinsic value of 'love' or any other of a dozen generally positive emotions is intangible. This value certainly doesn't equal money, indeed it is more often than not completely orthogonal to monetary value, circular Randian arguments (as seen in other posts in this thread) notwithstanding.
If giving software away for free helps to market consulting services, then one can indeed "get rich".
Free Software does not mean 'gratis', it means software freedom. There is a difference, as RMS and others have been at pains to point out for years now.
As I understand it, unless you hold a commercial pilot's license, it would be a violation of FAA regulations for you to charge your passengers any more than the pro-rata cost of the trip--fuel, airplane depreciation, etc.
First, that is incorrect. Without a commercial license you CANNOT charge a passenger for their portion of the plane's depreciation (planes generally appreciate in value anyway, but that's another story). You can only charge their pro-rata cost of fuel (and oil, if any), landing/parking fees, etc. Even estimated per hour costs of maintenance are off limits.
Second, all of this bears absolutely no relevance to the point I was making. If I didn't have a commercial pilots license I could easilly go out and get one (besides, doing lazy eights and chandellas is fun), which would in no way change the fact that if I were to start charging friends for flights I would turn a fun hobby into a mundane job.
It would also be illegal to do flights for hire in a Part 91 aircraft... I would have to maintain it according to the stricter standards for commercial for-hire aircraft (including 100 hour inspections, etc.). Once again though that is completely irrelevant to the point I was making.
Of course not. That was the entire point of coining the term "Stallmanism." It is the use of language to subliminally implant and drive home a particular political stance, in this case a strongly anti-RMS, anti-FSF, anti-freedom (or at least, apathy-toward-freedom) stance.
In short, the usage of such a term is a cheap form of propoganda on the part of the Slashdot poster (the term is not used by Joel Spolsky in the article itself). Which isn't really surprising, since most slashdot article posts have a strong bias in their summaries... this is just a little more extreme than most (and quite a bit less appropriate than most, for a site the prides itself on being a supporter of free software).
The greatest lie of our market-based system is that time equals money, in all circumstances.
Exactly!
If you and your girlfriend are having sex (for free), do you regret it because you spent six hours making passionate love and didn't charge her for it? Does she regret it because she didn't charge you? After all, time is money and hookers typically charge a couple hundred bucks an hour.
(I won't bother with the "did you buy her dinner, then you paid for it" argument, since it misses a number of nuances... like going out to dinner because you enjoy eating out, and enjoy a woman's company, etc.).
Contrary to popular myth greed ins't good, and most of the time time isn't money. Greed may be a reality we have to live with (especially living in a society that deiefies and nurturs it the way ours does), but it comes at a very high cost. I could charge someone for the time I spend boring holes in the sky in my little Beech Sundowner, but since I'm doing it for pleasure, and taking a friend along for a ride doesn't cost me anymore than flying by myself does, the only thing greed would bring me in that context is a little money at the expense of taking a hobby I love and turning it into Yet Another Mundane Job. No thanks.
The same applies to free software. Those who write free software (myself included) do so because we love to do it, not because we are trying to get rich doing so. If you're writing free software because you hope to get rich by doing so, then you're in the wrong field.
The amount of great software I've received for free, not to mention the amount of freedom I've gained in both my business and home life by using free software, more than compensates me for the time I put into it, whether it is writing stuff as a hobby, or testing it (and reporting bugs) for my job. The payoff is in the collaboration, a collaboration to a degree which wouldn't exist between people blinded by their myopic, Ayn Randian Greed.
There is still no easy way to do this in Gentoo, but I heard that it is comming in portage v2...
When this is implimented Gentoo will really, really rock!
That is exceptionally good news. The one thing I really miss from using Source Mage (well, actually I miss several things about Source Mage, but my employer opted for Gentoo, so Gentoo is what I must use for now[1]) is Source Mage's 'auto-healing' feature, which uses the recursive approach you describe. Actually, IIRC it recursively determines what needs to be recompiled, then flattens the recursion to a list, ordered based on dependency, then recompiles the necessary software in order.
Very nice, and the one really important feature Gentoo has been missing up until now.
I'm delighted to see some cross-polination between Gentoo and Source Mage. Both are incredibly excellent distributions (though both are very different from one another), and seeing them take the best features from one another and impliment them is marvelous.
[1]Looking at this it sounds a little like I regret using Gentoo instead of Source Mage, which isn't really the case. What regret I feel is mostly nostalgia, and very mild... Source Mage is really fun to work with too, and I enjoyed it a lot. Technically they are both very good distros, with different strengths and weaknesses, and very different approaches to how source packages are managed. I'd be hard pressed to say one is better than the other, in all fairness (though I always enjoyed the 'sorcery' motif of Source Mage... casting spells to install apps, etc.). I just want to make clear that I really like Gentoo also. Both are fantastic distros, and which one a person uses is largely a question of personal taste.
Whereas on my Debian boxes at work it was a simple [two commands] and I didn't have to wait while it re-built.
No, but you did have to wait for debian to release the binary. In the case of ssh it was done quickly (and, if you are running 2-year old software in debian Stable it will always be quick to get security fixes, but at the very high price of running archaic software).
Even security releated fixes don't make it into unstable as quickly as they do stable, and testing is generally a couple of weeks later still. And if you want to run software that is anything approaching modern under Debian, you have to either run unstable or testing, or compile the software yourself. If you're doing the latter, you may as well be using a source-based distro that will manage the compilation process and handle dependencies for you.
Then there are all those packages that aren't security related per se, but still contain signficant bug fixes or enhancements people may really need. Have you tried to apt-get X 4.2 under Debian lately? You can't, because even in unstable it still isn't supported yet, despite it being months since its release to the community. On the other hand, I've been using X 4.2 since January.
The thing that makes distros like Gentoo so powerful isn't just the performance improvement of having everything compiled optimized for your hardware (which is significant, naysayers notwithstanding), but that it makes installing from source as easy as other distros make installing precompiled binaries. This is a huge deal, as installing from source has all kinds of performance and stability advantages, not to mention less complex dependency issues, over precompiled binaries. And on a reasonably modern CPU the wait for something to compile really isn't a big deal for most packages, a few very large ones (KDE, X) excepted.
Testing is the key, not software age
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Gentoo Linux 1.2
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· Score: 4, Informative
While Gentoo does rock, I don't suggest any of the cutting edge stuff for production boxes.
One should always do significant testing before rolling something out for production use. This is true whether or not the software in question is "cutting edge."
That having been said, there can be real advantages to using up-to-date software in a production environment. You may need the new features (e.g. X support of a new touchscreen the tablets you want to deploy require) or bugfixes (KDE 3.0.1 v. KDE 2.2.1 is a good example here), so cutting edge software, while it should be treated with caution, can be very beneficial.
The key is rigorous testing prior to deployment, so while this means the software your using will likely be at least a month or two old, it can still be pretty cutting edge if that is what is required, and it holds up in testing. In our case, X 4.2 was deployed very quickly (within 6 weeks of its release), as was KDE 3.x, while other "cutting edge" stuff, like gcc 3.x, probably won't be deployed for another 6 months because it didn't hold up in testing.
You are right, though, Gentoo (and Source Mage, for those who like trying out a pallate of different source based distros) can lead one into temptation. I've installed and backed out more than one bleeding edge app on my home machine for just this reason... but again, I was able to back out stuff quite easilly, and the benefits of having current stuff that does work makes this added burden very worthwhile IMHO.
At the other extreme, Debian's 2-year-old plus 'stable' distro isn't the answer. With the speed with which free software evolves, running 2 year-old free software is analogous to running 10-year old proprietary software... something that in many cases simply isn't acceptable (though in some cases it can be... I do have an old GNU/Linux 2.0.x box that hasn't been upgraded in years, because it is behind a much more current firewall and does its one simple task just fine). Gentoo (and Source Mage, to be fair) solves this problem by giving you pretty good stability while allowing you to run very up-to-date software.
Re:Binary Distros Are Dead
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 2
Would you recommend Source Mage or Gentoo? What are the differences?
First: SAVE YOUR EXISTING XF86Config/XF86Config-4 configuration, and any other configurations that would normally be tedious to create. Source based distros are less polished, and do not configure X for you automatically the way Mandrake et. al. do. By saving this file ("cheating" if you will) you'll save yourself a lot of time on the back end of the source-based install.
That having been said, it is a tough call. Both are excellent, but neither is very polished, and both are still in beta (and thus will have some bugs).
Source Mage's main drawback is that it assumes the 'source-only' paradigm almost to a fault, and has no provision for allowing older packages to remain installed when a newer version is installed. I.e. when you upgrade libpng, the older library is removed, the newer one installed, and anything linked to libpng (that the packaging system "sorcery" keeps track of) is recompiled. This works wonderfully for source-based packages and makes a system very easy to upgrade and keep up to date.
The problem is when one has 3rd party binaries that requires the older library, and one can't recompile the binary against the new library. The deveopers of source mage are working on versioning support to fix this problem.
If you want a source based distro that doesn't involve a lot of manual work to get it running, and is almost a no-brainer to upgrade, you probably want to try Source Mage.
Gentoo is a mirror image of the above. It supports multiple package versions being installed at the same time pretty cleanly, is less source-only centric, and is quite good at supporting legacy binaries (at the speed with which free software moves, any 3rd party commercial binary is likely to be "legacy").
Upgrades on Gentoo require care. Unlike Source Mage you should not run around doing 'upgrade world' commands without examining them first and considering the consiquences. It still isn't as difficult and error prone as Mandrake and Suse upgrades have been (but is arguably about as error prone as typical Debian testing upgrades can be).
In other words, its pretty safe and easy to upgrade, but not a no-brainer and, very occasionally, an upgrade run simply as is with no consideration can break things.
If you want a very flexible system with excellent documentation, and don't mind performing the installation steps required by hand (but documented step-by-step by the distro), then you want Gentoo.
I like them both. I find Gentoo a little more ready than Source Mage for production work, but Source Mage's "auto-healing" function is unequalled anywhere else. What is more, developers for each distro are working to address that distro's difficiencies, so in the long run both distros are likely to have most of the features of the other. In other words, I expect Gentoo will have Source Mage's autohealing functionality in the not so distant future, and I suspect Source Mage will have better versioning support quite soon as well.
My advice? If you have the disk space and partitions available, install them both, try them both out, and pick whichever one you feel most comfortable with. Both are, IMHO, excellent.
Re:oh no... more global warming (...not...??)
on
Baked Alaska
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· Score: 2
What I don't understand is why most right-wingers in the USA like to classify issues such as global warming as a left-wing political issue. Is it not possible to be right wing and concerned about the environment?
Disclaimer: I am an American.
What many non-Americans, and particularly Europeans, may not understand is just how conservative (and in the post 9/11 era, downright ugly) American politics have become. What you consider pretty far to the right is likely left of the current Democratic party. The US political spectrum overlaps that of Europe only to the right of the European Center, while what we call 'centrist' politics would, in Germany, probably be somewhere between the CDU (conservative) and Republikaner (ultra-nationalists).
In this country one set of conservatives believe global warming could be a problem. Most, but not all, of these conservatives are Democrats. Another set is in complete denial, and will remain so even after the seas have risen and they've been forced to relocate their factories inland several hundred miles. Most, but not all, of these tend to be Republican (or even farther to the right: Libertarian).
Both sides use the issue as a political football, which is reprehensible IMHO, but it is the Reagan-Bush Republicans who are truly adept at humiliating this country in just about every international ecological summit or meeting. The scientific evidence that human industrial activity is aggrivating, perhaps fundamentally causing, the warming of the planet is mounting geometricly, and psuedo-scientific demands for 100% proof are reminiscent of Creationists and their arguments (another source of humiliation for America).
It has, indeed, become quite emberrassing to be an American, and I fear it will only become more so before things get any better.
He deserves praise either way despite his arroganc
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Wolframania
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Written by S. Wolfram, Peer reviewed by noone, Edited by S. Wolfram, Published by S. Wolfram's company.
Well, Wolfram had a team of PhDs working under him, so it did go through some nomimal review and quite a rigorous check for accuracy. That is certainly comparable to the "peer review" that one sees in publishing scientific papers in scientific journals, and is arguably better than much of the "peer review" that takes place prior to such publications.
The real "peer review" will be that of other scientists now that his work is published. Can they replicate his results (almost certainly) and do the applications he outlined produce useful results to those working in the various fields of scientific inquiry his book touches upon. Quite possibly... we'll just have to wait and see.
I'm reading his book now, and it is quite fascinating. I disagree with the various calls for editors others have been making... he is trying to drive a point home, and (thus far, I've only made it through chapter 7) is doing so in a time honored, rigorous fashion that is reminiscent of just about every theoretical mathematics, physics and engineering course I've taken.
Does that mean his conclusions are correct? No.
But it does set a very solid foundation for his thesis, and allow one to regard his theories in a solid context and an informed way, and, what is more, to understand them without first having become an expert in the field of CA.
He thinks he's discovered an overlooked tool for doing scientific analasys of systems which to date have defied calculus and other methods of analysis. He makes a compelling argument for why this is so, and provides ample data and information for anyone who is interested to duplicate and check his work.
He may not be correct, and his method of publishing may not have been within the channels the establishment generally prefers, but his publication itself appears to be in no way lacking in scientific rigorousness, and has certainly provided the detail and wherewithall for anyone to challenge it.
He may not be paying proper homage to those who came before him, or giving sufficient credit to those who have thought along similar lines (though he does cite other works and give due credit, so I'm not sure that criticism is even accurate), but his work, right or wrong, certainly appears scientifically valid. And if it is wrong, it will be rebutted quite thoroughly I'm sure, given the number of toes he has likely stepped on in persuing such a nontraditional course.
Re:Binary Distros Are Dead
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 2
What benchmarking did you and few others do? (And what CPU do you use?)
Nothing terribly official (which is why I used the word casual).
Time to compile the kernel, Time to load X, time to load KDE, the time it takes transcode to encode a 42 minute episode of Max Headroom into xvid format (that was one that experienced nearly 30% improvement over versions compiled on, and run on, Debian, for example).
Architecture for myself is nothing special: a dual 1GHz Pentium 3, compiler flags:
gcc 2.95 gave me roughly 20% speed improvements on every test over my old Debian install, and about the same over my old Mandrake install. gcc 3.04 gave me roughly 25% speed improvements, and gcc 3.1 gave me right around 27% speed improvements.
I actually had the most dramatic speed increase (30.7%) on a dual Athlon MP box compiled with -march=athlon-mp using gcc 3.1. People can poo poo source based, optimized speed improvements all they like, but once you've tried them you'll likely notice the speed improvement yourself, and be reluctant to go back to binary based distros.
Source based distros are a natural evolution, given the source availability of today's best operating systems and utilities (FreeBSD and GNU/Linux). They eliminate a whole class of problems we've all had to contend with, and give us dramatically better performance to boot.
I for one will never go back, and everyone I know who has tried either Gentoo or Source Mage feels the same way, despite the fact that neither of those distros is anywhere near as polished as Mandrake, Suse, or Red Hat.
Re:Cost of failure.
on
Baked Alaska
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· Score: 5, Insightful
There is a difference between the two. The cost of the correlation between masturbation/eyesight is a pair of glasses. The cost of global warming is conceivably a lot higher, and so deserves more attention and effort.
More to the point, there isn't, and never has been, any evidence that masturbation leads to blindness (or poor vision at all).
There is a mountain of evidence, piling ever higher, that our industrial wastes are changing the albedo of the planet, that the planet is thus radiating less heat away than previously, and as a result the climate is growing warmer.
Is it absolute proof? As you point out, no, it isn't, and absolute proof wouldn't be possible even after the entire process runs its course and Earth comes to resemble Venus (assuming it were ever allowed to go so far), as one could still argue that it might have been a natural phenomenon.
It is like arguing that an oily beach is a natural phenomenon. It is possible that an oil reserve is exposed to the sea through natural causes (like an undersea earthquake opening a rift), but the hulking remains of the Exxon Valdeze would, for example, make the argument that the cause could have been natural pretty weak, even without 100% irrefutable proof.
So to with the ever warming planet. It could possibly be natural, but a mountain of strong evidence suggests it isn't, and to proceed on the very unlikely assumption that it is natural is folly to the nth degree, and an action only someone living in complete denial because they simply don't want it to be so could ever advocate.
BTW, you can't even 'prove' 2+2=4... much less explain why. It is aximoatic that 2+2=4... one could build a methematics just as easilly on the notion that the plus sign adds 1 to the value, such that 1+1=3 and 2+2=5. It wouldn't yield very useful results, but it can be done. 2+2=4 because that is how we have axiomatically defined addition to work.
Binary Distros Are Dead
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Well, not quite, but now that I've got your attention...:-)
It isn't the packaging format really... most of the issues raised are inherent to binary based distros, which with todays processors really should become a thing of the past.
Source Mage and Gentoo[1] are two excellent source based distros that avoid these classes of problems altogether, and unlike RPM (or debs[2]) add no burden to the upstream software developer.
Shawn Gordon of The Kompany touches on this when he says (from the article, you did read the article, right?)
So rather than providing a myriad of different binary RPMs for the dozens of different Linux distribution, The Kompany, which is a commercial entity developing Linux applications, reluctantly decides to give away the source code to paying customers. [Emphesis added]
Source based distros like Gentoo and Source Mage have packaging systems that automate the process of downloading, configuring, compiling, and installing all of the software on their systems from source (pedants will note there is the occasional binary package, e.g. NVidia drivers, but for the vast, vast majority of software my point holds). Indeed, this approach makes the packaging system itself less important (so long as it works properly) than the overall engineering and organization of the distro itself, and completely irrelevant to the software developer (as it should be).
This has a couple of disadvantages, and a whole bunch of real advantages. So much so that almost no one who has used a source based distro will go back to a binary based distro once they've tried it, despite the cons (in fact, of the numerous people I know who've tried Source Mage and Gentoo, both very different from one another BTW, I know of not a single person who has gone back to their old binary favorite, be it Suse, Mandrake, Red Hat, or Debian).
CONS of source based distros
Initial install typically requires source to all of the system, which is generally downloaded from the net. I.e. in most cases requires a fat pipe for installation.
The installation is time consuming, due to the fact that each package must be compiled. For modern CPUs this isn't such a big deal (a day will suffice, most of which you can spend away from the computer while it chugs away), but for older CPUs like an AMD K6 233 I have, the initial install can literally take days.
PROS of source based distros
Updates and upgrades typically require much less bandwidth than their binary equivelents, as only the new package's source needs to be downloaded.
The software is compiled optimized for your hardware. Typically such systems run 20-30% faster than their binary equivelents, based on some casual benchmarking I and a few others have done.
The software is compiled against the exact library versions installed on your system, so no subtle incompatabilities arise due to slightly mis-matched binaries. This eliminates a whole class of bugs, and a whole host of problems that can affect stability and reliability.
In the case of Gentoo, you have very precise control over the configuration of your system, and what is installed vs. what is not, as well as where it is installed to.
In the case of Source Mage, the system is auto-healing, meaning that if and when a new library is installed and the older one removed, all packages that rely on that library are recompiled against the new library. This makes upgrades (on Source Mage) very easy.
Upgrades are very easy. In the case of Source Mage they are virtually automatic (you select the package to update and everything is taken care of for you), in the case of Gentoo they are less automatic and require some care, but are nevertheless easier than with any binary distribution I've ever tried (and I've used all the major ones at one time or another), and with Gentoo the flexibility of having multiple versions of libraries and even runtime apps is very useful.
Security is improved in one way: the ease and ability to keep up with security updates. Binary distros are still trying to get this to work smoothly (and mostly not succeeding, or requiring a tradeoff like Debian Stable, in which one must run 2 year-old software to enjoy that level of security). This is really a side effect of the previous point, but is significant enough to deserve sepearate mention.
The ability to run current hardware. Again, this goes back to the ease and stability of upgrades inherent in source based distros like Source Mage and Gentoo. Source Mage had X 4.2 out a day after its release, giving its users the advantages of all the new features and bug fixes it had to offer. Ditto for KDE 3. Gentoo had these packages out almost as quickly. This means users get the latest features, and the latest bug fixes, almost immediately, in contrast to binary distros that typically require 3-6 months (worse for some distros. I still recall the Debian developers irate answer to a user's question on when thye could expect X 4.2 support in the experimental version of Debian ("unstable"), to the effect of "leave me alone, it will be months!")
There are numerous other advantages I could add here, but you get the idea.
The entire article on the flaws of RPM might better be entitled "The Flaws of Source Based Distributions" which, in the age of Free Software and source code availability, coupled with todays fast processors, really ought to become a thing of the past. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Debian, Suse, Mandrake, and Red Hat all embracing the notion of source-based distros sometime in the future... as processors get even faster, the day long install (on my dual 1 GHz P3), which has already shrunk to less than half a day on the dual 2GHz Athlon I have at work, will shrink even more, to a couple of hours or less.
And the advantages in speed, stability, and ability to keep current with new software releases in a timely manner will only become more acute as time goes on.
So while binary based distros are by no means dead (despite my rather provocative headline), it is my opinion that the writing is certainly on the wall, and the ovservant person can already mark the shifting change in the wind.
[1]There are other source based distros as well, including Linux from Scratch and Lunar Penguin, and likely others as well. [2]Though in fairness the Debian developers take up most if not all of that burden
Once a patent has expired, that's it -- you can't re-patent it, and neither can anyone else. So logically, if people are currently filing zillions of frivolous patents now, that means in twenty years it will become considerably more difficult to file frivolous patents.
But then I sat back and thought "No, in twenty years they'll be filing a whole new set of frivolous patents on technologies that don't yet exist; and nobody will care about all those frivolous patents that they filed way-back-when."
You are absolutely right, but you don't go far enough. Frivolous patents will be filed for (and granted!) on the same invention again and again. This is very common practice in the pharamceutical industry, where a slightly modified version of a drug (perhaps with a new coating) is granted a new, broad patent which they can then use to extort money from or even completely shut down attempts at making a generic version of the old (now patent-expired) drug.
This practice is not limited to the pharmaceutical field, BTW, that is merely the most widely known example (and most potent, since people's lives are affected and, quite possibly ended, as a result).
Patents, no matter what else is wrong with them, have the good grace to expire 20 years after being issued.
Actually, it is 20 years after they were filed. It used to be 17 years after issuance, but no more.
In other words, we've arguably already had one Sony Bono copyright act for patents.
As for patents' shorter duration, one must balance that against patents much further reaching restrictions. With copyright you are prevented from copying a particular work, but you can still incorporate parts of it via quotation/fair use, and there's nothing to prevent you from writing a similiar story/program/movie with slightly different characters. Remember all the cheesy 70's techno-super-hero knockoffs (6 million dollar man, the guy with the watch that made him invisible, etc.)... some of 'em had episodes that could literally have emerged from a word processor with just the character names changed and some minor alterations to dialog.
Contrast that with patents, which would have made the cliffhanger ending off limits to everybody for 20 years (and quite possibly longer, as there is a habit of making very slight alterations to a product, especially medicines, and then getting a new patent on essentially the same item).
Copyrights are bad, and I've long advocated their elimination and replacement with something far milder, that doesn't convey monopoly priveleges on anyone, creator or not. But patents are just as bad... they slowdown not only current innovation, but lock out future innovation that could build upon what we have today for a minimum of 20 years!
The social and economic costs of these government mandated monopoly regimes is simply too high... monopolies need to be replaced with tax incentives and required public acknowledgement, and the terms of even those reduced dramatically.
Nowhere do I see the word Linux. How is the average uneducated (OS wise) Wal-Mart customer going to know that Lindows uses the Linux kernel? Will they even know/care what the kernel is?
"Sauce for the goose, Mr. Savik."
Wallmart Lindows users will care as much about GNU/Linux as many of the zealously anti-RMS Linux folks care about the Free Software Foundation's message of Freedom (as opposed to "simply getting it to work as cheaply and as well as possible.").
The GNU/Linux community may get a small taste of what Stallman has undoubtably felt as he has seen his work taken, and no credit given (to the point where Linus Torvalds is actively discouraging any reference to the Free Software Foundation in any Linux kernel documentation, a rather spiteful act if there ever was one).
A small taste, mind you, and I think you are right to point out that any damage if Lindows doesn't perform may not affect GNU/Linux directly as a result (i.e. the community could dodge a bullet on this one). On the other hand, if it becomes wildly popular, we may very well see a world in which everybody has heard of and uses Lindows, but few have heard of or are aware that they are using Linux, much less GNU/Linux.
Sauce for the Goose, indeed, and an amusing bit of poetic irony if it indeed plays out that way. Personally, I think anything that brings freedom to the masses is a good thing (which is why, though I am deeply critical and fiarly annoyed at Linus' anti-FSF stance, I do not actively dislike the guy or in any way wish him ill, much less the OS I've come to know and love, by whatever name), and Wallmart's Lindows program might do just that, if they start offering such machines in their stores. Of course, Richard would undoubtably prefer it be called GNU/Lindows [evil grin], and it is with no little irony that he would be right in wishing so, as that might at least make people aware of GNU, of free software, and of software freedom in general (and thus, of the Linux kernel that underlies an important part of their Lindows systems)... but just as open source provided a stepping stone for many a cynical suit (myself included... yes, I was once a suit) to come to understand and ultimately embrace free software, so to might Wallmart and Lindows provide a similar stepping stone to many others.
Here's wishing them success, whatever the branding and naming conventions they use.
It was called "truth in advertising," which has gone completely by the wayside. Corporate speech is not the same as individual speech, and is NOT entitled to the same constitutional protections.
Individuals' rights to lie may be constitutionally protected... corporate rights to lie are not (unless more than an average number of justices have been smoking crack of late).
I am not normally one to advocate new legislation, but in this particular case it is sorely needed. We need firm, explicit, unequivocable laws requiring truth in advertising and marketing (and yes, that includes press releases), with real punishments, involving real sums of money (and/or real jail time) for those who violate the law. It is the only way corporate entities like McCaffee will ever be forced to modify that sort of behavior, and the only way consumers will ever have even a remote chance of making an informed purchase... i.e. the only way there will ever be a remote chance for the free market to work as intended (and as it is advocated to supposedly work).
I dunno, I think there should be a government bailout of something like this.
No. No. No.
If the infrastructure is really that critical (like a country's highway system is), then the government should nationalize the backbone and make it available to competing ISPs under identical terms (i.e. actually allow competition and prevent vertical monopolies leveraged from physical monopolies over last mile cable and critical backbone links from forming).
If it isn't that important, then they should simply stand aside and let these companies go belly up, with all the consiquences that entails.
In no way should an existing, unsuccessful commercial enterprise be propped up by government: either the free market works, or there is no free market (read: monopoly), in which case the underlying structural cause of the monopoly (if any, in this case perhaps the copper, esp. if last-mile copper is involved) should be nationalized, and the market opened up so it can operate freely, with competition.
Bailouts are the worst of both possible worlds: government intervention and expenditure of public funds AND private corporate control with no public accountability (beyond their stockholders, if they happen to be traded publicly).
When Northpoint went under with no warning it sucked (we were off the net for 2 days due to that fiasco, and NSI didn't fix our DNS for 10 days), but even there a government bailout would have been wrong.
Nationalizing Ameritech's last mile of copper, so that Ameritech wouldn't be able to maliciously leverage that monopoly to drive competing DSL providers like Northpoint out of business, on the other hand, would have been a reasonable response. Unfortunately the ayndroids of the far right have managed to convince a large percentage of people that free enterprise is a panacea in all contexts and the only good governance is no governance. Nonsense, of course, as anyone can see (just try applying that logic to public highways and try to imagine the economic impact of Road Monopolies), but it is a widespread and in many respects crippling meme that has infected much of America.
yes, but in that example the car dealer buys the car and then sells to a consumer... the sale to the consumer is where the law is applied.
That makes absolutely no difference. Iowa (or any state) has the right to impose regulations on anything sold within their boundries, whether the seller is a resident of the state or not. Iowa cannot regulate widgets going from Nebraska and being sold in Illinois which are just passing through, but if the widgets are being sold in Iowa they can impose whatever (constitutional) regulations they like, whether the manufacturer is in Iowa, Nebraska, Washington State, or Timbuktu.
It is very clear cut, and, once again, Microsoft is in the wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, geeks without an understanding of history.
Again, trolls without any understanding of history.
The entire concept of an inalienable right dates back at least as far as the Greeks, and quite probably much farther than that, as a lot of tribal cultures have certain rights as well as responsiblities encoded into their tribal customs that appear to go back many tens of thousands of years at least.
The notion that the state, or the church, could limit information is a relatively new idea, going back perhaps as far as the Egyptions, if that. In comparison to 3 million years of human existence those kinds of restrictions are almost as new as the copyright laws designed to propogate them into the age of the printing press.
Your confusion of basic property rights with the artificial, and largely arbitrary, concept of "intellectual property" such as patents and, in the context of this duscussion copyright, and your confusion of basic property rights with basic human rights, underscores your ayndroidian myopia in viewing everything in economic terms, when clearly economic issues are only one small part of the overall human experience. I do not expect to be able to heal you of your myopia in one post, but perhaps my rebuttal will protect another from being taken in by such fallacious arguments (and yes, I have read Ayn Rand's works, so I do know what I'm talking about WRT her myopia, which is echoed by the Libertarians and indeed constitutes one of their most fatal philosophical as well as practical flaws).
The constitution recognizes copyright in no small part because a concentrated interest, in the form of several publishers, pushed the concept through. Just as the constitution's recongnition of slavery involved a compromise with a corrupt element of the founding colonies, so too copyright represents an equally corrupt, if certainly much less horrific, compromise between publishers who excersized undue influence on the writing of the constitution, and the rest of the founding fathers who, at the time, had much bigger fish to fry.
How is this any more absurd than the notion that a creator is obligated to distribute no only the information, but any source material used to create that information?
Said creator is only obligated to do so if he or she uses a GPLed work within his or her own work, in which case the creator has chosen to accept such a requirement consciously and knowingly. This is in contrast to the incredibly onerous restrictions copyright places on our freedom to use and disseminate information, which is forced down our throats with absolutely no input, or choice, on our part. Indeed, it is a direct result of that very coercion under copyright law that the GNU project felt it necessary to impose any defensive and protective requirements in the GPL at all.
Finally, plagorism has nothing to do with copyright and is yet another strawman you have created with no particular relevance to the discussion at hand. Taking another person's work and claiming credit for it is entirely orthogonal to restrictions in copying that work and disseminating it as is (or even with annotated modifications), and is addressed by numerous academic and legal standards that have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright.
As for your claim that fair use allows one to disseminate information, you clearly know that to be untrue, as evidenced by your very next sentance in which you correctly point out that we do not have the freedom to copy information verbatim, which is in fact the definition of what it means to disseminate information.
This asserts the existance of unalienable rights to copy, modify and disseminate the information created by others.
... indeed copyright has nothing to do with the protection of secrets, even if it was originally created by the British Crown for the sole purpose of censorship.
No, it points out that this freedom existed for most of the 3 million years humans have been around, and was only abridged in the last few centuries. Obviously the right is "alienable," as we have had it denied us all our lives.
What is absurd is the notion that the creator of some information has the right to limit is spread through ceorcive legislation, fining or imprisoning others who make use of it or pass it along.
The whole private diary argument is nonsensical, and has nothing to do with copyright anyway. It is more akin to corporate secrets, which are protected by law against espionage, but not against that corporation willingly disseminating said information. If you are foolish enough to give someone your diary you have essentially divulged your secrets to that person, and shouldn't be all that surprised if that person passes them along (unless they are a closely trusted friend who has sworn an oath not to pass them along, but, once again, even that has absolutely nothing to do with copyright, and even less to do with GNU).
This in no way justifies the mass limitation of freedom to use and disseminate information that is copyright
That's the premise that GNU is founded on, but I have not seen to date any justification for it.
Nonsense. The premise GNU is founded upon is that copyright is inappropriate when applied to software (and that application certainly is not what the founding fathers had in mind when they passed copyright legislation in the United States), and that a society that doesn't impose such restrictions would be measurably better off.
And, interestingly enough, the success of the GNU project, and of free software in general, more than vindicates that premise.
Gentoo seems to be nothing but cvs in a package.
/etc/make.conf to point to the new round-robin DNS alias before 'emerge rsync' would work again). That however was a very unusual circumstance that resulted from a very sudden spike in Gentoo's popularity for which their infrastructure was unprepared.
... and there are a whole bunch of us ex-debian users using Gentoo these days. Indeed, this sounds a little more like Debian advocacy than anything else ... which is fine, as those of us who prefer Gentoo (and/or Source Mage) advocate our favorite distros as well. But your accusations of instability sure don't fit the usual experience most of us are having.
That makes no sense at all. One of the recent feature requests on the mailing list was support for CVS, so that daring, bleeding-edgers could use portage to install CVS versions of their software.
To my knowledge portage does not support downloading sources from CVS at all, so your comment makes no sense to me.
As for stability, I have found Gentoo to be at least as stable as Debian Unstable/Testing, and Source Mage to be even more stable than that. And I say this as a former Debian user and fan (Debian is IMHO the best binary-based distro around), one who, having tried source-based distros, will never go back.
OTOH if you happened to try Gentoo out during the week when their server got overloaded and they had to roll out their round-robin dns mirrors prematurely because of the load, I can understand your impression (things broke for a day or two, and required hand-edits to
And that wouldn't have been instability in the system, just a broken 'upgrade' capability that required one small hand-edit to fix. You are the only person I've ever seen claim that Debian Unstable is more stable than Gentoo
Now, I am not in complete disagreement with RMS's stance. But IMHO, this trivializes the word "freedom" and misrepresents what the FSF stands for, by making it seem much more grandiose than it really is. Lightheartedly calling the free-software people "Stallmanists" is a far less extreme statement than the term "free software" itself.
I must take rather strong exception to this assertion.
We live in a society that (in terms of copyright law) basically says:
You as the original author, by default, shall automatically deprive everyone else on the planet from any basic freedom they might otherwise have to use, copy, modify, or disseminate what you happened to create (freedoms which the species happened to enjoy some 3 million odd years previously, btw). What is more, because of the peculiarities in how digital systems function, you can impose whatever onerous restrictions above and beyond the removal of those freedoms you wish to, as a price for granting anyone the privelege of using what you created, and in fact you are encouraged to do so.
In this context the free software foundation has said simply "If you include our work in your own work, you must agree not to go around restricting other peoples freedoms in this manner, and you may not impose additional onerous restrictions on other people."
Lacking the "freedom" to imprison other people in your cellar hardly makes you less free, indeed quite the contrary as such a restriction protects you from being incarcerated in turn by another third party.
This entire argument that the GPL's built in protections of the software freedom it grants, and its innoculation against abuse by unscrupulous third parties (cf. "tragedy of the commons") is IMHO quite nonsensical, as the above metaphor should help to illuminate.
Even were that not so, using a more specific (or even incorrect) definition for the word freedom (as the U.S. government frequently does, for example) is a far cry from villianizing someone not through logical argument, but through the coining of clever phrases that equates a foundation's founder with a bloodthirsty dictator who murdered millions. To imply the two are equal is absurd. To imply the deliberate and systematic villianization of a man is less extreme than the alleged misuse of the word freedom (which, as I already pointed out, isn't being misused at all), is IMHO nonsense of the lowest form.
"Arguably better" how? The "team of PhDs" were Wolfram's employees, and beholden to him. Real peer review means independent peer review, sans the conflict of interest inherent in checking the boss' work....
... review his work and check it in minute detail for accuracy, I would submit that, while such is possible, it is extremely unlikely and would be incredibly self-defeating (as he would then open himself up widely to public ridicule once his unchecked work was published).
Because one of the real weaknesses in the current scientific establishment is the orthodoxy that often plagues scientific publications, in which 'peer review' often amounts to a single colleague, sometimes for reasons more personal and political than scientific, prevents a work from ever seeing the wider light of day.
Peer review doesn't necessarilly have to occur prior to publication. Indeed, it is arguably better that work be published widely, and then either vindicated or rebutted publicly, rather than this happening in the quiet of a magazine's editorial office. That too is peer review (public acceptance or condemnation of a work, public vindiciaton or rebutting of its arguments, data, and/or interpretation), and that is precisely what Wolfram's work will be subjected to, now that it has been published.
It will either stand or fall on its own merits. Wolfram's team of PhDs provided sanity checks on his work, and as I understand it were given fairly wide latitude in pointing out any errors or inconsitencies that might have arisen. That is typically what the purpose of peer review prior to publication is supposed to accomplish, to insure that the work not have any glaring and emberrassing errors prior to publication.
Unfortunately it is often used as a means of enforcing orthodoxy, which is inappropriate and antithetical to what science is supposed to be about. History is repleat with scientific work that went unpublished for years, until the scientific orthodoxy in the discipline shifted and the work suddenly became "acceptable," despite having been chanced or "corrected" in no way whatsoever. Wolfram wisely avoided this nonsense entirely, and whether his theories turn out to be correct or not, they are sufficiently revolutionary that his approach was probably quite justified.
As for the insinuation that Wolfram would pressure his people not to do what he hired them to do
I think the gist of my father's message is a good one for people, and perhaps a happier one then originally came across.
... and that generation's fascination with greed (I've seen it in my own family) has had some rather unpleasant consiquences for our culture, and our world.
That is indeed a happier and fundamentally more healthy approach than your original post described, and a stance I think most of us (myself included) would agree on.
Of course, this gets back to the question of why your father would suggest you turn a hobby you enjoy doing into a mundane job that would almost certainly rob you of a significant portion of that enjoyment. I somehow don't see parents doing the same for other acts (e.g. the sexual example I brought up earlier)
Time may have intrinsic value, but if so that value is (for the most part) intangible, just as the intrinsic value of 'love' or any other of a dozen generally positive emotions is intangible. This value certainly doesn't equal money, indeed it is more often than not completely orthogonal to monetary value, circular Randian arguments (as seen in other posts in this thread) notwithstanding.
If giving software away for free helps to market consulting services, then one can indeed "get rich".
Free Software does not mean 'gratis', it means software freedom. There is a difference, as RMS and others have been at pains to point out for years now.
As I understand it, unless you hold a commercial pilot's license, it would be a violation of FAA regulations for you to charge your passengers any more than the pro-rata cost of the trip--fuel, airplane depreciation, etc.
... I would have to maintain it according to the stricter standards for commercial for-hire aircraft (including 100 hour inspections, etc.). Once again though that is completely irrelevant to the point I was making.
First, that is incorrect. Without a commercial license you CANNOT charge a passenger for their portion of the plane's depreciation (planes generally appreciate in value anyway, but that's another story). You can only charge their pro-rata cost of fuel (and oil, if any), landing/parking fees, etc. Even estimated per hour costs of maintenance are off limits.
Second, all of this bears absolutely no relevance to the point I was making. If I didn't have a commercial pilots license I could easilly go out and get one (besides, doing lazy eights and chandellas is fun), which would in no way change the fact that if I were to start charging friends for flights I would turn a fun hobby into a mundane job.
It would also be illegal to do flights for hire in a Part 91 aircraft
Anyone else misread that as "Stalinism"
... this is just a little more extreme than most (and quite a bit less appropriate than most, for a site the prides itself on being a supporter of free software).
Of course not. That was the entire point of coining the term "Stallmanism." It is the use of language to subliminally implant and drive home a particular political stance, in this case a strongly anti-RMS, anti-FSF, anti-freedom (or at least, apathy-toward-freedom) stance.
In short, the usage of such a term is a cheap form of propoganda on the part of the Slashdot poster (the term is not used by Joel Spolsky in the article itself). Which isn't really surprising, since most slashdot article posts have a strong bias in their summaries
The greatest lie of our market-based system is that time equals money, in all circumstances.
... like going out to dinner because you enjoy eating out, and enjoy a woman's company, etc.).
Exactly!
If you and your girlfriend are having sex (for free), do you regret it because you spent six hours making passionate love and didn't charge her for it? Does she regret it because she didn't charge you? After all, time is money and hookers typically charge a couple hundred bucks an hour.
(I won't bother with the "did you buy her dinner, then you paid for it" argument, since it misses a number of nuances
Contrary to popular myth greed ins't good, and most of the time time isn't money. Greed may be a reality we have to live with (especially living in a society that deiefies and nurturs it the way ours does), but it comes at a very high cost. I could charge someone for the time I spend boring holes in the sky in my little Beech Sundowner, but since I'm doing it for pleasure, and taking a friend along for a ride doesn't cost me anymore than flying by myself does, the only thing greed would bring me in that context is a little money at the expense of taking a hobby I love and turning it into Yet Another Mundane Job. No thanks.
The same applies to free software. Those who write free software (myself included) do so because we love to do it, not because we are trying to get rich doing so. If you're writing free software because you hope to get rich by doing so, then you're in the wrong field.
The amount of great software I've received for free, not to mention the amount of freedom I've gained in both my business and home life by using free software, more than compensates me for the time I put into it, whether it is writing stuff as a hobby, or testing it (and reporting bugs) for my job. The payoff is in the collaboration, a collaboration to a degree which wouldn't exist between people blinded by their myopic, Ayn Randian Greed.
There is still no easy way to do this in Gentoo, but I heard that it is comming in portage v2...
... Source Mage is really fun to work with too, and I enjoyed it a lot. Technically they are both very good distros, with different strengths and weaknesses, and very different approaches to how source packages are managed. I'd be hard pressed to say one is better than the other, in all fairness (though I always enjoyed the 'sorcery' motif of Source Mage ... casting spells to install apps, etc.). I just want to make clear that I really like Gentoo also. Both are fantastic distros, and which one a person uses is largely a question of personal taste.
When this is implimented Gentoo will really, really rock!
That is exceptionally good news. The one thing I really miss from using Source Mage (well, actually I miss several things about Source Mage, but my employer opted for Gentoo, so Gentoo is what I must use for now[1]) is Source Mage's 'auto-healing' feature, which uses the recursive approach you describe. Actually, IIRC it recursively determines what needs to be recompiled, then flattens the recursion to a list, ordered based on dependency, then recompiles the necessary software in order.
Very nice, and the one really important feature Gentoo has been missing up until now.
I'm delighted to see some cross-polination between Gentoo and Source Mage. Both are incredibly excellent distributions (though both are very different from one another), and seeing them take the best features from one another and impliment them is marvelous.
[1]Looking at this it sounds a little like I regret using Gentoo instead of Source Mage, which isn't really the case. What regret I feel is mostly nostalgia, and very mild
Whereas on my Debian boxes at work it was a simple [two commands] and I didn't have to wait while it re-built.
No, but you did have to wait for debian to release the binary. In the case of ssh it was done quickly (and, if you are running 2-year old software in debian Stable it will always be quick to get security fixes, but at the very high price of running archaic software).
Even security releated fixes don't make it into unstable as quickly as they do stable, and testing is generally a couple of weeks later still. And if you want to run software that is anything approaching modern under Debian, you have to either run unstable or testing, or compile the software yourself. If you're doing the latter, you may as well be using a source-based distro that will manage the compilation process and handle dependencies for you.
Then there are all those packages that aren't security related per se, but still contain signficant bug fixes or enhancements people may really need. Have you tried to apt-get X 4.2 under Debian lately? You can't, because even in unstable it still isn't supported yet, despite it being months since its release to the community. On the other hand, I've been using X 4.2 since January.
The thing that makes distros like Gentoo so powerful isn't just the performance improvement of having everything compiled optimized for your hardware (which is significant, naysayers notwithstanding), but that it makes installing from source as easy as other distros make installing precompiled binaries. This is a huge deal, as installing from source has all kinds of performance and stability advantages, not to mention less complex dependency issues, over precompiled binaries. And on a reasonably modern CPU the wait for something to compile really isn't a big deal for most packages, a few very large ones (KDE, X) excepted.
While Gentoo does rock, I don't suggest any of the cutting edge stuff for production boxes.
... but again, I was able to back out stuff quite easilly, and the benefits of having current stuff that does work makes this added burden very worthwhile IMHO.
... something that in many cases simply isn't acceptable (though in some cases it can be ... I do have an old GNU/Linux 2.0.x box that hasn't been upgraded in years, because it is behind a much more current firewall and does its one simple task just fine). Gentoo (and Source Mage, to be fair) solves this problem by giving you pretty good stability while allowing you to run very up-to-date software.
One should always do significant testing before rolling something out for production use. This is true whether or not the software in question is "cutting edge."
That having been said, there can be real advantages to using up-to-date software in a production environment. You may need the new features (e.g. X support of a new touchscreen the tablets you want to deploy require) or bugfixes (KDE 3.0.1 v. KDE 2.2.1 is a good example here), so cutting edge software, while it should be treated with caution, can be very beneficial.
The key is rigorous testing prior to deployment, so while this means the software your using will likely be at least a month or two old, it can still be pretty cutting edge if that is what is required, and it holds up in testing. In our case, X 4.2 was deployed very quickly (within 6 weeks of its release), as was KDE 3.x, while other "cutting edge" stuff, like gcc 3.x, probably won't be deployed for another 6 months because it didn't hold up in testing.
You are right, though, Gentoo (and Source Mage, for those who like trying out a pallate of different source based distros) can lead one into temptation. I've installed and backed out more than one bleeding edge app on my home machine for just this reason
At the other extreme, Debian's 2-year-old plus 'stable' distro isn't the answer. With the speed with which free software evolves, running 2 year-old free software is analogous to running 10-year old proprietary software
Would you recommend Source Mage or Gentoo? What are the differences?
First: SAVE YOUR EXISTING XF86Config/XF86Config-4 configuration, and any other configurations that would normally be tedious to create. Source based distros are less polished, and do not configure X for you automatically the way Mandrake et. al. do. By saving this file ("cheating" if you will) you'll save yourself a lot of time on the back end of the source-based install.
That having been said, it is a tough call. Both are excellent, but neither is very polished, and both are still in beta (and thus will have some bugs).
Source Mage's main drawback is that it assumes the 'source-only' paradigm almost to a fault, and has no provision for allowing older packages to remain installed when a newer version is installed. I.e. when you upgrade libpng, the older library is removed, the newer one installed, and anything linked to libpng (that the packaging system "sorcery" keeps track of) is recompiled. This works wonderfully for source-based packages and makes a system very easy to upgrade and keep up to date.
The problem is when one has 3rd party binaries that requires the older library, and one can't recompile the binary against the new library. The deveopers of source mage are working on versioning support to fix this problem.
If you want a source based distro that doesn't involve a lot of manual work to get it running, and is almost a no-brainer to upgrade, you probably want to try Source Mage.
Gentoo is a mirror image of the above. It supports multiple package versions being installed at the same time pretty cleanly, is less source-only centric, and is quite good at supporting legacy binaries (at the speed with which free software moves, any 3rd party commercial binary is likely to be "legacy").
Upgrades on Gentoo require care. Unlike Source Mage you should not run around doing 'upgrade world' commands without examining them first and considering the consiquences. It still isn't as difficult and error prone as Mandrake and Suse upgrades have been (but is arguably about as error prone as typical Debian testing upgrades can be).
In other words, its pretty safe and easy to upgrade, but not a no-brainer and, very occasionally, an upgrade run simply as is with no consideration can break things.
If you want a very flexible system with excellent documentation, and don't mind performing the installation steps required by hand (but documented step-by-step by the distro), then you want Gentoo.
I like them both. I find Gentoo a little more ready than Source Mage for production work, but Source Mage's "auto-healing" function is unequalled anywhere else. What is more, developers for each distro are working to address that distro's difficiencies, so in the long run both distros are likely to have most of the features of the other. In other words, I expect Gentoo will have Source Mage's autohealing functionality in the not so distant future, and I suspect Source Mage will have better versioning support quite soon as well.
My advice? If you have the disk space and partitions available, install them both, try them both out, and pick whichever one you feel most comfortable with. Both are, IMHO, excellent.
What I don't understand is why most right-wingers in the USA like to classify issues such as global warming as a left-wing political issue. Is it not possible to be right wing and concerned about the environment?
Disclaimer: I am an American.
What many non-Americans, and particularly Europeans, may not understand is just how conservative (and in the post 9/11 era, downright ugly) American politics have become. What you consider pretty far to the right is likely left of the current Democratic party. The US political spectrum overlaps that of Europe only to the right of the European Center, while what we call 'centrist' politics would, in Germany, probably be somewhere between the CDU (conservative) and Republikaner (ultra-nationalists).
In this country one set of conservatives believe global warming could be a problem. Most, but not all, of these conservatives are Democrats. Another set is in complete denial, and will remain so even after the seas have risen and they've been forced to relocate their factories inland several hundred miles. Most, but not all, of these tend to be Republican (or even farther to the right: Libertarian).
Both sides use the issue as a political football, which is reprehensible IMHO, but it is the Reagan-Bush Republicans who are truly adept at humiliating this country in just about every international ecological summit or meeting. The scientific evidence that human industrial activity is aggrivating, perhaps fundamentally causing, the warming of the planet is mounting geometricly, and psuedo-scientific demands for 100% proof are reminiscent of Creationists and their arguments (another source of humiliation for America).
It has, indeed, become quite emberrassing to be an American, and I fear it will only become more so before things get any better.
Written by S. Wolfram,
... we'll just have to wait and see.
... he is trying to drive a point home, and (thus far, I've only made it through chapter 7) is doing so in a time honored, rigorous fashion that is reminiscent of just about every theoretical mathematics, physics and engineering course I've taken.
Peer reviewed by noone,
Edited by S. Wolfram,
Published by S. Wolfram's company.
Well, Wolfram had a team of PhDs working under him, so it did go through some nomimal review and quite a rigorous check for accuracy. That is certainly comparable to the "peer review" that one sees in publishing scientific papers in scientific journals, and is arguably better than much of the "peer review" that takes place prior to such publications.
The real "peer review" will be that of other scientists now that his work is published. Can they replicate his results (almost certainly) and do the applications he outlined produce useful results to those working in the various fields of scientific inquiry his book touches upon. Quite possibly
I'm reading his book now, and it is quite fascinating. I disagree with the various calls for editors others have been making
Does that mean his conclusions are correct? No.
But it does set a very solid foundation for his thesis, and allow one to regard his theories in a solid context and an informed way, and, what is more, to understand them without first having become an expert in the field of CA.
He thinks he's discovered an overlooked tool for doing scientific analasys of systems which to date have defied calculus and other methods of analysis. He makes a compelling argument for why this is so, and provides ample data and information for anyone who is interested to duplicate and check his work.
He may not be correct, and his method of publishing may not have been within the channels the establishment generally prefers, but his publication itself appears to be in no way lacking in scientific rigorousness, and has certainly provided the detail and wherewithall for anyone to challenge it.
He may not be paying proper homage to those who came before him, or giving sufficient credit to those who have thought along similar lines (though he does cite other works and give due credit, so I'm not sure that criticism is even accurate), but his work, right or wrong, certainly appears scientifically valid. And if it is wrong, it will be rebutted quite thoroughly I'm sure, given the number of toes he has likely stepped on in persuing such a nontraditional course.
What benchmarking did you and few others do? (And what CPU do you use?)
Nothing terribly official (which is why I used the word casual).
Time to compile the kernel, Time to load X, time to load KDE, the time it takes transcode to encode a 42 minute episode of Max Headroom into xvid format (that was one that experienced nearly 30% improvement over versions compiled on, and run on, Debian, for example).
Architecture for myself is nothing special: a dual 1GHz Pentium 3, compiler flags:
CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe"
gcc 2.95 gave me roughly 20% speed improvements on every test over my old Debian install, and about the same over my old Mandrake install. gcc 3.04 gave me roughly 25% speed improvements, and gcc 3.1 gave me right around 27% speed improvements.
I actually had the most dramatic speed increase (30.7%) on a dual Athlon MP box compiled with -march=athlon-mp using gcc 3.1. People can poo poo source based, optimized speed improvements all they like, but once you've tried them you'll likely notice the speed improvement yourself, and be reluctant to go back to binary based distros.
Source based distros are a natural evolution, given the source availability of today's best operating systems and utilities (FreeBSD and GNU/Linux). They eliminate a whole class of problems we've all had to contend with, and give us dramatically better performance to boot.
I for one will never go back, and everyone I know who has tried either Gentoo or Source Mage feels the same way, despite the fact that neither of those distros is anywhere near as polished as Mandrake, Suse, or Red Hat.
There is a difference between the two. The cost of the correlation between masturbation/eyesight is a pair of glasses. The cost of global warming is conceivably a lot higher, and so deserves more attention and effort.
... much less explain why. It is aximoatic that 2+2=4 ... one could build a methematics just as easilly on the notion that the plus sign adds 1 to the value, such that 1+1=3 and 2+2=5. It wouldn't yield very useful results, but it can be done. 2+2=4 because that is how we have axiomatically defined addition to work.
More to the point, there isn't, and never has been, any evidence that masturbation leads to blindness (or poor vision at all).
There is a mountain of evidence, piling ever higher, that our industrial wastes are changing the albedo of the planet, that the planet is thus radiating less heat away than previously, and as a result the climate is growing warmer.
Is it absolute proof? As you point out, no, it isn't, and absolute proof wouldn't be possible even after the entire process runs its course and Earth comes to resemble Venus (assuming it were ever allowed to go so far), as one could still argue that it might have been a natural phenomenon.
It is like arguing that an oily beach is a natural phenomenon. It is possible that an oil reserve is exposed to the sea through natural causes (like an undersea earthquake opening a rift), but the hulking remains of the Exxon Valdeze would, for example, make the argument that the cause could have been natural pretty weak, even without 100% irrefutable proof.
So to with the ever warming planet. It could possibly be natural, but a mountain of strong evidence suggests it isn't, and to proceed on the very unlikely assumption that it is natural is folly to the nth degree, and an action only someone living in complete denial because they simply don't want it to be so could ever advocate.
BTW, you can't even 'prove' 2+2=4
It isn't the packaging format really
Source Mage and Gentoo[1] are two excellent source based distros that avoid these classes of problems altogether, and unlike RPM (or debs[2]) add no burden to the upstream software developer.
Shawn Gordon of The Kompany touches on this when he says (from the article, you did read the article, right?)
Source based distros like Gentoo and Source Mage have packaging systems that automate the process of downloading, configuring, compiling, and installing all of the software on their systems from source (pedants will note there is the occasional binary package, e.g. NVidia drivers, but for the vast, vast majority of software my point holds). Indeed, this approach makes the packaging system itself less important (so long as it works properly) than the overall engineering and organization of the distro itself, and completely irrelevant to the software developer (as it should be).
This has a couple of disadvantages, and a whole bunch of real advantages. So much so that almost no one who has used a source based distro will go back to a binary based distro once they've tried it, despite the cons (in fact, of the numerous people I know who've tried Source Mage and Gentoo, both very different from one another BTW, I know of not a single person who has gone back to their old binary favorite, be it Suse, Mandrake, Red Hat, or Debian).
There are numerous other advantages I could add here, but you get the idea.
The entire article on the flaws of RPM might better be entitled "The Flaws of Source Based Distributions" which, in the age of Free Software and source code availability, coupled with todays fast processors, really ought to become a thing of the past. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Debian, Suse, Mandrake, and Red Hat all embracing the notion of source-based distros sometime in the future
And the advantages in speed, stability, and ability to keep current with new software releases in a timely manner will only become more acute as time goes on.
So while binary based distros are by no means dead (despite my rather provocative headline), it is my opinion that the writing is certainly on the wall, and the ovservant person can already mark the shifting change in the wind.
[1]There are other source based distros as well, including Linux from Scratch and Lunar Penguin, and likely others as well.
[2]Though in fairness the Debian developers take up most if not all of that burden
Once a patent has expired, that's it -- you can't re-patent it, and neither can anyone else. So logically, if people are currently filing zillions of frivolous patents now, that means in twenty years it will become considerably more difficult to file frivolous patents.
But then I sat back and thought "No, in twenty years they'll be filing a whole new set of frivolous patents on technologies that don't yet exist; and nobody will care about all those frivolous patents that they filed way-back-when."
You are absolutely right, but you don't go far enough. Frivolous patents will be filed for (and granted!) on the same invention again and again. This is very common practice in the pharamceutical industry, where a slightly modified version of a drug (perhaps with a new coating) is granted a new, broad patent which they can then use to extort money from or even completely shut down attempts at making a generic version of the old (now patent-expired) drug.
This practice is not limited to the pharmaceutical field, BTW, that is merely the most widely known example (and most potent, since people's lives are affected and, quite possibly ended, as a result).
Patents, no matter what else is wrong with them, have the good grace to expire 20 years after being issued.
... some of 'em had episodes that could literally have emerged from a word processor with just the character names changed and some minor alterations to dialog.
... they slowdown not only current innovation, but lock out future innovation that could build upon what we have today for a minimum of 20 years!
... monopolies need to be replaced with tax incentives and required public acknowledgement, and the terms of even those reduced dramatically.
Actually, it is 20 years after they were filed. It used to be 17 years after issuance, but no more.
In other words, we've arguably already had one Sony Bono copyright act for patents.
As for patents' shorter duration, one must balance that against patents much further reaching restrictions. With copyright you are prevented from copying a particular work, but you can still incorporate parts of it via quotation/fair use, and there's nothing to prevent you from writing a similiar story/program/movie with slightly different characters. Remember all the cheesy 70's techno-super-hero knockoffs (6 million dollar man, the guy with the watch that made him invisible, etc.)
Contrast that with patents, which would have made the cliffhanger ending off limits to everybody for 20 years (and quite possibly longer, as there is a habit of making very slight alterations to a product, especially medicines, and then getting a new patent on essentially the same item).
Copyrights are bad, and I've long advocated their elimination and replacement with something far milder, that doesn't convey monopoly priveleges on anyone, creator or not. But patents are just as bad
The social and economic costs of these government mandated monopoly regimes is simply too high
Nowhere do I see the word Linux. How is the average uneducated (OS wise) Wal-Mart customer going to know that Lindows uses the Linux kernel? Will they even know/care what the kernel is?
... but just as open source provided a stepping stone for many a cynical suit (myself included ... yes, I was once a suit) to come to understand and ultimately embrace free software, so to might Wallmart and Lindows provide a similar stepping stone to many others.
"Sauce for the goose, Mr. Savik."
Wallmart Lindows users will care as much about GNU/Linux as many of the zealously anti-RMS Linux folks care about the Free Software Foundation's message of Freedom (as opposed to "simply getting it to work as cheaply and as well as possible.").
The GNU/Linux community may get a small taste of what Stallman has undoubtably felt as he has seen his work taken, and no credit given (to the point where Linus Torvalds is actively discouraging any reference to the Free Software Foundation in any Linux kernel documentation, a rather spiteful act if there ever was one).
A small taste, mind you, and I think you are right to point out that any damage if Lindows doesn't perform may not affect GNU/Linux directly as a result (i.e. the community could dodge a bullet on this one). On the other hand, if it becomes wildly popular, we may very well see a world in which everybody has heard of and uses Lindows, but few have heard of or are aware that they are using Linux, much less GNU/Linux.
Sauce for the Goose, indeed, and an amusing bit of poetic irony if it indeed plays out that way. Personally, I think anything that brings freedom to the masses is a good thing (which is why, though I am deeply critical and fiarly annoyed at Linus' anti-FSF stance, I do not actively dislike the guy or in any way wish him ill, much less the OS I've come to know and love, by whatever name), and Wallmart's Lindows program might do just that, if they start offering such machines in their stores. Of course, Richard would undoubtably prefer it be called GNU/Lindows [evil grin], and it is with no little irony that he would be right in wishing so, as that might at least make people aware of GNU, of free software, and of software freedom in general (and thus, of the Linux kernel that underlies an important part of their Lindows systems)
Here's wishing them success, whatever the branding and naming conventions they use.
... and at one time there was.
... corporate rights to lie are not (unless more than an average number of justices have been smoking crack of late).
... i.e. the only way there will ever be a remote chance for the free market to work as intended (and as it is advocated to supposedly work).
It was called "truth in advertising," which has gone completely by the wayside. Corporate speech is not the same as individual speech, and is NOT entitled to the same constitutional protections.
Individuals' rights to lie may be constitutionally protected
I am not normally one to advocate new legislation, but in this particular case it is sorely needed.
We need firm, explicit, unequivocable laws requiring truth in advertising and marketing (and yes, that includes press releases), with real punishments, involving real sums of money (and/or real jail time) for those who violate the law. It is the only way corporate entities like McCaffee will ever be forced to modify that sort of behavior, and the only way consumers will ever have even a remote chance of making an informed purchase
I dunno, I think there should be a government bailout of something like this.
No. No. No.
If the infrastructure is really that critical (like a country's highway system is), then the government should nationalize the backbone and make it available to competing ISPs under identical terms (i.e. actually allow competition and prevent vertical monopolies leveraged from physical monopolies over last mile cable and critical backbone links from forming).
If it isn't that important, then they should simply stand aside and let these companies go belly up, with all the consiquences that entails.
In no way should an existing, unsuccessful commercial enterprise be propped up by government: either the free market works, or there is no free market (read: monopoly), in which case the underlying structural cause of the monopoly (if any, in this case perhaps the copper, esp. if last-mile copper is involved) should be nationalized, and the market opened up so it can operate freely, with competition.
Bailouts are the worst of both possible worlds: government intervention and expenditure of public funds AND private corporate control with no public accountability (beyond their stockholders, if they happen to be traded publicly).
When Northpoint went under with no warning it sucked (we were off the net for 2 days due to that fiasco, and NSI didn't fix our DNS for 10 days), but even there a government bailout would have been wrong.
Nationalizing Ameritech's last mile of copper, so that Ameritech wouldn't be able to maliciously leverage that monopoly to drive competing DSL providers like Northpoint out of business, on the other hand, would have been a reasonable response. Unfortunately the ayndroids of the far right have managed to convince a large percentage of people that free enterprise is a panacea in all contexts and the only good governance is no governance. Nonsense, of course, as anyone can see (just try applying that logic to public highways and try to imagine the economic impact of Road Monopolies), but it is a widespread and in many respects crippling meme that has infected much of America.
yes, but in that example the car dealer buys the car and then sells to a consumer... the sale to the consumer is where the law is applied.
That makes absolutely no difference. Iowa (or any state) has the right to impose regulations on anything sold within their boundries, whether the seller is a resident of the state or not. Iowa cannot regulate widgets going from Nebraska and being sold in Illinois which are just passing through, but if the widgets are being sold in Iowa they can impose whatever (constitutional) regulations they like, whether the manufacturer is in Iowa, Nebraska, Washington State, or Timbuktu.
It is very clear cut, and, once again, Microsoft is in the wrong.