...so, in a nutshell, Nader is saying that the government should make an effort to influence the marketplace in a certain direction, rather than letting natural market forces dictate what heppens (questionable/illegal business practices being part of the market).
The is an utterly moot point, as a market dominated by a monopoly is not, I repeat, not a free market! All of the assumptions any of us make about the effectiveness of the free market cease to be relevant when one entity, in this case, Microsoft, enjoys monopolistic power over that market. In which case the only alternative to a non-free, monopolistic or oligarchical marketplace in which no competition can possibly occur is government intervention, either in the form of enforced regulation to prevent monopolies from forming in the first place (the ideal solution from a free market perspective, ie. keep the market free at all times), enforced anti-trust legislation for when monopolies do form and abuse their position (less ideal, in that monopolies can form and then tread close to that line without crossing it, resulting in markets that are not free and thus inherently dysfunctional, but still better than nothing as it does, presumably, prevent and punish the worst excesses of a monopolist like Microsoft), or use of its purchasing might to encourage, even coerce, desired behavior from a recalcitrant and unrepentent monopolist such as Microsoft.
Notice the keyword enforced, which with the current sellout of the DOJ is missing from this situation entirely. Nader makes an excellent point here... if another department of government abdicates its resposibility to the people and society, the purchasing power of other portions of government can, if used correctly, go a long way toward correcting that problem. It would be better to root out the corruption at the heart of the Dept. of Justice, but if that isn't doable something along these lines is certainly better than nothing.
I'd love to see the rise of Open Source, the fall of Microsoft, etc, as much as the next guy. But I don't want the government using my tax dollars to achieve that (except in antitrust and other legal manners).
And what do you do when the DOJ snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, as it is doing with the current Microsoft case, because of backroom political sweetheart deals and campaign contributions stuffing the pockets of our elected(?) officials? If the government refuses to step up to its responsibilities to bust monopolies who are abusing its power (indeed, if we are truly interested in free markets then IMHO the law should be changed to disallow monopolies, period, but that is a debate for another day), then Microsoft (and entities like them, e.g. Monsanto) become unassailable in their respective markets and the entire notion of a free market becomes little more than an idealized theory that no longer has any relevance to the real world.
In which case, to the have-nots, revolution starts to look like a damn good alternative (and thank the fates I'm not one of the have-nots, at least not yet).
While "freedom software" and "software freedom" are both acceptable noun phrases (head noun + modifying noun), the former in particular seems awkward. I think we (English speakers) have a choice between "free software" and "open source" - I don't think there's room to create a third phrase.
I disagree. While "open source" as a catchphrase played an important role in bringing software freedom to corporations and companies (such as mine), it is important to keep in mind that "open source" is merely a stepping stone across which, ideally at least, a cynical suit steps in his or her walk to freedom.
That sounds pretty idealistic and far fetched, doesn't it. The interesting thing, though, is how true it has been, at least in my experience.
There was a time when Free Software was banned from where I worked, not because of the freedom it represented, or because of Richard Stallman's long hair, long beard, or feiery rhetoric, but because people mistook the word "free" to mean gratis, and then equated it with buggy and virus-ridden shareware commonly distributed on a virus and worm-prone operating system from our favorite folks in the Redmond Barrens[1].
Open source played an important role in getting the otherise close minded suits to see the technical benefits of open and free collaboration, and to get past the mistaken assumption that free software meant shoddy quality (the 'you get what you pay for' fallacy) or vulnerability to security flaws/viruses (the 'security through obscurity' fallacy).
The mistake people who advocate 'open source' make is that this is not an ends in itself, but merely a means to an ends... bringing otherwise close minded and cynical people over to where they can experience the benefits of free software first hand.
We initially started using free software because of its unarguable technical superiority over proprietary products from Micrsoft, Sun, and others. But what has, over the years, proven to be of far greater value to my employer has been the software freedom that using free software has brought us. Not just the four freedoms the Free Software Foundation expounds upon, but the freedom from vendors dictating software upgrades at great expense in time and money to ourselves, the freedom from orphaning of critical libraries or applications that used to leave us scrambling for alternatives, and the freedom from license audits that cost so much time and money, etc., etc., etc.
Freedom is what is ultimately important to a business, and the technical merits (while certainly laudable) have become a distant second to the security, protection, and power those freedoms bring to our ability to conduct our business and earn money without living in fear of our vendors, their BSA goons, or their incompetence. For a pittance (relative to profits) we can hire someone to maintain a free software package if it is abandoned and we need it... before we were up the proverbial creek without a paddle, and projects would be set well behind schedule as alternatives were looked for. And don't even get me started on the ever-moving target that was, and remains, the Microsoft development environment... that nonsense costs even more man hours just to track from quarter to quarter. Now we upgrade when and how we choose, with the luxury of freezing whatever targets we need to, for as long as we wish, and that alone saves us millions.
It is interesting that companies and governments in the rest of the world seem to be learning the bottom-line value software freedom brings to business faster and with less difficulty than corporations in the so-called "land of the free" are capable of. An irony historians may be scratching their heads over in years to come, perhaps.
Back to my original point: there is room for a third term, "software freedom", as my use of it above illustrates. Open Source deemphesized freedom and emphesizes the technical merits of peer review and free collaboration, while free software emphesizes software freedom. Both are important, but while open source is a means, freedom is the end to which all of these philosophies are ultimately striving.
Come on, people. This is nothing to get bent out of shape about -- this is exactly what the free market is for! Yes, it might be a kewl product, but if you don't agree with the license, don't purchase the product.
The problem is, there really isn't a free market. The copyright cartels, and their goons, are strongarming ReplayTV, TiVo, and other PVR manufacturers into disabling features they don't like (commercial skipping) and possibly even requiring features they do like (embedded commercials, coming to a PVR near you?).
Those that want to make a kick ass PVR and sell it face the daunting certainty of being sued into oblivion by such household cartels as the MPAA and, if the device allows the sharing of music, the RIAA. So long as these monopolists can send their IP lawyer/thugs around shutting down businesses they don't like, intimidating the rest, and even absorbing the more successful (mp3.com), no free market will ever really exist because consumers will be prevented from having the choice of buying what they want altogether.
The invisible hand of the free market doesn't work when this sort of coercion is in play, and whether the terms of this particular license are to protect Replay from the copyright cartels (and whatever court orders their copyright priveleges may result in), or to take advantage of their customers down the road is quite irrelevant. Either way, it is the customer, that's you and I folks, who gets screwed, and the only viable alternative is to give up a little convinience and roll your own GNU/Linux based PVR (it is with pleasure I hear the screaming and wailing of the naysayers now, as I watch my Max Headroom episodes in resolutions they can't even dream of:-).
As for me, I will not be buying this product, but I will be writing Sonic Blue to tell them just exactly why I won't be buying. To make it easier for you, here is Sonic Blue's contact page [replaytv.com]. I urge you to send them a similar letter if this policy bothers you.
That is excellent advice... and about the only way a consumer can wield any power in an oligarchical market: vocal boycott of the entire product. (It is the copyright cartels, not the PVR makers, who are the oligarchs, but since they effectively decide which PVRs are legal and which are not it amounts to much the same thing.)
So... there are only 10^10 bits of unique information to be bookkept for every elementary particle? I find this intuitively inadequte.
I think there are two points to this:
* it is a reasonable, probably correct, conclusion to draw that a classical, finite state binary computer could not be constructed within the universe that would be capable of running the universe on itself... at least not within the lifespan of the universe itself AND with the computational resources of the universe itself (remove either of those two constraints and it might well be possible... remember than any simple turing-complete machine can emulate any other turing complete machine of arbitrary complexity and power, provided your willing to trade off time against computational capacity). Since the question is whether or not we can do this within the confines of this universe, those limitations are, at least as long as we don't know how to tunnel out of this universe or access whatever underlying structure might contain it, very reasonable. * your intuition is correct as far as it goes, but you are not accounting for changing states encoded in the calculation (but not stored to media). Storage requirements would likely be much greater if you wanted to take a snapshot every, say, planck-time unit (~10-64 sec). But if your goal is simulation, not archival, the numbers given might be adequate, assuming their underlying assumptions are correct.
Of course, we could see a lot more improvement if we used quantum computing.
I think you touch on something interesting here (in addition to the obvious fact that we are, in fact, embedded in a quantum universe/computer)... with quantum computing it may become possible to emulate the universe without using so much storage and/or computational power, depending on what sorts of shortcuts quantum algorithms may allow for. Intuition tells me that won't fly, but intuition is a dangerous thing to use when dealing with QM, which at its heart is quite alien to our "common-sense" yet nevertheless demonstrably true. It is possible that the way eigenstates collapse in nature is not the most efficient way they can collapse, particularly when looked at from a computational perspective. Fun speculation for a good SF story if nothing else.:-)
It isn't a sham, it is a hint at something greater
on
Open Source... Mining?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Open source comparison is a sham
No, it isn't a sham, but it is a poor choice of wording.
Free Software, Free Media, and Open Source are subsets of a much more fundamental, and important, concept, namely freedom of information, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression, which together might be termed simply freedom were it not that that particular word has been so abused by pundits over the last century as to have lost much of its meaning. These freedoms are antithetical to secrecy at their most basic levels, and in their consiquences, whether that is secrecy of information, secrecy of methodology, or secrecy of design (to name just three).
So, while mapping the benefits of open and free information to those of open and free software is a bit of a misnomer, clearly the underlying theme that free information is, unsurprisingly, bringing the same benefits to this particular mining company that free source code does to software companies is a valid parallel to draw, in that these benefits are a consiquence of freedom of knowledge and freedom of information, in other words, of the freedoms being granted, of which free software and free geological data are but two small examples.
It is a shame that our intellectual property laws are such that these freedoms must be granted rather than assumed by default, making them (and their obvious benefits) so much rarer in our society than they need to be.
Libertarian: They are great allies on many of our issues, but if you look deeper they have some real scarry positions. Like getting rid of the FDA, eliminiating licencing for doctors, and selling off all public land to finance all sorts of radical changes. Not only are they opposed to the Microsoft anti-trust case, they want to eliminate the anti-monopoly laws. [lp.org]
The libertarians equate business (or corporate) freedom with individual freedom, (some even claim that individual freedom is predicated on corporate freedom), so while they want to get rid of unjust drug laws that incarcerate thousands of living, breathing people they also want to get rid of drug regulations to unfetter the pharmaceutical companies from "oppresive" government regulation as well.
This is their fatal flaw: setting individual freedom equal to corporate freedom. The two are often in conflict with one another (e.g. an employer who wants to spy on their employees during off hours), and all but the very smallest of companies is significantly larger, richer, and more powerful than individuals, even indivuduals of means. That of course means that, in a society that sets a human being's rights equal to those of a corporations, the corporation is going to have the advantage in terms of resources, power, and influence, which means whenever said freedoms conflict it is the individual who will almost invariably lose their freedoms as a result.
This is an absolutely fatal flaw in Libertarian thinking, and the reason I am not a libertarian.
So yes we are paying for their idocy, and we shouldnt. Failed bussiness plans should just fail, they shouldnt pass their failures on to their consumers.
Well, actually they should, as that is what is required for them to stay in business and it is their fudiciary responsiblity to do whatever is legal and ethical to stay in business.
However, the customers should then stop being customers when the prices rise unacceptably, and either the providor will become leaner and lower prices to a more acceptable level (again, to stay in business), or they will go under.
Unfortunately, this all presupposes a free market, which as everyone knows doesn't exist in the telco/broadband market, where monopolies own the last mile of copper and can leverage that to destroy their competitors (as the baby bells have done to many third party DSL providors already).
Imagine if the last mile of highway to your house were privately owned by a monopoly. Do you really think competitors cars, shipping companies, and delivery services would be able to get to your driveway under the same terms as the subsidiaries/strategic partners of the local road monopoly? Hardly... just like many of the 3rd party telco services they would be driven out of business by the owners of the last mile, and your service, to your home, would become more shoddy, and more expensive, as a result. Just like what has been happening with the telcos.
The only reasonable solution to this quandary is for the wire to be treated as we treat our roads and highways: a public works project to which providors and users all have the same access, under the same terms, in a competative environment. The alternative is exactly what we have now: the very worst possible marketplace one can have: that controlled and manipulated by our local monopolies.
So if I start moving all my domains to ".sr" (the assigned country code of Suriname), and promote them as "Silly Rabbit", this somehow changes who owns the TLD?
Effectively it does, if you control all of the radio and television that the majority of people in the US can get their information from.
If you repeat a deception, even an outright lie, long enough and loudly enough people will believe it. Does it really matter that.cc stands for the Coconos if 90% of the people have been convinced that it stands for 'clear channel'? Not really. Think of the frustration RMS feels when his GNU system is almost always referred to as "Linux" giving him zero credit for having written most of the system... now imagine trying to explain to someone living in Colombus, Ohio (or another medium-sized city with only Clear Channel stations to listen to, and no other real choice) that.cc doesn't stand for what every rock, country, and talk station has been telling them it does, but for an obscure collection of islands somewhere 'out there' instead. You'll be even less well received than RMS has been.
Granted, Clear Channel doesn't appear to have succeeded in their effort to rebrand.cc under their name, but it certainly looks as though they tried, and had they succeeded it would not have been the first time in recent history that mass media would have succeeded in redefining what was 'true' and what wasn't... that is one of the things that make these media cartels so powerful, after all.
I think trying to paint corporations as villains for trying to "keep their profits high" is a strategy waiting to backfire. Keeping profits high is what corporations are supposed to do.
Not when they are deliberately and consciously subverting the constitution and working to neuter or outright ban the most democratic technology (the internet) to come along in two centuries to do so.
And not when they are trying to ban the technologies that make it possible for hobbiests to create content equal to or better than what they produce, in order to protect their cartel at the expense of the wider society and culture.
No one in power is going to spank them for doing that.
Well, that is indicative of another problem... the legalized bribery that has turned our once proud congress into a collection of cheap whores who routinely sell their votes (for a relative pittence) to their corporate sponsors in hopes financing their campaign to allow themselves to live on the public dole for another two (or six) years.
The DMCA doesn't care if DeCSS is a secret or not. They can be sued by offering a device that circumvents access control measures on the DVD's.
Not if their products are, as advertised, solely for sale in the greater China area. Any grey market products offered for sale in the United States aren't officially sanctioned by the manufacturerers, and therefor the only people at risk are the grey market importers. The Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers can make and sell these devices all over the rest of the world with impunity.
CSS used to be a trade secret. It is not and never was patented, and if they try to get a patent on it now there is plenty of "prior art," include deCSS itself.:-)
Then some rather intelligent youths in Europe figured out how to break the profoundly weak algorithm used to encrypt DVDs and restrict their playback (but not bit-for-bit copies, as most DVD-Rs were capable of doing back then, before the deCSS case and their wholesale redesign).
CSS isn't a secret anymore, indeed there are T-Shirts, songs, and 7 line perl scripts that can algorithmicly crack the code without any keys whatsoever.
The Taiwainese or Chinese can use any of this widely and publicly available information to make DVD playback devices capable of decrypting and playing DVDs and, I suspect, under the rules of the WTO, there is absolutely nothing the Copyright and Media Cartels can do about it.
Oh, BTW, as I noted, two of those systems didn't belong to me, they belonged to people I know who experienced similar difficulties (and documented them as well).
Enough people, of enough diverse walks of life, are having issues like this with Reiserfs that it is clearly not something that is safe to be deploying in a production environment. Even if only 1% of the people using it are being so bitten, that number is way too high (and based on my own experiences and those of several people I know, I suspect that number is a lot higher than 1 per cent).
I understand your ire at the community at large. I share it. At the same time, I don't believe that Richard is choosing his battles wisely. He is certainly free to do so, but I regret the damage it is causing to the larger purpose.
I agree. I understand RMS's reasoning, and his reasons (and they are reasonable and good), but you are absolutely right about the inertia a name, once given, has, and the unnecessary divisiveness RMS's GNU/Linux v. Linux campaign entails. He probably thinks that the awareness the argument itself raises is worth the divisions it creates, which may or may not be the case (I don't know).
Certainly, now that Linus has decided to take a political stand (and his calling it an apolitical stand doesn't make it any less political... in fact it strikes me as rather hypocritical) to deliberately and with malice of forethought deemphesize and edit out references to the Free Software Foundation from any and all kernel documentation deepens that schism tremendously, and adds unecessary fuel to the fire while IMHO doing a disservice to all sides of the community in the process. And, unlike RMS (who I think we agree chose his battle poorly in this case), Linus has IMHO no good justification at all for pointing people away from the FSF. RMS at least had reasonable grounds for his request, even if it was, tactically, a foolish request (although one I will still continue to try and honor out of respect for the guy, whenever I remember to).
But, at least in my view, that threat pales in comparison to that posed by groups (well-known to us all) that are actively trying to strip away that same freedom. I would worry more about the enemy soldier shooting at me than my squadmate's second-hand smoke.
Excellent point, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. We are definitely all of us on the same side of the "freedom-of-expression v. autoritarian cartel economy" battle even if we do (perhaps vehemently, on some subjects) disagree. I really wish Torvalds, RMS, and ESR would realize the same and stop sniping one another, but that is probably far too much to hope for. In the interim I'll try and choose my words more carefully so as not to inadvertantly insult friends and allies like yourself, and again, I apologize for having done so.:-)
restore some social responsibility to these businesses
An easy platitude to utter, but exactly what are you proposing? Brainwash the management? Throw 'em in jail as an example? Pass a law that says they have to be nice?
Don't be silly. Suspend their corporate charter and take away their license to do business for acting against the common interest. If you look at the wording of the laws that allow for coporations to exist, you'll see that they require said corporations serve the public interest.
Indeed, it was very uncommon in the early republic for corporate charters to be granted, and not so terribly uncommon for them to be revoked, essentially putting the offending company out of business. Of course, back then corporations were not considered "real" people like they have been since a particularly bizzar (and unprecedented) California court case some eighty years ago that turned everything on its ear and granted corporations all the rights and priveleges of real, breathing, living human beings.
I think one or two revocations of corporate charters would be sufficient to change the behavior of other large corporations, without the need for managerial brainwashing or laws telling people to be nice, don't you?
As for jail time, if someone is managing a company (like, say, Monsanto) that knowingly falsifies FDA test results in order to get dangerous milk hormones approved for public consumption [c.f. Into the Buzzsaw] or knowingly and with premeditation poisons the groundwater of a town in the southern U.S. in the 1990's (and gets caught with the memos discussing how to deal with the political fallout should they ever get caught) [c.f. just about every major American Newspaper, pre 9/11], then yes, I do think the fucking bastards should be put in jail. Perminently, if their behavior, or negligence, has resulted in the loss of human life.
The obvious solution is standardization in combination with version management that's how regular distributions pull it off.
Yes, of course, but there is a heavy price to be paid for that "standardization", namely the inability to have current software on your system, and the subsequent slowdown in providing timely feedback and bug reports to authors.
Debian, as an example (and as my favorite binary only distribution), had one of its developers respond to a question by a curious user as to when XFree 4.2 would be included in debian with the curt answer: "Leave me alone. It will be months." Source Mage ("Sorcery" at the time) had X 4.2 available within a day, Gentoo very shortly thereafter. Those of us who needed the bug fixes and additional hardware support didn't have to wait "months" for its inclusion into a binary distro, or alternatively have to compile it ourselves (by hand) and then watch as various distribution-provided binaries start to break because of X 4.2's differences from X 4.1.
On the contrary, we had clean, solid, good support from day one, which meant we got the bug fixes in a much more timely manner, and were able to deploy configurations not even possible with other distriutions. And we didn't have to sacrifice stability in order to do it.
As for Mozilla, it may have nightly cvs builds, but Gentoo and Source Mage both reference release builds (e.g Mozilla RC2, RC3, etc.), not nightly builds as a rule. So while those wishing to have the very latest may find themselves compiling mozilla once every two or three weeks, it certainly isn't a nightly affair. Ditto for KDE... 3.0.1 came out more than a month after 3.0, so while I want the latest bug fixes and enhancements, I'm running an overnight compile of KDE at most once every 5 or 6 weeks. This is hardly a great burden, and the trouble saved by having packages compiled against the proper librarys, and the resultant stability, more than makes up for whatever time is spent starting the compile before going to bed (or leaving work for the day).
It also makes keeping up with security fixes much, much easier than with Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, and Debian (stable excepted, but debian stable makes the Jurassic appear contemporary).
You may be personally allergic to compiling large packages (or have a processor that is painfully slow to do so... I have Gentoo installed on an old Intel MMX 233, which did take 3 days (!!) to install, but as I've said before, I probably spent a total of an hour sitting in front of that box, and the rest of the time ignoring it while it churned away), in which case binary distros, with all their many faults, may be exactly what you want. Even with a slow processor, though, I suspect you would find the incremental time savings of having a more responsive and quick system well worth the initial investment of time... my slower boxes benefit even more in some cases from the kinds of optimizations Gentoo and Source Mage provide than some of the quicker boxes.
In any event, for those of us working with this stuff every day, who have reasonably modern CPUs and who are required to troubleshoot live systems whenever anything goes wrong, having quick and painless access to the current bug fixes and features is an invaluable asset. In short, for many people (I would venture to say most), once they've tried a source-based distro, binary distros feel klunky by comparison and a person will never want to go back. The benefits are simply too great, naysayers notwithstanding.
The one reason I have not yet downloaded this is recompilation. I mean, compiling is pretty much a deterministic activity. Given similar compiler settings you'd expect the result to be the same each time.
What isn't deterministic is what packages (and what versions of those packages, and what compile-time options for those packages you've selected) you've chosen to install. If you're using somelib.so.1.0.1 and someone else is using somelib.so.1.0.2, there is a small (but real) chance that a minor incompatability will result in a binary compiled against one displaying some occasional flackeyness when run against the other. This isn't terribly common (and it represents a mistake on the library maintainer's part when it does happen... incomopatabilities should mean major revision number changes, not minor), but it does happen. When borrowing packages and binaries from other distros this becomes more acute.
Compiling on your own machine eliminates this.
There is also the problem of binaries compiled with different versions of the GCC compiler behaving is subtly different ways... again, this is very acute when moving from GCC 2.9.x to 3.x, and again, compiling everything yourself fixes that problem.
If you have a decent processor, compiling isn't really that burdensome (the initial installation excepted of course). Most people start their daily or weekly upgrades in the evening before going to bed, making the burden effectively zero. In any event, the advantages are well worth the trouble, and the speed improvements are dramatic.
Your P2P idea is interesting (sort of a shared cpu cycle approach a la Seti@home). Again, the problem with having others compile for you (rather than sharing cpu cycles you use yourself) is that they will likely have slightly different libraries than you do, for some things at least, possibly compiled with different optimizations, so you cannot be 100% certain that what you are getting is exactly what you want. With Gentoo and Source Mage's approach you can be 100% certain that you are getting precisely what you want, and that it is compiled against precisely what is on your system.
Now, as to your accusation of ad hominem attacks upon RMS, I suggest you read some of my other posts. Despite your ad hominem attack on me you will find that I like and admire Richard.
My points weren't aimed at you specifically, but a more general commentary on the numerous posts I've seen on the LKML, here on slashdot, and elsewhere.
As to the definition of what is a core operating system, we are discussing UNIX and UNIX-Like operating systems, of which the defintion I presented is the most widely accepted one (barring rewrites by Microsoft and others), one which goes back to the early days of System V (and arguably even System 7, though System 7 folks would probably think it bloated). It was not my definition you were referring to (the minimum to make your computer something other than a chunk of metal), but that of a followup poster. My definition was the one most commonly accepted for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, which includes more than that bare minimum, but is nevertheless limited to the kernel, a core set of libraries, a core set of utilities, a shell, and perhaps a compiler.
My criticisms weren't intended to reflect upon you, though in rereading my comments I certainly didn't make that clear. My point is that the argument of 'we shouldn't call it GNU/Linux because then we'll have to call it GNU/X/BSD/Apache/Netscape/KDE/Linux' is (a) flawed and (b) that argument is in my experience almost always presented by someone who (a) knows better and (b) is simply grinding a political ax because they dislike/are annoyed with RMS. In these threads I have seen people bend the truth rather severely, and I do believe the argument that the X Window system could reasonably be considered a part of the UNIX operating system is nonsense.
It was not my intention to insult you personally, or attack you personally, and I apologize that my post came across that way.
I've been using GNU/Linux (I'll call it that out of respect for RMS's contribution, even if I disagree with his emphesis of the naming issue) since the early 0.48x days, and was as annoyed and angry as everyone else when RMS came out with his stupid and untactful 'lignux' nonsense. I am even ambivelent to whether it is called Linux or GNU/Linux, even though I try to call it the latter (when I remember, which isn't all that often). But what really irks me is Linus telling people to remove all references to the free software foundation from the kernel Howto's and documentation... that to me is just spiteful and wretched ungratefulness, and it disgusts me profoundly. I may not agree with all of RMS's politics, but a deliberate effort to point people away from his message as a response to his plea to point people toward his message is simply despicable by any measure, and, to be very blunt, I lost most of my respect for the Linux kernel leadership when that happened.
As a result, even though I don't agree with RMS on a number of issues, I feel compelled, as someone who has benefited greatly from his contributions, to stand up to efforts to denigrate his contribution, and his GNU/Linux request, when I feel the arguments are fallaceous (which I believe the whole X/Apache/... thing to be). My ire isn't aimed at you personally so much as at a community, of which I am a part, that is behaving in a really despicable manner toward a person, and an organization, without which it not only wouldn't exist, but which is even now, in spite of that behavior, actively working to protect those very same freedoms that community requires, yet takes completely for granted.
...I didn't realise Red Hat had much dominance. I'd always thought of it as the "crappy Linux distro" (which I know is unfair). I run Windows 2000 at the moment, and have been looking into which distro would be best for my needs. Essentially, Mandrake and SuSE were the two that seemed most useful. RedHat never featured.
If you are not afraid to get your hands dirty, and don't mind compiling stuff, you should give Source Mage or Gentoo a gander. Both are "source-based" distros, meaning their packaging systems have been designed to automate the download-compile-install procedure. The result are packages that are compiled against the libraries already on your system (read: no subtle binary compatability issues between library versions, etc. as crop up with binary distros from time to time, and is the reason redhat RPMs often don't work with Suse and visa versa), and which are optimized for your hardware. Systems so constructed are typically 20-30% faster (based on anecdotal benchmarks people on the mailing lists have run. It matches my own experience... my video capture, editing, and playback tools run much more smoothly on a Source Mage or Gentoo system than any other binary distro I've tried, and I've tried a bunch of them).
cons: * installation takes time
- time to download sourcecode packages
- time to compile said packages * you have to get your hands dirty
- no easy X config a la Mandrake/Suse/RH
- no hardware autodetection a la Mandrake
pros:
* stable, rock solid system * fast, optimized system * very current versions of the software * ability to keep current fairly easilly (no waiting for months, perhaps even a year, before getting the current version of xfree or KDE) * utter flexibility as to what you choose to include or exclude from your installation... little to no cruft * package system takes most of the pain out of compiling and installing packages by hand
Not for lack of wanting; backwards compatibility forced MS to keep with the DOS+GUI model far longer than they wanted. The current Windows offerings don't have a console-only mode.
True, but unless they've done a complete rewrite the current crop of Windows/XP stuff is very likely still just a gui user app running atop a DOS "operating system." This is likely more of a response to DR DOS's demonstration, in which they ran Windows 95 (or perhaps it was 98) on top of DR DOS, having replaced MS DOS completely. A rather dramatic proof that, all marketing aside, the GUI was in fact not part and parcel to the operating system, but just another user program running on top of DOS.
Even NT kicks out to a console (the famouse BSOD) when it crashes... it too is a GUI running on top of a text based operating system... MS has simply obfuscated that a little more.
Now they are trying to get video card manufactureres to make video cards without text mode (in order to make other, more intelligently designed operating systems jump through additional hoops before they can boot). This will likely obfuscate that underlying fact even more, but the fact remains that the GUI is not, and never has been, a fundamental part of the operating system... Orwellian "historian"[1] efforts on the part of Micrsoft notwithstanding.
[1]1984 reference: historians were tasked with rewriting history according to whatever the current party doctrine was.
... in the form of 8 different machines, all of which were running reiserfs on various GNU/Linux distros ranging from Suse to Mandrake to Debian, all of which suffered data corruption, data loss, and even the mysterious vanishing of entire directory trees (while disk usage exploded). In short, all had unrecoverably corrupted filesystems, not as a result of unscheduled shutdowns (which journalling is supposed to help protect against anyway), but on machines that were operating normally, without interruption. None of these filesystems survived more than 9 months of normal, everyday activity (without improper shutdowns, I will stress once again).
These machines were located at three disparate sites, had different base configs, and in two cases were installed and maintained by different people.
The only things they had in common were that they used Reiser, they lost data (severely), and had to be reconstructed from backups (this time without using Reiserfs).
You may believe that you can trust ReiserFS, but I know for an absolute fact that I cannot, and I think it is very possible you will discover that at some point as well. Of course, having relegated everyone else's experience to mere anecdote, it is clear you won't learn this until it hits you in the face, personally. That's OK, not everyone is willing to learn from the experience of others.
However, to those who are interested in learning from the experience of others I will say this: tread very, very carefully with ReiserFS. It is not ready for prime time, and should not be used in any production system. If you really need journalling, use XFS. It is very stable and quite difficult to damage (so far it has survived every stress test I've been able to throw at it).
Now, go ahead and relegate this to anecdote if it makes you feel better... I have hard data to back up my claims, and, quite frankly, a filesystem is sufficiently important that "your milage may vary" should be an unacceptable answer. By all accounts, if those who haven't (yet) suffered data loss with ReiserFS are to be believed, with ReiserFS YYM indeed V.
Some days ago, users in Australia had their broadband access severely limited [slashdot.org] as the major providers changed the rules [slashdot.org]. There were many Slashdot posts effectively telling these users to 'get over it'.
[...]
Now that a major US provider is changing the rules, it'll be interesting to see how Slashdot readers take the news when it affects them a bit closer to home.
A-fucking-men. I get so utterly sick of these Randian libertarianesque businesses-can-do-no-wrong every-consumer-should-be-an-expert-at-deciphering- contracts (even those with obscure clauses, or that get rewritten by the vendor after they have your money) posts. This whole meme that businesses have as their sole responsibility to make money, and ethics, much less their customers' satisfaction, be damned is nonsense from start to finish, doubly so when you're dealing with telco type situations (of which cable companies are an example) where there is an effectively monopoly (or duopoly) on your choices.
Most homes can only get cable/cable-modem service from one providor, or local telephone service from one providor (in both cases, the company that owns the last mile of copper going to your house), so telling people to "vote with their feet" is literally tantamount to telling them to physically move to a new community or do without what is becoming an increasingly vital service.
It is utter crap when these self-styled free marketeers (who apparently can't recognize a limited, non-free market when it hits them in the face) tell folks in Australia that sort of nonsense, and it will be equal crap when they do so in this thread.
It is past time that people and consumers organize once again and restore some social responsibility to these businesses. Businesses and corporations exist at the sufferance of the people... perhaps we should end that sufference in a couple of high-profile cases and the other behometh's will fall in line. That presupposes, of course, that our democracy isn't so far gone, and our leaders so profoundly corrupt, that the people can still have a voice politically. The jury is definitely still out on that, but it would certainly be worth a try.
Don't know what to think... Microsoft evil... yet... Microsoft right... too much... head pain
Microsoft is evil. In this context, Stefi Graf is simply more evil than Microsoft, no small feat, that.
What I want to know is, where can I see the pictures of Stefi's cum-splattered face?
Seriously, if you disagree with this ruling (and, as someone who actively dislikes Microsoft, I do disagree with it and agree that Microsoft should have won), then a little object lesson to Ms. Graf would be in order, by distributing said material far and wide throughout the non-German world. People who want to set speech-chilling precedents in order to protect their own pathetic public image deserve to have, as a direct consiquence of their actions, the exact opposite to occur.
So, I ask again, where are the pics of Stefi Graf's cum-splattered face? Anyone have any links?:-)
My Linux desktop contains less than 3% GNU software.
I am assuming you are running a Linux system (as opposed to a Windows, OS X, or *BSD System). If so, delete glibc and see how far you get.
The fact is, something like 99.9999999% of the non-GNU software you have you your Linux Desktop does, in fact, contain GNU software (in the form of library function calls). Not that percentages matter, since a well designed OS, like the Linux and GNU stuff, should be small and tight compared to the user applications (The X Window System, KDE/Gnome, OpenOffice, etc.) that run upon it. And, as my glibc example above illustrates, percentages are hardly indicative of importance, else you shouldn't be calling it Linux at all, since that is only 10% of the 3% (i.e. 0.3%) of your desktop system.
Reject Stallman's request to prefix the OS name with GNU if you like, but refusing to recognize his contribution, without which you wouldn't have the desktop system you have at all, is nothing more than crass ingratitude parading around as some kind of misguided political statement
What is your criterium from calling something part of an operating system
It isn't my criterium, it is the criterium that has been applied by numerous academics, and virtually every UNIX vendor, and is encoded in the POSIX standard itself. (C.f. amongst numerous others, Tannenbaum et. al.)
Also I really do think that a GUI is an essential part of a modern operating system. Just like a file system is an essential part of an operating system.
You may think that, but (despite being a project leader of a very interesting project... nice, subtle appeal to authority there btw) there are literally thousands of Apache+GNU+Linux servers deployed throughout the web which prove that a GUI is not an essential part of an operating system, indeed isn't a part of the operating system at all, while a filesystem clearly is.
Indeed, it wasn't until people began adopting Microsoft Newspeak that the GUI was considered a part of the operating system (even though Macs had been bundling their GUI as part of their OS for years, ironicly enough).
You can make a GUI a fundamental part of your OS, without which the operating system cannot boot or function, but that isn't an indication of a GUI being necessary for a functioning OS as much as a design flaw in your implimentation (and a serious one at that if you have any serious intention of using it to deploy servers).
Interestingly enough Microsoft didn't do this (you can still boot without running the GUI in "dos" mode), and Apple has gotten away from that with their BSD-based OS X.
All of course is neither here nor there, since we are discussing UNIX operating systems like (GNU)Linux, not Mac or Windows. The X Window System is not, and never has been, a fundamental, core component of the UNIX or (GNU)Linux operating system, nor does it appear in the POSIX standard which does define, quite precisely, what is included in a POSIX compliant operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
...so, in a nutshell, Nader is saying that the government should make an effort to influence the marketplace in a certain direction, rather than letting natural market forces dictate what heppens (questionable/illegal business practices being part of the market).
... if another department of government abdicates its resposibility to the people and society, the purchasing power of other portions of government can, if used correctly, go a long way toward correcting that problem. It would be better to root out the corruption at the heart of the Dept. of Justice, but if that isn't doable something along these lines is certainly better than nothing.
The is an utterly moot point, as a market dominated by a monopoly is not, I repeat, not a free market! All of the assumptions any of us make about the effectiveness of the free market cease to be relevant when one entity, in this case, Microsoft, enjoys monopolistic power over that market. In which case the only alternative to a non-free, monopolistic or oligarchical marketplace in which no competition can possibly occur is government intervention, either in the form of enforced regulation to prevent monopolies from forming in the first place (the ideal solution from a free market perspective, ie. keep the market free at all times), enforced anti-trust legislation for when monopolies do form and abuse their position (less ideal, in that monopolies can form and then tread close to that line without crossing it, resulting in markets that are not free and thus inherently dysfunctional, but still better than nothing as it does, presumably, prevent and punish the worst excesses of a monopolist like Microsoft), or use of its purchasing might to encourage, even coerce, desired behavior from a recalcitrant and unrepentent monopolist such as Microsoft.
Notice the keyword enforced, which with the current sellout of the DOJ is missing from this situation entirely. Nader makes an excellent point here
I'd love to see the rise of Open Source, the fall of Microsoft, etc, as much as the next guy. But I don't want the government using my tax dollars to achieve that (except in antitrust and other legal manners).
And what do you do when the DOJ snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, as it is doing with the current Microsoft case, because of backroom political sweetheart deals and campaign contributions stuffing the pockets of our elected(?) officials? If the government refuses to step up to its responsibilities to bust monopolies who are abusing its power (indeed, if we are truly interested in free markets then IMHO the law should be changed to disallow monopolies, period, but that is a debate for another day), then Microsoft (and entities like them, e.g. Monsanto) become unassailable in their respective markets and the entire notion of a free market becomes little more than an idealized theory that no longer has any relevance to the real world.
In which case, to the have-nots, revolution starts to look like a damn good alternative (and thank the fates I'm not one of the have-nots, at least not yet).
While "freedom software" and "software freedom" are both acceptable noun phrases (head noun + modifying noun), the former in particular seems awkward. I think we (English speakers) have a choice between "free software" and "open source" - I don't think there's room to create a third phrase.
... bringing otherwise close minded and cynical people over to where they can experience the benefits of free software first hand.
... before we were up the proverbial creek without a paddle, and projects would be set well behind schedule as alternatives were looked for. And don't even get me started on the ever-moving target that was, and remains, the Microsoft development environment ... that nonsense costs even more man hours just to track from quarter to quarter. Now we upgrade when and how we choose, with the luxury of freezing whatever targets we need to, for as long as we wish, and that alone saves us millions.
I disagree. While "open source" as a catchphrase played an important role in bringing software freedom to corporations and companies (such as mine), it is important to keep in mind that "open source" is merely a stepping stone across which, ideally at least, a cynical suit steps in his or her walk to freedom.
That sounds pretty idealistic and far fetched, doesn't it. The interesting thing, though, is how true it has been, at least in my experience.
There was a time when Free Software was banned from where I worked, not because of the freedom it represented, or because of Richard Stallman's long hair, long beard, or feiery rhetoric, but because people mistook the word "free" to mean gratis, and then equated it with buggy and virus-ridden shareware commonly distributed on a virus and worm-prone operating system from our favorite folks in the Redmond Barrens[1].
Open source played an important role in getting the otherise close minded suits to see the technical benefits of open and free collaboration, and to get past the mistaken assumption that free software meant shoddy quality (the 'you get what you pay for' fallacy) or vulnerability to security flaws/viruses (the 'security through obscurity' fallacy).
The mistake people who advocate 'open source' make is that this is not an ends in itself, but merely a means to an ends
We initially started using free software because of its unarguable technical superiority over proprietary products from Micrsoft, Sun, and others. But what has, over the years, proven to be of far greater value to my employer has been the software freedom that using free software has brought us. Not just the four freedoms the Free Software Foundation expounds upon, but the freedom from vendors dictating software upgrades at great expense in time and money to ourselves, the freedom from orphaning of critical libraries or applications that used to leave us scrambling for alternatives, and the freedom from license audits that cost so much time and money, etc., etc., etc.
Freedom is what is ultimately important to a business, and the technical merits (while certainly laudable) have become a distant second to the security, protection, and power those freedoms bring to our ability to conduct our business and earn money without living in fear of our vendors, their BSA goons, or their incompetence. For a pittance (relative to profits) we can hire someone to maintain a free software package if it is abandoned and we need it
It is interesting that companies and governments in the rest of the world seem to be learning the bottom-line value software freedom brings to business faster and with less difficulty than corporations in the so-called "land of the free" are capable of. An irony historians may be scratching their heads over in years to come, perhaps.
Back to my original point: there is room for a third term, "software freedom", as my use of it above illustrates. Open Source deemphesized freedom and emphesizes the technical merits of peer review and free collaboration, while free software emphesizes software freedom. Both are important, but while open source is a means, freedom is the end to which all of these philosophies are ultimately striving.
[1]Gratuitious RPG reference
Come on, people. This is nothing to get bent out of shape about -- this is exactly what the free market is for! Yes, it might be a kewl product, but if you don't agree with the license, don't purchase the product.
:-).
... and about the only way a consumer can wield any power in an oligarchical market: vocal boycott of the entire product. (It is the copyright cartels, not the PVR makers, who are the oligarchs, but since they effectively decide which PVRs are legal and which are not it amounts to much the same thing.)
The problem is, there really isn't a free market. The copyright cartels, and their goons, are strongarming ReplayTV, TiVo, and other PVR manufacturers into disabling features they don't like (commercial skipping) and possibly even requiring features they do like (embedded commercials, coming to a PVR near you?).
Those that want to make a kick ass PVR and sell it face the daunting certainty of being sued into oblivion by such household cartels as the MPAA and, if the device allows the sharing of music, the RIAA. So long as these monopolists can send their IP lawyer/thugs around shutting down businesses they don't like, intimidating the rest, and even absorbing the more successful (mp3.com), no free market will ever really exist because consumers will be prevented from having the choice of buying what they want altogether.
The invisible hand of the free market doesn't work when this sort of coercion is in play, and whether the terms of this particular license are to protect Replay from the copyright cartels (and whatever court orders their copyright priveleges may result in), or to take advantage of their customers down the road is quite irrelevant. Either way, it is the customer, that's you and I folks, who gets screwed, and the only viable alternative is to give up a little convinience and roll your own GNU/Linux based PVR (it is with pleasure I hear the screaming and wailing of the naysayers now, as I watch my Max Headroom episodes in resolutions they can't even dream of
As for me, I will not be buying this product, but I will be writing Sonic Blue to tell them just exactly why I won't be buying. To make it easier for you, here is Sonic Blue's contact page [replaytv.com]. I urge you to send them a similar letter if this policy bothers you.
That is excellent advice
So... there are only 10^10 bits of unique information to be bookkept for every elementary particle? I find this intuitively inadequte.
... at least not within the lifespan of the universe itself AND with the computational resources of the universe itself (remove either of those two constraints and it might well be possible ... remember than any simple turing-complete machine can emulate any other turing complete machine of arbitrary complexity and power, provided your willing to trade off time against computational capacity). Since the question is whether or not we can do this within the confines of this universe, those limitations are, at least as long as we don't know how to tunnel out of this universe or access whatever underlying structure might contain it, very reasonable.
... with quantum computing it may become possible to emulate the universe without using so much storage and/or computational power, depending on what sorts of shortcuts quantum algorithms may allow for. Intuition tells me that won't fly, but intuition is a dangerous thing to use when dealing with QM, which at its heart is quite alien to our "common-sense" yet nevertheless demonstrably true. It is possible that the way eigenstates collapse in nature is not the most efficient way they can collapse, particularly when looked at from a computational perspective. Fun speculation for a good SF story if nothing else. :-)
I think there are two points to this:
* it is a reasonable, probably correct, conclusion to draw that a classical, finite state binary computer could not be constructed within the universe that would be capable of running the universe on itself
* your intuition is correct as far as it goes, but you are not accounting for changing states encoded in the calculation (but not stored to media). Storage requirements would likely be much greater if you wanted to take a snapshot every, say, planck-time unit (~10-64 sec). But if your goal is simulation, not archival, the numbers given might be adequate, assuming their underlying assumptions are correct.
Of course, we could see a lot more improvement if we used quantum computing.
I think you touch on something interesting here (in addition to the obvious fact that we are, in fact, embedded in a quantum universe/computer)
Open source comparison is a sham
No, it isn't a sham, but it is a poor choice of wording.
Free Software, Free Media, and Open Source are subsets of a much more fundamental, and important, concept, namely freedom of information, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression, which together might be termed simply freedom were it not that that particular word has been so abused by pundits over the last century as to have lost much of its meaning. These freedoms are antithetical to secrecy at their most basic levels, and in their consiquences, whether that is secrecy of information, secrecy of methodology, or secrecy of design (to name just three).
So, while mapping the benefits of open and free information to those of open and free software is a bit of a misnomer, clearly the underlying theme that free information is, unsurprisingly, bringing the same benefits to this particular mining company that free source code does to software companies is a valid parallel to draw, in that these benefits are a consiquence of freedom of knowledge and freedom of information, in other words, of the freedoms being granted, of which free software and free geological data are but two small examples.
It is a shame that our intellectual property laws are such that these freedoms must be granted rather than assumed by default, making them (and their obvious benefits) so much rarer in our society than they need to be.
Libertarian: They are great allies on many of our issues, but if you look deeper they have some real scarry positions. Like getting rid of the FDA, eliminiating licencing for doctors, and selling off all public land to finance all sorts of radical changes. Not only are they opposed to the Microsoft anti-trust case, they want to eliminate the anti-monopoly laws. [lp.org]
The libertarians equate business (or corporate) freedom with individual freedom, (some even claim that individual freedom is predicated on corporate freedom), so while they want to get rid of unjust drug laws that incarcerate thousands of living, breathing people they also want to get rid of drug regulations to unfetter the pharmaceutical companies from "oppresive" government regulation as well.
This is their fatal flaw: setting individual freedom equal to corporate freedom. The two are often in conflict with one another (e.g. an employer who wants to spy on their employees during off hours), and all but the very smallest of companies is significantly larger, richer, and more powerful than individuals, even indivuduals of means. That of course means that, in a society that sets a human being's rights equal to those of a corporations, the corporation is going to have the advantage in terms of resources, power, and influence, which means whenever said freedoms conflict it is the individual who will almost invariably lose their freedoms as a result.
This is an absolutely fatal flaw in Libertarian thinking, and the reason I am not a libertarian.
So yes we are paying for their idocy, and we shouldnt. Failed bussiness plans should just fail, they shouldnt pass their failures on to their consumers.
... just like many of the 3rd party telco services they would be driven out of business by the owners of the last mile, and your service, to your home, would become more shoddy, and more expensive, as a result. Just like what has been happening with the telcos.
Well, actually they should, as that is what is required for them to stay in business and it is their fudiciary responsiblity to do whatever is legal and ethical to stay in business.
However, the customers should then stop being customers when the prices rise unacceptably, and either the providor will become leaner and lower prices to a more acceptable level (again, to stay in business), or they will go under.
Unfortunately, this all presupposes a free market, which as everyone knows doesn't exist in the telco/broadband market, where monopolies own the last mile of copper and can leverage that to destroy their competitors (as the baby bells have done to many third party DSL providors already).
Imagine if the last mile of highway to your house were privately owned by a monopoly. Do you really think competitors cars, shipping companies, and delivery services would be able to get to your driveway under the same terms as the subsidiaries/strategic partners of the local road monopoly? Hardly
The only reasonable solution to this quandary is for the wire to be treated as we treat our roads and highways: a public works project to which providors and users all have the same access, under the same terms, in a competative environment. The alternative is exactly what we have now: the very worst possible marketplace one can have: that controlled and manipulated by our local monopolies.
So if I start moving all my domains to ".sr" (the assigned country code of Suriname), and promote them as "Silly Rabbit", this somehow changes who owns the TLD?
.cc stands for the Coconos if 90% of the people have been convinced that it stands for 'clear channel'? Not really. Think of the frustration RMS feels when his GNU system is almost always referred to as "Linux" giving him zero credit for having written most of the system ... now imagine trying to explain to someone living in Colombus, Ohio (or another medium-sized city with only Clear Channel stations to listen to, and no other real choice) that .cc doesn't stand for what every rock, country, and talk station has been telling them it does, but for an obscure collection of islands somewhere 'out there' instead. You'll be even less well received than RMS has been.
.cc under their name, but it certainly looks as though they tried, and had they succeeded it would not have been the first time in recent history that mass media would have succeeded in redefining what was 'true' and what wasn't ... that is one of the things that make these media cartels so powerful, after all.
Effectively it does, if you control all of the radio and television that the majority of people in the US can get their information from.
If you repeat a deception, even an outright lie, long enough and loudly enough people will believe it. Does it really matter that
Granted, Clear Channel doesn't appear to have succeeded in their effort to rebrand
I think trying to paint corporations as villains for trying to "keep their profits high" is a strategy waiting to backfire. Keeping profits high is what corporations are supposed to do.
... the legalized bribery that has turned our once proud congress into a collection of cheap whores who routinely sell their votes (for a relative pittence) to their corporate sponsors in hopes financing their campaign to allow themselves to live on the public dole for another two (or six) years.
Not when they are deliberately and consciously subverting the constitution and working to neuter or outright ban the most democratic technology (the internet) to come along in two centuries to do so.
And not when they are trying to ban the technologies that make it possible for hobbiests to create content equal to or better than what they produce, in order to protect their cartel at the expense of the wider society and culture.
No one in power is going to spank them for doing that.
Well, that is indicative of another problem
The DMCA doesn't care if DeCSS is a secret or not. They can be sued by offering a device that circumvents access control measures on the DVD's.
Not if their products are, as advertised, solely for sale in the greater China area. Any grey market products offered for sale in the United States aren't officially sanctioned by the manufacturerers, and therefor the only people at risk are the grey market importers. The Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers can make and sell these devices all over the rest of the world with impunity.
CSS used to be a trade secret. It is not and never was patented, and if they try to get a patent on it now there is plenty of "prior art," include deCSS itself. :-)
Then some rather intelligent youths in Europe figured out how to break the profoundly weak algorithm used to encrypt DVDs and restrict their playback (but not bit-for-bit copies, as most DVD-Rs were capable of doing back then, before the deCSS case and their wholesale redesign).
CSS isn't a secret anymore, indeed there are T-Shirts, songs, and 7 line perl scripts that can algorithmicly crack the code without any keys whatsoever.
The Taiwainese or Chinese can use any of this widely and publicly available information to make DVD playback devices capable of decrypting and playing DVDs and, I suspect, under the rules of the WTO, there is absolutely nothing the Copyright and Media Cartels can do about it.
Searches of google and google groups turns up no one else that shares your experences of "unrecoverably corrupted filesystems" with reiserfs.
ahem. You really didn't look very hard, did you?
filesystem corruption (2.4.18, reiserfs)
Bug#122230: reiserfsprogs: filesystem corruption with reiserfs
Re: ReiserFS / 2.4.6 / Data Corruption
ReiserFS desaster - advice please !
and about 829 other matches. Need I go on?
Oh, BTW, as I noted, two of those systems didn't belong to me, they belonged to people I know who experienced similar difficulties (and documented them as well).
Enough people, of enough diverse walks of life, are having issues like this with Reiserfs that it is clearly not something that is safe to be deploying in a production environment. Even if only 1% of the people using it are being so bitten, that number is way too high (and based on my own experiences and those of several people I know, I suspect that number is a lot higher than 1 per cent).
I understand your ire at the community at large. I share it. At the same time, I don't believe that Richard is choosing his battles wisely. He is certainly free to do so, but I regret the damage it is causing to the larger purpose.
... in fact it strikes me as rather hypocritical) to deliberately and with malice of forethought deemphesize and edit out references to the Free Software Foundation from any and all kernel documentation deepens that schism tremendously, and adds unecessary fuel to the fire while IMHO doing a disservice to all sides of the community in the process. And, unlike RMS (who I think we agree chose his battle poorly in this case), Linus has IMHO no good justification at all for pointing people away from the FSF. RMS at least had reasonable grounds for his request, even if it was, tactically, a foolish request (although one I will still continue to try and honor out of respect for the guy, whenever I remember to).
:-)
I agree. I understand RMS's reasoning, and his reasons (and they are reasonable and good), but you are absolutely right about the inertia a name, once given, has, and the unnecessary divisiveness RMS's GNU/Linux v. Linux campaign entails. He probably thinks that the awareness the argument itself raises is worth the divisions it creates, which may or may not be the case (I don't know).
Certainly, now that Linus has decided to take a political stand (and his calling it an apolitical stand doesn't make it any less political
But, at least in my view, that threat pales in comparison to that posed by groups (well-known to us all) that are actively trying to strip away that same freedom. I would worry more about the enemy soldier shooting at me than my squadmate's second-hand smoke.
Excellent point, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. We are definitely all of us on the same side of the "freedom-of-expression v. autoritarian cartel economy" battle even if we do (perhaps vehemently, on some subjects) disagree. I really wish Torvalds, RMS, and ESR would realize the same and stop sniping one another, but that is probably far too much to hope for. In the interim I'll try and choose my words more carefully so as not to inadvertantly insult friends and allies like yourself, and again, I apologize for having done so.
restore some social responsibility to these businesses
An easy platitude to utter, but exactly what are you proposing? Brainwash the management? Throw 'em in jail as an example? Pass a law that says they have to be nice?
Don't be silly. Suspend their corporate charter and take away their license to do business for acting against the common interest. If you look at the wording of the laws that allow for coporations to exist, you'll see that they require said corporations serve the public interest.
Indeed, it was very uncommon in the early republic for corporate charters to be granted, and not so terribly uncommon for them to be revoked, essentially putting the offending company out of business. Of course, back then corporations were not considered "real" people like they have been since a particularly bizzar (and unprecedented) California court case some eighty years ago that turned everything on its ear and granted corporations all the rights and priveleges of real, breathing, living human beings.
I think one or two revocations of corporate charters would be sufficient to change the behavior of other large corporations, without the need for managerial brainwashing or laws telling people to be nice, don't you?
As for jail time, if someone is managing a company (like, say, Monsanto) that knowingly falsifies FDA test results in order to get dangerous milk hormones approved for public consumption [c.f. Into the Buzzsaw] or knowingly and with premeditation poisons the groundwater of a town in the southern U.S. in the 1990's (and gets caught with the memos discussing how to deal with the political fallout should they ever get caught) [c.f. just about every major American Newspaper, pre 9/11], then yes, I do think the fucking bastards should be put in jail. Perminently, if their behavior, or negligence, has resulted in the loss of human life.
The obvious solution is standardization in combination with version management that's how regular distributions pull it off.
... 3.0.1 came out more than a month after 3.0, so while I want the latest bug fixes and enhancements, I'm running an overnight compile of KDE at most once every 5 or 6 weeks. This is hardly a great burden, and the trouble saved by having packages compiled against the proper librarys, and the resultant stability, more than makes up for whatever time is spent starting the compile before going to bed (or leaving work for the day).
... I have Gentoo installed on an old Intel MMX 233, which did take 3 days (!!) to install, but as I've said before, I probably spent a total of an hour sitting in front of that box, and the rest of the time ignoring it while it churned away), in which case binary distros, with all their many faults, may be exactly what you want. Even with a slow processor, though, I suspect you would find the incremental time savings of having a more responsive and quick system well worth the initial investment of time ... my slower boxes benefit even more in some cases from the kinds of optimizations Gentoo and Source Mage provide than some of the quicker boxes.
Yes, of course, but there is a heavy price to be paid for that "standardization", namely the inability to have current software on your system, and the subsequent slowdown in providing timely feedback and bug reports to authors.
Debian, as an example (and as my favorite binary only distribution), had one of its developers respond to a question by a curious user as to when XFree 4.2 would be included in debian with the curt answer: "Leave me alone. It will be months." Source Mage ("Sorcery" at the time) had X 4.2 available within a day, Gentoo very shortly thereafter. Those of us who needed the bug fixes and additional hardware support didn't have to wait "months" for its inclusion into a binary distro, or alternatively have to compile it ourselves (by hand) and then watch as various distribution-provided binaries start to break because of X 4.2's differences from X 4.1.
On the contrary, we had clean, solid, good support from day one, which meant we got the bug fixes in a much more timely manner, and were able to deploy configurations not even possible with other distriutions. And we didn't have to sacrifice stability in order to do it.
As for Mozilla, it may have nightly cvs builds, but Gentoo and Source Mage both reference release builds (e.g Mozilla RC2, RC3, etc.), not nightly builds as a rule. So while those wishing to have the very latest may find themselves compiling mozilla once every two or three weeks, it certainly isn't a nightly affair. Ditto for KDE
It also makes keeping up with security fixes much, much easier than with Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, and Debian (stable excepted, but debian stable makes the Jurassic appear contemporary).
You may be personally allergic to compiling large packages (or have a processor that is painfully slow to do so
In any event, for those of us working with this stuff every day, who have reasonably modern CPUs and who are required to troubleshoot live systems whenever anything goes wrong, having quick and painless access to the current bug fixes and features is an invaluable asset. In short, for many people (I would venture to say most), once they've tried a source-based distro, binary distros feel klunky by comparison and a person will never want to go back. The benefits are simply too great, naysayers notwithstanding.
The one reason I have not yet downloaded this is recompilation. I mean, compiling is pretty much a deterministic activity. Given similar compiler settings you'd expect the result to be the same each time.
... incomopatabilities should mean major revision number changes, not minor), but it does happen. When borrowing packages and binaries from other distros this becomes more acute.
... again, this is very acute when moving from GCC 2.9.x to 3.x, and again, compiling everything yourself fixes that problem.
What isn't deterministic is what packages (and what versions of those packages, and what compile-time options for those packages you've selected) you've chosen to install. If you're using somelib.so.1.0.1 and someone else is using somelib.so.1.0.2, there is a small (but real) chance that a minor incompatability will result in a binary compiled against one displaying some occasional flackeyness when run against the other. This isn't terribly common (and it represents a mistake on the library maintainer's part when it does happen
Compiling on your own machine eliminates this.
There is also the problem of binaries compiled with different versions of the GCC compiler behaving is subtly different ways
If you have a decent processor, compiling isn't really that burdensome (the initial installation excepted of course). Most people start their daily or weekly upgrades in the evening before going to bed, making the burden effectively zero. In any event, the advantages are well worth the trouble, and the speed improvements are dramatic.
Your P2P idea is interesting (sort of a shared cpu cycle approach a la Seti@home). Again, the problem with having others compile for you (rather than sharing cpu cycles you use yourself) is that they will likely have slightly different libraries than you do, for some things at least, possibly compiled with different optimizations, so you cannot be 100% certain that what you are getting is exactly what you want. With Gentoo and Source Mage's approach you can be 100% certain that you are getting precisely what you want, and that it is compiled against precisely what is on your system.
Now, as to your accusation of ad hominem attacks upon RMS, I suggest you read some of my other posts. Despite your ad hominem attack on me you will find that I like and admire Richard.
... that to me is just spiteful and wretched ungratefulness, and it disgusts me profoundly. I may not agree with all of RMS's politics, but a deliberate effort to point people away from his message as a response to his plea to point people toward his message is simply despicable by any measure, and, to be very blunt, I lost most of my respect for the Linux kernel leadership when that happened.
My points weren't aimed at you specifically, but a more general commentary on the numerous posts I've seen on the LKML, here on slashdot, and elsewhere.
As to the definition of what is a core operating system, we are discussing UNIX and UNIX-Like operating systems, of which the defintion I presented is the most widely accepted one (barring rewrites by Microsoft and others), one which goes back to the early days of System V (and arguably even System 7, though System 7 folks would probably think it bloated). It was not my definition you were referring to (the minimum to make your computer something other than a chunk of metal), but that of a followup poster. My definition was the one most commonly accepted for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, which includes more than that bare minimum, but is nevertheless limited to the kernel, a core set of libraries, a core set of utilities, a shell, and perhaps a compiler.
My criticisms weren't intended to reflect upon you, though in rereading my comments I certainly didn't make that clear. My point is that the argument of 'we shouldn't call it GNU/Linux because then we'll have to call it GNU/X/BSD/Apache/Netscape/KDE/Linux' is (a) flawed and (b) that argument is in my experience almost always presented by someone who (a) knows better and (b) is simply grinding a political ax because they dislike/are annoyed with RMS. In these threads I have seen people bend the truth rather severely, and I do believe the argument that the X Window system could reasonably be considered a part of the UNIX operating system is nonsense.
It was not my intention to insult you personally, or attack you personally, and I apologize that my post came across that way.
I've been using GNU/Linux (I'll call it that out of respect for RMS's contribution, even if I disagree with his emphesis of the naming issue) since the early 0.48x days, and was as annoyed and angry as everyone else when RMS came out with his stupid and untactful 'lignux' nonsense. I am even ambivelent to whether it is called Linux or GNU/Linux, even though I try to call it the latter (when I remember, which isn't all that often). But what really irks me is Linus telling people to remove all references to the free software foundation from the kernel Howto's and documentation
As a result, even though I don't agree with RMS on a number of issues, I feel compelled, as someone who has benefited greatly from his contributions, to stand up to efforts to denigrate his contribution, and his GNU/Linux request, when I feel the arguments are fallaceous (which I believe the whole X/Apache/... thing to be). My ire isn't aimed at you personally so much as at a community, of which I am a part, that is behaving in a really despicable manner toward a person, and an organization, without which it not only wouldn't exist, but which is even now, in spite of that behavior, actively working to protect those very same freedoms that community requires, yet takes completely for granted.
If you are not afraid to get your hands dirty, and don't mind compiling stuff, you should give Source Mage or Gentoo a gander. Both are "source-based" distros, meaning their packaging systems have been designed to automate the download-compile-install procedure. The result are packages that are compiled against the libraries already on your system (read: no subtle binary compatability issues between library versions, etc. as crop up with binary distros from time to time, and is the reason redhat RPMs often don't work with Suse and visa versa), and which are optimized for your hardware. Systems so constructed are typically 20-30% faster (based on anecdotal benchmarks people on the mailing lists have run. It matches my own experience
cons:
* installation takes time
- time to download sourcecode packages
- time to compile said packages
* you have to get your hands dirty
- no easy X config a la Mandrake/Suse/RH
- no hardware autodetection a la Mandrake
pros:
* stable, rock solid system
* fast, optimized system
* very current versions of the software
* ability to keep current fairly easilly (no waiting for months, perhaps even a year, before getting the current version of xfree or KDE)
* utter flexibility as to what you choose to include or exclude from your installation
* package system takes most of the pain out of compiling and installing packages by hand
Not for lack of wanting; backwards compatibility forced MS to keep with the DOS+GUI model far longer than they wanted. The current Windows offerings don't have a console-only mode.
... it too is a GUI running on top of a text based operating system ... MS has simply obfuscated that a little more.
... Orwellian "historian"[1] efforts on the part of Micrsoft notwithstanding.
True, but unless they've done a complete rewrite the current crop of Windows/XP stuff is very likely still just a gui user app running atop a DOS "operating system." This is likely more of a response to DR DOS's demonstration, in which they ran Windows 95 (or perhaps it was 98) on top of DR DOS, having replaced MS DOS completely. A rather dramatic proof that, all marketing aside, the GUI was in fact not part and parcel to the operating system, but just another user program running on top of DOS.
Even NT kicks out to a console (the famouse BSOD) when it crashes
Now they are trying to get video card manufactureres to make video cards without text mode (in order to make other, more intelligently designed operating systems jump through additional hoops before they can boot). This will likely obfuscate that underlying fact even more, but the fact remains that the GUI is not, and never has been, a fundamental part of the operating system
[1]1984 reference: historians were tasked with rewriting history according to whatever the current party doctrine was.
... in the form of 8 different machines, all of which were running reiserfs on various GNU/Linux distros ranging from Suse to Mandrake to Debian, all of which suffered data corruption, data loss, and even the mysterious vanishing of entire directory trees (while disk usage exploded). In short, all had unrecoverably corrupted filesystems, not as a result of unscheduled shutdowns (which journalling is supposed to help protect against anyway), but on machines that were operating normally, without interruption. None of these filesystems survived more than 9 months of normal, everyday activity (without improper shutdowns, I will stress once again).
... I have hard data to back up my claims, and, quite frankly, a filesystem is sufficiently important that "your milage may vary" should be an unacceptable answer. By all accounts, if those who haven't (yet) suffered data loss with ReiserFS are to be believed, with ReiserFS YYM indeed V.
These machines were located at three disparate sites, had different base configs, and in two cases were installed and maintained by different people.
The only things they had in common were that they used Reiser, they lost data (severely), and had to be reconstructed from backups (this time without using Reiserfs).
You may believe that you can trust ReiserFS, but I know for an absolute fact that I cannot, and I think it is very possible you will discover that at some point as well. Of course, having relegated everyone else's experience to mere anecdote, it is clear you won't learn this until it hits you in the face, personally. That's OK, not everyone is willing to learn from the experience of others.
However, to those who are interested in learning from the experience of others I will say this: tread very, very carefully with ReiserFS. It is not ready for prime time, and should not be used in any production system. If you really need journalling, use XFS. It is very stable and quite difficult to damage (so far it has survived every stress test I've been able to throw at it).
Now, go ahead and relegate this to anecdote if it makes you feel better
Under your matress?
... well, that's probably more information than anyone wants.
heh!
Actually, I keep my porn in my closet, right next to
Unfortunately Stefi Graf's cum-splattered face does not (yet) grace my collection.
Some days ago, users in Australia had their broadband access severely limited [slashdot.org] as the major providers changed the rules [slashdot.org]. There were many Slashdot posts effectively telling these users to 'get over it'.
- contracts (even those with obscure clauses, or that get rewritten by the vendor after they have your money) posts. This whole meme that businesses have as their sole responsibility to make money, and ethics, much less their customers' satisfaction, be damned is nonsense from start to finish, doubly so when you're dealing with telco type situations (of which cable companies are an example) where there is an effectively monopoly (or duopoly) on your choices.
... perhaps we should end that sufference in a couple of high-profile cases and the other behometh's will fall in line. That presupposes, of course, that our democracy isn't so far gone, and our leaders so profoundly corrupt, that the people can still have a voice politically. The jury is definitely still out on that, but it would certainly be worth a try.
[...]
Now that a major US provider is changing the rules, it'll be interesting to see how Slashdot readers take the news when it affects them a bit closer to home.
A-fucking-men. I get so utterly sick of these Randian libertarianesque businesses-can-do-no-wrong every-consumer-should-be-an-expert-at-deciphering
Most homes can only get cable/cable-modem service from one providor, or local telephone service from one providor (in both cases, the company that owns the last mile of copper going to your house), so telling people to "vote with their feet" is literally tantamount to telling them to physically move to a new community or do without what is becoming an increasingly vital service.
It is utter crap when these self-styled free marketeers (who apparently can't recognize a limited, non-free market when it hits them in the face) tell folks in Australia that sort of nonsense, and it will be equal crap when they do so in this thread.
It is past time that people and consumers organize once again and restore some social responsibility to these businesses. Businesses and corporations exist at the sufferance of the people
Don't know what to think... Microsoft evil... yet... Microsoft right... too much... head pain
:-)
Microsoft is evil. In this context, Stefi Graf is simply more evil than Microsoft, no small feat, that.
What I want to know is, where can I see the pictures of Stefi's cum-splattered face?
Seriously, if you disagree with this ruling (and, as someone who actively dislikes Microsoft, I do disagree with it and agree that Microsoft should have won), then a little object lesson to Ms. Graf would be in order, by distributing said material far and wide throughout the non-German world. People who want to set speech-chilling precedents in order to protect their own pathetic public image deserve to have, as a direct consiquence of their actions, the exact opposite to occur.
So, I ask again, where are the pics of Stefi Graf's cum-splattered face? Anyone have any links?
My Linux desktop contains less than 3% GNU software.
I am assuming you are running a Linux system (as opposed to a Windows, OS X, or *BSD System). If so, delete glibc and see how far you get.
The fact is, something like 99.9999999% of the non-GNU software you have you your Linux Desktop does, in fact, contain GNU software (in the form of library function calls). Not that percentages matter, since a well designed OS, like the Linux and GNU stuff, should be small and tight compared to the user applications (The X Window System, KDE/Gnome, OpenOffice, etc.) that run upon it. And, as my glibc example above illustrates, percentages are hardly indicative of importance, else you shouldn't be calling it Linux at all, since that is only 10% of the 3% (i.e. 0.3%) of your desktop system.
Reject Stallman's request to prefix the OS name with GNU if you like, but refusing to recognize his contribution, without which you wouldn't have the desktop system you have at all, is nothing more than crass ingratitude parading around as some kind of misguided political statement
What is your criterium from calling something part of an operating system
... nice, subtle appeal to authority there btw) there are literally thousands of Apache+GNU+Linux servers deployed throughout the web which prove that a GUI is not an essential part of an operating system, indeed isn't a part of the operating system at all, while a filesystem clearly is.
It isn't my criterium, it is the criterium that has been applied by numerous academics, and virtually every UNIX vendor, and is encoded in the POSIX standard itself. (C.f. amongst numerous others, Tannenbaum et. al.)
Also I really do think that a GUI is an essential part of a modern operating system. Just like a file system is an essential part of an operating system.
You may think that, but (despite being a project leader of a very interesting project
Indeed, it wasn't until people began adopting Microsoft Newspeak that the GUI was considered a part of the operating system (even though Macs had been bundling their GUI as part of their OS for years, ironicly enough).
You can make a GUI a fundamental part of your OS, without which the operating system cannot boot or function, but that isn't an indication of a GUI being necessary for a functioning OS as much as a design flaw in your implimentation (and a serious one at that if you have any serious intention of using it to deploy servers).
Interestingly enough Microsoft didn't do this (you can still boot without running the GUI in "dos" mode), and Apple has gotten away from that with their BSD-based OS X.
All of course is neither here nor there, since we are discussing UNIX operating systems like (GNU)Linux, not Mac or Windows. The X Window System is not, and never has been, a fundamental, core component of the UNIX or (GNU)Linux operating system, nor does it appear in the POSIX standard which does define, quite precisely, what is included in a POSIX compliant operating system.