Then perhaps some X rated JPGs need to be encoded in the Linux source so it IS deemed offensive.
As I see it, Linux is a big economic benefit to Australia right now. Causing Linux to be illegal in Australia would slap some idiot legislators upside the head with the realities of their stupidity.
If you would read the post carefully, you'd note that the poster merely used the phrase 'window manager' as a handle for a concept familiar to the Unix/X community. The poster went on to propose that the MS 'window manager' would use SVGA lib, or some such thing to talk to the display. This would make it a completely non-X program.
I too can see why Microsloth may want to do this. I personally wouldn't mind if they did. There'd be a level app playing field again with Microsoft's garbage OS would be out of the picture.
And I personally think that Microsoft's apps are OK. They're not particularily fantastic or innovative, but they're mostly OK. I wouldn't mind having them on an OS that actually worked.
What a curious mixture of elitism and anti-authoritarianism. If I were Linus, I'm not sure if I'd be insulted that you didn't seem to think I deserved a doctorate, or whipped up into a political furor over the way acadamia operates.
Let him accept his degree if he wants to. He certainly did enough work to earn it. I see nothing wrong with honoring great intellectual achievements this way, even if it does perpetuate the false mystique of acadamia.
I wish we could experiment with varying levels of IP protection to see what worked best. I'd like to see a 20 year experiment in having no IP protection whatsoever (except possibly for trademarks) to see what would result.
Of course, 20 year experiments by definition take a long time to run, and the potential economic effects could be very widespread.
Does anybody have any hard evidence to back up what kinds of protections work best for fostering innovations? I know hard evidence, politics, and philosophy often don't mix, but...:-)
That sounds like it would solve some 2D problems, but not 3D, and not a more general class of 2D problems either.
It wouldn't solve 3D problems because the cards need access to your data to do the raster rendering themselves. It sounds like you're advocating mainly framebuffer access, which isn't enough for this kind of thing.
Also, a lot of programs would want access to the 2D acceleration features of a card, and this solution doesn't allow for that either.
Maybe some kind of special shared-memory only version of the X protocol that allowed you to refer to client resources by shared memory offset so the server could access them directly. This would allow you to do anything with the shared memory area that you could normally do with the X protocol.
I also may be talking out of my hat here because I don't know a huge amount about how X servers or graphics cards work.
Seeing what has happened to C++ after the ISO has gotten through with it has made me very distrustful of that organizations ability to handle standardization of a technology. I like and use C++ every day, but I think ISO was driven more by people who wanted neat features added than people who wanted a simple consistent language.
Java currently is a simple, consistent language. That simplicity is very important to the spirit of the language. I can understand Sun's reluctance to hand it over to an ISO committee.
Even the most intelligent among us are often possessed of opinions that are demonstrably wrong, or at least, unpleasant. Dismissing neo-nazis as stupid is a dangerous underestimation.
Their attack took, at the very least, a fair amount of dogged planning. It sounds like some of the explosive devices they came up with took a lot of research and a fair amount of intelligence. Dismissing them as 'stupid' is just a 'they aren't like me, I would never do anything like that' response. In an attempt to understand, a response like that isn't very helpful.
Actually, I think Poul Anderson preceded Dan Simmons in dealing in depth with the Omega Point concept in a science fiction novel. The novel(s) are his 'The Stars Are Also Fire' series.
Poul Anderson has 'benevolent' computer entities running things for most of humanity. The goal of the computer entities is the omega point. They consider humans to be evolutionarily out of date, but also feel a duty to humans as sentient beings, and their creators.
These stories have an interesting set of ideas and tensions running through them. They are sort of hard to describe.
When I saw that ESR had written a letter, I was hoping it was something to the effect of "We don't trust you one little bit, but if you act in good faith, we will accept you.". I think the letter properly conveys this tone. I'm pleased with ESR and company for having written it.
On the other hand, I would prefer that ESR say that he speaks for OSI, not the open source community. I aprreciate what he's doing, and I think we need a spokesperson, but I never asked him to speak for me. The best leaders I've seen lead from behind. They help people accomplish what the wanted to in the first place. Putting words in my mouth doesn't fall into that category.
A way it could've been handled is if he had said something about our general reaction, attempting to summarize in a shorthand way our chaotic and diverse opinions. I think this is what he was attempting to do, but the semantics of the letter imply otherwise.
Well, the problem with buzzwords is that they seem to lose all meaning. Gore's website is a typical example of the process in that it has (as many other posts have pointed out) absolutely nothing to do with our concept of Open Source in any way whatsoever.
Attempting to jump on a bandwagon by mouthing pretty words is a politician sort of thing to do. Gore has just proven himself no different from any of the rest.
It's interesting that these ideas have been debated for this long. Everything old is new.
As our technological prowess increases, the cost of manufacturing drops.
We have witnessed a revolution in the publishing industry in the past 10-20 years. Now, you can copy practically any printed work to practically any level of quality relatively cheaply. The same thing has happened for music, and we're beginning to see it happen for more complex manufacturing. We already have a 3D 'fax' that uses a polymer liquid and curing lasers to build up 3D objects from pure information.
Soon, the biggest cost in creating anything will be researching the idea. Property laws will begin to become obsolete because if your neighbor has something, you can cheaply make your own copy of it.
What is the role of IP law in such an environment? How can innovation be encouraged? The real goal of IP law has never been to assure some inalienable right, but to foster innovation. IP law can be measured not by how well it protects a person's intellectual 'property', but by how well it encourages the creation of new and useful ideas.
Do patents and copyrights do this effectively? It seems, from the existence of the GPL and the Open Source movement that our current IP laws don't seem to be helping that much.
Someone rightly pointed out that the GPL is an excersize of the current IP laws. That belies the fact that it twists those laws to purposes that I'm sure their creators never envisioned. Instead of using the monopoly they grant, the liscense refuses that monopoly, and denies it to all others. The success of this liscense, and the obvious innovation apparent in the community of people who abide by it are an indication that perhaps our current IP laws aren't serving the purpose for which they were intended.
There are a lot of questions to be answered here, and they need answering soon. Soon IP will be the only kind of property that has any real value.
If you take a material object away from somebody, they don't have it anymore.
If you 'take' their idea, they still have their idea, and in fact, their idea often becomes even more useful.
Therefore, material and intellectual property laws should be considered very differently.
Then he goes on to make some analogy about corn that a lot of people picked up as being a barb about Monsanto's silly seed ownership policies.
The point is that he used obtuse and obscure language to say those things. I'm all for literacy. I understood the article just fine. I just think that uneccessary obtuseness and obscurity is a way for people to hide their fuzzy thinking and bad ideas. The Literary Critics new clothes as it were.
This is not to say that I disagree with the article. On the contrary, I think it raises a number of very valid points and deserves a lot of thought.
Of course, he couldn't possibly be expected to go through computer books and actually read them so he had a clue. After all, he's an artist, and way above all that technical stuff.
Heck, we're such lowly peons in terms of understanding art that the book "Difference Engine" will only be understood by us in 10-20 years or so.
I've read most of Gibson's books, but that doesn't mean I have to like him.:-)
Well, if I have to wander around the interface to figure out how to disable all of those annoying defaults then it's not very user friendly is it? It certainly doesn't seem like something that J. Random Casual User is going to like and enjoy if (s)he doesn't spend 1-2 hours a day typing up word documents.
At least it's hard to spread virii in the emacs macro language. In fact, there are specific features in emacs to prevent this from happening because some smart person realized that's what it would be used for if the features weren't there.
I dislike GTK because it isn't written in C++ and it should be.
One problem I see with LSB is that too much standardization is bad. A good OS will succeed in a marketplace (ecology) because it can adapt to fill a lot of niches. There's a shrink-wrap application/home user niche. There's a heavy duty file server niche. There's a web server niche, and there's an imbedded applications niche. There are TONS of niches. Linux is adaptable enough to fit into all of them.
The most important niche from a standardization standpoint is the shrink-wrap niche. That niche is large enough to have several players, and they will only badly hurt eachother if they don't cooperate to some extent. I see GNOME, and possibly LSB as a step in the direction of getting the shrink-wrap people to cooperate to the extent necessary to create a stable marketplace niche for Linux.
LSB is bad if it attempts to make ALL Linux distributions conform to the standards necessary to compete in the shrink-wrap niche. Distributions should be clear about the needs they try to fill, and standards should be flexible enough to let them fill them.
Xt (and hence Motif) has some significant bulkiness and design issues. There are large portions of Xt that just feel unpleasant and unwieldy to use, in addition to requiring too much code to implement. (Having event translations as a user-alterable resource springs to mind.)
I don't have a good idea of how GTK stacks up as I find the idea of bringing out yet another UI library that's designed to do OO in C instead of C++ to be rather revolting. I do recall GTK being rather more simply and cleanly implemented when I gave it a glance awhile back though.
Xt has some significant bulkiness and design issues. There are large portions of Xt that just feel unpleasant and unwieldy to use, in addition to requiring too much code to implement. (Having event translations as a user-alterable resource springs to mind.)
I don't have a good idea of how GTK stacks up as I find the idea of bringing out yet another UI library that's designed to do OO in C instead of C++ to be rather revolting. I do recall GTK being rather more simply and cleanly implemented when I gave it a glance awhile back though.
One way to look at you is to think of you as a bunch of information about the positions and properties of particular kinds of particles at a particular moment in time. I suspect you consider yourself to be sentient.
To me, all the best art is craft. Failure to take objective criteria into account when creating art results in art that communicates nothing to anyone besides its creator.
As a side note, I think much of the art in our museums today that's less than 50 years old is exactly this way. Perhaps it's just the fact that the 90% of everything that's garbage hasn't yet been culled.
I want to release under LGPL a C++ communications transport library based on the UNIX pipes concept that I've spent a lot of time developing, but I'm worried about the response of the OSS community. It would be highly disappointing to release it and have it fall flat.
This library could only have reasonably been written in an OO language. The only OO language with the speed I want, the type safety I want, and the access to low level OS facilities that I want is C++.
Some of the posts to this group are not very encouraging, and some are. Does anybody have any suggestions or advice? And no, it CAN'T be ported to C. I might consider a Java port, but that would co-exist with the C++ library, not replace it.
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Then perhaps some X rated JPGs need to be encoded in the Linux source so it IS deemed offensive.
As I see it, Linux is a big economic benefit to Australia right now. Causing Linux to be illegal in Australia would slap some idiot legislators upside the head with the realities of their stupidity.
If you would read the post carefully, you'd note that the poster merely used the phrase 'window manager' as a handle for a concept familiar to the Unix/X community. The poster went on to propose that the MS 'window manager' would use SVGA lib, or some such thing to talk to the display. This would make it a completely non-X program.
I too can see why Microsloth may want to do this. I personally wouldn't mind if they did. There'd be a level app playing field again with Microsoft's garbage OS would be out of the picture.
And I personally think that Microsoft's apps are OK. They're not particularily fantastic or innovative, but they're mostly OK. I wouldn't mind having them on an OS that actually worked.
What a curious mixture of elitism and anti-authoritarianism. If I were Linus, I'm not sure if I'd be insulted that you didn't seem to think I deserved a doctorate, or whipped up into a political furor over the way acadamia operates.
Let him accept his degree if he wants to. He certainly did enough work to earn it. I see nothing wrong with honoring great intellectual achievements this way, even if it does perpetuate the false mystique of acadamia.
I wish we could experiment with varying levels of IP protection to see what worked best. I'd like to see a 20 year experiment in having no IP protection whatsoever (except possibly for trademarks) to see what would result.
Of course, 20 year experiments by definition take a long time to run, and the potential economic effects could be very widespread.
Does anybody have any hard evidence to back up what kinds of protections work best for fostering innovations? I know hard evidence, politics, and philosophy often don't mix, but... :-)
That sounds like it would solve some 2D problems, but not 3D, and not a more general class of 2D problems either.
It wouldn't solve 3D problems because the cards need access to your data to do the raster rendering themselves. It sounds like you're advocating mainly framebuffer access, which isn't enough for this kind of thing.
Also, a lot of programs would want access to the 2D acceleration features of a card, and this solution doesn't allow for that either.
Maybe some kind of special shared-memory only version of the X protocol that allowed you to refer to client resources by shared memory offset so the server could access them directly. This would allow you to do anything with the shared memory area that you could normally do with the X protocol.
I also may be talking out of my hat here because I don't know a huge amount about how X servers or graphics cards work.
Seeing what has happened to C++ after the ISO has gotten through with it has made me very distrustful of that organizations ability to handle standardization of a technology. I like and use C++ every day, but I think ISO was driven more by people who wanted neat features added than people who wanted a simple consistent language.
Java currently is a simple, consistent language. That simplicity is very important to the spirit of the language. I can understand Sun's reluctance to hand it over to an ISO committee.
This was a gang rivalry. An oversimplification is that gangs are just what cliques are called when the participants are of a lower social class.
Even the most intelligent among us are often possessed of opinions that are demonstrably wrong, or at least, unpleasant. Dismissing neo-nazis as stupid is a dangerous underestimation.
Their attack took, at the very least, a fair amount of dogged planning. It sounds like some of the explosive devices they came up with took a lot of research and a fair amount of intelligence. Dismissing them as 'stupid' is just a 'they aren't like me, I would never do anything like that' response. In an attempt to understand, a response like that isn't very helpful.
Actually, I think Poul Anderson preceded Dan Simmons in dealing in depth with the Omega Point concept in a science fiction novel. The novel(s) are his 'The Stars Are Also Fire' series.
Poul Anderson has 'benevolent' computer entities running things for most of humanity. The goal of the computer entities is the omega point. They consider humans to be evolutionarily out of date, but also feel a duty to humans as sentient beings, and their creators.
These stories have an interesting set of ideas and tensions running through them. They are sort of hard to describe.
When I saw that ESR had written a letter, I was hoping it was something to the effect of "We don't trust you one little bit, but if you act in good faith, we will accept you.". I think the letter properly conveys this tone. I'm pleased with ESR and company for having written it.
On the other hand, I would prefer that ESR say that he speaks for OSI, not the open source community. I aprreciate what he's doing, and I think we need a spokesperson, but I never asked him to speak for me. The best leaders I've seen lead from behind. They help people accomplish what the wanted to in the first place. Putting words in my mouth doesn't fall into that category.
A way it could've been handled is if he had said something about our general reaction, attempting to summarize in a shorthand way our chaotic and diverse opinions. I think this is what he was attempting to do, but the semantics of the letter imply otherwise.
Well, the problem with buzzwords is that they seem to lose all meaning. Gore's website is a typical example of the process in that it has (as many other posts have pointed out) absolutely nothing to do with our concept of Open Source in any way whatsoever.
Attempting to jump on a bandwagon by mouthing pretty words is a politician sort of thing to do. Gore has just proven himself no different from any of the rest.
Gee, this happens even WITH IP law being the way it is. One wonders if IP law really has any effect at all on this scenario.
It's interesting that these ideas have been debated for this long. Everything old is new.
As our technological prowess increases, the cost of manufacturing drops.
We have witnessed a revolution in the publishing industry in the past 10-20 years. Now, you can copy practically any printed work to practically any level of quality relatively cheaply. The same thing has happened for music, and we're beginning to see it happen for more complex manufacturing. We already have a 3D 'fax' that uses a polymer liquid and curing lasers to build up 3D objects from pure information.
Soon, the biggest cost in creating anything will be researching the idea. Property laws will begin to become obsolete because if your neighbor has something, you can cheaply make your own copy of it.
What is the role of IP law in such an environment? How can innovation be encouraged? The real goal of IP law has never been to assure some inalienable right, but to foster innovation. IP law can be measured not by how well it protects a person's intellectual 'property', but by how well it encourages the creation of new and useful ideas.
Do patents and copyrights do this effectively? It seems, from the existence of the GPL and the Open Source movement that our current IP laws don't seem to be helping that much.
Someone rightly pointed out that the GPL is an excersize of the current IP laws. That belies the fact that it twists those laws to purposes that I'm sure their creators never envisioned. Instead of using the monopoly they grant, the liscense refuses that monopoly, and denies it to all others. The success of this liscense, and the obvious innovation apparent in the community of people who abide by it are an indication that perhaps our current IP laws aren't serving the purpose for which they were intended.
There are a lot of questions to be answered here, and they need answering soon. Soon IP will be the only kind of property that has any real value.
Oops, I read it through completely, but I skipped the introductory header 'fluff'. Yes, the author is now excused for his language and phrasing.
If you take a material object away from somebody, they don't have it anymore.
If you 'take' their idea, they still have their idea, and in fact, their idea often becomes even more useful.
Therefore, material and intellectual property laws should be considered very differently.
Then he goes on to make some analogy about corn that a lot of people picked up as being a barb about Monsanto's silly seed ownership policies.
The point is that he used obtuse and obscure language to say those things. I'm all for literacy. I understood the article just fine. I just think that uneccessary obtuseness and obscurity is a way for people to hide their fuzzy thinking and bad ideas. The Literary Critics new clothes as it were.
This is not to say that I disagree with the article. On the contrary, I think it raises a number of very valid points and deserves a lot of thought.
Of course, he couldn't possibly be expected to go through computer books and actually read them so he had a clue. After all, he's an artist, and way above all that technical stuff.
Heck, we're such lowly peons in terms of understanding art that the book "Difference Engine" will only be understood by us in 10-20 years or so.
I've read most of Gibson's books, but that doesn't mean I have to like him. :-)
Well, if I have to wander around the interface to figure out how to disable all of those annoying defaults then it's not very user friendly is it? It certainly doesn't seem like something that J. Random Casual User is going to like and enjoy if (s)he doesn't spend 1-2 hours a day typing up word documents.
At least it's hard to spread virii in the emacs macro language. In fact, there are specific features in emacs to prevent this from happening because some smart person realized that's what it would be used for if the features weren't there.
I dislike GTK because it isn't written in C++ and it should be.
One problem I see with LSB is that too much standardization is bad. A good OS will succeed in a marketplace (ecology) because it can adapt to fill a lot of niches. There's a shrink-wrap application/home user niche. There's a heavy duty file server niche. There's a web server niche, and there's an imbedded applications niche. There are TONS of niches. Linux is adaptable enough to fit into all of them.
The most important niche from a standardization standpoint is the shrink-wrap niche. That niche is large enough to have several players, and they will only badly hurt eachother if they don't cooperate to some extent. I see GNOME, and possibly LSB as a step in the direction of getting the shrink-wrap people to cooperate to the extent necessary to create a stable marketplace niche for Linux.
LSB is bad if it attempts to make ALL Linux distributions conform to the standards necessary to compete in the shrink-wrap niche. Distributions should be clear about the needs they try to fill, and standards should be flexible enough to let them fill them.
Xt (and hence Motif) has some significant bulkiness and design issues. There are large portions of Xt that just feel unpleasant and unwieldy to use, in addition to requiring too much code to implement. (Having event translations as a user-alterable resource springs to mind.)
I don't have a good idea of how GTK stacks up as I find the idea of bringing out yet another UI library that's designed to do OO in C instead of C++ to be rather revolting. I do recall GTK being rather more simply and cleanly implemented when I gave it a glance awhile back though.
Xt has some significant bulkiness and design issues. There are large portions of Xt that just feel unpleasant and unwieldy to use, in addition to requiring too much code to implement. (Having event translations as a user-alterable resource springs to mind.)
I don't have a good idea of how GTK stacks up as I find the idea of bringing out yet another UI library that's designed to do OO in C instead of C++ to be rather revolting. I do recall GTK being rather more simply and cleanly implemented when I gave it a glance awhile back though.
Strangely enough, I'm a rabid capitalist and an open source advocate. I would hesitate to equate open source with socialism.
One way to look at you is to think of you as a bunch of information about the positions and properties of particular kinds of particles at a particular moment in time. I suspect you consider yourself to be sentient.
To me, all the best art is craft. Failure to take objective criteria into account when creating art results in art that communicates nothing to anyone besides its creator.
As a side note, I think much of the art in our museums today that's less than 50 years old is exactly this way. Perhaps it's just the fact that the 90% of everything that's garbage hasn't yet been culled.
I want to release under LGPL a C++ communications transport library based on the UNIX pipes concept that I've spent a lot of time developing, but I'm worried about the response of the OSS community. It would be highly disappointing to release it and have it fall flat.
This library could only have reasonably been written in an OO language. The only OO language with the speed I want, the type safety I want, and the access to low level OS facilities that I want is C++.
Some of the posts to this group are not very encouraging, and some are. Does anybody have any suggestions or advice? And no, it CAN'T be ported to C. I might consider a Java port, but that would co-exist with the C++ library, not replace it.