Man, all those people using SGML must be imagining these benefits then!
Seriously, having a DTD is VERY helpful, because it allows you to edit a document using ANY SGML (or nowdays XML) compliant editor and ensure that you will be producing something which can be loaded back in to the original editor 100% cleanly (and without blowing away half of the structure that the original editor had setup). This is the specific functionality that the question was referring to.
DTD's do indeed have their semantics documented, indeed most of the more common ones have their semantics documented MUCH more extensively than ANY proprietary format out there. Easy and obvious examples would be HTML and XHTML, indeed just about anything produced by the W3C. Better exampleswould include DocBook, TEI, MIL-STD-38784, and ISO 12083. I would argue that these are all documented much more extensively than most proprietary file formats. Certianly, being proprietary doesn't mean that the file format defines semantics any better than something with a DTD.
Sure the semantics aren't enforced by the DTD, but they can be enforced by the end user, something which is typically not true when you're editing a proprietary format using a foreign tool.
This kind of stuff is done by the US government on a daily basis.
I find it amusing that Motif is equated as a good GUI toolkit because it allows one to build great GUI builders.
I guess that makes Visual programming languages better than anything else as well?
Seriously, the job of a GUI library is NOT to make life easy for GUI builders. Just like every other library on the planet is not judged by how well a RAD tool can be intergrated with it. I particularly liked his comments about Java. I can tell you that Sun's own experts on Java's AWT and Swing will tell you that the first thing you should do if you want to have decent GUI code is NOT to use a GUI builder.
The truth is, a modern GUI is much more sophisticated than what existed when Motif was originally put together. Motif was a great "internationalization capable" Forms package, but now we have this thing called HTML which does that job for us quite nicely. If you are going to use a GUI today you have to be far more sophisticated and flexible than that, and that requires having a good GUI programming library.
I also was amused by his comments about how you could make C++ wrappers for Motif and suddenly Qt has no benefit: he couldn't be more wrong!! As Qt developers have said time and time again, there is a HUGE difference between a GUI library build from the ground up using C++ objects verses a functional library with C++ wrappers tacked on (this is usually said in reference to GTK+, but that's another story). Anyone who's looked at how Motif's "inheritence" works can appreciate this. Anyone who's used Qt before can also appreciate this.
His comments about "support" for Motif vs. Open Source stuff shows complete ignorance of the support benefit derived from being open source. I can tell you from personal experience that I've been screwed over by bugs in various Motif libraries and I have NOT been able to get them fixed, partially because of the dwindling commercial support for them.
His comments about not being able to have a cross platform GUI were also silly, particularly given how much he likes Java! While Java is indeed very cool, there are tons of circumstances under which it does not make sense (silly example: do you really want that clock in your Gnome Panel to require a huge Java VM to work?), which at the same time have nothing to do with being cross platform or not. If a cross-platform GUI library is really that useless then TrollTech must have excellent sales people given that they can sell Qt for Windows for thousands of dollars, despite the fact that everyone knows it's such an excellent Xwindows library. The funny thing is, the whole notion of how X was built came from the idea that you should be able to have ANY widget set applied to it. All you have to have to support Xwindows is conformance with the X protocol and it's various extensions.
I've seen apps built with HTML, Tk, Qt, and wxWindows, and I tell you, they look pretty damn good to me on both platforms. I've also seen MFC apps that work pretty well on the MacOS (at least as well as they work on Windows...;-).
He commented about the 650 controls that are available for Motif, which sounds impressive. However, a lot of those are tons of proprietary (yes, that means they AREN'T interoperable) implementations of table views, because the existing table support is basically pathetic. Qt and GTK+ have the advantage of being open source which means that when you have N different implementations of a control, you tend to have the code migrate into just a few well supported controls rather than having tons of semi-functional commercial products. Then there's a bunch of graphing controls. Once you drop those, well, there just aren't that many interesting controls left.
His comment about companies who won't touch GNU tools are COMPLETELY out of touch with reality (which may indeed describe some of these companies as well). While there might be a perception problem, there is not a real one, either technical or legal. First off, Qt isn't a GNU tool, so I guess that ends that part of the argument. Indeed, if you really feel compelled to pay money to feel good about a library, TrollTech charges extensive hunks of money to developers who want to pay for the tool kit (again, amazingly on multiple platforms!!). GTK+ is covered by the LGPL, which means there's no risk of losing proprietary technology unless you're extending the library.
Finally, his comments about how everyone using Motif "in secret" are laughable. First off, there is nothing about open source that requires that you stand on the top of a hill and shout that you're using it. Indeed, so long as you aren't distributing your binaries, NOBODY need know what you're doing, because you're not necessarily even BUYING it from someone. Qt can be purchased under a license which does not require you to distribute your code. The cry of "lots of people are using this technology in secret" has been around for quite some time, and it's always that of an underrated technology (indeed, it's normally associated with startups). There was a time when people proudly shouted that they were using Motif. There was a time when people proudly shouted that they were using C compiler X or GUI toolkit Y. This is the kind of thing that commercial companies do in order to promote the idea that everyone is using your product. While there are companies who want to use technology in secret, if you really are popular, successful and growing there will be plenty of companies who will be happy to have you mention their names in a press release.
I hate to say it, but this guys seems to be suffering from a bad case of NIH syndrome.
XML is a simplified version of SGML. Both of them are more than just parsers. You forget about the benefit of a DTD. By using SGML/XML and an appropriate DTD, you can ensure that document structure is not lost. XML in particular is great for handling tags that for whatever reason aren't even defined in a DTD.
This has been a huge win for people using SGML for quite some time.
This is exactly what SGML has been doing for documents for years. The government and military has been using SGML to ensure that document structure is maintained and that documents are always readable.
Of course SGML is pretty complex, so XML has been born to simplify SGML. XML is now being used to accomplish the same thing.
There is a big difference between saying that the GNU project "exists" now because of Linux and that it is "so big now" because of Linux. GNU basically owes it's existence to RMS and whatever forces consipired to inspire him to form GNU. To suggest that something which came in to existing 7 years later could be the cause of it's existence is disingenuous in the extreme. Certainly Linux is probably the best poster boy that GNU has to herald the concepts of free software. However, there were other projects before that (gcc in particular comes to mind) which were also quite huge, and indeed without which it's quite possible Linux would not have happened.
That being said, the real contributions of GNU to the Linux kernel are a) all the handy pieces of the Unix puzzle which were made available to Linus and the world at large, and b) the GPL, the use of which even Linus believes was probably his smartest design decision with regards to the Linux kernel. I think it's not hard to argue that those two pieces of the puzzle EASILY represent a more signficant contribution to the movement than the kernel itself.
To suggest that if the "early Linux users had not found GNU they would have hacked their own tools." shows blatant disregard for the magnitude of the situation. For starters, GNU tools were used to BUILD Linux, so there wouldn't be a Linux for users to use without them. Additionally, without those tools, there would not have been a whole lot that that users could do with just a kernel to stare at. One could point to the BSD code base but for the fact that at the time it's "freedom" was severely tainted and people didn't want to come near it. Finally, I think both the BSD and the GNU guys would point out that the extensive set of tools that they built represents signficantly more work than an OS kernel. Indeed, the last time I checked glibc alone was signficantly larger than the Linux kernel.
Finally, you are missing your point about the whole GNU/Linux controversy anyway. The whole point is not to get people to trumpet GNU's horn. The GNU project's work was always meant to be a tangible mechanism to talk about free software, and GNU is trying to keep it in that role. Currently, people easily talk about Linux without talking about free software, and THAT is why GNU is trying to trumpet the GNU/Linux name scheme more than anything else. Indeed, I think the majority of GNU code is actually not RMS's, so it's hard to describe it as his work.
I do agree that it's likely a doomed effort because it's not achieve the kind of grass roots support which is necessary for that to happen.
Strong adherence to first principles is not the same as literal interpretation of first principles. Indeed, THAT is the key difference that defines fundamentalism.
While everyone has some basic assumptions upon which they base their beliefs, there is a difference between this and fundamentalism. Your comments almost seem to suggest that anyone is a fundamentalist who has strong commitment to a set of beliefs. I would argue many leaders of the various Christian churches are not fundamentalists based on the true meaning of the term, even though I would never suggest they were not devout or uncompromising in their beliefs.
It's not possible to make a literal deduction from that very vague and intangible statement. Your quote of RMS's "first principles" is him basically saying that he thinks right and wrong should be evaluated based on what the consequences are for the general public. That's basically a definition of ethics, and doesn't imply any kind of a belief system (indeed, those first principles can be applied to anything from Christianity, Nazism, Communism, Democracy, Anarchy or Objectivism --which one is RMS?;-). It is not anything that indicates a literal interpretation of first principles.
Fundamentalism, particularly with religious texts, is indicated when the meaning of those texts is taken literally from the specific words and punctuation in the text, rather than the context in which such words were written. I can't even think of an instance where RMS has even QUOTED a source in the kind of authoritative terms necessary to be considered fundamentalism.
RMS made comments about religious fundamentalism, not about Christianity. One could argue that there are a lot more fundamentalists out there who aren't Christian than otherwise.
"Dogma" is actually seperate from fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is about imposing a very literal interpretation of basic principles. Perhaps the Open Source movement can be characterized like that, I don't know. However, RMS is not associated with that movement (as he tried to point out in his comments). I think RMS's behavior suggests his views and rigorous support of those views are based on what he perceives as overal good for the society, not some literal interpretations of anything.
In all seriousness, I had no idea that RMS was so ideologically aligned with the far-left in this country.
I think your seeing your own demons here. Ideologies are funny things. In a lot of ways, RMS supports the notion of fewer laws, which in theory is a fundamentally right-wing concept. I think mapping ideology onto an independant thinker like RMS is a bad idea in general. RMS has his own ideology, and I think it deserves to be evaluated independantly, rather than likened to any others. Certainly, I think I could argue that he's a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Communist, or Fascist with about equal ease (and duplicity;-).
Furthermore, the attacks on the "War on Drugs" and conservative politicians in general were completely unnecessary in this forum.
The door was opened by the questions he was given. People were clearly interested in hearing more about RMS than just his work on GNU. Based on the rules that Slashdot operates, if people are interested, then it is an appropriate forum.
He attacked ONE conservative politican (well, two if you count his son) in a very specific context, which, btw, had nothing to do with the "War on Drugs". He was describing what drove him to become a member of the ACLU.
painting the ACLU as the Grand Defenders of the Bill of Rights omits a pretty important detail.
I think there is little doubt the ACLU works to support issues enclosed in the Bill of Rights. Sure they have specific interpretations of those rights, ones which you might not agree with, but even casual examination indicates the ACLU's work involves defending specific sections of the Bill of Rights. RMS's comments didn't suggest anything beyond that, and only your interpretation of his comments describes them as the "grand defenders" you refer to.
Perhaps Stallman should come down from his throne and spend a few months actually working in law enforcement. Perhaps he should see the kind of cruelty and callousness exhibited by elements of our society. Perhaps then he wouldn't be so quick to complain about high rates of imprisonment in the U.S.
Don't presume to know what RMS's experiences with law enforcement are. RMS comments about imprisonment rates were with respect to the impact the war on drugs has had on rates of imprisonment. Any time you outlaw an activity that a sizeable portion of the population want to do, and you enforce it rigourously, you're going to have that happen. It's also unlikely to be an effective action. Any Christian who knows their history can look back on Roman times to understand that.
Your statements, by implication, suggest that all the people locked up in prison on drug charges are exceptionally callous individuals. It's arguable whether you're right, but beyond that, you have to ask yourself why the U.S. has so many of those types of people compared to the rest of the world (or are you suggesting that countries like Canada and Saudi Arabia just have tons of free exceptionally callous individuals roaming around?). It's fair to say that SOMETHING in the US is making this happen, and it may very well be possible that there's a way to avoid it that isn't being explored.
He simply doesn't see the big picture with regard to social issues.
Actually, I think that is terribly misrepresentative. RMS perhaps doesn't see your big picture, but I've read a lot of material on the GNU website that looks very much at the big picture side of social issues. Indeed, RMS's most compelling argument about free software has always been about the kind of society one creates with it versus without it. That's entirely a big picture issue.
I have to say that one of rms's comments on religion seem odd to me. Specifically the comment, "...any being no matter how powerful can still be wrong." While, I acknowledge that I have a tough time conceiving of the idea of a being who never makes mistakes, the fundamental basis for many western religions defines a god in those terms.
Now, I'll accept the fact that such a being is impossible for most people to imagine, but at least in a Christian context this is concidered OK, because it's accepted that God cannot be fully conceived and fully understood by us mere mortals. Indeed, the expression "God moves in mysterious ways" stems from this concept.
Now there are lots of religions in the world where the gods are far from infallable, but I'm shocked and surprised that rms seems oblivious to these variations. It doesn't fit with my existing experiences with the guy.
I've never used it, but I know one of the chief architects of the software that supports it. There have been delays with the rollout of the technology, but there are currently ongoing trials in Kansas City and I think Washington.
ION is effectively ATM provided all the way to the end point. It's a very interesting strategy, but I suspect it's going to run head first into generic IP based solutions. Nonetheless, having ATM right to the end point is very handy, particularly for businesses. This allows businesses to dynamically configure their line utiliztion, etc. As a consequence, Sprint is currently focused on the business side of this whole thing. That being said, I know that their original plans called for a rollout of the services to 10 major metropolitan centers by the end of this year.
Interestingly ION doesn't really care too much about the underlying media. For a lot of end points they're using DSL, but they can go with just about anything that has the required bandwidth.
As far as Internet connectivity goes, I wouldn't expect it to be any different from what you can currently get from other DSL service providers. I think they're a tad faster, but that probably depends on how far you are from the switch. I also am personally not too wild about Sprint's backbone (admittedly I'm prejudiced from negative experiences in the mid 90's), regardless of whether I'm hooked up to it at 4mbps or not.
I'd say it's rather naive to assume that governments will always be behind what suitably paranoid people utilize for privacy. If you look through history you will find that more often than not cryptanalysts have had the edge on cryptographers. More often than not, said cryptanalysts were employed by governments, and more often than not, they kept secret the fact that they could decrypt messages.
I've noticed that Ars seems to stress RDBMS-centric development over OO-centric development. Even looking at your job openings section you stress database programming experience while not mentioning OO. I'm wondering how you compare OO analysis/design techniques vs. what I'll refer to as "traditional" RDBMs techniques like Structured Analsysis.
I remeber reading Travels with Samantha when it first came out on the world wide web (some of my first real reading on the web). What struck me about it, aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it, was how much of yourself was laid bare in the story. Publicly exposing oneself like this is something that celeberties do all the time, but it was (particularly at that time) a rare thing for Joe private citizen to do (although certainly within your nature;-).
I'm wondering you can describe what happened as a result of exposing so much of yourself online. I remember reading the comments on the story, and there were certainly a wide range of responses, but I was wondering if you noticed any larger consequences?
Compuserve does not have a patent on LZW compression. They just made the mistake of using it for their GIF encoding format.
LZW is a variant of LZ. The variation is what's patented. To the best of my knowledge you can use LZ as much as you like.
How exactly do you ensure 100% compatibility?
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Actually, thanks to the insanities of the ia32 ISA, Intel and AMD have about equal odds of being 100% compatible. Intel engineers don't KNOW their new chips are 100% compatible: they just run a lot of tests on them. Indeed, from what I understand, compiling and running a Linux kernel is one of the tests they run.
Think about it this way: P6-cores translate x86 instructions into uOP's, which is in many ways a new instruction set, and they execute the uOP's in the core. Athlon chips do a very similar thing. Do you think EITHER of these cores behave a lot like a 386, given they aren't even running the same ISA internally?
AMD systems have had problems in the past, and most of them have been chipset related (particularly with regards to AGP). Oddly enough, Intel systems have had problems as well. Rest assured, the current crop of VIA chipset based motherboards out there SERIOUSLY kick butt and are very reliable.
Microsoft vouches for Windows on AMD chips, and that's good enough for me. If anybody would have tons of bizarre ia32 instruction paths it'd be Microsoft.
Re:The difference is 84% marketshare vs. 10%
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Intel themselves has said they will be releasing chips at speeds between 800MHz and 1000MHz next quarter.
That being said, both sides basically overclocked there chips to get to where they are, it just was easier for AMD.
While supplying 84% of the CPU maket vs. 10% does make a difference, keep in mind that Intel's manufacturing capabilities exceed AMD's on a far larger scale. So, in theory, if they have similar yields Intel should have an easier time filling the supply chain.
Ok, the smart way to do this is to have a reverse proxy setup in front of your web server. This will do much better optimization than you could do by hand and it takes 2 minutes to setup. However, there are a few things one can do to improve performance:
Filter out all white-spacing a comments before sending down a web page. This can improve download times signficantly.
Serve up compressed HTML files (.gz) to Netscape and any other browser that supports it.
Specify image and table sizes in your HTML tags so that a browser doesn't have to load the whole thing to calculate a layout.
NT does allow you to filter out incomming IP packets. Of course, the NT IP stack has been so insecure that a lot of software firewall makers replace it with their own stack.
NT2000 could fix a lot of this though. I haven't used it.
While the project may be too ambitious in that it's covering a LOT of new ground all at once, don't kid yourself about the platform issue. Browsers have always been about a platform, and that's specifically why Microsoft was so freaked out about Netscape and why they very aggressively tried to take them out of the market.
Even the early browsers had API's for plugins, API's for automation, etc. It's been quite possible, for quite a long time, to build applications that work entirely from the browser. All Mozilla does is make those applications significantly more powerful.
Slashdot Mirror
#!/usr/bin/perl
sub getWord() {
my ($number) = @_;
my $answer;
open DICT, "/usr/dict/words";
while($number--) {
$answer = ;
}
return $answer;
}
open TERMINAL, "/dev/pttyN";
while(true) {
sleep 10;
print TERMINAL (getWord(random()));
}
close TERMINAL;
Man, all those people using SGML must be imagining these benefits then!
Seriously, having a DTD is VERY helpful, because it allows you to edit a document using ANY SGML (or nowdays XML) compliant editor and ensure that you will be producing something which can be loaded back in to the original editor 100% cleanly (and without blowing away half of the structure that the original editor had setup). This is the specific functionality that the question was referring to.
DTD's do indeed have their semantics documented, indeed most of the more common ones have their semantics documented MUCH more extensively than ANY proprietary format out there. Easy and obvious examples would be HTML and XHTML, indeed just about anything produced by the W3C. Better exampleswould include DocBook, TEI, MIL-STD-38784, and ISO 12083. I would argue that these are all documented much more extensively than most proprietary file formats. Certianly, being proprietary doesn't mean that the file format defines semantics any better than something with a DTD.
Sure the semantics aren't enforced by the DTD, but they can be enforced by the end user, something which is typically not true when you're editing a proprietary format using a foreign tool.
This kind of stuff is done by the US government on a daily basis.
I find it amusing that Motif is equated as a good GUI toolkit because it allows one to build great GUI builders.
;-).
I guess that makes Visual programming languages better than anything else as well?
Seriously, the job of a GUI library is NOT to make life easy for GUI builders. Just like every other library on the planet is not judged by how well a RAD tool can be intergrated with it. I particularly liked his comments about Java. I can tell you that Sun's own experts on Java's AWT and Swing will tell you that the first thing you should do if you want to have decent GUI code is NOT to use a GUI builder.
The truth is, a modern GUI is much more sophisticated than what existed when Motif was originally put together. Motif was a great "internationalization capable" Forms package, but now we have this thing called HTML which does that job for us quite nicely. If you are going to use a GUI today you have to be far more sophisticated and flexible than that, and that requires having a good GUI programming library.
I also was amused by his comments about how you could make C++ wrappers for Motif and suddenly Qt has no benefit: he couldn't be more wrong!! As Qt developers have said time and time again, there is a HUGE difference between a GUI library build from the ground up using C++ objects verses a functional library with C++ wrappers tacked on (this is usually said in reference to GTK+, but that's another story). Anyone who's looked at how Motif's "inheritence" works can appreciate this. Anyone who's used Qt before can also appreciate this.
His comments about "support" for Motif vs. Open Source stuff shows complete ignorance of the support benefit derived from being open source. I can tell you from personal experience that I've been screwed over by bugs in various Motif libraries and I have NOT been able to get them fixed, partially because of the dwindling commercial support for them.
His comments about not being able to have a cross platform GUI were also silly, particularly given how much he likes Java! While Java is indeed very cool, there are tons of circumstances under which it does not make sense (silly example: do you really want that clock in your Gnome Panel to require a huge Java VM to work?), which at the same time have nothing to do with being cross platform or not. If a cross-platform GUI library is really that useless then TrollTech must have excellent sales people given that they can sell Qt for Windows for thousands of dollars, despite the fact that everyone knows it's such an excellent Xwindows library. The funny thing is, the whole notion of how X was built came from the idea that you should be able to have ANY widget set applied to it. All you have to have to support Xwindows is conformance with the X protocol and it's various extensions.
I've seen apps built with HTML, Tk, Qt, and wxWindows, and I tell you, they look pretty damn good to me on both platforms. I've also seen MFC apps that work pretty well on the MacOS (at least as well as they work on Windows...
He commented about the 650 controls that are available for Motif, which sounds impressive. However, a lot of those are tons of proprietary (yes, that means they AREN'T interoperable) implementations of table views, because the existing table support is basically pathetic. Qt and GTK+ have the advantage of being open source which means that when you have N different implementations of a control, you tend to have the code migrate into just a few well supported controls rather than having tons of semi-functional commercial products. Then there's a bunch of graphing controls. Once you drop those, well, there just aren't that many interesting controls left.
His comment about companies who won't touch GNU tools are COMPLETELY out of touch with reality (which may indeed describe some of these companies as well). While there might be a perception problem, there is not a real one, either technical or legal. First off, Qt isn't a GNU tool, so I guess that ends that part of the argument. Indeed, if you really feel compelled to pay money to feel good about a library, TrollTech charges extensive hunks of money to developers who want to pay for the tool kit (again, amazingly on multiple platforms!!). GTK+ is covered by the LGPL, which means there's no risk of losing proprietary technology unless you're extending the library.
Finally, his comments about how everyone using Motif "in secret" are laughable. First off, there is nothing about open source that requires that you stand on the top of a hill and shout that you're using it. Indeed, so long as you aren't distributing your binaries, NOBODY need know what you're doing, because you're not necessarily even BUYING it from someone. Qt can be purchased under a license which does not require you to distribute your code. The cry of "lots of people are using this technology in secret" has been around for quite some time, and it's always that of an underrated technology (indeed, it's normally associated with startups). There was a time when people proudly shouted that they were using Motif. There was a time when people proudly shouted that they were using C compiler X or GUI toolkit Y. This is the kind of thing that commercial companies do in order to promote the idea that everyone is using your product. While there are companies who want to use technology in secret, if you really are popular, successful and growing there will be plenty of companies who will be happy to have you mention their names in a press release.
I hate to say it, but this guys seems to be suffering from a bad case of NIH syndrome.
XML is a simplified version of SGML. Both of them are more than just parsers. You forget about the benefit of a DTD. By using SGML/XML and an appropriate DTD, you can ensure that document structure is not lost. XML in particular is great for handling tags that for whatever reason aren't even defined in a DTD.
This has been a huge win for people using SGML for quite some time.
This is exactly what SGML has been doing for documents for years. The government and military has been using SGML to ensure that document structure is maintained and that documents are always readable.
Of course SGML is pretty complex, so XML has been born to simplify SGML. XML is now being used to accomplish the same thing.
There is a big difference between saying that the GNU project "exists" now because of Linux and that it is "so big now" because of Linux. GNU basically owes it's existence to RMS and whatever forces consipired to inspire him to form GNU. To suggest that something which came in to existing 7 years later could be the cause of it's existence is disingenuous in the extreme. Certainly Linux is probably the best poster boy that GNU has to herald the concepts of free software. However, there were other projects before that (gcc in particular comes to mind) which were also quite huge, and indeed without which it's quite possible Linux would not have happened.
That being said, the real contributions of GNU to the Linux kernel are a) all the handy pieces of the Unix puzzle which were made available to Linus and the world at large, and b) the GPL, the use of which even Linus believes was probably his smartest design decision with regards to the Linux kernel. I think it's not hard to argue that those two pieces of the puzzle EASILY represent a more signficant contribution to the movement than the kernel itself.
To suggest that if the "early Linux users had not found GNU they would have hacked their own tools." shows blatant disregard for the magnitude of the situation. For starters, GNU tools were used to BUILD Linux, so there wouldn't be a Linux for users to use without them. Additionally, without those tools, there would not have been a whole lot that that users could do with just a kernel to stare at. One could point to the BSD code base but for the fact that at the time it's "freedom" was severely tainted and people didn't want to come near it. Finally, I think both the BSD and the GNU guys would point out that the extensive set of tools that they built represents signficantly more work than an OS kernel. Indeed, the last time I checked glibc alone was signficantly larger than the Linux kernel.
Finally, you are missing your point about the whole GNU/Linux controversy anyway. The whole point is not to get people to trumpet GNU's horn. The GNU project's work was always meant to be a tangible mechanism to talk about free software, and GNU is trying to keep it in that role. Currently, people easily talk about Linux without talking about free software, and THAT is why GNU is trying to trumpet the GNU/Linux name scheme more than anything else. Indeed, I think the majority of GNU code is actually not RMS's, so it's hard to describe it as his work.
I do agree that it's likely a doomed effort because it's not achieve the kind of grass roots support which is necessary for that to happen.
Strong adherence to first principles is not the same as literal interpretation of first principles. Indeed, THAT is the key difference that defines fundamentalism.
;-). It is not anything that indicates a literal interpretation of first principles.
While everyone has some basic assumptions upon which they base their beliefs, there is a difference between this and fundamentalism. Your comments almost seem to suggest that anyone is a fundamentalist who has strong commitment to a set of beliefs. I would argue many leaders of the various Christian churches are not fundamentalists based on the true meaning of the term, even though I would never suggest they were not devout or uncompromising in their beliefs.
It's not possible to make a literal deduction from that very vague and intangible statement. Your quote of RMS's "first principles" is him basically saying that he thinks right and wrong should be evaluated based on what the consequences are for the general public. That's basically a definition of ethics, and doesn't imply any kind of a belief system (indeed, those first principles can be applied to anything from Christianity, Nazism, Communism, Democracy, Anarchy or Objectivism --which one is RMS?
Fundamentalism, particularly with religious texts, is indicated when the meaning of those texts is taken literally from the specific words and punctuation in the text, rather than the context in which such words were written. I can't even think of an instance where RMS has even QUOTED a source in the kind of authoritative terms necessary to be considered fundamentalism.
RMS made comments about religious fundamentalism, not about Christianity. One could argue that there are a lot more fundamentalists out there who aren't Christian than otherwise.
"Dogma" is actually seperate from fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is about imposing a very literal interpretation of basic principles. Perhaps the Open Source movement can be characterized like that, I don't know. However, RMS is not associated with that movement (as he tried to point out in his comments). I think RMS's behavior suggests his views and rigorous support of those views are based on what he perceives as overal good for the society, not some literal interpretations of anything.
In all seriousness, I had no idea that RMS was so ideologically aligned with the far-left in this country.
I think your seeing your own demons here. Ideologies are funny things. In a lot of ways, RMS supports the notion of fewer laws, which in theory is a fundamentally right-wing concept. I think mapping ideology onto an independant thinker like RMS is a bad idea in general. RMS has his own ideology, and I think it deserves to be evaluated independantly, rather than likened to any others. Certainly, I think I could argue that he's a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Communist, or Fascist with about equal ease (and duplicity ;-).
Furthermore, the attacks on the "War on Drugs" and conservative politicians in general were completely unnecessary in this forum.
The door was opened by the questions he was given. People were clearly interested in hearing more about RMS than just his work on GNU. Based on the rules that Slashdot operates, if people are interested, then it is an appropriate forum.
He attacked ONE conservative politican (well, two if you count his son) in a very specific context, which, btw, had nothing to do with the "War on Drugs". He was describing what drove him to become a member of the ACLU.
painting the ACLU as the Grand Defenders of the Bill of Rights omits a pretty important detail.
I think there is little doubt the ACLU works to support issues enclosed in the Bill of Rights. Sure they have specific interpretations of those rights, ones which you might not agree with, but even casual examination indicates the ACLU's work involves defending specific sections of the Bill of Rights. RMS's comments didn't suggest anything beyond that, and only your interpretation of his comments describes them as the "grand defenders" you refer to.
Perhaps Stallman should come down from his throne and spend a few months actually working in law enforcement. Perhaps he should see the kind of cruelty and callousness exhibited by elements of our society. Perhaps then he wouldn't be so quick to complain about high rates of imprisonment in the U.S.
Don't presume to know what RMS's experiences with law enforcement are. RMS comments about imprisonment rates were with respect to the impact the war on drugs has had on rates of imprisonment. Any time you outlaw an activity that a sizeable portion of the population want to do, and you enforce it rigourously, you're going to have that happen. It's also unlikely to be an effective action. Any Christian who knows their history can look back on Roman times to understand that.
Your statements, by implication, suggest that all the people locked up in prison on drug charges are exceptionally callous individuals. It's arguable whether you're right, but beyond that, you have to ask yourself why the U.S. has so many of those types of people compared to the rest of the world (or are you suggesting that countries like Canada and Saudi Arabia just have tons of free exceptionally callous individuals roaming around?). It's fair to say that SOMETHING in the US is making this happen, and it may very well be possible that there's a way to avoid it that isn't being explored.
He simply doesn't see the big picture with regard to social issues.
Actually, I think that is terribly misrepresentative. RMS perhaps doesn't see your big picture, but I've read a lot of material on the GNU website that looks very much at the big picture side of social issues. Indeed, RMS's most compelling argument about free software has always been about the kind of society one creates with it versus without it. That's entirely a big picture issue.
I have to say that one of rms's comments on religion seem odd to me. Specifically the comment, "...any being no matter how powerful can still be wrong." While, I acknowledge that I have a tough time conceiving of the idea of a being who never makes mistakes, the fundamental basis for many western religions defines a god in those terms.
Now, I'll accept the fact that such a being is impossible for most people to imagine, but at least in a Christian context this is concidered OK, because it's accepted that God cannot be fully conceived and fully understood by us mere mortals. Indeed, the expression "God moves in mysterious ways" stems from this concept.
Now there are lots of religions in the world where the gods are far from infallable, but I'm shocked and surprised that rms seems oblivious to these variations. It doesn't fit with my existing experiences with the guy.
I've never used it, but I know one of the chief architects of the software that supports it. There have been delays with the rollout of the technology, but there are currently ongoing trials in Kansas City and I think Washington.
ION is effectively ATM provided all the way to the end point. It's a very interesting strategy, but I suspect it's going to run head first into generic IP based solutions. Nonetheless, having ATM right to the end point is very handy, particularly for businesses. This allows businesses to dynamically configure their line utiliztion, etc. As a consequence, Sprint is currently focused on the business side of this whole thing. That being said, I know that their original plans called for a rollout of the services to 10 major metropolitan centers by the end of this year.
Interestingly ION doesn't really care too much about the underlying media. For a lot of end points they're using DSL, but they can go with just about anything that has the required bandwidth.
As far as Internet connectivity goes, I wouldn't expect it to be any different from what you can currently get from other DSL service providers. I think they're a tad faster, but that probably depends on how far you are from the switch. I also am personally not too wild about Sprint's backbone (admittedly I'm prejudiced from negative experiences in the mid 90's), regardless of whether I'm hooked up to it at 4mbps or not.
I'd say it's rather naive to assume that governments will always be behind what suitably paranoid people utilize for privacy. If you look through history you will find that more often than not cryptanalysts have had the edge on cryptographers. More often than not, said cryptanalysts were employed by governments, and more often than not, they kept secret the fact that they could decrypt messages.
I've noticed that Ars seems to stress RDBMS-centric development over OO-centric development. Even looking at your job openings section you stress database programming experience while not mentioning OO. I'm wondering how you compare OO analysis/design techniques vs. what I'll refer to as "traditional" RDBMs techniques like Structured Analsysis.
I remeber reading Travels with Samantha when it first came out on the world wide web (some of my first real reading on the web). What struck me about it, aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it, was how much of yourself was laid bare in the story. Publicly exposing oneself like this is something that celeberties do all the time, but it was (particularly at that time) a rare thing for Joe private citizen to do (although certainly within your nature ;-).
I'm wondering you can describe what happened as a result of exposing so much of yourself online. I remember reading the comments on the story, and there were certainly a wide range of responses, but I was wondering if you noticed any larger consequences?
Compuserve does not have a patent on LZW compression. They just made the mistake of using it for their GIF encoding format.
LZW is a variant of LZ. The variation is what's patented. To the best of my knowledge you can use LZ as much as you like.
Actually, thanks to the insanities of the ia32 ISA, Intel and AMD have about equal odds of being 100% compatible. Intel engineers don't KNOW their new chips are 100% compatible: they just run a lot of tests on them. Indeed, from what I understand, compiling and running a Linux kernel is one of the tests they run.
Think about it this way: P6-cores translate x86 instructions into uOP's, which is in many ways a new instruction set, and they execute the uOP's in the core. Athlon chips do a very similar thing. Do you think EITHER of these cores behave a lot like a 386, given they aren't even running the same ISA internally?
AMD systems have had problems in the past, and most of them have been chipset related (particularly with regards to AGP). Oddly enough, Intel systems have had problems as well. Rest assured, the current crop of VIA chipset based motherboards out there SERIOUSLY kick butt and are very reliable.
Microsoft vouches for Windows on AMD chips, and that's good enough for me. If anybody would have tons of bizarre ia32 instruction paths it'd be Microsoft.
Intel themselves has said they will be releasing chips at speeds between 800MHz and 1000MHz next quarter.
That being said, both sides basically overclocked there chips to get to where they are, it just was
easier for AMD.
While supplying 84% of the CPU maket vs. 10% does make a difference, keep in mind that Intel's manufacturing capabilities exceed AMD's on a far larger scale. So, in theory, if they have similar yields Intel should have an easier time filling the supply chain.
However, there are a few things one can do to improve performance:
Xenix was actually an offshoot of Microsoft work, so it seems unlikely that Microsoft would say it couldn't be done.
Hmm... the URL for the specs appears to be down.
Does anyone have a copy somewhere?
Ok. I wasn't going to comment, and I know this is off topic, but you thought Sphere was a good movie?!?!
NT does allow you to filter out incomming IP packets. Of course, the NT IP stack has been so insecure that a lot of software firewall makers replace it with their own stack.
NT2000 could fix a lot of this though. I haven't used it.
While the project may be too ambitious in that it's covering a LOT of new ground all at once, don't kid yourself about the platform issue. Browsers have always been about a platform, and that's specifically why Microsoft was so freaked out about Netscape and why they very aggressively tried to take them out of the market.
Even the early browsers had API's for plugins, API's for automation, etc. It's been quite possible, for quite a long time, to build applications that work entirely from the browser. All Mozilla does is make those applications significantly more powerful.
Iay eanmay oneday.
Done.