Only half of GNU's freedoms have much value to... most people. Freedom's 1 and 3 are only available to a very small segment of society: computer programmers. Furthermore, even if you are a programmer chances are you don't want to study a particular piece of software. I could care less how a DNS server works. I just care how reliable it is and how much it costs. I don't even need to tinker with its inner workings to know its secure because I can use network monitoring tools to make sure it's not snooping on me... not that the upstream DNS server couldn't be reporting my activity anyway, and OSS on mine can't fix that.
Freedom 0 is a given, assuming that you've already acquired the software. Some legal weenie might be able to place restrictions on what I'm allowed to do with the software, but that's virtually unenforceable.
So, what it all boils down to for most people is freedom 2 which is really just another way of saying all software should be gratis despite the FS advocates claims to the contrary. Communism. Been there. Done that. Didn't work. Thank-you for trying, have a nice day.
And if you think the answer is "emacs" you still don't get it.
The biggest hurdle to users starting out is vi. What's needed is for every *NIX system to have an "edit" command. It's OK if it aliases to vi hacked to stay in an easy mode and rigged to have a simple menu; the implementation doesn't matter. What does matter is that when newbies need to edit a file they have a simple way to do it with a lightweight editor, without destroying what the poweruser base has come to expect. But this will never happen in a reliable way due to...
2....there being too many implementations, and they are all different in subtle ways. Even when they try to standardize it usually does little more than prove the old quip that "standards are good that's why there are so many of them". The only real solution to this is something like MacOS X for the PC, and since we all know that ain't gonna happen, we're stuck with no clear winner for the PC *NIX desktop. None of them have the quality "feel" of a MacOS or a Windows. Yes, that's not a rational statement, but you know it's true. People are emotional. Go figure. Which brings us to a point that others have raised, namely...
3....*NIX elitism. I define eliteism as the ability to engage in activity and/or hold opinions that are obviously flawed, and not only overlook one's own flaws, but insist that they are not in fact flaws but are in fact qualities! Elitism is pervasive in the *NIX community. However, it will all but disappear if a winner ever emerges on the PC desktop. It is certainly nowhere near as bad as it was among Linux people circa 1998.
Well, there are more, but that's all I feel like typing right now.
If we can place a solar sail on the thing by 2010, how big would it have to be to alter the orbit? Five years to develop and deploy that technology sounds reasonable, and even a small ammount of drag over 19 years should alter the trajectory by a significant ammount, right?
On second thought, solar sail is probably the wrong tech. How about a robot that grinds up the asteroid and shoots the particles forward at high velocity like a retro-rocket? They could be solar powered of course, and we could deploy several of them. The only real challenge there is that the asteroid could be difficult to grind up, so the robots would have to have lots of spare drilling bits.
Binary object serialization, virtual machine binaries, and other methods of interchange can result in obscure formats that change over time. As long as the software that creates those formats is open, there's not a problem.
If you had to enforce a laundry-list of accepted formats, that would stifle creativity on the part of the developers. I don't think the line is too unclear right now. When somebody gets a C program that looks like a brick on the screen, and all the variables have names like T2343242 you can be pretty sure that what you've got is obfuscated source, plainly in violation of the current clause.
Similarly, if you had a scripting environment that saved scripts in a binary format, you still have to open the script in an editor, and when you do that it's plain to see whether or not the source is obfuscated. This makes it possible to GPL software, even if it is loaded and saved by a proprietary binary scripting environment. In some way, it's also the same sort of thing that makes it possible for GPL'd software to run in any proprietary environment--e.g., the fact that source for Windows applications contain Windows API calls into the proprietary OS doesn't make them obfuscated, it just makes them non-portable.
When I was a kid I saw a commercial hovering mower called the "flymo" or something like that. It did have the advantage of being easier to maneuver around corners. For some reason it never caught on though.
I imagine it burned more gas than a regular mower, since it had to hover as well as cut. I suspect the real reason it didn't catch on was the difficulty of getting an even cut when you throttled the thing back to stop. It couldn't bag either. The problem of the thing riding down as it accumulated clippings was probablly the reason.
There just doesn't seem to be enough merit to the idea.
...as you might think. Japan has really high numbers because of diet (rich in fish, tofu, not too much red meat, etc). Other countries probably have higher figures due to lifestyle and infrastructure issues. In particular, less dependance on the automobile which gives the US a Vietnam casualty rate every other year. The US lifestyle sucks in a lot of ways when it comes to health; in particular our overindulgence of fatty foods.
So, I really wish people would quit trying to use these figures as justification to push for a beurocratized socialist "health care system". These social systems may be a result of good health as opposed to being the cause of it. In other words, socialism is expensive, and those who are already healthy and wealthy can afford it.
Anybody who follows mini-itx and 'meta has known about that for months. They've also known that you can't buy it retail in onesies and twosies--nowhere. Nowhere. It's dead. There are so many other solutions out there that unless you, like Slashdot, follow 'meta out of some warped allegience to Linus, it's not even on your radar. It's dead.
Well, you've sort of proved my point. 'meta is just a VLIW chip with some special firmware on it. The real magic is in the firmware. Now, I'm not suggesting that they should open source the firmware, but when you can't socket the thing into a PC MoBo, when you can't even buy the mini-ITX board at a reasonable price, when people have to reverse-engineer basic technical data, it's DOA for any real hacker (except hackers who like to reverse-engineer!). It's for "corporate partners only". It's closed. It's dead, and that's a shame.
Transmeta is too closed to hackers. That's part of the reason it's failing. Few hackers are going to buy one of their $1000+ devkits when they can get a mini-itx board for $200. Yeah, the 'meta board can supposedly peform better without a fan, but so what? Transmeta has no clue. They could have started a revolution, instead they tried to push disruptive technology through channels that didn't want disruptive technology.
If they wanted to have a constitutional ammendment that limited campaign spending, I might support it if it were worded properly.
That's a core part of our problems--issues that ought to be addressed by constitutional ammendment are just being legislated on. You may not agree with the anti-gay-marriage thing, but at least they are taking the proper route in asking for a CA. Same deal with prohibition, yet pot is illegal without a CA. Go figure. Which reminds me, since prohibition left the sale of "intoxicating liquors" up to the states, what would happen if somebody tried to make a drink out of pot plants? It's a liquor. It's intoxicating. Therefore, it ought to be regulated by the states.:)
If they were printing ads on dollar bills and handing them out, you might have an argument.
And furthermore, money doesn't win elections either. Just ask Steve Forbes, Ross Perot, and the (IIRC) Rockefellers.
Yeah, if the candidates are tweedle-dee and tweedle dum, the richer tweedle might have an edge, but that's about it.
If I had an opportunity to violate McCain-Feingold, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Only people that violate this trash legislation are real Americans. Everybody else is an imposter.
Exactly how do you achieve this "100% saturation" they talk about? Does D actually diffuse into Paladium to the point where there is a 1:1 atomic ratio? I find that hard to believe.
Maybe they are just talking about the surface perhaps? Can anybody clarify this?
Before we invent any of that stuff, we need to figure out a way to prevent even one person from being insane enough to use these high-energy, space-bending, mass-moving devices in an irresponsabla manner.
Nuclear weapons are scary enough, but you have to have a large number of people conspiring to produce and use them. Sanity has, thus far, prevailed.
Give Joe Sixpack the ability to harvest sub-etha superbosons and create a kg of antimatter, and that's all she wrote.
We had a black-n-white Philco when I was a little kid. When my Mom told me to turn off the TV and go to bed, I would insist on waiting for the little white dot to disappear. "Mom, nooo... the little white dot's not gone yet".
By the time I was a teenager, the Philco had be consigned to the basement for well over a decade, no longer used even as an emergency backup set.
I plugged the TV-output of my Commodore-64 into the Philco one day and for a few brief moments the up-and-coming technology of the digital age met the post-war vacuum tube era. The image was distorted. Perhaps some of the old Phil's components were slightly out of value. It still would have been useable though. It was one of those moments that you have to be a true geek to appreciate. If only I could have gone back in time and shown that to the Philco guys.
While I was away at college, the Philco was unceremoniously disposed of by my parents.
Your fetid icons nevertheless repudiate the obnoxiousness of linguistic homophones. When tragic absorptions of words succeed to subsume more common-place ironies, won't obfuscation randomize your perceptions more often, and isn't that beneficial?
Slashdot Mirror
Only half of GNU's freedoms have much value to... most people. Freedom's 1 and 3 are only available to a very small segment of society: computer programmers. Furthermore, even if you are a programmer chances are you don't want to study a particular piece of software. I could care less how a DNS server works. I just care how reliable it is and how much it costs. I don't even need to tinker with its inner workings to know its secure because I can use network monitoring tools to make sure it's not snooping on me... not that the upstream DNS server couldn't be reporting my activity anyway, and OSS on mine can't fix that.
Freedom 0 is a given, assuming that you've already acquired the software. Some legal weenie might be able to place restrictions on what I'm allowed to do with the software, but that's virtually unenforceable.
So, what it all boils down to for most people is freedom 2 which is really just another way of saying all software should be gratis despite the FS advocates claims to the contrary. Communism. Been there. Done that. Didn't work. Thank-you for trying, have a nice day.
vi
And if you think the answer is "emacs" you still don't get it.
The biggest hurdle to users starting out is vi. What's needed is for every *NIX system to have an "edit" command. It's OK if it aliases to vi hacked to stay in an easy mode and rigged to have a simple menu; the implementation doesn't matter. What does matter is that when newbies need to edit a file they have a simple way to do it with a lightweight editor, without destroying what the poweruser base has come to expect. But this will never happen in a reliable way due to...
2. ...there being too many implementations, and they are all different in subtle ways. Even when they try to standardize it usually does little more than prove the old quip that "standards are good that's why there are so many of them". The only real solution to this is something like MacOS X for the PC, and since we all know that ain't gonna happen, we're stuck with no clear winner for the PC *NIX desktop. None of them have the quality "feel" of a MacOS or a Windows. Yes, that's not a rational statement, but you know it's true. People are emotional. Go figure. Which brings us to a point that others have raised, namely...
3. ...*NIX elitism. I define eliteism as the ability to engage in activity and/or hold opinions that are obviously flawed, and not only overlook one's own flaws, but insist that they are not in fact flaws but are in fact qualities! Elitism is pervasive in the *NIX community. However, it will all but disappear if a winner ever emerges on the PC desktop. It is certainly nowhere near as bad as it was among Linux people circa 1998.
Well, there are more, but that's all I feel like typing right now.
Next, How Movies cost Vaudeville Money. 'nuff said.
If we can place a solar sail on the thing by 2010, how big would it have to be to alter the orbit? Five years to develop and deploy that technology sounds reasonable, and even a small ammount of drag over 19 years should alter the trajectory by a significant ammount, right?
On second thought, solar sail is probably the wrong tech. How about a robot that grinds up the asteroid and shoots the particles forward at high velocity like a retro-rocket? They could be solar powered of course, and we could deploy several of them. The only real challenge there is that the asteroid could be difficult to grind up, so the robots would have to have lots of spare drilling bits.
Binary object serialization, virtual machine binaries, and other methods of interchange can result in obscure formats that change over time. As long as the software that creates those formats is open, there's not a problem.
If you had to enforce a laundry-list of accepted formats, that would stifle creativity on the part of the developers. I don't think the line is too unclear right now. When somebody gets a C program that looks like a brick on the screen, and all the variables have names like T2343242 you can be pretty sure that what you've got is obfuscated source, plainly in violation of the current clause.
Similarly, if you had a scripting environment that saved scripts in a binary format, you still have to open the script in an editor, and when you do that it's plain to see whether or not the source is obfuscated. This makes it possible to GPL software, even if it is loaded and saved by a proprietary binary scripting environment. In some way, it's also the same sort of thing that makes it possible for GPL'd software to run in any proprietary environment--e.g., the fact that source for Windows applications contain Windows API calls into the proprietary OS doesn't make them obfuscated, it just makes them non-portable.
There's a guy around the corner from my office who built a house out of an overpass and some plastic bags.
Use it to make a cloning machine and a killing machine, then well, you know the rest...
When I was a kid I saw a commercial hovering mower called the "flymo" or something like that. It did have the advantage of being easier to maneuver around corners. For some reason it never caught on though.
I imagine it burned more gas than a regular mower, since it had to hover as well as cut. I suspect the real reason it didn't catch on was the difficulty of getting an even cut when you throttled the thing back to stop. It couldn't bag either. The problem of the thing riding down as it accumulated clippings was probablly the reason.
There just doesn't seem to be enough merit to the idea.
I thought things that were just accepted as true were called "axioms". Is "law" a synomym for "axiom" or are they different?
Come on. He was an astronaut: Black skies, Gordo. :)
...as you might think. Japan has really high numbers because of diet (rich in fish, tofu, not too much red meat, etc). Other countries probably have higher figures due to lifestyle and infrastructure issues. In particular, less dependance on the automobile which gives the US a Vietnam casualty rate every other year. The US lifestyle sucks in a lot of ways when it comes to health; in particular our overindulgence of fatty foods.
So, I really wish people would quit trying to use these figures as justification to push for a beurocratized socialist "health care system". These social systems may be a result of good health as opposed to being the cause of it. In other words, socialism is expensive, and those who are already healthy and wealthy can afford it.
Wow! That page has a lot of alternative voting methods on it. How do you propose we decide which one to use? :)
No? Then what good are they? :)
What you really means is: First "you can't really steal code because you haven't deprived anyone of the use of it" post.
But I see you've already been modded Troll, which is exactly what that tired old argument ammounts to in my book.
Anybody who follows mini-itx and 'meta has known about that for months. They've also known that you can't buy it retail in onesies and twosies--nowhere. Nowhere. It's dead. There are so many other solutions out there that unless you, like Slashdot, follow 'meta out of some warped allegience to Linus, it's not even on your radar. It's dead.
Well, you've sort of proved my point. 'meta is just a VLIW chip with some special firmware on it. The real magic is in the firmware. Now, I'm not suggesting that they should open source the firmware, but when you can't socket the thing into a PC MoBo, when you can't even buy the mini-ITX board at a reasonable price, when people have to reverse-engineer basic technical data, it's DOA for any real hacker (except hackers who like to reverse-engineer!). It's for "corporate partners only". It's closed. It's dead, and that's a shame.
Transmeta is too closed to hackers. That's part of the reason it's failing. Few hackers are going to buy one of their $1000+ devkits when they can get a mini-itx board for $200. Yeah, the 'meta board can supposedly peform better without a fan, but so what? Transmeta has no clue. They could have started a revolution, instead they tried to push disruptive technology through channels that didn't want disruptive technology.
If they wanted to have a constitutional ammendment that limited campaign spending, I might support it if it were worded properly.
That's a core part of our problems--issues that ought to be addressed by constitutional ammendment are just being legislated on. You may not agree with the anti-gay-marriage thing, but at least they are taking the proper route in asking for a CA. Same deal with prohibition, yet pot is illegal without a CA. Go figure. Which reminds me, since prohibition left the sale of "intoxicating liquors" up to the states, what would happen if somebody tried to make a drink out of pot plants? It's a liquor. It's intoxicating. Therefore, it ought to be regulated by the states. :)
If they were printing ads on dollar bills and handing them out, you might have an argument.
And furthermore, money doesn't win elections either. Just ask Steve Forbes, Ross Perot, and the (IIRC) Rockefellers.
Yeah, if the candidates are tweedle-dee and tweedle dum, the richer tweedle might have an edge, but that's about it.
If I had an opportunity to violate McCain-Feingold, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Only people that violate this trash legislation are real Americans. Everybody else is an imposter.
What do you think "Various scientific purposes" are?
Exactly how do you achieve this "100% saturation" they talk about? Does D actually diffuse into Paladium to the point where there is a 1:1 atomic ratio? I find that hard to believe.
Maybe they are just talking about the surface perhaps? Can anybody clarify this?
Before we invent any of that stuff, we need to figure out a way to prevent even one person from being insane enough to use these high-energy, space-bending, mass-moving devices in an irresponsabla manner.
Nuclear weapons are scary enough, but you have to have a large number of people conspiring to produce and use them. Sanity has, thus far, prevailed.
Give Joe Sixpack the ability to harvest sub-etha superbosons and create a kg of antimatter, and that's all she wrote.
We had a black-n-white Philco when I was a little kid. When my Mom told me to turn off the TV and go to bed, I would insist on waiting for the little white dot to disappear. "Mom, nooo... the little white dot's not gone yet".
By the time I was a teenager, the Philco had be consigned to the basement for well over a decade, no longer used even as an emergency backup set.
I plugged the TV-output of my Commodore-64 into the Philco one day and for a few brief moments the up-and-coming technology of the digital age met the post-war vacuum tube era. The image was distorted. Perhaps some of the old Phil's components were slightly out of value. It still would have been useable though. It was one of those moments that you have to be a true geek to appreciate. If only I could have gone back in time and shown that to the Philco guys.
While I was away at college, the Philco was unceremoniously disposed of by my parents.
Your fetid icons nevertheless repudiate the obnoxiousness of linguistic homophones. When tragic absorptions of words succeed to subsume more common-place ironies, won't obfuscation randomize your perceptions more often, and isn't that beneficial?