AFAIK nothing happened to the "when it's ready" philosophy. But saying that it will actually be delieverd when it's ready doesn't preclude trying to estimate when that will be or trying to encourage people to get changes committed instead of procrastinating by giving reasonably hard deadlines. And that's what this is: it's an estimate of when things will be done and a target for developers to tell them when he wants them to be finished. It's certainly not a drop-dead, will be released by this date type of deadline.
My impression from what I've read is that Linus is pretty happy with the features that have been implimented in the latest version, and that he thinks that most of the things that can actually be included within a reasonable time frame either have been put in already or can be put in by the end of the month. After that he plans a feature freeze, where no new things are added but existing features can still undergo changes, and then a code freeze, where no changes are allowed except for serious bug fixes. I don't see why it's unreasonable for him to give rough estimates of how long those things will take.
Unfortunately, it doesn't sound as though the "Open" in "Openexchange" means that it's going to be open-source. SUSE mentions that they have a much friendlier licensing policy than MS, only paying for people who are actually connected to the server instead of per seat that can connect. That's nice, but it just means that you're getting hooked into a proprietary system that's likely to be less well developed and possibly even less reliable than Exchange, without any of the advantages of Free/Open Source software. Very disappointing.
So what if the thing comes with Windows. If you really dislike Windows that much, you can always wipe the hard drive and install your favorite *nix distribution- Redhat, Debian, FreeBSD, etc. I realize that you're still paying the MS tax, but the overall price still works out to less than a TiBook.
I think that you fail to see the basic issue. I understand that advertizing has value, but that doesn't mean that the DMA's vision of advertizing anywhere and everywhere is attractive to me. There are so many legitimate companies out there that might potentially want my business that even if I only got one email from each of them every year I'd still be swamped. This isn't good for me, since my email box would be constantly full, and it wouldn't be good for them because I'd miss the few really interesting messages in the sea of useless ones. I don't want to be in a system where any legitimate business can send me advertizements on the presumption that I'm interested until I explicitly tell them otherwise.
If I want information, I can go out and get it myself. I can buy specialty magazines, where one of the attractions of the magazine is ads that are narrowly aimed at the targeted audience. Or I could go and look at web sites where interesting new things are regularly discussed. (I seem to recall that there's one that bills itself as "News for nerds, stuff that matters".) If I want to buy a new car, I can go to auto companies' web sites and see what they have to say for themselves. I don't need to be drowned in ads from any fool who thinks that I might be interested.
Wrong. Look at the 21st Ammendment. It ended the Federal prohibition on alcohol, but it also specifically allowed state and lower level governments to pass their own anti-liquor laws. OTOH, if the Federal anti-spam law says specifically that it superceeds all state laws on the issue, it does. This is sensible and constitutional, given that the Constitution and laws passed under it are the supreme law of the land (i.e. superceed any state law that is in conflict with them) and Congress certainly has the power to regulate interstate commerce (which the net is) and the post.
I have received notices that mail I tried to send couldn't be delivered. But in fact, the mail was not from me, and some spammer had spoofed the email address and pretended to be me.
The chances are that it wasn't a spammer doing that, or rather that it wasn't the result of a spammer doing so deliberately. Some of the more recent email viruses have adopted the strategy of forging from headers in their propagation letters. They pick two addresses from the victim's computer, one recipient and one forged sender. The theory seems to be that there's a decent chance that the two are likely enough to know each other that it will increase the chances of the letter being opened, while masking the identity of the infected machine. It seems as though some spammers have become infected, so there are lots of people receiving random messages apparently from people they've never heard of.
Not really. They just want a law that will shut down all of the small time spamvertizers so that the big boys will have the market all to themselves. They want the new Federal law, which would only forbid sending mail with forged headers but not other noxious practices like opt-out only lists- to superceed stronger state laws. IOW, they want a Federal law that specifically legalizes spam with a few trivial limitations. Don't think that this will result in you receiving any less spam.
If you're paying your own electrical bill, you should. Every kWh you save with a more efficient monitor is that much less money on your electrical bill. It may not seem like that much, but if you use your computer a lot it can add up.
I'm not sure, but this may have something to do with how they look when you film them. If you're shooting with a fast shutter speed, you can get some ugly effects from the scanning of the monitor. That's why you'll see some odd flickering of the screen on CRTs in movies. IIRC, there's not the same problem with LCDs so they should be easier to film.
There's also an issue of efficiency. LCD monitors use a lot less power than similarly sized CRTs. Looking at the stats, it's something like 100 W less. If you're a business that has your monitors on 24/7, that adds up to quite a bit of power savings over the lifespan of the monitor. It's probably not enough to win the argument outright, but it does swing things a bit back in the LCD's direction- especially in a place with expensive electricity like California.
Advertising. (Except for that Court bit, which someone should be sued for)
Don't forget about their announcements of vaporware, which is undoubtedly lying. Or their claims that software is perfectly secure (or that security problems are a result of something other than the software when it's found) or that IE is an integrated part of the OS. Besides, it's perfectly possible to advertize ones products truthfully, so claiming advertizing as an excuse for lies is bogus.
"What the market may bear"
Threatening costly and disruptive software audits if people won't accept the latest licensing terms is not an attempt to charge what the market will bear. It's an attempt to extort more money from people who have already paid the market price.
Do you mean besides the antitrust laws? I mean, when MS was a small company, their "monopolist" tactics weren't illegal at all.
Yes, I meant the anti trust laws, but also their patent violations. In any case, it doesn't matter if their tactics were OK back when they were a small company. They're a monopoly now, and they legally can't keep using the same tactics now that they could back then.
So, you never lie, never take advantage in a business deal, and never ever break a law?
No, I don't lie for money and I don't take advantage in business deals; I bend over backward to be as fair as possible with the people I do business with. I point out to cashiers when they've made a mistake in my favor.
In any case, it's stupid and dishonest to pretend that somebody who once makes a mistake can never fairly criticize another who does something far worse in the same general area. It's also outrageous to compare an occasional slip up with a long term patter of behavior. If I've been caught speeding, I don't lose the right to be morally outraged at morons who kill innocent bystanders while street racing. If I once illegally procured alcohol for a minor, that doesn't eliminate my right to complain about people peddling dope to elementary school kids. If I once made a mistake on my taxes, I can still complain about Enron. So even if I've lied, cheated, and broke the law, I still have a right to claim that my morals are better than Microsoft's.
Their morals--real morality, not technicalities like "can I play my MP3 on fifteen computers with one purchase"--are most likely almost exactly in line with yours or mine (or the non-software part of Stallman's.)
I doubt it. Microsoft's morals seem to include the idea that it's acceptable to do just about anything for a buck. They appear to have no qualms whatsoever about lying about their products, bullying people into overpaying for software licenses, and violating federal law, all in pursuit of profit. I think that all of those things are immoral, so I'd have to say that my morals are rather different from theirs.
And how precisely are they going to save money ? And save money relative to what ? The old system ?
The savings are probably compared to buying a comprably powerful system running a proprietary Unix. I'd assume that the biggest chunk of the savings is that they can run on (comparatively) cheap commodity hardware. This seems to be a very common reason for moving to Linux: it lets you run your old Unix software on much cheaper boxes.
It's nothing but more government interference in private business that chains capitalism to the ground and makes us as weak and inefficient as the old Soviet Union was. This does not simplify anything with electronic transactions -- it just bogs down the already efficient electronic systems in place with red tape.
Since you don't like government interference in your business, I hope that your health care firm will give up access to funding in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, NIH research funds, etc. It would be terrible if you were to behave hypocritically by taking lots of government money and then turn around and complain about government regulations.
It reminds me of the old joke about the guy who goes in to see his doctor because it hurts every time he bends in a strange way. The doctor tells him to stop bending that way, and the pain will go away.
If it really hurts the box office that the DVD is released just a few months after the theatrical release, why in hell are the doing it? They could always delay the DVD so that it only comes out a year or more after the theatrical release. That preserves the incentive to see the movie on the big screen, while letting the DVD come out close enough to the theatrical release that people can still remember the movie and want to buy it. What is wrong with these people?
They're not as contradictory as you think. Almost all journaling systems journal metadata only, so they only protect the integrity of the filesystem, not the actual data. There are a few systems that actually journal everything, providing protection of the actual data as well as the filesystem integrity, but most ordinary users aren't likely to use them.
As I understand it, full data journaling is not really practical for most user applications. If you journal to the same physical device that the main filesystem is on, there's a big performance penalty because you essentially have to write everything twice. That obviously isn't efficient, and you can still lose your data if the system crashes while you're writing it to the journal. Full data journaling only makes sense if you have another device to use as the journal- say a small but blazingly fast SCSI disk or some kind of nonvolatile RAM. That's not something that most users are going to do, but it would make sense in an enterprise environment.
Journaling means that if your system isn't shut down cleanly, it won't take forever to fsck your disk the next time you start up. The journal will contain all the information the system needs to get the system into a consistent state after an unclean shutdown. In addition, if the system journals all data instead of just metadata (as most journaling systems seem to do) it will prevent data loss, too.
Also bear in mind that it won't cost you 10-15% of your system resources; it will slow down disk operations by 10-15%, which is a much smaller penalty. If you aren't doing really disk intensive stuff, you probably won't even notice the slowdown. If you are doing lots of disk intensive activities, you'll probably like the fact that you're less likely to be hosed if your system crashes in the middle of one.
Question: is the average Word user made more or less free by having the source code to Word?
Wrong question. The correct question is whether the average user of Word would be better off if the source code were available. I think that the answer is clearly yes. What's the most annoying thing about Word, after all? It's the forced upgrade cycle. Every time a new version comes out, it has incompatible file formats, a new UI, etc., that make it necessary, expensive, and painful to upgrade. Source code availability would break the upgrade treadmill, letting people stick with good, old versions of the software rather than wasting their money on new versions. I'd say that's a big win.
You misunderstand RMS's point about Free vs. proprietary software. He isn't the one who claims that Free Software is better because it has a superior development model, or at least that's not his primary point. His point is that Free Software is better because it gives freedom to its users: freedom to use it as they choose, to understand how it works, and to modify it to fit their needs. The points that he's making about BitKeeper are exactly in line with the points that he's always made about why proprietary software is so bad- it doesn't respect the needs of its users.
Some? Some of the best anime has been translated from manga? It's almost certainly more than half, and quite possibly a lot more than that. Just try picking your 10 favorite anime titles and check how many of them came out as a manga first. I'd guess that it'll be at least 5 and more likely 7 or 8.
Additionally, tremendous amounts of music (and many would say the best ever) was created before copyright was ever even thought of. Back then there were entire >100 piece orchestras to be paid too, and yet, they managed to eat and create.
In fairness, though, those pre-copyright days were also pre-recording, so the large orchestras didn't have to compete with CD sales for an audience. Perhaps more relevant is that there are large orchestras today that can support themselves by performing music that is out of copyright, like Bach, Mozart, Bethoven, Wagner, etc. They don't necessarily make as much money as orchestras that sell copyrighted recordings, but it is possible to make money as a musician without copyright.
What right to make a living off your work? There never has been such a thing, and there shouldn't be. There are rights that are helpful in making a living (like copyright) but they don't give you a right to make a living. Nobody should make a law to preserve an old way of doing things just because some people might be hurt by the world changing. If you can't make money selling your CDs, you'll just have to get another job.
There is absolutely nothing in the constitution to say exactly what the meaning of "limited" is, and unless they can dodge the question the court has no recourse except to substitute their own best judgement. They get to define it any way they like. On this point we can toss the lawbooks out the window, it's all about getting the judges to be sympathetic to our position.
Which means that retorical skills are going to be at a premium. The judges are going to be making a decision based on the quality of the arguments that are put before them, so having a convincing argument may be more important than one that necessarily hits the legal fine points. One strong analogy could be worth more than 10 pages of case citations.
Striking down one part of the act will not affect the rest of it unfortunately.
At least according to Lessig, this is incorrect. He claims that the law, as written, is not explicitly severable (i.e. that it doesn't explicitly state that the rest remains in force if one part is struck down) and that that it isn't even implicitly severable (i.e. that if one part is struck down it necessarily takes the rest down with it). The first part is a matter of record, and I'd assume that he can't just go out and make a bold faced lie on that point, but I'm not so sure about the second, either.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK nothing happened to the "when it's ready" philosophy. But saying that it will actually be delieverd when it's ready doesn't preclude trying to estimate when that will be or trying to encourage people to get changes committed instead of procrastinating by giving reasonably hard deadlines. And that's what this is: it's an estimate of when things will be done and a target for developers to tell them when he wants them to be finished. It's certainly not a drop-dead, will be released by this date type of deadline.
My impression from what I've read is that Linus is pretty happy with the features that have been implimented in the latest version, and that he thinks that most of the things that can actually be included within a reasonable time frame either have been put in already or can be put in by the end of the month. After that he plans a feature freeze, where no new things are added but existing features can still undergo changes, and then a code freeze, where no changes are allowed except for serious bug fixes. I don't see why it's unreasonable for him to give rough estimates of how long those things will take.
Unfortunately, it doesn't sound as though the "Open" in "Openexchange" means that it's going to be open-source. SUSE mentions that they have a much friendlier licensing policy than MS, only paying for people who are actually connected to the server instead of per seat that can connect. That's nice, but it just means that you're getting hooked into a proprietary system that's likely to be less well developed and possibly even less reliable than Exchange, without any of the advantages of Free/Open Source software. Very disappointing.
So what if the thing comes with Windows. If you really dislike Windows that much, you can always wipe the hard drive and install your favorite *nix distribution- Redhat, Debian, FreeBSD, etc. I realize that you're still paying the MS tax, but the overall price still works out to less than a TiBook.
I think that you fail to see the basic issue. I understand that advertizing has value, but that doesn't mean that the DMA's vision of advertizing anywhere and everywhere is attractive to me. There are so many legitimate companies out there that might potentially want my business that even if I only got one email from each of them every year I'd still be swamped. This isn't good for me, since my email box would be constantly full, and it wouldn't be good for them because I'd miss the few really interesting messages in the sea of useless ones. I don't want to be in a system where any legitimate business can send me advertizements on the presumption that I'm interested until I explicitly tell them otherwise.
If I want information, I can go out and get it myself. I can buy specialty magazines, where one of the attractions of the magazine is ads that are narrowly aimed at the targeted audience. Or I could go and look at web sites where interesting new things are regularly discussed. (I seem to recall that there's one that bills itself as "News for nerds, stuff that matters".) If I want to buy a new car, I can go to auto companies' web sites and see what they have to say for themselves. I don't need to be drowned in ads from any fool who thinks that I might be interested.
Wrong. Look at the 21st Ammendment. It ended the Federal prohibition on alcohol, but it also specifically allowed state and lower level governments to pass their own anti-liquor laws. OTOH, if the Federal anti-spam law says specifically that it superceeds all state laws on the issue, it does. This is sensible and constitutional, given that the Constitution and laws passed under it are the supreme law of the land (i.e. superceed any state law that is in conflict with them) and Congress certainly has the power to regulate interstate commerce (which the net is) and the post.
The chances are that it wasn't a spammer doing that, or rather that it wasn't the result of a spammer doing so deliberately. Some of the more recent email viruses have adopted the strategy of forging from headers in their propagation letters. They pick two addresses from the victim's computer, one recipient and one forged sender. The theory seems to be that there's a decent chance that the two are likely enough to know each other that it will increase the chances of the letter being opened, while masking the identity of the infected machine. It seems as though some spammers have become infected, so there are lots of people receiving random messages apparently from people they've never heard of.
Not really. They just want a law that will shut down all of the small time spamvertizers so that the big boys will have the market all to themselves. They want the new Federal law, which would only forbid sending mail with forged headers but not other noxious practices like opt-out only lists- to superceed stronger state laws. IOW, they want a Federal law that specifically legalizes spam with a few trivial limitations. Don't think that this will result in you receiving any less spam.
If you're paying your own electrical bill, you should. Every kWh you save with a more efficient monitor is that much less money on your electrical bill. It may not seem like that much, but if you use your computer a lot it can add up.
I'm not sure, but this may have something to do with how they look when you film them. If you're shooting with a fast shutter speed, you can get some ugly effects from the scanning of the monitor. That's why you'll see some odd flickering of the screen on CRTs in movies. IIRC, there's not the same problem with LCDs so they should be easier to film.
There's also an issue of efficiency. LCD monitors use a lot less power than similarly sized CRTs. Looking at the stats, it's something like 100 W less. If you're a business that has your monitors on 24/7, that adds up to quite a bit of power savings over the lifespan of the monitor. It's probably not enough to win the argument outright, but it does swing things a bit back in the LCD's direction- especially in a place with expensive electricity like California.
Don't forget about their announcements of vaporware, which is undoubtedly lying. Or their claims that software is perfectly secure (or that security problems are a result of something other than the software when it's found) or that IE is an integrated part of the OS. Besides, it's perfectly possible to advertize ones products truthfully, so claiming advertizing as an excuse for lies is bogus.
Threatening costly and disruptive software audits if people won't accept the latest licensing terms is not an attempt to charge what the market will bear. It's an attempt to extort more money from people who have already paid the market price.
Yes, I meant the anti trust laws, but also their patent violations. In any case, it doesn't matter if their tactics were OK back when they were a small company. They're a monopoly now, and they legally can't keep using the same tactics now that they could back then.
No, I don't lie for money and I don't take advantage in business deals; I bend over backward to be as fair as possible with the people I do business with. I point out to cashiers when they've made a mistake in my favor.
In any case, it's stupid and dishonest to pretend that somebody who once makes a mistake can never fairly criticize another who does something far worse in the same general area. It's also outrageous to compare an occasional slip up with a long term patter of behavior. If I've been caught speeding, I don't lose the right to be morally outraged at morons who kill innocent bystanders while street racing. If I once illegally procured alcohol for a minor, that doesn't eliminate my right to complain about people peddling dope to elementary school kids. If I once made a mistake on my taxes, I can still complain about Enron. So even if I've lied, cheated, and broke the law, I still have a right to claim that my morals are better than Microsoft's.
I doubt it. Microsoft's morals seem to include the idea that it's acceptable to do just about anything for a buck. They appear to have no qualms whatsoever about lying about their products, bullying people into overpaying for software licenses, and violating federal law, all in pursuit of profit. I think that all of those things are immoral, so I'd have to say that my morals are rather different from theirs.
The savings are probably compared to buying a comprably powerful system running a proprietary Unix. I'd assume that the biggest chunk of the savings is that they can run on (comparatively) cheap commodity hardware. This seems to be a very common reason for moving to Linux: it lets you run your old Unix software on much cheaper boxes.
Since you don't like government interference in your business, I hope that your health care firm will give up access to funding in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, NIH research funds, etc. It would be terrible if you were to behave hypocritically by taking lots of government money and then turn around and complain about government regulations.
It reminds me of the old joke about the guy who goes in to see his doctor because it hurts every time he bends in a strange way. The doctor tells him to stop bending that way, and the pain will go away.
If it really hurts the box office that the DVD is released just a few months after the theatrical release, why in hell are the doing it? They could always delay the DVD so that it only comes out a year or more after the theatrical release. That preserves the incentive to see the movie on the big screen, while letting the DVD come out close enough to the theatrical release that people can still remember the movie and want to buy it. What is wrong with these people?
They're not as contradictory as you think. Almost all journaling systems journal metadata only, so they only protect the integrity of the filesystem, not the actual data. There are a few systems that actually journal everything, providing protection of the actual data as well as the filesystem integrity, but most ordinary users aren't likely to use them.
As I understand it, full data journaling is not really practical for most user applications. If you journal to the same physical device that the main filesystem is on, there's a big performance penalty because you essentially have to write everything twice. That obviously isn't efficient, and you can still lose your data if the system crashes while you're writing it to the journal. Full data journaling only makes sense if you have another device to use as the journal- say a small but blazingly fast SCSI disk or some kind of nonvolatile RAM. That's not something that most users are going to do, but it would make sense in an enterprise environment.
Journaling means that if your system isn't shut down cleanly, it won't take forever to fsck your disk the next time you start up. The journal will contain all the information the system needs to get the system into a consistent state after an unclean shutdown. In addition, if the system journals all data instead of just metadata (as most journaling systems seem to do) it will prevent data loss, too.
Also bear in mind that it won't cost you 10-15% of your system resources; it will slow down disk operations by 10-15%, which is a much smaller penalty. If you aren't doing really disk intensive stuff, you probably won't even notice the slowdown. If you are doing lots of disk intensive activities, you'll probably like the fact that you're less likely to be hosed if your system crashes in the middle of one.
Wrong question. The correct question is whether the average user of Word would be better off if the source code were available. I think that the answer is clearly yes. What's the most annoying thing about Word, after all? It's the forced upgrade cycle. Every time a new version comes out, it has incompatible file formats, a new UI, etc., that make it necessary, expensive, and painful to upgrade. Source code availability would break the upgrade treadmill, letting people stick with good, old versions of the software rather than wasting their money on new versions. I'd say that's a big win.
You misunderstand RMS's point about Free vs. proprietary software. He isn't the one who claims that Free Software is better because it has a superior development model, or at least that's not his primary point. His point is that Free Software is better because it gives freedom to its users: freedom to use it as they choose, to understand how it works, and to modify it to fit their needs. The points that he's making about BitKeeper are exactly in line with the points that he's always made about why proprietary software is so bad- it doesn't respect the needs of its users.
Some? Some of the best anime has been translated from manga? It's almost certainly more than half, and quite possibly a lot more than that. Just try picking your 10 favorite anime titles and check how many of them came out as a manga first. I'd guess that it'll be at least 5 and more likely 7 or 8.
The Judean People's Front?
No! The Romans.
In fairness, though, those pre-copyright days were also pre-recording, so the large orchestras didn't have to compete with CD sales for an audience. Perhaps more relevant is that there are large orchestras today that can support themselves by performing music that is out of copyright, like Bach, Mozart, Bethoven, Wagner, etc. They don't necessarily make as much money as orchestras that sell copyrighted recordings, but it is possible to make money as a musician without copyright.
What right to make a living off your work? There never has been such a thing, and there shouldn't be. There are rights that are helpful in making a living (like copyright) but they don't give you a right to make a living. Nobody should make a law to preserve an old way of doing things just because some people might be hurt by the world changing. If you can't make money selling your CDs, you'll just have to get another job.
Which means that retorical skills are going to be at a premium. The judges are going to be making a decision based on the quality of the arguments that are put before them, so having a convincing argument may be more important than one that necessarily hits the legal fine points. One strong analogy could be worth more than 10 pages of case citations.
At least according to Lessig, this is incorrect. He claims that the law, as written, is not explicitly severable (i.e. that it doesn't explicitly state that the rest remains in force if one part is struck down) and that that it isn't even implicitly severable (i.e. that if one part is struck down it necessarily takes the rest down with it). The first part is a matter of record, and I'd assume that he can't just go out and make a bold faced lie on that point, but I'm not so sure about the second, either.