Yeah but he shot a bounty hunter who was going to take him to his death or kill him anyway. I don't condone Han's actions in any context whatsoever, but I don't know if it qualifies as "cold blood".:}
Here is a Slashdot discussion announcing that Apple is banning the publication of employees' names in software credits. The news article it links to is now gone, but here is another one, talking about Apple and others.
An organization the size of Apple or Microsoft might want to ban credits because although Apple is an organizational model of small teams, it's got so many of them that contribute in some way, that it would be impractical to figure out who's in or out. So although it seems at first somewhat hive-like to sign the inside of a Mac with only "love, Apple", it is unfortunately a very practical and "necessary evil".
Some speculated that it had to do with outside recruiting, and that may be a coincidence with Apple's extremely private and occasionally secretive internal culture.
But that is way different than blacking out the faces of known contributors in a photo!:)
No kidding! That post helped me to just realize why I've always had a subtle aversion to the idea of using KDE, even now. It was one of those subtle but obvious ideas that I didn't totally realize. I couldn't explain it until I saw this post.
I sort of understood that I didn't really trust the KDE project's background, and that I have always had to remind myself that QPL is now an open source license every time I thought about it. The reason I didn't fully realize it, was because I always try so hard to be open minded, compassionate, and empathetic; I could understand Troll Tech's misimplemented intentions, and I assumed that the KDE developers probably believed that a licensing solution would eventually arise.
I now see that my mistrust was because I didn't know whether they thought it was a problem at all, or what they intended to do about it.
Does anyone have a link to any rhetoric from the KDE leaders which discussed the non-open source QPL back then?
And it is the GPL which governs most of the software that Caldera does use. So indeed, I ask you all, "wtf?"
Italics(tm) used strictly for emphatic purposes. No similarity to any other emphatic style is intended, either expressed or implied. Patent spending, no restrictions may apply, valid where prohibited, all rights worth crap.
I don't mean to be harsh, but how does it make sense to call something "good", because it's less bad than something else?
I just want to make sure that you realize that you're calling it "exceptional" because it lets you do the work for them, of workaround design flaws and "nonsensical bugs" that should never have existed or that certainly should have been fixed in a subsequent update if they had already figured it out.
Ok, maybe I don't know all of what I'm talking about, having never seen the exact products in question, and maybe some of those nonsensical flaws are common to all software. But I just get itchy when someone calls something "good" because it's less bad.
Here's my brief analogy of the history of humanity, in computer terms.
I know you're probably joking, but seriously, the initial passing of Jesus and the resulting New Testament, are what happened to most such spectacular public miracles. Now humans are no longer so materially dependant for everything, and have more of the hookup to God and the rest of nature, all built in. What you're talking about, is a price of such permanently increased freedom, GPL-style.
Imagine if God was an OS kernel and superuser, the earth is a big userspace and filesystem, and humans are normal processes and files therein. The regular userspace can't preempt or change the kernel. In the Old Testament, it would be like an original UNIX user trying to buy new kernel features from a very rigid closed-source vendor who says, "Not yet. Do it in user space while we're working on GNU/Linux/BSD/etc, available Real Soon Now(tm) as a freely distributable CD-ROM. Here's a magic userspace workaround in the meantime."
Jesus was a normal but priviliged file or process, like a special file in/dev or like a kernel thread, providing userspace with an independant, personal interface straight up to all the kernel functions.
Then when Jesus passed on, the kernel vendor ported his interface straight to/proc, once again directly back within kernel space. Contents of/proc don't even occupy the space of a special node file; it's merely a direct interface. That kernel interface is now completely built in, inherently and freely available to all of us through simply our faith alone if we only freely accept it.
Don't listen to the BOFH. He's a sick, disgruntled former employee who was caught embezzling. Only read BOFH for the privilege of learning what not to do!
I apologize for any error or breakdown of the integrity of this analogy. It's my first attempt with it.:) This does not mean I advocate blasphemy or spiritual or religious zealotry toward computers, free software, or any other material thing.
A cynical Slashdot reader would say that Slashdot's own non-editors continually prove that information doesn't need to be accurate, relevant, new, informative, or worthwhile in order to be treated as news. Ideas are always recycled here. The discussion responses vary widely, often resulting in innovative or additional content each time.
But to take an even more dry view, even if everything that can happen, has happened, as in your US Patent clerk mentality, people would still have the option of rehashing the past anyway.
I know what you mean, but don't like it! Do it only when absolutely forced, until you can actually fix it! One should have bought a real printer with open standard protocols built in. My time, frustration, shame, and the ethernet adapter were far more valuable than the $200-400 saved on the sticker price.:(
As if the ISO's are going to ever disappear, evaporate, or expire because their immediate parents have?:)
Software mirrors and archive vendors like Cheapbytes keep stuff around forever. After the apocalypse there'll be cockroaches and 1993 Infomagic cd-roms.
I would think that typically, the sysadmin can set up an open standard print server, like lpd or CUPS, which can abstract away any printer as a common PostScript device of varying pixel and color resolution. That assumes that the sysadmin selected a printer which is compatible with an open-standard print server.
Here's my procedure for supporting proprietary clients from an open standard print server.
I typically buy a printer that's supported by Linux, set up a Linux print server, then export that via lpd, Appletalk, and Samba. Then I install the standard Apple Laserwriter driver on any Windows clients, because it's simply a Postscript driver. In fact, you'll find that a lot of the entries in the Windows driver database are simply alternate names for or versions of the Apple Laserwriter driver because it's just Postscript. Then I install MacOS's standard Postscript lpr client on the MacOS client hosts.
Another time, I made Linux print to a totally proprietary printer. It was an HP 3150, which is an excellent value although proprietary; sometimes you take the hit and run with it. You can install an ethernet adapter from HP, on any parallel printer device of any kind. Then on the aforementioned print server, I installed VMware and Windows 98 with the proprietary drivers, which exported the printer to Samba, which reexported it as Postscript. That whole virtual machine was just another printer driver!
That's almost as crazy as writing an open source, open standard implementation of a reverse engineered Microsoft protocol based on their buggy specs and implementations.;) But it's still a good idea to try to eventually directly support the alleged standards, to support the exceptional cases where a direct local client-side driver is necessary.
I am sure there are people who are unfortunate enough to have chosen very driver-specific proprietary devices for printing and imaging, but in most cases it was technicall preventable.
I'm sure there would be a grace period during which a company is allowed to fulfill their proprietary commercial software licenses. And during that period, an emergency open source migration service can be unleashed! Now that would be hard, potentially expensive, but immediately worthwhile. Let's start one!
And sticker price is not the only issue in the total cost of ownership. Here are some major costs:
time, if something is slow, inefficient, or must use workarounds for flaws rather than being able to fix them; or for waiting on the availability of a software license. Time cost is exponentially incalculable, especially for Internet startups.
state of mind, if people are frustrated due to instability, slowdowns, a rigid workflow, or poor usability. Your I.T. department should be able to customize and train users for an open-source-based environment, then automatically and remotely distribute, update, and support it, and finally neatly wrap up the exceptions with file format translators, remote application servers, and virtual machines.
downtime. All of these costs are incalculable in the truly big picture, but this is the least subtle and the most incalculable. Pure and simple opportunity cost!
But some software situations are worth paying for, and would be very difficult for a volunteer community to reimplement. But it's a matter of time for most of them to simply convert to open source once software has eventually been reasonably universally commoditized. The exceptions to that would be very rare, obscure, and niche-oriented. So it won't be utopian, but source code and standards will eventually become more open, even if not always truly free as in libre or gratis.
I have other notes listed at my site if you'd like to see an old rough draft of my idea of an I.T. department. I'd just like to be able to make one from scratch in a survivable company.;-)
That's why you want to hire honest community members who would be doing the learning and experience on their own principle for free anyway. It should be a matter of individual workmanship to be trained on one's core competency. The exceptions should usually be that of a true specialty or niche like complex databases or complex routing, or that of dirty work like migrations and firefighting.
I'm no expert, but I know of what I speak! Go see my resume at http://mmmgood.net and email me about jobs!;-) I'll take calculated risks in order to help push the edge, and I'll accept only mutually fair compensation.
Yes I have. For about the last 6 months, I've done absolutely _all_ work, _all_ day, exclusively via stock VNC from ORL, over a 10mbps LAN. Full usage of all applications: full multimedia web browsing, text editing, system administration, xchat irc client, all that. From MacOS or IRIX clients, to a Linux server. I understand what you _mean_ about the performance drop, but I simply haven't ever seen it beyond that of a fraction of a second, and only occasionally during certain types of tasks. So I'll keep an eye out, but I can't imagine how it could be a problem unless you're excruciatingly impatient or intolerant.:)
There are people who call fast things "slow" only because they're less fast than something else. And who will say that downloading a 600MB file over a modem is "impossible" just because it takes more time. I'm not saying that you're one of them, and I'll keep an open mind and read all the opinions and research, but I don't personally see a problem.
Have you guys ever heard of TridiaVNC? Tridia is a company devoted to the development of VNC. They host some good mailing lists, etc. There are ideas out there for embedding VNC inside of Basilisk II so that we can have a MacOS application server, for a sliding scale selection of various compression for various latency/bandwidth usage combinations, and Yggdrasil has added automatic VNC attachment features directly to XFree86 so that you don't have to run your apps in a VNC server first in order to connect to them later and also enjoy fully local performance. Search the mailing lists at http://tridiavnc.com and scour ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com.
BTW I think that Win4Lin is making a remote Windows app server which might be based on VNC.
Aside from the other excellent Slashdot responses to the question of why we still listen to Richard, it's also because nobody else does the same job that he does.
These are the two main jobs he performs in the public eye:
1) having coded the basis of most Free and open source software in existance
2) the ultimate champion of Free Software advocacy
He takes permanent lifelong fulltime personal responsibility for the liberty of GPL related users and software.
Maybe nobody else has stepped up to the plate or have done as good of a job. It's freaking hard. It's not very fun unless one has obsessively narcissistic tendencies. He doesn't do it just because he likes it; he does it because it has to be done. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Or maybe like some other projects the right good gentleman has chaired, he won't relinquish the spot.:)
So why don't you ask him, or stand up to the job yourself? I'd suggest that if you're going to criticize him, that you'd better have a URL on hand that lists all your contributions to freedom and liberty.:)
Other Slashdot readers have suggested retrying the act using obfuscated letters or arrangements, like "sweat" and "shop", "5w34t5h0p", or a mix-and-match between orders. How about obfuscating the entire act by trying it in another language? The odds are pretty low that Nike can interpret all those languages, so it would be interesting to see if they tried. Also, try splitting up individual non-English words or phrases, and submit them across multiple orders made by multiple individuals. Then mix and match, so they can't track it!
I applaud this person's activities, and I really like the term "culture jamming". I thought that he had a masterful use of language and social appropriateness in his responses up to the point where he requested the photo. I think that was way too blunt and bordering on the disrespectful.
In any case, Nike's attempts to block this have failed. Especially in the information age, the number one way to make an idea popular is to try to censor it. That's why printing an anti-sweatshop message on Nike shoes, or printing an anti-leather message on a leather jacket, are totally appropriate. People always silently ignore or boycott ideas in protest, but they tend not to let anyone else know about it!
I don't understand why you put the "unless it's a Powerbook" comment on only one of your criteria!
* I heard the new Powerbooks in January are going to use PC133 memory. Powerbooks can now take one gigabyte of RAM, using 512MB sticks! Go see http://powerbookguy.com!
* CPUs are as you said:)
* Powerbooks are not slower except for possibly the PCI bus speed (I'm not sure); Apple uses virtually the same motherboard on all models, using their UMA (unified motherboard architecture).
* Powerbooks have the same CPU's as desktops. I heard that the G3 cpu is the size of a person's thumbnail.
* Installing LinuxPPC on my Powerbook (Wallstreet II series) was the single easiest installation of Linux I've ever done on any platform. It basically said "Oh, you have a Mac." It didn't ask for any hardware support and it was unconcerned with the fact that it's a Powerbook and not a desktop or anything else; they all use virtually identical hardware and it all just worked. Even at the time without a video driver, thanks to Open Firmware. It used SCSI, ethernet, the same video options as MacOS was in whenever booting Linux, PCMCIA, serial, and ADB. That's everything except video acceleration and sleeping, which came later.
* You don't need PCMCIA RAID when you have Firewire or SCSI. You can use software RAID or an external hardware RAID controller. Older Powerbooks like mine have SCSI-II and newer ones have USB and Firewire.
In short, there is no reason not to buy a Powerbook unless you want these:
* A bare minimum lower price on an equivalent system if you're strapped for cash, but they're no more expensive on average than anything else, especially considering the mind-numbing amount of integrated features they have. In that case, I'd probably buy an older or cheaper Powerbook from somewhere like powerbookguy.com.
* More than one CPU per host
* More than one gigabyte of RAM per host
* Some morbid juvenile fascination with native binary compatibility with IA32
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but he shot a bounty hunter who was going to take him to his death or kill him anyway. I don't condone Han's actions in any context whatsoever, but I don't know if it qualifies as "cold blood". :}
===
An organization the size of Apple or Microsoft might want to ban credits because although Apple is an organizational model of small teams, it's got so many of them that contribute in some way, that it would be impractical to figure out who's in or out. So although it seems at first somewhat hive-like to sign the inside of a Mac with only "love, Apple", it is unfortunately a very practical and "necessary evil".
Some speculated that it had to do with outside recruiting, and that may be a coincidence with Apple's extremely private and occasionally secretive internal culture.
But that is way different than blacking out the faces of known contributors in a photo! :)
===
And you don't want your //gs's? Send em here, buddy.
===
The part that blows my mind is the implication of force. :) Cliff says that Apple forces their users to install updates.
===
You faxed him, eh? Neat.
===
I sort of understood that I didn't really trust the KDE project's background, and that I have always had to remind myself that QPL is now an open source license every time I thought about it. The reason I didn't fully realize it, was because I always try so hard to be open minded, compassionate, and empathetic; I could understand Troll Tech's misimplemented intentions, and I assumed that the KDE developers probably believed that a licensing solution would eventually arise.
I now see that my mistrust was because I didn't know whether they thought it was a problem at all, or what they intended to do about it.
Does anyone have a link to any rhetoric from the KDE leaders which discussed the non-open source QPL back then?
Thanks.
===
And it is the GPL which governs most of the software that Caldera does use. So indeed, I ask you all, "wtf?"
Italics(tm) used strictly for emphatic purposes. No similarity to any other emphatic style is intended, either expressed or implied. Patent spending, no restrictions may apply, valid where prohibited, all rights worth crap.
===
I just want to make sure that you realize that you're calling it "exceptional" because it lets you do the work for them, of workaround design flaws and "nonsensical bugs" that should never have existed or that certainly should have been fixed in a subsequent update if they had already figured it out.
Ok, maybe I don't know all of what I'm talking about, having never seen the exact products in question, and maybe some of those nonsensical flaws are common to all software. But I just get itchy when someone calls something "good" because it's less bad.
===
I know you're probably joking, but seriously, the initial passing of Jesus and the resulting New Testament, are what happened to most such spectacular public miracles. Now humans are no longer so materially dependant for everything, and have more of the hookup to God and the rest of nature, all built in. What you're talking about, is a price of such permanently increased freedom, GPL-style.
Imagine if God was an OS kernel and superuser, the earth is a big userspace and filesystem, and humans are normal processes and files therein. The regular userspace can't preempt or change the kernel. In the Old Testament, it would be like an original UNIX user trying to buy new kernel features from a very rigid closed-source vendor who says, "Not yet. Do it in user space while we're working on GNU/Linux/BSD/etc, available Real Soon Now(tm) as a freely distributable CD-ROM. Here's a magic userspace workaround in the meantime."
Jesus was a normal but priviliged file or process, like a special file in /dev or like a kernel thread, providing userspace with an independant, personal interface straight up to all the kernel functions.
Then when Jesus passed on, the kernel vendor ported his interface straight to /proc, once again directly back within kernel space. Contents of /proc don't even occupy the space of a special node file; it's merely a direct interface. That kernel interface is now completely built in, inherently and freely available to all of us through simply our faith alone if we only freely accept it.
Don't listen to the BOFH. He's a sick, disgruntled former employee who was caught embezzling. Only read BOFH for the privilege of learning what not to do!
I apologize for any error or breakdown of the integrity of this analogy. It's my first attempt with it. :) This does not mean I advocate blasphemy or spiritual or religious zealotry toward computers, free software, or any other material thing.
===
But to take an even more dry view, even if everything that can happen, has happened, as in your US Patent clerk mentality, people would still have the option of rehashing the past anyway.
===
I know what you mean, but don't like it! Do it only when absolutely forced, until you can actually fix it! One should have bought a real printer with open standard protocols built in. My time, frustration, shame, and the ethernet adapter were far more valuable than the $200-400 saved on the sticker price. :(
===
As if the ISO's are going to ever disappear, evaporate, or expire because their immediate parents have? :)
Software mirrors and archive vendors like Cheapbytes keep stuff around forever. After the apocalypse there'll be cockroaches and 1993 Infomagic cd-roms.
===
Here's my procedure for supporting proprietary clients from an open standard print server.
I typically buy a printer that's supported by Linux, set up a Linux print server, then export that via lpd, Appletalk, and Samba. Then I install the standard Apple Laserwriter driver on any Windows clients, because it's simply a Postscript driver. In fact, you'll find that a lot of the entries in the Windows driver database are simply alternate names for or versions of the Apple Laserwriter driver because it's just Postscript. Then I install MacOS's standard Postscript lpr client on the MacOS client hosts.
Another time, I made Linux print to a totally proprietary printer. It was an HP 3150, which is an excellent value although proprietary; sometimes you take the hit and run with it. You can install an ethernet adapter from HP, on any parallel printer device of any kind. Then on the aforementioned print server, I installed VMware and Windows 98 with the proprietary drivers, which exported the printer to Samba, which reexported it as Postscript. That whole virtual machine was just another printer driver!
That's almost as crazy as writing an open source, open standard implementation of a reverse engineered Microsoft protocol based on their buggy specs and implementations. ;) But it's still a good idea to try to eventually directly support the alleged standards, to support the exceptional cases where a direct local client-side driver is necessary.
I am sure there are people who are unfortunate enough to have chosen very driver-specific proprietary devices for printing and imaging, but in most cases it was technicall preventable.
===
I'm sure there would be a grace period during which a company is allowed to fulfill their proprietary commercial software licenses. And during that period, an emergency open source migration service can be unleashed! Now that would be hard, potentially expensive, but immediately worthwhile. Let's start one!
===
But some software situations are worth paying for, and would be very difficult for a volunteer community to reimplement. But it's a matter of time for most of them to simply convert to open source once software has eventually been reasonably universally commoditized. The exceptions to that would be very rare, obscure, and niche-oriented. So it won't be utopian, but source code and standards will eventually become more open, even if not always truly free as in libre or gratis.
I have other notes listed at my site if you'd like to see an old rough draft of my idea of an I.T. department. I'd just like to be able to make one from scratch in a survivable company. ;-)
===
The talent needn't be pricey if it's honest.
That's why you want to hire honest community members who would be doing the learning and experience on their own principle for free anyway. It should be a matter of individual workmanship to be trained on one's core competency. The exceptions should usually be that of a true specialty or niche like complex databases or complex routing, or that of dirty work like migrations and firefighting.
I'm no expert, but I know of what I speak! Go see my resume at http://mmmgood.net and email me about jobs! ;-) I'll take calculated risks in order to help push the edge, and I'll accept only mutually fair compensation.
===
There are people who call fast things "slow" only because they're less fast than something else. And who will say that downloading a 600MB file over a modem is "impossible" just because it takes more time. I'm not saying that you're one of them, and I'll keep an open mind and read all the opinions and research, but I don't personally see a problem.
===
BTW I think that Win4Lin is making a remote Windows app server which might be based on VNC.
VNC is like magic, man. That's where it's at. :)
===
So is "firewire", without the wires, just "fire"?
===
Aside from the other excellent Slashdot responses to the question of why we still listen to Richard, it's also because nobody else does the same job that he does.
These are the two main jobs he performs in the public eye:
1) having coded the basis of most Free and open source software in existance
2) the ultimate champion of Free Software advocacy
He takes permanent lifelong fulltime personal responsibility for the liberty of GPL related users and software.
Maybe nobody else has stepped up to the plate or have done as good of a job. It's freaking hard. It's not very fun unless one has obsessively narcissistic tendencies. He doesn't do it just because he likes it; he does it because it has to be done. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Or maybe like some other projects the right good gentleman has chaired, he won't relinquish the spot. :)
So why don't you ask him, or stand up to the job yourself? I'd suggest that if you're going to criticize him, that you'd better have a URL on hand that lists all your contributions to freedom and liberty. :)
===
Other Slashdot readers have suggested retrying the act using obfuscated letters or arrangements, like "sweat" and "shop", "5w34t5h0p", or a mix-and-match between orders. How about obfuscating the entire act by trying it in another language? The odds are pretty low that Nike can interpret all those languages, so it would be interesting to see if they tried. Also, try splitting up individual non-English words or phrases, and submit them across multiple orders made by multiple individuals. Then mix and match, so they can't track it!
:)
I applaud this person's activities, and I really like the term "culture jamming". I thought that he had a masterful use of language and social appropriateness in his responses up to the point where he requested the photo. I think that was way too blunt and bordering on the disrespectful.
In any case, Nike's attempts to block this have failed. Especially in the information age, the number one way to make an idea popular is to try to censor it. That's why printing an anti-sweatshop message on Nike shoes, or printing an anti-leather message on a leather jacket, are totally appropriate. People always silently ignore or boycott ideas in protest, but they tend not to let anyone else know about it!
This is great though. Thanks.
===
Hey. Send me some email. I'd seriously like to talk with you further about these matters. Thanks :)
===
There are significant NT deployments throughout Nike. See what you can do. Good work.
===
I don't understand why you put the "unless it's a Powerbook" comment on only one of your criteria!
:)
* I heard the new Powerbooks in January are going to use PC133 memory. Powerbooks can now take one gigabyte of RAM, using 512MB sticks! Go see http://powerbookguy.com!
* CPUs are as you said
* Powerbooks are not slower except for possibly the PCI bus speed (I'm not sure); Apple uses virtually the same motherboard on all models, using their UMA (unified motherboard architecture).
* Powerbooks have the same CPU's as desktops. I heard that the G3 cpu is the size of a person's thumbnail.
* Installing LinuxPPC on my Powerbook (Wallstreet II series) was the single easiest installation of Linux I've ever done on any platform. It basically said "Oh, you have a Mac." It didn't ask for any hardware support and it was unconcerned with the fact that it's a Powerbook and not a desktop or anything else; they all use virtually identical hardware and it all just worked. Even at the time without a video driver, thanks to Open Firmware. It used SCSI, ethernet, the same video options as MacOS was in whenever booting Linux, PCMCIA, serial, and ADB. That's everything except video acceleration and sleeping, which came later.
* You don't need PCMCIA RAID when you have Firewire or SCSI. You can use software RAID or an external hardware RAID controller. Older Powerbooks like mine have SCSI-II and newer ones have USB and Firewire.
In short, there is no reason not to buy a Powerbook unless you want these:
* A bare minimum lower price on an equivalent system if you're strapped for cash, but they're no more expensive on average than anything else, especially considering the mind-numbing amount of integrated features they have. In that case, I'd probably buy an older or cheaper Powerbook from somewhere like powerbookguy.com.
* More than one CPU per host
* More than one gigabyte of RAM per host
* Some morbid juvenile fascination with native binary compatibility with IA32
===
Join channel #demoscene on the Open Projects Network. Try the servers irc.openprojects.net, irc.us.openprojects.net, or irc.linux.com.
===