There is no good reason whatsoever to require users to configure X modelines. Standing alone, this is the single biggest reason (well, aside from performance) to shell out some money for AccelleratedX from XInside.
I'm sure someone will tell me now how understanding how modelines work is good for the soul, kind of like self-flagellation, and I should spend 3 or 4 hours doing that, instead of my job. Let me issue a preemptive "bite me" to anyone inclined to recommend that.
Remember, the goal of Intel and AMD is not to put out the studliest CPU, but to maximize profit. The $150 premium you pay for the Intel P-III over the Athlon is probably a fair estimation of the business goodwill Intel has invested in the Pentium trademark. And most people (although perhaps not most slashdot readers) are probably willing to pay that premium to get the "Intel Inside" sticker.
If the only reason you code is for the approval and applause of others, maybe you should find a new job. The Mozilla team isn't doing Mozilla for you. They're doing it because they want to build it. Whether you or I or anyone else like or use it is immaterial.
I hack because I want to. Not because you want me to. I'm willing to bet that they feel the same way.
Look: I completely disagree with you. You're wrong.
The first thing you're wrong about is in thinking that I'm criticizing the Mozilla team. I ain't. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wants to write code can go ahead and do it without hindrance from me. The people I'm criticizing are those (like, say, YOU) who are willing to judge Mozilla (or any software project) based on its PR and good intentions rather than on its results. I would be criticizing you just as strongly if you were a pro-Microsoft lackey.
I don't particularly care that the Mozilla guys got a lousy source base to begin with, and that that made the project take longer. Hey, life's rough, OK? The fact that the original source base was better doesn't make the current product any better (note: I am speaking PHILOSOPHICALLY here -- I haven't looked at the M10 release yet, and I certainly am not passing judgment on its quality!)
I don't really know what to say about your utterly wrong comments about a "browser not being easily split up into modules" except "Wow, what a complete load of bullshit." Of course a browser is easily split up into modules. I ssupect that a lot of the rewriting the Mozilla team was doing, in fact, was exactly this sort of encapsulation. For example, the truly excellent HTML and HTTP classes with Java2 (footnote 1) are a great example of what you can do with decent components. They certainly didn't take too long to write, and good programmers can use them easily for things like transparent HTML editors, viewers, etc.
Lastly, I am not whining. I'm not putting anyone down (well, ok. Perhaps I'm putting you down.) What I am trying to do is inject a note of sanity into the sycophancy. I've said what I want: encapsulated browser objects (footnote 2) instead of a browser. That doesn't mean I expect the Mozilla guys to give it to me if they're not interested in building it. But I stand by my original point that at this point I think getting excited about Mozilla would be like getting excited over an open source FTP client. The moment for excitement about this particular project passed us all by long ago.
footnote 1: There are lots of valid criticisms of Java and the java classes. The HTML and HTTP classes, however, are great. footnote 2: The earlier poster's point that there are already other systems to do this (such as Gtk) is well taken.
I'd just like to point out that if Microsoft had spent this long releasing a long-awaited product (like, say....Windows 2000?) the release of a new beta would be an opportunity to mock them rather than celebrate them.
Look, I like the Mozilla guys as much as anyone, but as far as the release of an integrated browser goes, "everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows that the good guys lost."[1]. There are already free (as in free beer) browsers available for every platform. In terms of importance to the open source community, a project to release small, documented, interchangable browser components freely (as in free speech) would be of much greater value.
In other words, give me the toolbox to build my own browser, instead of a complete browser.
Hi! Let me take this opportunity to sermonize about the features of my Dream PDA.
My Dream PDA is:
The size of a Palm V or smaller.
A cell phone (and of course can do TCP over said connection). Should be able to send and receive faxes over same.
Does speech-to-text so that I don't have to have a stylus at all.
Has color.
Has batteries that last for, oh, about a month.
Note that I haven't put a price on this puppy. To me, price is less important than features. If I could find a unit that would do all of the above, and do it well I'd probably be willing to pay in excess of $1,000 for it.
So, which venture capitalist is going to give me a few million to develop this thing?
Ah, Slashdot -- the home of "legal advice by wishful thinking."
>First of all, WTF is an "unregistered >trademark?". How can you know if you're >violating an unregistered trademark or not? >Maybe someone could clear up what they mean >by this - but it sounds like nonsense.
Of course its not nonsense. A trademark is a name or symbol that, through usage and/or tradition, has become associated with or symbolic of a company or a product. Whether or not a trademark is registered has nothing to do with whether or not it is symbolic of a company. For example, in the US, if I say the words "Pink Panther" and "Fiberglass," most people will think -- without pause -- "Owens-Corning". What makes the trademark is that association in the mind of the consumer. The registration is just some red tape that affects what remedies you can or can not sue for.
And as for the originator of the thread, who asked if this wasn't protected by "fair use" -- my god, man, if I asked a question like "Hey, can't I distribute my specially modified Emacs as binary-only because it's protected by the BSD license?" you would jump all over me for being ignorant, stupid, and making statements about things I didn't bother to research. Fair Use is a limited exception (actually, an affirmative defense) to (American) Copyright law. There is no fair use defense to trademark law. Nor should there be.
The key question in trademark law is "Does the use of the trademark cause confusion in the consumer?" If the answer is yes, I've infringed. If it is no, I haven't. For example: "Coke is it!" is a trademark of the Coca-cola company. If in a skit in a movie about cocaine abusers, I snort a HUGE line of cocaine, look into the camera, grinning madly, saying "COKE IS IT!" that is probably not an infringement because no one is confused or thinks Coca-Cola (inc) produced the cocaine. On the other hand, if I am a small soda producer, and I put "Coke is it!" on the cans of my orange-flavored soda, a reasonable consumer might think that perhaps Coke produced the soda. That would be trademark infringement (actually, in my first example I might be liable for trademark dilution but that's another issue entirely.)
Pez's point of view is obviously that if someone types "Pez" into a search engine and they get back a bunch of links, a reasonable person might think that the returned sites might be somehow affiliated with Pez. Perhaps they're wrong, but I don't think its unreasonable of them to make the argument.
First off, let me say that I am not posting advocacy or flamebait. I have used both Linux and *BSD for years and like both a heck of a lot.
I have worked at a commercial ISP that used BSDI's BSD/OS, and at home I have run Free, Net, and OpenBSD. I liked all of them. The differences between them are fairly minor, IMHO, and which one to run generally depends on which hardware platform you're using. Sometimes you have some obscure card that FreeBSD supports but NetBSD doesn't, or vice-versa, and you install whatever supports it. From an operational perspective, they are nearly indistinguishable.
I've just recently switched back to Linux because I'm developing for that platform now. I like the hardware support. I like the packaging job RedHat has done. I kinda like RPM's (although I think FreeBSD's ports/package system is a little better).
There is one thing about Linux I don't like: the lack of usable system documentation. I have a very simple definiton of "usable documentation". When I see a file in/etc -- let's say its called "veryimportantfile" -- I should be able to type "man veryimportantfile" and get an explanation of the file format, and pointers to related documents.
I can do that on *BSD. I can't do that on Linux. I can't begin to describe how much this irritates me. Searching the net, while fun, may not always be a solution -- what if I'm installing a new server on a site without a net connection? Should I really need a telephone line to read crucial documentation? Sure, I can read the source, but it would be nice to not have to.
I appreciate the HOWTOs and FAQs on the net, but I'd personally love to see the LDP concentrate on simply documenting, via man pages, the system configuration files.
But my summary of this is that I use both Linux and BSD whenever possible, and hope that I never have to stop using either! -Peter
First of all, the QWERTY keyboard was not designed to slow down typists. It was designed to reduce mechanical problems by intelligent arrangement of the letters (maximizing the separation of the most frequently used letters), and thus the angles at which the swingarms interacted. Those few of you who (like me) have ever USED a mechanical swingarm typewriter know what i'm talking about -- the swingarms that jam are the ones that tend to be close together. But the other story sounds better, and so it gets repeated in places like Newsweek -- and, of course, Slashdot. A nice article on this myth effect can be found at http://www.ddj.com/articles/1 998/9875/9875l/9875l.htm
Second, there have been no conclusive studies that Dvorak typists are any faster than QWERTY typists. The article at http://www.reasonmag.com/9606/Fe.QWERT Y.html gives a reasonably good summary of the non-evidence of Dvorak superiority.
Lastly, my personal experience is that a friend who has switched to Dvorak said "It's a nightmare of pain relearning a new layout for no benefit whatsoever. Go ahead and learn Dvorak if you don't know how to type, but don't go through the psychic trauma of rewiring your fingers if you already are using QWERTY. Its not worth it."
I think its unrealistic to talk about "commercial" software being buggy.
All software sucks. Yes, even Linux and emacs suck, by certain definitions. Being open source does not prevent poor coding by any stretch of the imaginination (just take a look at any of the open source trouble-ticket / bug tracking packages, for one ironic example).
The 1976 Copyright Act provides that all expression is automatically copyrighted from the moment it is fixed in some tangible medium of expression. In other words, you automatically own the rights to all that you write.
Oh please. Look. The spirit of Free software says that if you want to build a better mousetrap, shut the fuck up and build it. Yes, I think software patents aren't great either, but to claim that Unisys is a "monster" just because they're trying to use their (legally obtained) software patent to make a buck is completely hysterical.
You can't expect a huge megacorporation to act as an agent of social change. The most you can hope for is that they act in a way that is marginally reasonable, and its pretty clear that Unisys is doing that.
And you know who I hope feels sick? I hope you feel sick for calling some poor underpaid secretary a "tyrants body guard." People are being killed and oppressed around the world just for trying to live their lives, and you're shouting about tyranny just because one of the approximately EIGHTY MILLION graphic file formats available isn't free. Grow the fuck up.
> Funny, I'm sure that is exactly how artists felt > when cameras were introduced. It did take > some time before creative use of photography > came to be considered 'art'. Its funny that you're sure, because you're also completely wrong. Film photography was recognized and embraced pretty much immediately as an important and groundbreaking art form. The reason digital photograph has not been embraced as clearly is simply because the quality, compared to film, is on the whole inferior. That doesn't mean that High Art won't eventually be produced with digital cameras (I've certainly been to art exhibits in the past several years with works produced via digital means). It simply means that on the whole, TODAY, the digital camera is a generally inferior tool in terms of absolute resolution compares to color slides. The point isn't that Digital is Bad, Film is Good. The point is that for some of us, quality is paramount. For those of us for whom convenience matters more, digital will replace film sooner. But photographers for National Geographic (for example) aren't going to be throwing away their medium format cameras any time in the next 20 years, either.
This item was originally posted on memepool on Friday. Hey folks, there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking items from one forum and sharing them on another. Just make sure credit is given where credit is due. In this case, the original item at the geeks list referenced both memepool and robotwisdom.
No, it's not strange at all. Yes, most research Universities prefer Unix for their research work (you'll only pull NetBSD out of my cold, dead, fingers...) Nevertheless, Windows products are strongly represented in academia. A Windows suite that works well over high-performance (not just high speed) networks, windows products that support advanced services such as QoS and PKI -- that's something that benefits everyone associated with I2.
Look, everyone just calm down and stop the ranting for a few minutes. First of all, most of you are talking about Internet2 when it's apparently that you misunderstand what it is. I suggest you go to the web site and read up.
Secondly, I2 has plenty of corporate partners. It is unrealistic to think that any one of these partners is going to dominate the effort, particularly given that Internet2 is being run and coordinated by some extremely smart people, who are not in the habit of selecting technically inferior solutions. The I2 engineering staff has a proven history of thinking for the long term.
This is a good thing. It's a great sign that Microsoft is willing to play by the rules and wants to join in with collaborative efforts rather than compete them into the ground. Are they interested in a profit? Well, I'd imagine so, but so, frankly, is everyone else involved. I welcome Microsoft to the I2 project and hope they will be productive contributors to the community.
Peter Berger Chairman, Internet2 Security Working Group speaking only for myself.
...but you could have read about this yesterday (beating the "Strict Press Embargo until 10 am April 15") on memepool. Hey, self-promotion is my middle name:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Your response is completely ignorant in so many ways I don't even know where to begin.
I'm sure someone will tell me now how understanding how modelines work is good for the soul, kind of like self-flagellation, and I should spend 3 or 4 hours doing that, instead of my job. Let me issue a preemptive "bite me" to anyone inclined to recommend that.
Remember, the goal of Intel and AMD is not to put out the studliest CPU, but to maximize profit. The $150 premium you pay for the Intel P-III over the Athlon is probably a fair estimation of the business goodwill Intel has invested in the Pentium trademark. And most people (although perhaps not most slashdot readers) are probably willing to pay that premium to get the "Intel Inside" sticker.
I hack because I want to. Not because you want me to. I'm willing to bet that they feel the same way.
The first thing you're wrong about is in thinking that I'm criticizing the Mozilla team. I ain't. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wants to write code can go ahead and do it without hindrance from me. The people I'm criticizing are those (like, say, YOU) who are willing to judge Mozilla (or any software project) based on its PR and good intentions rather than on its results. I would be criticizing you just as strongly if you were a pro-Microsoft lackey.
I don't particularly care that the Mozilla guys got a lousy source base to begin with, and that that made the project take longer. Hey, life's rough, OK? The fact that the original source base was better doesn't make the current product any better (note: I am speaking PHILOSOPHICALLY here -- I haven't looked at the M10 release yet, and I certainly am not passing judgment on its quality!)
I don't really know what to say about your utterly wrong comments about a "browser not being easily split up into modules" except "Wow, what a complete load of bullshit." Of course a browser is easily split up into modules. I ssupect that a lot of the rewriting the Mozilla team was doing, in fact, was exactly this sort of encapsulation. For example, the truly excellent HTML and HTTP classes with Java2 (footnote 1) are a great example of what you can do with decent components. They certainly didn't take too long to write, and good programmers can use them easily for things like transparent HTML editors, viewers, etc.
Lastly, I am not whining. I'm not putting anyone down (well, ok. Perhaps I'm putting you down.) What I am trying to do is inject a note of sanity into the sycophancy. I've said what I want: encapsulated browser objects (footnote 2) instead of a browser. That doesn't mean I expect the Mozilla guys to give it to me if they're not interested in building it. But I stand by my original point that at this point I think getting excited about Mozilla would be like getting excited over an open source FTP client. The moment for excitement about this particular project passed us all by long ago.
footnote 1: There are lots of valid criticisms of Java and the java classes. The HTML and HTTP classes, however, are great.
footnote 2: The earlier poster's point that there are already other systems to do this (such as Gtk) is well taken.
Look, I like the Mozilla guys as much as anyone, but as far as the release of an integrated browser goes, "everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows that the good guys lost."[1]. There are already free (as in free beer) browsers available for every platform. In terms of importance to the open source community, a project to release small, documented, interchangable browser components freely (as in free speech) would be of much greater value.
In other words, give me the toolbox to build my own browser, instead of a complete browser.
[1] Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows"
My Dream PDA is:
Note that I haven't put a price on this puppy. To me, price is less important than features. If I could find a unit that would do all of the above, and do it well I'd probably be willing to pay in excess of $1,000 for it.
So, which venture capitalist is going to give me a few million to develop this thing?
This topic was discussed (in painstaking detail) in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. I'm not sure what else there is to say about it after that!
>First of all, WTF is an "unregistered
>trademark?". How can you know if you're
>violating an unregistered trademark or not?
>Maybe someone could clear up what they mean
>by this - but it sounds like nonsense.
Of course its not nonsense. A trademark is a name or symbol that, through usage and/or tradition, has become associated with or symbolic of a company or a product. Whether or not a trademark is registered has nothing to do with whether or not it is symbolic of a company. For example, in the US, if I say the words "Pink Panther" and "Fiberglass," most people will think -- without pause -- "Owens-Corning". What makes the trademark is that association in the mind of the consumer. The registration is just some red tape that affects what remedies you can or can not sue for.
And as for the originator of the thread, who asked if this wasn't protected by "fair use" -- my god, man, if I asked a question like "Hey, can't I distribute my specially modified Emacs as binary-only because it's protected by the BSD license?" you would jump all over me for being ignorant, stupid, and making statements about things I didn't bother to research. Fair Use is a limited exception (actually, an affirmative defense) to (American) Copyright law. There is no fair use defense to trademark law. Nor should there be.
The key question in trademark law is "Does the use of the trademark cause confusion in the consumer?" If the answer is yes, I've infringed. If it is no, I haven't. For example: "Coke is it!" is a trademark of the Coca-cola company. If in a skit in a movie about cocaine abusers, I snort a HUGE line of cocaine, look into the camera, grinning madly, saying "COKE IS IT!" that is probably not an infringement because no one is confused or thinks Coca-Cola (inc) produced the cocaine. On the other hand, if I am a small soda producer, and I put "Coke is it!" on the cans of my orange-flavored soda, a reasonable consumer might think that perhaps Coke produced the soda. That would be trademark infringement (actually, in my first example I might be liable for trademark dilution but that's another issue entirely.)
Pez's point of view is obviously that if someone types "Pez" into a search engine and they get back a bunch of links, a reasonable person might think that the returned sites might be somehow affiliated with Pez. Perhaps they're wrong, but I don't think its unreasonable of them to make the argument.
I have worked at a commercial ISP that used BSDI's BSD/OS, and at home I have run Free, Net, and OpenBSD. I liked all of them. The differences between them are fairly minor, IMHO, and which one to run generally depends on which hardware platform you're using. Sometimes you have some obscure card that FreeBSD supports but NetBSD doesn't, or vice-versa, and you install whatever supports it. From an operational perspective, they are nearly indistinguishable.
I've just recently switched back to Linux because I'm developing for that platform now. I like the hardware support. I like the packaging job RedHat has done. I kinda like RPM's (although I think FreeBSD's ports/package system is a little better).
There is one thing about Linux I don't like: the lack of usable system documentation. I have a very simple definiton of "usable documentation". When I see a file in /etc -- let's say its called "veryimportantfile" -- I should be able to type "man veryimportantfile" and get an explanation of the file format, and pointers to related documents.
I can do that on *BSD. I can't do that on Linux. I can't begin to describe how much this irritates me. Searching the net, while fun, may not always be a solution -- what if I'm installing a new server on a site without a net connection? Should I really need a telephone line to read crucial documentation? Sure, I can read the source, but it would be nice to not have to.
I appreciate the HOWTOs and FAQs on the net, but I'd personally love to see the LDP concentrate on simply documenting, via man pages, the system configuration files.
But my summary of this is that I use both Linux and BSD whenever possible, and hope that I never have to stop using either! -Peter
Second, there have been no conclusive studies that Dvorak typists are any faster than QWERTY typists. The article at http://www.reasonmag.com/9606/Fe.QWERT Y.html gives a reasonably good summary of the non-evidence of Dvorak superiority.
Lastly, my personal experience is that a friend who has switched to Dvorak said "It's a nightmare of pain relearning a new layout for no benefit whatsoever. Go ahead and learn Dvorak if you don't know how to type, but don't go through the psychic trauma of rewiring your fingers if you already are using QWERTY. Its not worth it."
Anyway. Use whatever keyboard makes you happy.
Peter
All software sucks. Yes, even Linux and emacs suck, by certain definitions. Being open source does not prevent poor coding by any stretch of the imaginination (just take a look at any of the open source trouble-ticket / bug tracking packages, for one ironic example).
The 1976 Copyright Act provides that all expression is automatically copyrighted from the moment it is fixed in some tangible medium of expression. In other words, you automatically own the rights to all that you write.
You can't expect a huge megacorporation to act as an agent of social change. The most you can hope for is that they act in a way that is marginally reasonable, and its pretty clear that Unisys is doing that.
And you know who I hope feels sick? I hope you feel sick for calling some poor underpaid secretary a "tyrants body guard." People are being killed and oppressed around the world just for trying to live their lives, and you're shouting about tyranny just because one of the approximately EIGHTY MILLION graphic file formats available isn't free. Grow the fuck up.
> Funny, I'm sure that is exactly how artists felt > when cameras were introduced. It did take > some time before creative use of photography > came to be considered 'art'. Its funny that you're sure, because you're also completely wrong. Film photography was recognized and embraced pretty much immediately as an important and groundbreaking art form. The reason digital photograph has not been embraced as clearly is simply because the quality, compared to film, is on the whole inferior. That doesn't mean that High Art won't eventually be produced with digital cameras (I've certainly been to art exhibits in the past several years with works produced via digital means). It simply means that on the whole, TODAY, the digital camera is a generally inferior tool in terms of absolute resolution compares to color slides. The point isn't that Digital is Bad, Film is Good. The point is that for some of us, quality is paramount. For those of us for whom convenience matters more, digital will replace film sooner. But photographers for National Geographic (for example) aren't going to be throwing away their medium format cameras any time in the next 20 years, either.
-Peter
Let's get those attributions right!
Peter
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie!
TCP Tuning information for many operating systems (including Linux, BSD, and Microsoft's offerings) may be found at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and NLANR Engineering Services
But pardon me for confusing you with facts.
No, it's not strange at all. Yes, most research Universities prefer Unix for their research work (you'll only pull NetBSD out of my cold, dead, fingers...) Nevertheless, Windows products are strongly represented in academia. A Windows suite that works well over high-performance (not just high speed) networks, windows products that support advanced services such as QoS and PKI -- that's something that benefits everyone associated with I2.
Secondly, I2 has plenty of corporate partners. It is unrealistic to think that any one of these partners is going to dominate the effort, particularly given that Internet2 is being run and coordinated by some extremely smart people, who are not in the habit of selecting technically inferior solutions. The I2 engineering staff has a proven history of thinking for the long term.
This is a good thing. It's a great sign that Microsoft is willing to play by the rules and wants to join in with collaborative efforts rather than compete them into the ground. Are they interested in a profit? Well, I'd imagine so, but so, frankly, is everyone else involved. I welcome Microsoft to the I2 project and hope they will be productive contributors to the community.
Peter Berger
Chairman, Internet2 Security Working Group
speaking only for myself.
> Linux's user base is somewhere around 2 to 3
> times the size of Macintosh's user base
You are higher than a fucking kite. I'd like to see a source for this nonsensical and utterly wrong statistic.
\broken_record{ This was memepooled on April 4th.} -peter
...but you could have read about this yesterday (beating the "Strict Press Embargo until 10 am April 15") on memepool. Hey, self-promotion is my middle name :-)