I see three reasons why Linux won the battle of the minds:
1. Linus had working code out before Jolitz (who released the first free working BSD distribution, 386BSD).
2. Jolitz really didn't get how you could be working with the net. He didn't participate much in the public forums, but came with some weird announcements. And he tended to ignore the patches from the community promising something "much better" would be released later. And that meant the the community splintered as first the NetBSD people and later the patchkit people (FreeBSD) gave up on Jolitz, and rolled their own distributions.
3. The leading BSD developers saw themselves as "computer science profesionals who through great personal sacrifices contributed to the BSD cause". They tended to come from a strong Unix background. The leading Linux developers saw themselves as a bunch of nerds having fun. They tended to come from a MSDOS background, or at most Unix-user-level background. Basically, the Linux people were a lot more fun to hang out with, and had a background more similar to most young nerds looking for a project had.
At the time AT&T sued BSDI, Linux had already won heart and mind of the young nerds. The lawsuit might have delayed the technical development of some of the free BSD's a bit, but the battle was never one of technical strength.
and Apple is contributing their Obj-C improvements to that branch. There doesn't seem to be any resistance among the main GCC developers to the changes in that branch, but some of the GNUStep people seem less enthusiastic about some of the language changes.
The problem is that the changes in the Apple version of GCC are mixed together and often Apple specific. They need to be seperated, cleaned up, and made generic before inclusion in the main branch. Both Apple and GCC agree that is a good policy, and Apple *is* willing to do the work (because it makes it easier to "track" GCC), and they are doing the work. It just take time.
Both of the above are probably as significant contributers to GCC as Red Hat. The current release manager is from CodeSourcery, and the big, user visible features in GCC 3.4 are contributed by CodeSourcery (the new C++ Parser) and Apple (pre-compiled headers). And there are a lot of smaller conributors, who combined are more important than any of the big three. This includes the BSD projects.
Cygnus *used* to be the dominating GCC contributor, with about half all patches. However, that was before the egcs fork, which primary purpose was to make it easier for others to contribute. It worked, so while Red Hat now contribute as much as Cygnus used to contribute, other players have entered the game making the playing field more even.
I know that I'm responding to a troll, but someone moderated its lies "interesting", so apparently not everyone has the facts straight.
Depend on the timeframe. I saw the inside of a SPARCStation-1 and a DECstation of the same time. They cost the same and could the same, but the DECStation was crammed with electric components and spaghetti connections everywhere, while the SPARCStation was nice and clean with just a few integrated circuts. Sun was clearly leading at the time, much less stuff to go wrong.
All I want is for the state to keep their nose out of it. As it is now, you jail jail-time for killing spammers, which is a clear violation of my citizin right to protect myself and my property. If they would just stop interfering, we could sove the spammer-problem by ourself.
On the other hand, if the state insists on taking away our right to defend ourselves, the state has the duty to defend us. The current situation is not acceptable.
It is anti-competitive to get yourself in a position where you in practise is not able to switch vendor.
As all anti-compettive praxises, while it may have some short-time benefits, it is also expensive at the long time. After you have accepted the one-vendor solution, the vendor will in the future negotiations only be bounded by the price of switching vendor. If you data is in a proprietary format, or you have spend a lot of money educating your employees to use proprietary tools, that price will be very high.
If you use a solution that allows multiple vendors to bid in for future maintenance (either because it is based on free software or open standards), the vendor will be forced to keep his demands below those of the competition, as the switch-cost is minimal.
Puting yourself at the mercy of a single compagny is very much like the old soviet, where you also were at the mercy of a single company (the state). That is the ideology of it.
Keeping your options open is not ideology, that is just common sense.
Using software whose data format lock you into a single vendor may be more profitable on a short-term, but is dangerous on a long term. The vendor may change price or license in the future, or may not choose to evolve the software at a path that is different from your need.
All Mass. wants to require is to maintain the ability to switch vendor. Calling such a requirement for "setting up a monopoly" requires either gross ignorance or deliberate lies. Requiring all data to be in formats supported by multiple, independent vendors will keep the market open for others to provide better offers than your current vendor, and will thus on the long term be cheaper than the lock-in solution.
This is actually much the same mechanism that make running a market economy cheaper in the long run than a planned economy, so CAGW are the one alligned with old soviet ideology.
If you want to "just be a hacker" you will hate software patents, as they make it impossible to be "just a hacker" unless you work for a huge corporation. Otherwise, you will have to be "a hacker and a lawyer" to know what code you are allowed to write.
EU parliamentarians are largely ignored, so they are happy for any feedback they get from the public at home. The experience you have with US politicians do not translate to EU.
Most European countries have proportional voting systems, and rather strict party discipline. I think that make "campaign lobbying" less effective, it is harder to bribe a party than to bribe a person. Of course, rich interest organization do donate to parties they believe will promote their views. Given that most countries have many parties, it is easy to find someone allready aligned with you.
However, there are plenty of lobbyists, and the parliamentarians need them. They explain how the legislation affect the interest group they represents.
I didn't read mail saturday, Sunday my new mail file was over 270MB, too big for Emacs (my mail client) to read. I hadn't had that happen before.
I actually ended up using mailx (a good old command-line mailreader) to delete alle the virus mail, just in order to be able to read the handfull of non-virus mail.
Spammers harm me, quite a lot actually, so they should be punnished. Mail was useful before the spammers took it over. Over the last 10 years I have spend time worth tens of thousand dollars in order to keep mail useful dispite spam. Spam-apologist will probably point out that I "could have done it faster by other means", which is both true and very easy to point out in hindsight. But I had to learn by doing.
So I'm as happy about spammers as I would be about a burgler who had stolen tens of dolars from my home. And I'm as apreciate about people telling me "it is not so bad, and if it is, it is your own fault for not keeping your address a secret" or however the apologists try to may pass the blame to the victim today.
Since the professionel spammers have far more victims than even the most active burgler, he should be punished harder. For the naive first-time spammer "who didn't knew better" however, a fine large enough to make it clear that this is not how to MAKE MONEY FAST is enough.
I find it deeply depressing that/. collectively (especially the moderators) have taken the side of the spammers on this one. Maybe you are to young to remember when the mail system worked.
And no, establishing prof is not the problem of the law, it is the problem of the legal system to prove beying reasonable doubt that you did it. Just like any other crime. And not, it is not actually any harder to solve than other crimes. These profs does not rely entirely on technical evidence, and yes, occationally a really smart criminal will be able to get away with it.
And by the way, people who have voluntary sex, smoke pot, or do other thing that does not harm me or other innocent bystanders, are not in any way comparable to a spammer. I find it amazing that you can draw a connection between the two.
You can certainly get in prison for sending email today, it is just a matter of the content of the email. It seems perfectly fair to make the number of (unvoluntary) receivers another criteria.
People are thrown in prison for far less damaging actions than what the large scale spammers do.
"The government is answerable to no one"
on
eGovOS 3 Announced
·
· Score: 1
Maybe where you live, but I live in a democracy where the government is answerable to the people. Not only on elections, but in the daily running of the government there are zillions of checks and balances.
This make no sence. GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection, one of the compilers in the collection is GNU C++ (aka g++). There isn't a collection of GNU C++ compilers.
You mistake "study economics" with "studying right wing dogma". The free market can only exist when there is a strong state, and historically the marked economy developed in parallel with the centralization of power with the king, and removal of power from the church and feudal lords.
There are two ways you can win in the marked, by making yourself better than the competition, or by making the competition worse than you. There is very little lasting profit in the first, the competion will always try to do the same to you, keeping profit margins at a minimum (and prices low, which is why a working market is such a good thing). However, if you can prevent your competition from entering the market, huge profit is possible. So this is what any executive who cares about shareholder value will attempt. Whenever you see large profits, you see a dysfunctional market.
As any economist worth his pay will know, the main function of the state is to make sure the market is run by good competion, improving yourself, not bad competition, damaging your competion. Intelligent right-wingers, and they are not as rare as you would think, especially among economists, believe this should be the only role of the state. Protecting the market. This is why we have anti-trust laws, because sometime economic theory wins over lobbyism.
Unfortunately, there are many other kind of right-wingers out there. One, currently in government, believe it is the job of the state to protect the rich, and help them become richer. They obviously dislike anti-trust laws. Another kind is the Libertarians, who has as an article of faith that government is the root of all evil, and derive their other values from that. They believe, contrary to economic theory, history, and common sense, that the market can exist by itself, and that all signs of dysfunction are results of government intervention.
Basically, because SMS has become such a huge hit among European children, deaf children have become much more integrated in the social life of their peers. They can SMS on equal basis. Whatever else cell phones may do, they have made life a lot brighter for a generation of deaf kids.
Various alarm agancies (the people behind 112, the European 911) have also created numbers where you can SMS alarms, especially for deaf people.
Maybe that is the problem. The idea of plug-ins were obvious way before HTML and HTTP were invented, teh X11 windows system is designed for it, in that processes can open windows within other windows owned by other processes. Lucid Emacs supported this (and Epoch probably did before that), which is why the Emacs w3 browser was the first web-browser to offer embedded video. It was an obvious application of well-known techniques in a new area.
It might not be obvious to 12 regular joes, but it was obvious to anyone in the field.
I did not bother reading all of them, and some have little interest outside the US. But those I checked was either news or viewpoints that are represented in the news sources I subscribe to.
Slashdot Mirror
I see three reasons why Linux won the battle of the minds:
1. Linus had working code out before Jolitz (who released the first free working BSD distribution, 386BSD).
2. Jolitz really didn't get how you could be working with the net. He didn't participate much in the public forums, but came with some weird announcements. And he tended to ignore the patches from the community promising something "much better" would be released later. And that meant the the community splintered as first the NetBSD people and later the patchkit people (FreeBSD) gave up on Jolitz, and rolled their own distributions.
3. The leading BSD developers saw themselves as "computer science profesionals who through great personal sacrifices contributed to the BSD cause". They tended to come from a strong Unix background. The leading Linux developers saw themselves as a bunch of nerds having fun. They tended to come from a MSDOS background, or at most Unix-user-level background. Basically, the Linux people were a lot more fun to hang out with, and had a background more similar to most young nerds looking for a project had.
At the time AT&T sued BSDI, Linux had already won heart and mind of the young nerds. The lawsuit might have delayed the technical development of some of the free BSD's a bit, but the battle was never one of technical strength.
His agenda seem quite influential, much of Linux' success is due to his agenda (through the GPL and software).
He may not be at the top, but he should be on the list. And above the Sobig author...
and Apple is contributing their Obj-C improvements to that branch. There doesn't seem to be any resistance among the main GCC developers to the changes in that branch, but some of the GNUStep people seem less enthusiastic about some of the language changes.
The problem is that the changes in the Apple version of GCC are mixed together and often Apple specific. They need to be seperated, cleaned up, and made generic before inclusion in the main branch. Both Apple and GCC agree that is a good policy, and Apple *is* willing to do the work (because it makes it easier to "track" GCC), and they are doing the work. It just take time.
Both of the above are probably as significant contributers to GCC as Red Hat. The current release manager is from CodeSourcery, and the big, user visible features in GCC 3.4 are contributed by CodeSourcery (the new C++ Parser) and Apple (pre-compiled headers). And there are a lot of smaller conributors, who combined are more important than any of the big three. This includes the BSD projects.
Cygnus *used* to be the dominating GCC contributor, with about half all patches. However, that was before the egcs fork, which primary purpose was to make it easier for others to contribute. It worked, so while Red Hat now contribute as much as Cygnus used to contribute, other players have entered the game making the playing field more even.
I know that I'm responding to a troll, but someone moderated its lies "interesting", so apparently not everyone has the facts straight.
Depend on the timeframe. I saw the inside of a SPARCStation-1 and a DECstation of the same time. They cost the same and could the same, but the DECStation was crammed with electric components and spaghetti connections everywhere, while the SPARCStation was nice and clean with just a few integrated circuts. Sun was clearly leading at the time, much less stuff to go wrong.
All I want is for the state to keep their nose out of it. As it is now, you jail jail-time for killing spammers, which is a clear violation of my citizin right to protect myself and my property. If they would just stop interfering, we could sove the spammer-problem by ourself.
On the other hand, if the state insists on taking away our right to defend ourselves, the state has the duty to defend us. The current situation is not acceptable.
It is anti-competitive to get yourself in a position where you in practise is not able to switch vendor.
As all anti-compettive praxises, while it may have some short-time benefits, it is also expensive at the long time. After you have accepted the one-vendor solution, the vendor will in the future negotiations only be bounded by the price of switching vendor. If you data is in a proprietary format, or you have spend a lot of money educating your employees to use proprietary tools, that price will be very high.
If you use a solution that allows multiple vendors to bid in for future maintenance (either because it is based on free software or open standards), the vendor will be forced to keep his demands below those of the competition, as the switch-cost is minimal.
Puting yourself at the mercy of a single compagny is very much like the old soviet, where you also were at the mercy of a single company (the state). That is the ideology of it.
Keeping your options open is not ideology, that is just common sense.
Using software whose data format lock you into a single vendor may be more profitable on a short-term, but is dangerous on a long term. The vendor may change price or license in the future, or may not choose to evolve the software at a path that is different from your need.
All Mass. wants to require is to maintain the ability to switch vendor. Calling such a requirement for "setting up a monopoly" requires either gross ignorance or deliberate lies. Requiring all data to be in formats supported by multiple, independent vendors will keep the market open for others to provide better offers than your current vendor, and will thus on the long term be cheaper than the lock-in solution.
This is actually much the same mechanism that make running a market economy cheaper in the long run than a planned economy, so CAGW are the one alligned with old soviet ideology.
The GNU project dropped the plan to write their own window system when X became popular. I actually believe they had an early prototype.
Similarly, the priority of Hurd development fot GNU decreased a lot when Linux became available. Hurd was "too far along" to drop entirely though.
If you want to "just be a hacker" you will hate software patents, as they make it impossible to be "just a hacker" unless you work for a huge corporation. Otherwise, you will have to be "a hacker and a lawyer" to know what code you are allowed to write.
EU parliamentarians are largely ignored, so they are happy for any feedback they get from the public at home. The experience you have with US politicians do not translate to EU.
Most European countries have proportional voting systems, and rather strict party discipline. I think that make "campaign lobbying" less effective, it is harder to bribe a party than to bribe a person. Of course, rich interest organization do donate to parties they believe will promote their views. Given that most countries have many parties, it is easy to find someone allready aligned with you.
However, there are plenty of lobbyists, and the parliamentarians need them. They explain how the legislation affect the interest group they represents.
I didn't read mail saturday, Sunday my new mail file was over 270MB, too big for Emacs (my mail client) to read. I hadn't had that happen before.
I actually ended up using mailx (a good old command-line mailreader) to delete alle the virus mail, just in order to be able to read the handfull of non-virus mail.
> Statistically I'd have a more than even chance of
> being right!
Maybe, but I happen to live in the other 49% of the world, so you are wrong.
Spammers harm me, quite a lot actually, so they should be punnished. Mail was useful before the spammers took it over. Over the last 10 years I have spend time worth tens of thousand dollars in order to keep mail useful dispite spam. Spam-apologist will probably point out that I "could have done it faster by other means", which is both true and very easy to point out in hindsight. But I had to learn by doing.
/. collectively (especially the moderators) have taken the side of the spammers on this one. Maybe you are to young to remember when the mail system worked.
So I'm as happy about spammers as I would be about a burgler who had stolen tens of dolars from my home. And I'm as apreciate about people telling me "it is not so bad, and if it is, it is your own fault for not keeping your address a secret" or however the apologists try to may pass the blame to the victim today.
Since the professionel spammers have far more victims than even the most active burgler, he should be punished harder. For the naive first-time spammer "who didn't knew better" however, a fine large enough to make it clear that this is not how to MAKE MONEY FAST is enough.
I find it deeply depressing that
And no, establishing prof is not the problem of the law, it is the problem of the legal system to prove beying reasonable doubt that you did it. Just like any other crime. And not, it is not actually any harder to solve than other crimes. These profs does not rely entirely on technical evidence, and yes, occationally a really smart criminal will be able to get away with it.
And by the way, people who have voluntary sex, smoke pot, or do other thing that does not harm me or other innocent bystanders, are not in any way comparable to a spammer. I find it amazing that you can draw a connection between the two.
You can certainly get in prison for sending email today, it is just a matter of the content of the email. It seems perfectly fair to make the number of (unvoluntary) receivers another criteria.
People are thrown in prison for far less damaging actions than what the large scale spammers do.
Maybe where you live, but I live in a democracy where the government is answerable to the people. Not only on elections, but in the daily running of the government there are zillions of checks and balances.
This make no sence. GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection, one of the compilers in the collection is GNU C++ (aka g++). There isn't a collection of GNU C++ compilers.
There are some pretty smart mothers out there ;-)
That's fair use.
You mistake "study economics" with "studying right wing dogma". The free market can only exist when there is a strong state, and historically the marked economy developed in parallel with the centralization of power with the king, and removal of power from the church and feudal lords.
There are two ways you can win in the marked, by making yourself better than the competition, or by making the competition worse than you. There is very little lasting profit in the first, the competion will always try to do the same to you, keeping profit margins at a minimum (and prices low, which is why a working market is such a good thing). However, if you can prevent your competition from entering the market, huge profit is possible. So this is what any executive who cares about shareholder value will attempt. Whenever you see large profits, you see a dysfunctional market.
As any economist worth his pay will know, the main function of the state is to make sure the market is run by good competion, improving yourself, not bad competition, damaging your competion. Intelligent right-wingers, and they are not as rare as you would think, especially among economists, believe this should be the only role of the state. Protecting the market. This is why we have anti-trust laws, because sometime economic theory wins over lobbyism.
Unfortunately, there are many other kind of right-wingers out there. One, currently in government, believe it is the job of the state to protect the rich, and help them become richer. They obviously dislike anti-trust laws. Another kind is the Libertarians, who has as an article of faith that government is the root of all evil, and derive their other values from that. They believe, contrary to economic theory, history, and common sense, that the market can exist by itself, and that all signs of dysfunction are results of government intervention.
Basically, because SMS has become such a huge hit among European children, deaf children have become much more integrated in the social life of their peers. They can SMS on equal basis. Whatever else cell phones may do, they have made life a lot brighter for a generation of deaf kids.
Various alarm agancies (the people behind 112, the European 911) have also created numbers where you can SMS alarms, especially for deaf people.
Maybe that is the problem. The idea of plug-ins were obvious way before HTML and HTTP were invented, teh X11 windows system is designed for it, in that processes can open windows within other windows owned by other processes. Lucid Emacs supported this (and Epoch probably did before that), which is why the Emacs w3 browser was the first web-browser to offer embedded video. It was an obvious application of well-known techniques in a new area.
It might not be obvious to 12 regular joes, but it was obvious to anyone in the field.
I did not bother reading all of them, and some have little interest outside the US. But those I checked was either news or viewpoints that are represented in the news sources I subscribe to.