Must have missed that study on the popularity of LAN parties....
Anyway, I'm relatively certain that some people simply have easily addictable personalities. If they don't get addicted to porn, their job, or casual sex, they'll find something else to fill the hole. Computer games have become part of our society. Years ago they weren't. Is there any surprise that some percentage of easily addictable people find their addiction in games rather than illicit drugs? If you live in a white bred suburban utopia and have beliefs again drug use that doesn't suddenly make your personality change such that you are no longer easily addicted. It just means you fall prey to gaming or movies or anime or books rather than cocaine or heroin or women.
Even with the huge DaimlerChrysler merger, GM and Ford still have revenues that dwarf the competition. Ford has 1.5 times the revenue of Toyota, 2.5 times the revenue of Volkwagen, 3.5 times the revenue of Honda or Nissan, and 5 times BMW or Mitsubishi.
Ford also owns Aston Martin, Jaguar, Volvo, Land Rover, 1/3 of Mazda, and 10% of Kia. GM owns Opel, Vauxhall, 20% of Fiat, half of Saab, half of Isuzu, 20% of Suzuki, and one-quarter of Subaru.
The American auto industry made horrible mistakes from 1967 straight through 1978. Yet they still dwarf the competition. If you call that not working out, I'd love to see what you actually consider success!
Yeah back during the halcyon days of creativity when they churned out such classics as Ms. Pac Man and Jr. Pac Man, and who could forget ET? And then there all those Great Games like Tapper, LED Storm, Cupfinal, and Chase HQ. Wait, you mean you don't remember them? That's because they sucked. They had horrible gameplay. Hell, try going back and playing Dig Dug or Pac Man or Paperboy and tell me the gameplay on those things doesn't suck ass.
The problem with nostalgia is you only remember the best of the past and you're comparing it against the average from the present. How is Diablo's gameplay any worse than the original Gauntlet's? How is Thief or Half-Life less engrossing than Shinobi? How is Ghostbusters better than X-COM? Is Gran Tourismo less interesting than Pole Position?
The current complaints about style over substance might seem valid unless you haven't excised memories of Cinemaware and Dragon's Lair.
I would say that the Unix skeleton that Linus so quickly dismisses counts as a One Big Plan. Look at all the horrible legacy that Linux carries from that: ports under 1024 require root privileges to bind, the entire ACL system, "everything is a file", mount points versus "drives", and a million other things.
If Linus' view of history was actually true then we wouldn't be seeing any of those things. We would instead see something that was hodgepodge of Windows, Plan 9, Unix, BeOS, and other operating systems' features. That is not what Linux is today. Instead it is something Linus drives forward with his One Big Plan of a Unix-a-like Operating System.
His evolution-centric view also ignores the fact that society at large mitigates against natural selection. When was the last time you saw someone being selected against because they didn't have 20/20 vision? And the choice of an operating system takes place in exactly that same society.
Their definition of freedom seemed to apply to all written materials. Saying it only applies to user manuals makes as much sense as saying the GPL only applies to compilers.
I didn't say there was anything hypocritical going on. I said I don't understand what is going on. I would have to understand before I could accuse them of hypocrisy.
Disallowing others from modifying your manifesto is not inconsistent with the GNU philosophy
From GNU's Free Documentation License:
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other written document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially.
It certainly seems that they don't feel that their license needs to be "free" is the sense of the word they apply to other written documents. Does the FSF offer some explanation for why some written documents should be "free" and others not? Does the same line of argument apply to software?
As per my post toward the beginning of this discussion: that would be fine if there were a few hundred laws
I don't see how the number of laws is relevant.
if 99% of the population agreed on those laws and penalties
This also isn't relevant. Just because you disagree with a law doesn't mean you should be able to break it. You know the laws, you choose to live in this country, that's a fairly explicit agreement to abide by the laws. If you feel so strongly that a law is unjust you can go to court and a jury can acquit you.
if they were all enforced evenly across the population
You don't think removing arbitrary human judgments from the equation wouldn't help make laws be more evenly enforced? Now the attractive young woman in a halter top is just as likely to get the speeding ticket as the short, ugly, old man.
and if those doing the enforcing were only and always pure of heart.
Again, removing human judgment from the equation seems to help with this, contrary to what you are implying.
Now, can you say "Richard Nixon and the IRS"? How about "J. Edger Hoover and Martin Luther King"? "My Lai"? Any clearer?
What do these have to do with automatic surveillance versus human suveillance?
Yeah, in one case you're being an idiot and in the other case not.
It could just as easily be that a police officer sees you walking around the WTC with a camera and even though there is no law against it he uses his "human judgment" to haul you in, at which point they discover you have overstayed your visa and have 20 pounds of cocaine on your person and the AG decides to put you in a secret prison because you are a threat to national security.
The only argument you have made against automatic surveillance is that sometimes people should be able to break the law and get away with it. First you'd need to convince me that this is the case. Second you'd need to convince me that using cameras somehow makes this impossible. I can still contest a ticket and convince a judge that I should have been allowed to break the law in a specific case. And then the judge gets to use his human judgment to decide whether or not it is a valid argument.
So I guess I'm saying I don't understand your problem with automatic surveillance to detect breaches of law.
They are merely delaying the announcement so they can coordinate the availability of their updates.
That's all Microsoft does, too. If there is any delay between learning of the problem and widely publishing it then it can hardly be called "full disclosure" in any meaningful sense of the word. That's like calling the CIA's practices full disclosure because 120 years from now everything will be available under FOIA requests.
(Well, okay, the real argument is probably that the providers see a way to make more money but....)
I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. Why do they care how it gets used? If I spend my 10 MB/s downloading porn or if I only use half of it and then let my neighbor use the other half...seems like the problem is not people "stealing" bandwidth but the providers not provisioning correctly.
Why isn't that considered unnecessary directories? Executables are those things in/system that are +x. The library loader looks things up by name. Same for man. Seems like they are split up because while a program can handle the flat namespace people like things to be a little more structured. What one person thinks is unnecessary structure another finds completely necessary.
Then why do you separate bin and lib and man and etc? Just have a directory called/system and put everything in there. Everything just gets looked up by name anyway and that would simplify your PATHs, MANPATHs, and LIBRARY_PATHs.
You would only need 2000 path entries if your expect your shell to have the same exact semantics that it does today. There is no reason whatsoever that PATH couldn't mean "for every entry in my PATH environment variable look for executables in */bin". A smart shell could even hide all of these behind the scenes for you and provide a shell variable SMART_PATH that gets expanded to the big path for legacy apps.
Or you could do what DJB does with/command and symlink everything to one place. Although I'm not sure if that solves the original complaint. Actually, I'm not sure what the original complaint is, having re-read the article.
Anyone who claims that RedHat started the use of/usr/bin/ as a dumping ground can't be taken seriously. Pretty sure slackware and SLS did the same thing. Same goes for Solaris, AIX, AUX, Sun/OS, Irix, and HPUX.
It's not about lazy distributors. It's about administrators who are used to doing things this way and distributors going along with tradition.
It's not an excuse, it is an explanation, which is what the poster asked for. The analogy isn't perfect but comparing the US to the EU is much closer than comparing the US to France.
A more equivalent question would be: If France has done it why hasn't California?
(The US has many territories outside of the North America, too.)
Strange, I remember complaining on debian devel about four or five years ago about this -- about how debian assumed that/bin/sh was bash. Everyone told me to shut up and go away because it was obvious that/bin/sh was bash on linux. I'm glad to hear they've finally decided I was right:-)
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS ARE NOT PATTERN MATCHING (in this context)
Please read what pattern matching means when Safe-C (and ML and Prolog and Erlang and...) says "pattern matching" before you post your irrelevant link anymore.
I said pattern matching, not regular expressions. I don't think you know the difference, cause I've been using 1.4 jdk for a while now and haven't seen anything suggesting it has pattern matching.
If I make a function call that's because I want it to be synchronous (well, or because I'm too lazy or the language I'm using makes it far too hard to do asynchronous properly). I expect it to take however long it takes. Some of that time will be function call overhead. Some will be disk overhead. Some will be processing overhead. Some will be network overhead. All of those things are always there. I think you're making too much of an issue out of the increased function call overhead when there are plenty of other reasons a function might take many milliseconds to respond.
If I move my program from a flash device to an old MFM drive the drive latency would increase substantially but I don't think that would be reason for calling all synchronous disk I/O broken, evil, and misleading.
Slashdot Mirror
Must have missed that study on the popularity of LAN parties....
Anyway, I'm relatively certain that some people simply have easily addictable personalities. If they don't get addicted to porn, their job, or casual sex, they'll find something else to fill the hole. Computer games have become part of our society. Years ago they weren't. Is there any surprise that some percentage of easily addictable people find their addiction in games rather than illicit drugs? If you live in a white bred suburban utopia and have beliefs again drug use that doesn't suddenly make your personality change such that you are no longer easily addicted. It just means you fall prey to gaming or movies or anime or books rather than cocaine or heroin or women.
Even with the huge DaimlerChrysler merger, GM and Ford still have revenues that dwarf the competition. Ford has 1.5 times the revenue of Toyota, 2.5 times the revenue of Volkwagen, 3.5 times the revenue of Honda or Nissan, and 5 times BMW or Mitsubishi.
Ford also owns Aston Martin, Jaguar, Volvo, Land Rover, 1/3 of Mazda, and 10% of Kia. GM owns Opel, Vauxhall, 20% of Fiat, half of Saab, half of Isuzu, 20% of Suzuki, and one-quarter of Subaru.
The American auto industry made horrible mistakes from 1967 straight through 1978. Yet they still dwarf the competition. If you call that not working out, I'd love to see what you actually consider success!
That's when games were about gameplay
Yeah back during the halcyon days of creativity when they churned out such classics as Ms. Pac Man and Jr. Pac Man, and who could forget ET? And then there all those Great Games like Tapper, LED Storm, Cupfinal, and Chase HQ. Wait, you mean you don't remember them? That's because they sucked. They had horrible gameplay. Hell, try going back and playing Dig Dug or Pac Man or Paperboy and tell me the gameplay on those things doesn't suck ass.
The problem with nostalgia is you only remember the best of the past and you're comparing it against the average from the present. How is Diablo's gameplay any worse than the original Gauntlet's? How is Thief or Half-Life less engrossing than Shinobi? How is Ghostbusters better than X-COM? Is Gran Tourismo less interesting than Pole Position?
The current complaints about style over substance might seem valid unless you haven't excised memories of Cinemaware and Dragon's Lair.
There is no One Big Plan
I would say that the Unix skeleton that Linus so quickly dismisses counts as a One Big Plan. Look at all the horrible legacy that Linux carries from that: ports under 1024 require root privileges to bind, the entire ACL system, "everything is a file", mount points versus "drives", and a million other things.
If Linus' view of history was actually true then we wouldn't be seeing any of those things. We would instead see something that was hodgepodge of Windows, Plan 9, Unix, BeOS, and other operating systems' features. That is not what Linux is today. Instead it is something Linus drives forward with his One Big Plan of a Unix-a-like Operating System.
His evolution-centric view also ignores the fact that society at large mitigates against natural selection. When was the last time you saw someone being selected against because they didn't have 20/20 vision? And the choice of an operating system takes place in exactly that same society.
Their definition of freedom seemed to apply to all written materials. Saying it only applies to user manuals makes as much sense as saying the GPL only applies to compilers.
I didn't say there was anything hypocritical going on. I said I don't understand what is going on. I would have to understand before I could accuse them of hypocrisy.
From GNU's Free Documentation License:
It certainly seems that they don't feel that their license needs to be "free" is the sense of the word they apply to other written documents. Does the FSF offer some explanation for why some written documents should be "free" and others not? Does the same line of argument apply to software?
Except the voice isn't synthesized. They hire a real person to do it. Who can ask for a raise.
As per my post toward the beginning of this discussion: that would be fine if there were a few hundred laws
I don't see how the number of laws is relevant.
if 99% of the population agreed on those laws and penalties
This also isn't relevant. Just because you disagree with a law doesn't mean you should be able to break it. You know the laws, you choose to live in this country, that's a fairly explicit agreement to abide by the laws. If you feel so strongly that a law is unjust you can go to court and a jury can acquit you.
if they were all enforced evenly across the population
You don't think removing arbitrary human judgments from the equation wouldn't help make laws be more evenly enforced? Now the attractive young woman in a halter top is just as likely to get the speeding ticket as the short, ugly, old man.
and if those doing the enforcing were only and always pure of heart.
Again, removing human judgment from the equation seems to help with this, contrary to what you are implying.
Now, can you say "Richard Nixon and the IRS"? How about "J. Edger Hoover and Martin Luther King"? "My Lai"? Any clearer?
What do these have to do with automatic surveillance versus human suveillance?
Do you see the difference?
Yeah, in one case you're being an idiot and in the other case not.
It could just as easily be that a police officer sees you walking around the WTC with a camera and even though there is no law against it he uses his "human judgment" to haul you in, at which point they discover you have overstayed your visa and have 20 pounds of cocaine on your person and the AG decides to put you in a secret prison because you are a threat to national security.
The only argument you have made against automatic surveillance is that sometimes people should be able to break the law and get away with it. First you'd need to convince me that this is the case. Second you'd need to convince me that using cameras somehow makes this impossible. I can still contest a ticket and convince a judge that I should have been allowed to break the law in a specific case. And then the judge gets to use his human judgment to decide whether or not it is a valid argument.
So I guess I'm saying I don't understand your problem with automatic surveillance to detect breaches of law.
They are merely delaying the announcement so they can coordinate the availability of their updates.
That's all Microsoft does, too. If there is any delay between learning of the problem and widely publishing it then it can hardly be called "full disclosure" in any meaningful sense of the word. That's like calling the CIA's practices full disclosure because 120 years from now everything will be available under FOIA requests.
(Well, okay, the real argument is probably that the providers see a way to make more money but....)
I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. Why do they care how it gets used? If I spend my 10 MB/s downloading porn or if I only use half of it and then let my neighbor use the other half...seems like the problem is not people "stealing" bandwidth but the providers not provisioning correctly.
Microsoft just happens to have been a giant exception to this so far.
Sony, Merck, General Motors, Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Disney, Nike, Wal-Mart, Exxon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Monsanto, McDonald's, Nestle, Allstate, Macy's, Bloomingdales, Levi Strauss, Abercrombie & Fitch, British American Tobacco, Doubleclick, Ford, Glaxo Wellcome, Tyson Foods, Titan International, The Gap.
I'm sure if you really cared you could add more names to the list once you remove your anti-Microsoft blinders.
Why isn't that considered unnecessary directories? Executables are those things in /system that are +x. The library loader looks things up by name. Same for man. Seems like they are split up because while a program can handle the flat namespace people like things to be a little more structured. What one person thinks is unnecessary structure another finds completely necessary.
Then why do you separate bin and lib and man and etc? Just have a directory called /system and put everything in there. Everything just gets looked up by name anyway and that would simplify your PATHs, MANPATHs, and LIBRARY_PATHs.
You would only need 2000 path entries if your expect your shell to have the same exact semantics that it does today. There is no reason whatsoever that PATH couldn't mean "for every entry in my PATH environment variable look for executables in */bin". A smart shell could even hide all of these behind the scenes for you and provide a shell variable SMART_PATH that gets expanded to the big path for legacy apps.
/command and symlink everything to one place. Although I'm not sure if that solves the original complaint. Actually, I'm not sure what the original complaint is, having re-read the article.
Or you could do what DJB does with
Anyone who claims that RedHat started the use of /usr/bin/ as a dumping ground can't be taken seriously. Pretty sure slackware and SLS did the same thing. Same goes for Solaris, AIX, AUX, Sun/OS, Irix, and HPUX.
It's not about lazy distributors. It's about administrators who are used to doing things this way and distributors going along with tradition.
It's not an excuse, it is an explanation, which is what the poster asked for. The analogy isn't perfect but comparing the US to the EU is much closer than comparing the US to France.
A more equivalent question would be: If France has done it why hasn't California?
(The US has many territories outside of the North America, too.)
Population of US: 250 million
Population of France: 50 million
And France has nothing like states' rights that the US has to cope with that makes us a patchwork of sometimes conflicting laws.
Strange, I remember complaining on debian devel about four or five years ago about this -- about how debian assumed that /bin/sh was bash. Everyone told me to shut up and go away because it was obvious that /bin/sh was bash on linux. I'm glad to hear they've finally decided I was right :-)
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS ARE NOT PATTERN MATCHING (in this context)
Please read what pattern matching means when Safe-C (and ML and Prolog and Erlang and...) says "pattern matching" before you post your irrelevant link anymore.
Regular expressions are not pattern matching.
I said pattern matching, not regular expressions. I don't think you know the difference, cause I've been using 1.4 jdk for a while now and haven't seen anything suggesting it has pattern matching.
(right on the web page detailing the language)
Someone created a language the enforces types and does bounds checking! It's news!
If I make a function call that's because I want it to be synchronous (well, or because I'm too lazy or the language I'm using makes it far too hard to do asynchronous properly). I expect it to take however long it takes. Some of that time will be function call overhead. Some will be disk overhead. Some will be processing overhead. Some will be network overhead. All of those things are always there. I think you're making too much of an issue out of the increased function call overhead when there are plenty of other reasons a function might take many milliseconds to respond.
If I move my program from a flash device to an old MFM drive the drive latency would increase substantially but I don't think that would be reason for calling all synchronous disk I/O broken, evil, and misleading.