I think Linux is already at a stage where you can have a core team you implicitly trust directly update a central git repository. Other successful projects (the BSDs, GNU tools etc) follow the same model without too many issues.
I understand that the idea of distributed development is that there is no single authoritative repository, but whether you like it or not, your git repository at kernel.org is the blessed code.
Going default will be a short-lived remedy. The country will go back to 1990 in terms of market appeal and productivity. And yes, if the big tech companies leave, the hope of reacquiring a high-tech knowledge industry will go away as well.
Paul Krugman's latest column addresses this. The main point is that Iceland let the banks default, while Ireland took the banks debts as public debts and guaranteed it. In the end, Iceland has recovered while Ireland's people have to bear the burden due to austerity measures.
Ken Thompson, who invented Unix, creates an experimental new language with Rob Pike et. al. and Slashdotters try to overdo each other in pissing all over it.
Nice.
Tell you what kids, try learning something for a change. And show some respect.
Given decentralized constrained optimization by maximizing agents with well-defined convex objective functions and/or convex production functions, engaging in exchange and production with free disposal, leads, in the absence of externalities, market power, and other distortions, there exists an equilibrium characterized by Pareto optimality.
7:
Greedy people, competing, make the world go round.
Maybe you remember Cygnus and other numerous commercial contributors who have contributed significantly to GCC. They would have done that work if GCC was viral. And you know RMS views on Cygnus.
I still have a lot of respect for RMS ideals, his movement has spread an awareness and a framework in which you can discuss freedom of software. But I see the bad side too, and the worst of that is seen in the GPL3 debate and the Lignux debate.
I assume that by "commercial guys" you mean developers of proprietary applications rather than Red Hat and Canonical. If GlibC were GPL, one could still use other implementations such as uclibc and dietlibc. If RMS had really wanted to make it hard to release proprietary software that could run on GNU, he would have made GCC viral. Instead it has a specific exception that makes it acceptable to use for software of any license. Though GlibC is very important to GNU/Linux, GCC is absolutely essential as there's no complete alternative. GCC is essential to not all GNU/Linux systems but to most Free Software operating systems, including the FLOSS BSDs.
I don't think RMS have GCC non-viral because of this reason. IMO, if he makes GCC more restrictive, he will lose his control because it will surely get replaced. And don't think this cannot happen, the other efforts in C compilers does not get any traction because GCC is good enough and it had a license you can live with.
You can see from the SSH and PF situation what people can do if pushed too hard.
I don't think you got this right, PyQt is already available GPL licensed, and that is not acceptable for Nokia, so they moved to LGPL.
The important thing here is that, if a company wants to promote any infrastructure component, GPL is a horrible license to do that. If you release a library of even a device driver as GPL, you are imposing a very strict condition on your customers, that they have to be GPL too.
This is no way acceptable for most people, and that is why LGPL or BSD licensing is attractive in this situation.
RMS has got it wrong, actuall if RMS had got his way, GLIBC would be GPL and most of the commerical guys would have to get out of developing on Linux.
Almost every kid is expected to be an engineer and most of these engineers hardly even know what the hell they are talking about. As Feynman would say their knowledge is fragile.
Our educational system itself is a joke. Trust me on this.
I think you are being unnecessarily cynical here about India. The problem would be the the very good engineers go to higher studies in US and end up setting there. Look at the top tech companies in US and there is no difference between the level of Indian and other engineers. So we lose the best and brightest to US, because US culturally is very immigrant friendly.
Of course there are a some good engineers and very many engineers of lesser capability left here, but due to the magic of offshoring they can live very well at 1/5th the salary of a US engineer.
At the same time entrepeneurs are discouraged and looked down upon. They are sorta treated with ice, as everyone wants a *son* in an MNC with a prestigous MBA.
Okay, a MNC job was the middle class dream (once a government job was the middle class dream). Middle class in India are very insecure and they push their children into schools and then to engineering colleges and medical colleges because of this.
But things are changing, as the first generation who were in the internet boom are now growing older and richer. And that has definitely brought about change in attitude and entrepreneurship.
Guys, read it again. It wasn't a piece of policy advocacy, it was just economic analysis. What I said was that the only way the Fed could get traction would be if it could inflate a housing bubble. And that's just what happened.
Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command:
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 1
Bah. Your command would fail. You need to escape the splat just like the semicolon:
find my_lawn -name kids\* -exec rm -f {} \;
However -exec is slow. Try:
find my_lawn -name kids\* | xargs rm -rvf
Verbose for your kid-removing satisfaction.
Oh, and happy birthday, UNIX! Without you my career would have undoubtedly been less interesting.
I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.
He writes
And so, the best of my advice to the originators and designers of ADA has been ignored. In this last resort, I appeal to you, representatives of the programming profession in the United States, and citizens concerned with the welfare and safety of your own country and of mankind: Do not allow this language in its present state to be used in applications where reliability is critical, i.e., nuclear power stations, cruise missiles, early warning systems, anti-ballistic missile defense systems. The next rocket to go astray as a result of a programming language error may not be an exploratory space rocket on a harmless trip to Venus: It may be a nuclear warhead exploding over one of our own cities.
You are a bit off-base on your comments on Gandhi.
Then again huge numbers of people died following Partition in India which Gandhi was reponsible for and very few people died because of MLK. Gandhi was opposed to the partition of India and thought that Muslims and Hindus could live together. See wikipedia.
He also worked incessantly during the partition to protect the Muslims who otherwise would have been killed at a much larger scale.
Gandhi while very good was completely unwordly. For me, his major contribution was to break the untouchability and the caste system of India.
For the unworldly part:
"All progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself." - George Bernard Shaw
Tivoization is not about redistribution, it is about control of the hardware on which the software is distributed. And it can be argued that it is for or against the "spirit of GPL and Free Software". But in the end, you can see (if you have read the long linux kernel thread on it) that there are good arguments why Tivo should be allowed, as the make the software available without further restrictions. They want to retain control on the hardware, and they are not alone (e.g. a corporate laptop containing Free Software which I don't have root access to)
If you really look at it is not just Tivo which operates at the moral edge of GPL, lets see:
RedHat-ization:
To pull what did for RHEL releases, i.e, combine GPL code with trademarks and service contracts so that the binary is not freely re-distribution.
IBM/Google-ization:
Don't distribute the modified software, make a web API avaiable for that.
RMS-izataion:
Shamelessly use the "or later" clause in GPL to push thru an incompatible license to GPL2. Ethically, I would expect an incompatible license to be called something else say Freer GPL (FGPL) like LGPL, and let the developers decide for their software if they want to move to it. Making it GPL3 is an abuse of the power and trust people gave them when the use GPLv2 without removing the "or later"
I'm an Indian, and I can tell you that your information is wrong.
Linux is not considered a poor man's OS. It is just that most of the software here is pirated and available almost free, that people don't have the incentive to learn Linux, except the technically oriented people.
I've seen people buying high end systems (about 800$), from local dealers with pirated window xp, ms office and loads of cracked games, and 1000s of mp3s all free as part of the deal.
In big cities like Bangalore they have started cracking down on people selling pirated CDs.
I too have switched from FC4 to Ubuntu, and I'm sure that a lot of others have too. After FC2, I was looking for a better distribution, but decided that Gentoo(takes too much time), Mandrake(Mandriva whatever) & Suse(or Novell or whatever) was a step down. But Ubuntu is a step up from Fedora, esp synaptic for software updates is miles better than yum.
I don't see any fanboy-ism in the other AC's posting - he is probably right, it may not be the death, but Fedora will be the one losing out as Ubuntu gains.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Linux is already at a stage where you can have a core team you implicitly trust directly update a central git repository. Other successful projects (the BSDs, GNU tools etc) follow the same model without too many issues.
I understand that the idea of distributed development is that there is no single authoritative repository, but whether you like it or not, your git repository at kernel.org is the blessed code.
Is there anything stopping you from doing this?
Going default will be a short-lived remedy. The country will go back to 1990 in terms of market appeal and productivity. And yes, if the big tech companies leave, the hope of reacquiring a high-tech knowledge industry will go away as well.
Paul Krugman's latest column addresses this. The main point is that Iceland let the banks default, while Ireland took the banks debts as public debts and guaranteed it. In the end, Iceland has recovered while Ireland's people have to bear the burden due to austerity measures.
'Fed up' is the closest in English which means 'pissed' but can be confused with 'eaten'.
Interesting translation error.
To cancel moderation - ignore
Ken Thompson, who invented Unix, creates an experimental new language with Rob Pike et. al. and Slashdotters try to overdo each other in pissing all over it.
Nice.
Tell you what kids, try learning something for a change. And show some respect.
I thought that was very good. From his blog
24:
Given decentralized constrained optimization by maximizing agents with well-defined convex objective functions and/or convex production functions, engaging in exchange and production with free disposal, leads, in the absence of externalities, market power, and other distortions, there exists an equilibrium characterized by Pareto optimality.
7:
Greedy people, competing, make the world go round.
Maybe you remember Cygnus and other numerous commercial contributors who have contributed significantly to GCC. They would have done that work if GCC was viral. And you know RMS views on Cygnus.
I still have a lot of respect for RMS ideals, his movement has spread an awareness and a framework in which you can discuss freedom of software. But I see the bad side too, and the worst of that is seen in the GPL3 debate and the Lignux debate.
I assume that by "commercial guys" you mean developers of proprietary applications rather than Red Hat and Canonical. If GlibC were GPL, one could still use other implementations such as uclibc and dietlibc. If RMS had really wanted to make it hard to release proprietary software that could run on GNU, he would have made GCC viral. Instead it has a specific exception that makes it acceptable to use for software of any license. Though GlibC is very important to GNU/Linux, GCC is absolutely essential as there's no complete alternative. GCC is essential to not all GNU/Linux systems but to most Free Software operating systems, including the FLOSS BSDs.
I don't think RMS have GCC non-viral because of this reason. IMO, if he makes GCC more restrictive, he will lose his control because it will surely get replaced. And don't think this cannot happen, the other efforts in C compilers does not get any traction because GCC is good enough and it had a license you can live with.
You can see from the SSH and PF situation what people can do if pushed too hard.
I don't think you got this right, PyQt is already available GPL licensed, and that is not acceptable for Nokia, so they moved to LGPL.
The important thing here is that, if a company wants to promote any infrastructure component, GPL is a horrible license to do that. If you release a library of even a device driver as GPL, you are imposing a very strict condition on your customers, that they have to be GPL too.
This is no way acceptable for most people, and that is why LGPL or BSD licensing is attractive in this situation.
RMS has got it wrong, actuall if RMS had got his way, GLIBC would be GPL and most of the commerical guys would have to get out of developing on Linux.
Some critics regard BBC as a waste of resources in a country where millions lack basic services.
India may be lying in the gutter, but at least they are looking up, and working hard on getting out.
Almost every kid is expected to be an engineer and most of these engineers hardly even know what the hell they are talking about. As Feynman would say their knowledge is fragile.
Our educational system itself is a joke. Trust me on this.
I think you are being unnecessarily cynical here about India. The problem would be the the very good engineers go to higher studies in US and end up setting there. Look at the top tech companies in US and there is no difference between the level of Indian and other engineers. So we lose the best and brightest to US, because US culturally is very immigrant friendly.
Of course there are a some good engineers and very many engineers of lesser capability left here, but due to the magic of offshoring they can live very well at 1/5th the salary of a US engineer.
At the same time entrepeneurs are discouraged and looked down upon. They are sorta treated with ice, as everyone wants a *son* in an MNC with a prestigous MBA.
Okay, a MNC job was the middle class dream (once a government job was the middle class dream). Middle class in India are very insecure and they push their children into schools and then to engineering colleges and medical colleges because of this.
But things are changing, as the first generation who were in the internet boom are now growing older and richer. And that has definitely brought about change in attitude and entrepreneurship.
To be fair you have to add Krugman's response to this accusation:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/and-i-was-on-the-grassy-knoll-too/
Bah. Your command would fail. You need to escape the splat just like the semicolon:
find my_lawn -name kids\* -exec rm -f {} \;
However -exec is slow. Try:
find my_lawn -name kids\* | xargs rm -rvf
Verbose for your kid-removing satisfaction.
Oh, and happy birthday, UNIX! Without you my career would have undoubtedly been less interesting.
find my_lawn -name kids\* -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rvf
You will thank me one day when some kid creates a file named "\n/\n"
I got an unreadable desktop after the upgrade.
Finally fixed it by changing the anti-aliasing set up in the System Settings/Appearance.
Otherwise looking good....
... is a continuation of Bush policy.
Depressing times.
OP AC here... Thanks for the explanation.
But the original point remains...
With SF Bay or any other bay, the problem remain that you kill sea port, and screw up the environment with pollution or changing eco-system.
With the two oceans, there is no concern like this and the volume of water is unlimited, so you can practically generate as much power as you want...
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/706950
I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in
that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the
point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.
Terminus fonts (xfonts-terminus on ubuntu) looks good on LCD.
I've switched to that after using lucidasanstypewriter for about 12 yrs.
The fonts of the FF3 looks really bad on Ubunutu - which is a known issue for sometime. I have no idea why they went 3.0 without fixing that.
Hopefully it will get fixed when it's packaged by the Ubuntu guys.
He writes And so, the best of my advice to the originators and designers of ADA has been ignored. In this last
resort, I appeal to you, representatives of the programming profession in the United States, and citizens
concerned with the welfare and safety of your own country and of mankind: Do not allow this language
in its present state to be used in applications where reliability is critical, i.e., nuclear power stations,
cruise missiles, early warning systems, anti-ballistic missile defense systems. The next rocket to go
astray as a result of a programming language error may not be an exploratory space rocket on a harmless
trip to Venus: It may be a nuclear warhead exploding over one of our own cities.
He also worked incessantly during the partition to protect the Muslims who otherwise would have been killed at a much larger scale. Gandhi while very good was completely unwordly. For me, his major contribution was to break the untouchability and the caste system of India.
For the unworldly part:
"All progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself." - George Bernard Shaw
Here in India, a company Reva have a small plugin car available for a few years now.
It hasn't been a big hit, but you can spot a few of them in Bangalore streets.
Tivoization is not about redistribution, it is about control of the hardware on which the software is distributed. And it can be argued that it is for or against the "spirit of GPL and Free Software". But in the end, you can see (if you have read the long linux kernel thread on it) that there are good arguments why Tivo should be allowed, as the make the software available without further restrictions. They want to retain control on the hardware, and they are not alone (e.g. a corporate laptop containing Free Software which I don't have root access to)
If you really look at it is not just Tivo which operates at the moral edge of GPL, lets see:
RedHat-ization:
To pull what did for RHEL releases, i.e, combine GPL code with trademarks and service contracts so that the binary is not freely re-distribution.
IBM/Google-ization:
Don't distribute the modified software, make a web API avaiable for that.
RMS-izataion:
Shamelessly use the "or later" clause in GPL to push thru an incompatible license to GPL2. Ethically, I would expect an incompatible license to be called something else say Freer GPL (FGPL) like LGPL, and let the developers decide for their software if they want to move to it. Making it GPL3 is an abuse of the power and trust people gave them when the use GPLv2 without removing the "or later"
I'm an Indian, and I can tell you that your information is wrong.
Linux is not considered a poor man's OS. It is just that most of the software here is pirated and available almost free, that people don't have the incentive to learn Linux, except the technically oriented people.
I've seen people buying high end systems (about 800$), from local dealers with pirated window xp, ms office and loads of cracked games, and 1000s of mp3s all free as part of the deal.
In big cities like Bangalore they have started cracking down on people selling pirated CDs.
I too have switched from FC4 to Ubuntu, and I'm sure that a lot of others have too. After FC2, I was looking for a better distribution, but decided that Gentoo(takes too much time), Mandrake(Mandriva whatever) & Suse(or Novell or whatever) was a step down. But Ubuntu is a step up from Fedora, esp synaptic for software updates is miles better than yum.
I don't see any fanboy-ism in the other AC's posting - he is probably right, it may not be the death, but Fedora will be the one losing out as Ubuntu gains.
Another AC.