Yeah, that's what I think. He was using it as a metaphor: "bah, it's nothing, it was like the pain that kids have when they have growth spurts, nothing serious".
While there is a large overlap between the approved Free Software Licenses and the approved Open Source Licenses, the fact that a project has a license that is in both lists doesn't make it both Open Source and Free Software.
Sorry, but that's insane. You may dislike the other term ('Free Software' if you call your work 'Open Source' and 'Open Source' if you define your work as 'Free Software'), but the Linux kernel is both Free Software and Open Source, Python is both Open Source and Free Software, and so is all of the software in Debian main.
Consider the GPL - it's approved by both. But Red Hat doesn't publish Free Software, it publishes Open Source
According to your theory, the Linux kernel is partly Open Source and partly free, because some of the developers adscribe to the Free Software philosophy, while others are paid by Open Source companies. Does that make Linux 89% (or whatever) Open Source and only 11% free?
I too prefer to call it "Free Software" (I am Spanish, so "software libre" rolls of my tongue better than "open source"), but we can't pretend that Open Source and Free Software are exclusive terms.
The academic community studying Free and Open Source Software call it that, or by its acronym FOSS/FLOSS (the L standing for "Libre"). That way they can do away with the terminological hairsplitting and devote their attention to whatever aspect of Free Software they want to study.
Mozilla is in fact under a triple license at the choice of the licensee. You can pick whether you want to reuse its code under the LGPL, the LGPL-like MPL (weak copyleft, allowing proprietary derivatives as long as modifications to the MPL code is published with source and under the same license) and the GPL (strong copyleft, no proprietary derivatives). In any case, all three of those licenses have some form of copyleft.
For your needs I would rather recommend andLinux, which is a handy installer for coLinux+Ubuntu.
coLinux installs the whole Linux kernel as a ring 0 driver in windows, and installs the whole linux filesystem as a windows file. You then run your normal Linux OS applications through a native Windows headless X server. It works just great, with performance similar to that of User Mode Linux.
Wubi installs a loopback image of Ubuntu that can be dual-booted into in parallell with Windows. That means you can't have your windows apps runnign at the same time as your windows apps.
Others have recommended VMWare, but for the kind of usage where you don't have to mess around with different guest OS images, but just install once and run, I favour coLinux's approach. andLinux is just a nifty way to get it installed.
I used coLinux for a while three years ago, and it was great, but difficult to get running (particularly the networking). andLinux just makes it work.
If Batman had a laptop, it would be black and bad. It could be curvy and organic, like a Wallstreet/Pismo era powerbook, true. But more recently I have ben given to think that if Batman had a laptop, it would be a Thinkpad.
Sun will probably publish Solaris under the GPL v3, so everyone will have a choice of tree free kernels: *BSD under BSD, Linux under GPL v2 and Solaris under V3. I think there is a fair chances that some developers might want to dual-license their code from now on. I am thinking of someone publishing their new filesystem code under both GPL versions so both projects can use it.
Relicensing existing code might be too strenuous, but if many developers decide to follow this dual-licensing approach, the relicensing of Linux may be made easier by module replacement, as old GPL v2 code is swapped out for new "either GPL v2 or v3" dual-licensed code coming in.
In any case, this is highly speculative, and as much as I would like Linux to be under the GPL v2 (I think tivoization sucks), if its authors don't care about it as much as we do, I don't feel inclined to raise a stink. Or maybe I am inclined to raise it against tivoizers, but not against developers themselves. We can still use Linux, and I for one thank our kernel developer overlords for their good job working for all of us.
(Note: I know there are several BSD kernels, but that's true also of Linux: there are several forks for different uses and profiles).
> Thus the reason why many 2nd and 3rd world countries are 2nd and 3rd world countries.
You keep using that term. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Second world: The term "Second World" is a phrase that was used to describe the Communist states within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. (...) Additionally, the term is often used incorrectly, to describe a moderately developed country. This is most likely based on the misconception that the First World refers to the developed world, the Third World the developing world, and thus the Second World is an intermediate level between the two..
You are not alone. Designer Joshua Davis works on a Mac Mini. He is hardly a casual user. He writes code that produces the final graphics, and runs memory-and-processor hogs like Photoshop and Illustrator all the time.
This is a light but competent take on the human factors of sofware engineering. For the more formal approach, I recommend Scott Berkun's The Art of Project Management.
Between these two books and your experience, you should be golden. But it is also good to have a mentor. Approach the best manager you have had in your career as a tech and ask them to have a coffee with you once a month. They don't have to work for the same company, as you won't be discussing the strategic or technical side of work, but rather talking about the practical side of coordinanting people.
Congratulations on your new position (I somehow assume it is better paid), and good luck with your new challenges.
Thanks for the explanation, but isn't quadtrees and frustum culling what all engines before the supertexture were using? Also, your explanation does not manage to clear up the doubts raised by the grandparent's statement:
> "In fact, you can have 1GB of textures just for the stuff on screen, and still have that displayed on a system with only 256MB of video memory."
If the stuff *on screen* (ie inside the frustrum) needs 1GB of textures, it just can't be culled out, and if you only have 256MB of video memory, you need to downsample them. Something here must be new and relevant, I just can't tell it from what is common sense and common practice.
Can you please explain how this "virtualised texture" approach works?
To my uninformed but interested understanding, it seems that if you only have 256Mb of memory and 1Gb of texture, you are going to have a lot of paging, missing textures, or the performance hit associated with downsampling the textures so they fit in memory.
> anyone who analyses the literature will hate neuromancer and most other cyberpunk as well.
>> Incorrect. My wife has a masters in English and she informs me that Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' is part of what they call 'the literary canon'.
>>> No offense, but the fact that your wife has a Master's in English doesn't mean squat.
In this case it does matter. Your post's GP made an assertion as to what a group of people ("anyone who analyses the literature") thinks of Neuromancer ("will hate [it}"). The parent said that his wife belongs to a group of people who profesionally analyse the literature, and that she reports that group does not hate Neuromancer, but rather considers it a classic (that is what "part of what they call 'the literary canon'" means).
How is that irrelevant?
> There is no more or less informed opinion when talking about appreciation of art: it's all entirely subjective.
But there is a clear informed opinion when talking about current consensus on a given work. The Mona Lisa is universally considered a masterpiece in academic circles, primary school textbooks and the popular media, regardless of what your (or mine, for that matter) entirely subjective impression of it may be.
Feedburner has made great inroads in brokering advertising in RSS feeds. Google could easily reproduce what Feedburner has done, but in snatching Feedburner they also keep them from other prospective buyers.
> it's also unclear how Amazon plans to make even one thin dime from this patent.
Software patents are damaging because they hamper competition. Using the monopoly granted by the patent office, Amazon can forbid other retailers to implement a one-click-buy system, thereby denying the public of the usefulness of cookies (regardless of how good we think keeping all of a client's info in the server is).
For a big company, buying a smaller company that produces something they want is not only an acquisition, it is also recruitment. Google have messed up in the past (see Google, Dodgeball) but they have also got some of them right (Writely, Google Analytics). Business as usual, nothing to see here.
Unfortunately, in some countries the "license" thing is not bullshit, but perfectly legal. Spain's LPI (Ley de Propiedad Intelectual or Intellectual Property Act) has for over ten years now given the copyright owner of a piece of software control over how anyone can make a copy of it. This control extends over making of a program in your hard disk or making a temporary copy in memory for the purpose of running the program.
Yes, you have read correctly: Spanish copyright law now regulates not only how you can copy software, but also how you can use it. I too was apalled when I found out. Someone pulled a fast one over our legislators, and now EULAs are enforceable (at least to the point where you don't have permission to use the EULA'd software unless you agree to the "contract").
Tim Sweeney says that 90% of the CPU budget of Unreal Engine games is spent in functional code doing numerical computations: This functional code makes up 50% of the codebase, and he suggests that the next mainstream language should have more functional elements, learning "lessons from Haskell". According to slide 46, "80-90% of the CPU effort in Unreal can be parallellized" using "Haskell's HT, HTRef solution" which "enables encapsulating local heaps and mutability within referentially-transparent code".
More Tim Sweeny quotes from the presentation: "In the future, we will write these algorithms using referentially-transparent constructs.". "In a concurrent world, imperative is the wrong default!" That, to me, sounds like is using a functional language to write videogames, even if it is not a purely functional one and still has procedural parts. The only procedural code will be running the side effects, for about 10% of the total CPU time.
IANAL and all that, but yes, what matters in a licensing dispute is the original intent of the licensor, not of the person who wrote the license. So if you licensed your work under the GPLv3 and offered your own rationale, a judge would no doubt consider it in case of a dispute.
However, I think you would be hard pressed to offer a different interpretation from the one profferred by Eben Moglen and company. And you can't give an interpretation that is directly contrary to the language of the license, as you are bound by your words.
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Can you recommend a book for laypeople explaining this many-worlds view in more lenght?
Yeah, that's what I think. He was using it as a metaphor: "bah, it's nothing, it was like the pain that kids have when they have growth spurts, nothing serious".
Kinderkrankenheiten: Growing pains.
> where I worked on making movies they were compiled.
There-s a major pwnage in that answer there.
While there is a large overlap between the approved Free Software Licenses and the approved Open Source Licenses, the fact that a project has a license that is in both lists doesn't make it both Open Source and Free Software.
Sorry, but that's insane. You may dislike the other term ('Free Software' if you call your work 'Open Source' and 'Open Source' if you define your work as 'Free Software'), but the Linux kernel is both Free Software and Open Source, Python is both Open Source and Free Software, and so is all of the software in Debian main.
Consider the GPL - it's approved by both. But Red Hat doesn't publish Free Software, it publishes Open Source
According to your theory, the Linux kernel is partly Open Source and partly free, because some of the developers adscribe to the Free Software philosophy, while others are paid by Open Source companies. Does that make Linux 89% (or whatever) Open Source and only 11% free?
I too prefer to call it "Free Software" (I am Spanish, so "software libre" rolls of my tongue better than "open source"), but we can't pretend that Open Source and Free Software are exclusive terms.
The academic community studying Free and Open Source Software call it that, or by its acronym FOSS/FLOSS (the L standing for "Libre"). That way they can do away with the terminological hairsplitting and devote their attention to whatever aspect of Free Software they want to study.
Mozilla is in fact under a triple license at the choice of the licensee. You can pick whether you want to reuse its code under the LGPL, the LGPL-like MPL (weak copyleft, allowing proprietary derivatives as long as modifications to the MPL code is published with source and under the same license) and the GPL (strong copyleft, no proprietary derivatives). In any case, all three of those licenses have some form of copyleft.
For your needs I would rather recommend andLinux, which is a handy installer for coLinux+Ubuntu.
coLinux installs the whole Linux kernel as a ring 0 driver in windows, and installs the whole linux filesystem as a windows file. You then run your normal Linux OS applications through a native Windows headless X server. It works just great, with performance similar to that of User Mode Linux.
Wubi installs a loopback image of Ubuntu that can be dual-booted into in parallell with Windows. That means you can't have your windows apps runnign at the same time as your windows apps.
Others have recommended VMWare, but for the kind of usage where you don't have to mess around with different guest OS images, but just install once and run, I favour coLinux's approach. andLinux is just a nifty way to get it installed.
I used coLinux for a while three years ago, and it was great, but difficult to get running (particularly the networking). andLinux just makes it work.
Hear, hear!
If Batman had a laptop, it would be black and bad. It could be curvy and organic, like a Wallstreet/Pismo era powerbook, true. But more recently I have ben given to think that if Batman had a laptop, it would be a Thinkpad.
Sun will probably publish Solaris under the GPL v3, so everyone will have a choice of tree free kernels: *BSD under BSD, Linux under GPL v2 and Solaris under V3. I think there is a fair chances that some developers might want to dual-license their code from now on. I am thinking of someone publishing their new filesystem code under both GPL versions so both projects can use it.
Relicensing existing code might be too strenuous, but if many developers decide to follow this dual-licensing approach, the relicensing of Linux may be made easier by module replacement, as old GPL v2 code is swapped out for new "either GPL v2 or v3" dual-licensed code coming in.
In any case, this is highly speculative, and as much as I would like Linux to be under the GPL v2 (I think tivoization sucks), if its authors don't care about it as much as we do, I don't feel inclined to raise a stink. Or maybe I am inclined to raise it against tivoizers, but not against developers themselves. We can still use Linux, and I for one thank our kernel developer overlords for their good job working for all of us.
(Note: I know there are several BSD kernels, but that's true also of Linux: there are several forks for different uses and profiles).
Where's "locally"? That's a very sweet deal...
Two-thirds of all projects, and I would guess that about 90% of all lines of code. I am curious to know, has anybody done the study?
> Thus the reason why many 2nd and 3rd world countries are 2nd and 3rd world countries.
You keep using that term. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Second world:
The term "Second World" is a phrase that was used to describe the Communist states within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence.
(...)
Additionally, the term is often used incorrectly, to describe a moderately developed country. This is most likely based on the misconception that the First World refers to the developed world, the Third World the developing world, and thus the Second World is an intermediate level between the two..
You are not alone. Designer Joshua Davis works on a Mac Mini. He is hardly a casual user. He writes code that produces the final graphics, and runs memory-and-processor hogs like Photoshop and Illustrator all the time.
Also, anything can be sticky if it has enough sugar.
Get yourself Michael Lopp's Managing Humans, or read his blog Rands in Repose.
This is a light but competent take on the human factors of sofware engineering. For the more formal approach, I recommend Scott Berkun's The Art of Project Management.
Between these two books and your experience, you should be golden. But it is also good to have a mentor. Approach the best manager you have had in your career as a tech and ask them to have a coffee with you once a month. They don't have to work for the same company, as you won't be discussing the strategic or technical side of work, but rather talking about the practical side of coordinanting people.
Congratulations on your new position (I somehow assume it is better paid), and good luck with your new challenges.
Thanks for the explanation, but isn't quadtrees and frustum culling what all engines before the supertexture were using? Also, your explanation does not manage to clear up the doubts raised by the grandparent's statement:
> "In fact, you can have 1GB of textures just for the stuff on screen, and still have that displayed on a system with only 256MB of video memory."
If the stuff *on screen* (ie inside the frustrum) needs 1GB of textures, it just can't be culled out, and if you only have 256MB of video memory, you need to downsample them. Something here must be new and relevant, I just can't tell it from what is common sense and common practice.
Can you please explain how this "virtualised texture" approach works?
To my uninformed but interested understanding, it seems that if you only have 256Mb of memory and 1Gb of texture, you are going to have a lot of paging, missing textures, or the performance hit associated with downsampling the textures so they fit in memory.
> anyone who analyses the literature will hate neuromancer and most other cyberpunk as well.
>> Incorrect. My wife has a masters in English and she informs me that Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' is part of what they call 'the literary canon'.
>>> No offense, but the fact that your wife has a Master's in English doesn't mean squat.
In this case it does matter. Your post's GP made an assertion as to what a group of people ("anyone who analyses the literature") thinks of Neuromancer ("will hate [it}"). The parent said that his wife belongs to a group of people who profesionally analyse the literature, and that she reports that group does not hate Neuromancer, but rather considers it a classic (that is what "part of what they call 'the literary canon'" means).
How is that irrelevant?
> There is no more or less informed opinion when talking about appreciation of art: it's all entirely subjective.
But there is a clear informed opinion when talking about current consensus on a given work. The Mona Lisa is universally considered a masterpiece in academic circles, primary school textbooks and the popular media, regardless of what your (or mine, for that matter) entirely subjective impression of it may be.
And Neuromancer is now rutinely included in reading lists by English Departments the world over, whether you know someone with a CS degree who can't operate a toaster or not.
Calling 2^640000 an "inexhaustible" number instead of an "infinite" one has the advantage of being literally true as well as evocative.
Feedburner has made great inroads in brokering advertising in RSS feeds. Google could easily reproduce what Feedburner has done, but in snatching Feedburner they also keep them from other prospective buyers.
> it's also unclear how Amazon plans to make even one thin dime from this patent.
Software patents are damaging because they hamper competition. Using the monopoly granted by the patent office, Amazon can forbid other retailers to implement a one-click-buy system, thereby denying the public of the usefulness of cookies (regardless of how good we think keeping all of a client's info in the server is).
For a big company, buying a smaller company that produces something they want is not only an acquisition, it is also recruitment. Google have messed up in the past (see Google, Dodgeball) but they have also got some of them right (Writely, Google Analytics). Business as usual, nothing to see here.
Unfortunately, in some countries the "license" thing is not bullshit, but perfectly legal. Spain's LPI (Ley de Propiedad Intelectual or Intellectual Property Act) has for over ten years now given the copyright owner of a piece of software control over how anyone can make a copy of it. This control extends over making of a program in your hard disk or making a temporary copy in memory for the purpose of running the program.
Yes, you have read correctly: Spanish copyright law now regulates not only how you can copy software, but also how you can use it. I too was apalled when I found out. Someone pulled a fast one over our legislators, and now EULAs are enforceable (at least to the point where you don't have permission to use the EULA'd software unless you agree to the "contract").
So it goes.
Tim Sweeney says that 90% of the CPU budget of Unreal Engine games is spent in functional code doing numerical computations: This functional code makes up 50% of the codebase, and he suggests that the next mainstream language should have more functional elements, learning "lessons from Haskell". According to slide 46, "80-90% of the CPU effort in Unreal can be parallellized" using "Haskell's HT, HTRef solution" which "enables encapsulating local heaps and mutability within referentially-transparent code".
More Tim Sweeny quotes from the presentation: "In the future, we will write these algorithms using referentially-transparent constructs.". "In a concurrent world, imperative is the wrong default!" That, to me, sounds like is using a functional language to write videogames, even if it is not a purely functional one and still has procedural parts. The only procedural code will be running the side effects, for about 10% of the total CPU time.
IANAL and all that, but yes, what matters in a licensing dispute is the original intent of the licensor, not of the person who wrote the license. So if you licensed your work under the GPLv3 and offered your own rationale, a judge would no doubt consider it in case of a dispute.
However, I think you would be hard pressed to offer a different interpretation from the one profferred by Eben Moglen and company. And you can't give an interpretation that is directly contrary to the language of the license, as you are bound by your words.