the OS/2 community I somehow never really understood.
They're not that different from fans of BeOS, Amiga OS, or a dozen other platforms that never reached critical mass, despite their many virtues. For that matter, your see the same stubborn refusal to see economic sense from Mac and Linux fans when they complain about publishers not supporting their platforms.
Brad Wardell has this really insightful take on what it's like to be an OS/2 fanatic, and how his fellow fanatics turned on him when he started hedging his bets.
Buffy's relevance faded a long time ago. When it was a cute little low-budget fantasy series, just a little bit more imaginative than the competition, it was fun. When it turned into a franchise, it got boring.
Firefox is sort of a fork of Mozilla, but they always shared the same HTML engine.
As for the others you mention, they were all forked for very serious reasons. Gcc and X.org got forked after their predecessor communities self-destructed. Inkscape seems to have been forked in order to revive an moribund project (which was itself forked to revive a moribund GNOME application!). Apache forked because certain key people at NCSA decided they didn't want to work there anymore.
Can you name a single fork that happened because somebody wanted a slightly different feature set? I mean one that actually went anywhere.
I'm not sure all the ones you list can really be described as forks. But that's a quibble: I agree that there are dozens of "good" forks. But we're not talking about forks that worked out well (with the benefit of hindsight), we're talking about whether it's usually a good idea to fork a project. And it's not.
I'm not arguing against forks as such. I'm arguing with the TPP, who claimed that anybody who doesn't exactly like the way Chrome works can "fork it and run with what they like/dislike". If that were practical advice and a lot of people took it, there'd be thousands of "bad" forks.
An Open Source project is not just a collection of software. It's a community. Without the ongoing contributions and interactions of all those developers and users, the project is just not going to go anywhere. Now, sometimes communities need to split up for the sake of everybody involved. But you don't break up a community the first time you disagree with the other members of that community. The "divorce" needs to have some long term benefit beyond some individual's personal priorities.
This is not a close source browser that Google is shipping (According to their blogs/information), anyone can fork it and run with what they like/dislike.
It's worth mentioning that this is exactly how Chrome's Webkit engine got invented in the first place. It started out as a revision, then a fork, of KDE's KHTML engine. A lot of us were pretty hard on Apple when it became obvious that they weren't interested in participating in KHTML's ongoing development. But now that they've created a successful, portable, fork that's popular on a number of platforms (including KDE!) you have to admit that they made the right call.
Even so, forks are usually not a good thing. When you decide to fork an OS project, you're opting out of the original community, and basically telling them you don't care for where they're taking the project. It's like getting a divorce. Just as partners shouldn't break up their family the first time they get pissed at each other, it's dumb to pull out of a community just because they don't agree with all your priorities.
This is hard for many software people to understand, since they tend to have big opinions about little things. Which is why the Pidgin IM project got forked in a totally unnecessary squabble over a minor GUI feature that easily could have been made optional. Speaking of which, does anybody actually use the fork?
I've lost interest in Wil's thoughts since he took down his version of his fights with Rick Bermann. Presumably he did this in exchange for that walk-on role in Nemesis. Which was then cut. Serves him right.
By your logic, Ukraine isn't in Europe either. "Europe" is a geographical term, not another name for the EU. Which, incidentally, The UK belongs to, even though they've been allowed to keep their own currency.
No offense, but I'm afraid you suck as a benchmark. Unix didn't come from Berkeley, though they did play. a role in its development and popularization outside Bell Labs. And if you've never heard of Donald Knuth, you're pretty ignorant of computer science in general, never mind the best schools for teaching it.
That's Ok, not everybody needs to know this shit. Your lack of knowledge is just not evidence, that's all.
Thanks. You've answered my question quite clearly and concisely. Your examples are at the upper end of my CS comprehension skills, though; I certainly don't have it in me to follow up with the readings you suggest.
So now I have a new question: how do RPM-based distros manage without this feature.
Please. I'm not a grammar nazi. As far as I'm concerned, grammatical rules are just a convention, and people are entitled to use whatever conventions they want.
What I am is a clarity nazi. When we send our blackshirts to beat people up, we remind them that there's no substitute for clarity. As they say in the military services, an order or other communication that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood. Avoiding that situation means avoiding ambiguity, even when the resolution of that ambiguity seems obvious. And what's more ambiguous than directly contradicting yourself?
An implicit "you know what I mean" is OK in casual conversation. But in official communications, it's not a substitute for expressing yourself clearly in the first place. Especially when your job has to do with people's safety.
The purpose of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is probably obvious from its name...
That's a pretty clueless statement. If it were obvious, then we wouldn't have to make the Beer/Speech distinction every time we used the word.
One reason this is unclear: to many of us, it's not at all clear that whether you have the right to hack somebody else's code is a first amendment issue. In a technical sense, I suppose it is. But that's the same technical sense that Comcast uses when they assert their right to give us 500 channels of crap. Even if legally valid, it's hard to get worked up over it.
The main contribution of the FSF to posterity has been to create the Open Source movement, which has proven to be a superior model for large-scale collaboration than the old standards committees it replaced. This was obvious to me the first time I compared early prototype of open source desktops like KDE and GNOME to their committee-managed predecessors, such as (the late, unlamented) CDE. Even early betas of the OS desktops had more functionality than CDE, which had been under development for many years.
But does FSF boast about their role in inventing Open Source? They do not. They consider OS, arguably their biggest accomplishment, as a distraction. That's because the FSF is about changing all the intellectual property rules as it relates to software, not about better development models. And IMHO, they don't really have a lot to show for 25 years of attacks on that particular windmill.
...the FBI is again today warning users to ignore the spam and report any incidents...
Which is it? Ignore or report?
The educational requirements to become an FBI agent are supposed to be pretty high. Wouldn't know it from their press releases. I remember during the hunt for the Unabomber they mentioned that a parcel's return address was "factitious."
I suspect you have to be gullible and paranoid with a dash of guilty conscience thrown in to fall for this scam.
With any spam-driven scam, only one person in a million is gullible enough to fall for it. That's the whole point. If you had a scam that might fool a smart person, you wouldn't waste it on spam. But if people see through your scam 99.9999% of the time, spam is the only way for you to reach that vital 0.0001% of the population you're trying to rip off.
Sadly, the victims of scams are often elderly people you are a little out of it, and are easily misled. And who are really in a bad way when they lose their life's savings. It's not like they can start over again.
On a brighter note, I have a friend who's an African prince. He's been unfairly removed from his kingdom. Key army officials can be bribed for a mere $100,000. Contributors to his restoration will be paid back tenfold once he's back in power. If you'd like to help, please send email to tibtibtib@hotmail.com.
They should just say "Here's what you are required to do... we can do as we damn well please."
They do say that. They just don't say it clearly. The whole point of most consumer agreements is to say exactly that, but at great length and using very technical language. If nobody understand what you're saying, nobody can give you a hard time for saying it.
RTFA. This isn't about mobile phones, this is about mobile data plans, and people in rural areas that probably don't have any other way of getting online.
You'd be foolish to spend millions to get back $150 in fees.
Why does a simple issue of unfair fees have to go to the nation's highest court? And why does each individual who got ripped off have to pursue the issue separately?
My lawyer has told me to "let go" of $2500 problems because they just aren't worth taking to court.
That is, sadly, true. But that logic doesn't apply to every situation where one person owes another a small amount. In particular, a large corporation that rips off small amounts from thousands of people is subject to all kinds of legal, political, and social sanctions.
ECHELON? Isn't that where the government searches for words like bomb, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy?
What your point here? That you're so invested in the "war on terror" that you no longer care about privacy? Are you sure you're Canadian?
Given what it was meant to be, I don't think the show was that bad.
What was it meant to be? Unless it was something that didn't involve people, JA was not up to the role.
I watched it for a couple of episodes, found the premise kind of interesting. Then during one scene, she's walking down the street talking to a guy, and I suddenly found my suspension of disbelief all gone. If she can't do an ordinary conversation convincingly, how is she supposed to sell all her superhuman powers?
Slashdot Mirror
the OS/2 community I somehow never really understood.
They're not that different from fans of BeOS, Amiga OS, or a dozen other platforms that never reached critical mass, despite their many virtues. For that matter, your see the same stubborn refusal to see economic sense from Mac and Linux fans when they complain about publishers not supporting their platforms.
Brad Wardell has this really insightful take on what it's like to be an OS/2 fanatic, and how his fellow fanatics turned on him when he started hedging his bets.
http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html
Buffy's relevance faded a long time ago. When it was a cute little low-budget fantasy series, just a little bit more imaginative than the competition, it was fun. When it turned into a franchise, it got boring.
Egotist. Whoever heard of Rob T Firefly? This MMO is about your uncle Rufus.
Despite my previous post, I'm going to quibble anyway.
As for the others you mention, they were all forked for very serious reasons. Gcc and X.org got forked after their predecessor communities self-destructed. Inkscape seems to have been forked in order to revive an moribund project (which was itself forked to revive a moribund GNOME application!). Apache forked because certain key people at NCSA decided they didn't want to work there anymore.
Can you name a single fork that happened because somebody wanted a slightly different feature set? I mean one that actually went anywhere.
I'm not sure all the ones you list can really be described as forks. But that's a quibble: I agree that there are dozens of "good" forks. But we're not talking about forks that worked out well (with the benefit of hindsight), we're talking about whether it's usually a good idea to fork a project. And it's not.
I'm not arguing against forks as such. I'm arguing with the TPP, who claimed that anybody who doesn't exactly like the way Chrome works can "fork it and run with what they like/dislike". If that were practical advice and a lot of people took it, there'd be thousands of "bad" forks.
An Open Source project is not just a collection of software. It's a community. Without the ongoing contributions and interactions of all those developers and users, the project is just not going to go anywhere. Now, sometimes communities need to split up for the sake of everybody involved. But you don't break up a community the first time you disagree with the other members of that community. The "divorce" needs to have some long term benefit beyond some individual's personal priorities.
This is not a close source browser that Google is shipping (According to their blogs/information), anyone can fork it and run with what they like/dislike.
It's worth mentioning that this is exactly how Chrome's Webkit engine got invented in the first place. It started out as a revision, then a fork, of KDE's KHTML engine. A lot of us were pretty hard on Apple when it became obvious that they weren't interested in participating in KHTML's ongoing development. But now that they've created a successful, portable, fork that's popular on a number of platforms (including KDE!) you have to admit that they made the right call.
Even so, forks are usually not a good thing. When you decide to fork an OS project, you're opting out of the original community, and basically telling them you don't care for where they're taking the project. It's like getting a divorce. Just as partners shouldn't break up their family the first time they get pissed at each other, it's dumb to pull out of a community just because they don't agree with all your priorities.
This is hard for many software people to understand, since they tend to have big opinions about little things. Which is why the Pidgin IM project got forked in a totally unnecessary squabble over a minor GUI feature that easily could have been made optional. Speaking of which, does anybody actually use the fork?
Lighten up, dude. I know that he's contradicting himself. Does the word "joke" mean anything to you?
"Overpriced" means you hate paying it. "Well worth it" means you pay anyway.
I've lost interest in Wil's thoughts since he took down his version of his fights with Rick Bermann. Presumably he did this in exchange for that walk-on role in Nemesis. Which was then cut. Serves him right.
By your logic, Ukraine isn't in Europe either. "Europe" is a geographical term, not another name for the EU. Which, incidentally, The UK belongs to, even though they've been allowed to keep their own currency.
No offense, but I'm afraid you suck as a benchmark. Unix didn't come from Berkeley, though they did play. a role in its development and popularization outside Bell Labs. And if you've never heard of Donald Knuth, you're pretty ignorant of computer science in general, never mind the best schools for teaching it.
That's Ok, not everybody needs to know this shit. Your lack of knowledge is just not evidence, that's all.
Thanks. You've answered my question quite clearly and concisely. Your examples are at the upper end of my CS comprehension skills, though; I certainly don't have it in me to follow up with the readings you suggest.
So now I have a new question: how do RPM-based distros manage without this feature.
B (v1) Depends: C (v2)
B (v2) Depends: C (v1)
You have a later version of B depending on an earlier version of C! How often does that happen?
How do you draw that conclusion?
I asked you first.
The way you state it sounds like the FSF set out to create Open Source.
And you make it sound like I'm an admirer of the FSF. If you think that I do, you need to work on your reading skills.
Please. I'm not a grammar nazi. As far as I'm concerned, grammatical rules are just a convention, and people are entitled to use whatever conventions they want.
What I am is a clarity nazi. When we send our blackshirts to beat people up, we remind them that there's no substitute for clarity. As they say in the military services, an order or other communication that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood. Avoiding that situation means avoiding ambiguity, even when the resolution of that ambiguity seems obvious. And what's more ambiguous than directly contradicting yourself?
An implicit "you know what I mean" is OK in casual conversation. But in official communications, it's not a substitute for expressing yourself clearly in the first place. Especially when your job has to do with people's safety.
Buy one yourself. "Factitious" means "deliberately misleading". Makes no sense for a return address. The right word here is "fictitious".
The purpose of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is probably obvious from its name...
That's a pretty clueless statement. If it were obvious, then we wouldn't have to make the Beer/Speech distinction every time we used the word.
One reason this is unclear: to many of us, it's not at all clear that whether you have the right to hack somebody else's code is a first amendment issue. In a technical sense, I suppose it is. But that's the same technical sense that Comcast uses when they assert their right to give us 500 channels of crap. Even if legally valid, it's hard to get worked up over it.
The main contribution of the FSF to posterity has been to create the Open Source movement, which has proven to be a superior model for large-scale collaboration than the old standards committees it replaced. This was obvious to me the first time I compared early prototype of open source desktops like KDE and GNOME to their committee-managed predecessors, such as (the late, unlamented) CDE. Even early betas of the OS desktops had more functionality than CDE, which had been under development for many years.
But does FSF boast about their role in inventing Open Source? They do not. They consider OS, arguably their biggest accomplishment, as a distraction. That's because the FSF is about changing all the intellectual property rules as it relates to software, not about better development models. And IMHO, they don't really have a lot to show for 25 years of attacks on that particular windmill.
...the FBI is again today warning users to ignore the spam and report any incidents...
Which is it? Ignore or report?
The educational requirements to become an FBI agent are supposed to be pretty high. Wouldn't know it from their press releases. I remember during the hunt for the Unabomber they mentioned that a parcel's return address was "factitious."
I suspect you have to be gullible and paranoid with a dash of guilty conscience thrown in to fall for this scam.
With any spam-driven scam, only one person in a million is gullible enough to fall for it. That's the whole point. If you had a scam that might fool a smart person, you wouldn't waste it on spam. But if people see through your scam 99.9999% of the time, spam is the only way for you to reach that vital 0.0001% of the population you're trying to rip off.
Sadly, the victims of scams are often elderly people you are a little out of it, and are easily misled. And who are really in a bad way when they lose their life's savings. It's not like they can start over again.
On a brighter note, I have a friend who's an African prince. He's been unfairly removed from his kingdom. Key army officials can be bribed for a mere $100,000. Contributors to his restoration will be paid back tenfold once he's back in power. If you'd like to help, please send email to tibtibtib@hotmail.com.
They should just say "Here's what you are required to do... we can do as we damn well please."
They do say that. They just don't say it clearly. The whole point of most consumer agreements is to say exactly that, but at great length and using very technical language. If nobody understand what you're saying, nobody can give you a hard time for saying it.
Mobile phones aren't a requirement.
RTFA. This isn't about mobile phones, this is about mobile data plans, and people in rural areas that probably don't have any other way of getting online.
You'd be foolish to spend millions to get back $150 in fees.
Why does a simple issue of unfair fees have to go to the nation's highest court? And why does each individual who got ripped off have to pursue the issue separately?
My lawyer has told me to "let go" of $2500 problems because they just aren't worth taking to court.
That is, sadly, true. But that logic doesn't apply to every situation where one person owes another a small amount. In particular, a large corporation that rips off small amounts from thousands of people is subject to all kinds of legal, political, and social sanctions.
ECHELON? Isn't that where the government searches for words like bomb, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy?
What your point here? That you're so invested in the "war on terror" that you no longer care about privacy? Are you sure you're Canadian?
Given what it was meant to be, I don't think the show was that bad.
What was it meant to be? Unless it was something that didn't involve people, JA was not up to the role.
I watched it for a couple of episodes, found the premise kind of interesting. Then during one scene, she's walking down the street talking to a guy, and I suddenly found my suspension of disbelief all gone. If she can't do an ordinary conversation convincingly, how is she supposed to sell all her superhuman powers?
What DA needed was a prosthetic for Jessica Alba's acting!
His novella, "Blue Champagne." One of his better stories.