I really didn't want to get into this (so why did I start it? Ok you got me) -- but wasn't God supposed to have created Satan. And isn't God supposed to be everywhere and in control of everything?
It all makes less sense than believing, as I do, that it's all just there. Nobody made it, and when you die, you rot away and nothing else. --
I absolutely agree. PG make the argument that ASCII text is the only format universally readable to (almost) all computers.
However, if they were to mark up their texts in the XML-derived-markup-language of their choice, then their work would be so much more of a service to humanity.
From Elliotte rusty Harold's "XML: Extended Markup Language" (a bit old now), discussing Jon Bosak's marked up versions of the complete plays of Shakespeare: "What does this system offer over a book or even a plain text file? To a human reader, the answer is not much. To a computer doing textual analysis, however,it offers the opportunity to easily distinguish between the different elements into which the plays have been divided. For instance, this system makes it simple to extract all lines spoken by Romeo in Romeo & Juliet."
Then there's stuff like text to speech -- markup would help the reader with intonation, etc.
It seems to me the whole idea of DVD was to create a monopoly. As I understand it, the idea of the DVD protection was not to prevent copying, but to restrict playback on players who have not paid money to the DVD consortium.
I don't know whether there are any laws forbidding this kind of practice; I'm just saying it's wrong.
Look at it this way -- *some* form of digital medium for the sneakernet distribution of video will become the single de facto standard, and it's likely that DVD will be the one.
With the DVD consortium in control of the keys necessary to create disks and read them, a small number of companies effectively become in control of that significant chunk of media. Free speech? Dead. Indie movies? Dead.
Bah. --
Re:Forget pronunciation: discuss *freeness*
on
Linux on Jeopardy
·
· Score: 2
Certainly, gratis is a side-effect of libre.
... but you could also have downloaded IE5 for "free" as in "free beer". But you wouldn't be allowed/able to modify it and pass it on to someone else, the way you are with Slackware.
In reply to the other two posts - it's true that the Jeopardy question was correct. I was pointing out the emphasis built in to the question -- both free speech and free beer are parts of the Free Software appeal, and most people don't get exposed to the Free Speech side of the coin. --
So DOOM came out in 1989, did it? Before the SNES came out, people were happily fragging undead marines?
No.
The kind of games people rave about 10+ years later are things like Super Mario Bros (1986). Console games. Games that anyone can play, with minimal pissing about - because the more people actually manage to get the game running the more people there are to continue raving about it 10, 20, 30 years later.
As late as 1996, maybe later still, you had to write a new config.sys and autoexec.bat file for almost every DOS game you owned; and you needed a pretty good working knowledge of XMS and EMS memory (whatever the hell they were), and how to configure them. To be fair, DOOM was pretty well behaved in that respect.
I can't believe, you're here, taking part in an international, quasi-realtime discussion with thousands of people, yet you're extolling the virtues of Sneakernet.
If you can't envisage the kind of cool stuff possible with broadband to a console, you're just not thinking hard enough.
Think of the Ultima-Online-alike games/communities that could be set up, with the huge bandwidth provided by broadband. Imagine if every time you played Sonic Adventure, the levels were changed - perhaps to suit the time of year, perhaps varying with today's climate in Tokyo, perhaps with references to current affairs. Imagine dropping your virtual pet at a virtual daycare centre, where you can interact with other virtual petowners.
Cheap broadband connectivity is the revolution you're talking about, and it's the home entertainment companies that are going to get it done. Just pray it's the gaming companies (who undertand interactivity) that spearhead it, rather than the TV/movie comapnies, or you'll find that it gets no more exciting than video-on-demand and flawed email implementations (Sky Digital email sucks pole). --
I'd suggest that rather than being a mistranslation based on language barriers, it's a misunderstanding caused by unintended inferences. We've all said things that come out wrong, or that people are just too plain stupid to interpret correctly.
Here's a good analogy: IBM has repeatedly announced that its main business interest is solutions and services. The Sega story is kind of like Lou Gerstner saying "IBM will be concentrating on solutions and services", and some reporter rushing off and saying "IBM to stop writing software!".
BTW, the Dreamcast is *superb*. I already feel I've got my money's worth, and I only have two games so far (Power Stone and Sonic Adventure). --
But the IGN article contains compelling supporting evidence for the "misunderstanding" theory, whereas the original article just says "this is true" and provides no backup.
I might just about be convinced that Sega would ditch its hardware business (although it seems very unlikely given the tremendous success of the Dreamcast so far), but I can't possibly believe that a company like Sega would actually *tell* the public about such an intention, when they have a two month old (in the West) console to market. --
Just for those people who never bother reading the links that slashdot links to, the article basically says this is a misunderstanding.
In his speech, the guy basically said that Sega's emphasis would be on software and internet services.
The implication here is that Sega won't stop making consoles -- but that the console is not their business, it is merely an enabler for the *real* business, which is content production and delivery.
In strict computer science terms, the kernel is the OS.
However, the common use of the phrase seems to include all the basic tools.
Therefore, the "OS" of the average Linux box could be said to include the kernel, the shell, the basic shell and text utils, filesystem utils etc.
This is why RMS harps on about "GNU/Linux", since the FSF wrote all the GNU stuff to be part of the "GNU Operating System", and it's all in almost every Linux distribution.
IMHO, X, Window managers etc are a bit of a grey area. You *could* say they were part of the OS, but it's pushing it a bit.
As far as Windows is concerned, I the boundaries are harder to see -- isn't the GUI part of the kernel? Whatever, notepad.exe is on the CD, and that is not part of the OS.
--
Forget pronunciation: discuss *freeness*
on
Linux on Jeopardy
·
· Score: 2
I was struck by the wording "can be obtained for free".
It's an example of how the general public just haven't been told that GPL'd software is free in that it "has freedom", rather than "can be obtained gratis".
People, when you see this kind of thing, *please* make a point of informing people, so they'll know in future. --
Of course, you could give customers optional levels of security: "You may stick to a login/password, or you may pay $20 for a card reader for your PC" --
It's difficult to talk about this without seeming like a patronising bastard, so I'll apologise in advance.
There are a lot of stupid people out there, and once you start enforcing password quality rules, they'll get confused. Faced with something like the RedHat password quality checker, which requires a non-dictionary-word, and doesn't allow stuff like "t3th3r" or "gr0up13s" either, many people will either give up, or write the password down.
The more complex the restrictions, the harder the passwords become to remember, and the more likely they are to write them down.
One nice idea would be to make users accept some form of licence, which makes it clear that if *they* compromise their password's secrecy, you're not liable.
For more security, I guess you'd need some form of swipe-card or something (or the calculator thang described elsewhere), which would obviously up the cost of the project. --
Uh. I never said Communism was nice and dandy. Communism fails, because it ignores (perfectly natural and acceptable) aspects of human nature which bugger up the machinery.
Have a care for a simple-minded atheist, and reword that so that your point is clearer.
"It may be too much to hope that this statement will head off a flurry of snide opinion pieces divagating about "open-source communism"; the clumsy rhetoric of some of our past ambassadors may have made that outcome inevitable."
... so he couldn't resist getting some RMS-bashing in. And he complains about snideness in others !?! --
There I was, all prepared to slag off ESR for "presuming to speak for the whole Linux community", when he goes and apologises for it in advance.
My only problem is the bit about the "repressive ideals of Communism".
It's worth noting that there *are* *no* communist states in the world today, whatever they choose to call themselves. Every country which has tried to become communist, has ended up being something else. If you want to know why, read Animal Farm.
... and yeah, the Chinese Government sucks, and it'd do Linux a whole lot of harm if people in general thought that the average Linux hacker had any sympathies with them. --
Both keyboard and PC share a (pseudo) random number algorithm. When you power on, they negotiate a seed. At every keypress and/or clock tick, they both move on to the next random number, which will stay in sync. Keypresses are XOR'd with the random number before transmission.
Hence, the snooper needs to work out what the pseudo-random number algorithm is, *and* calculate the seed, in order to glean information from the RF emitted by your keyboard. --
There was a recent report (dunno where) which suggested that in two years' time, desktop PCs will not be the most common way of accessing the Internet, with the large number of set-top-box systems on their way.
For example, now I have a Dreamcast, if I just want to check a web page quickly, and I happen to be downstairs, I'll use the DC rather than leave the comfort of my living room.
The DC browser lacks a whole lot of features, which in one way is a shame -- but one positive aspect is that a large population of (potentially money-spending) internet users, stuck with basic HTML renderers and not much else, might encourage content providers to tone down their reliance on obscure plugins.
There's *very little* of real worth that can't be accomplished using a browser something akin to Netscape 2, and the fancy stuff goes on at the server side. That's what made the Web so nice in the first place. --
This article reinforces something that's struck me for a while now. The advantages of free software are almost always the customer's.
The Microsoft's, the IBMs, the Novells of this world have a lot to lose, in terms of customers who are no longer tied to their existing products
The number one reason for a large company like this to go Open Source is customer demand (I'm guessing IBM took on Apache because they realised that Apache was what the customer wanted).
Moral? -- keep evangelising. We have advertising budgets up against us. --
Slashdot Mirror
I really didn't want to get into this (so why did I start it? Ok you got me) -- but wasn't God supposed to have created Satan. And isn't God supposed to be everywhere and in control of everything?
It all makes less sense than believing, as I do, that it's all just there. Nobody made it, and when you die, you rot away and nothing else.
--
Why on earth would a merciful God, who (remember) is in control of *everything* want /anyone/ to suffer in the pits of hell forever? Believer or not?
If I truly believed that the majority of mankind, including most of my friends, were going to hell, I'd never stay sane.
--
I absolutely agree. PG make the argument that ASCII text is the only format universally readable to (almost) all computers.
However, if they were to mark up their texts in the XML-derived-markup-language of their choice, then their work would be so much more of a service to humanity.
From Elliotte rusty Harold's "XML: Extended Markup Language" (a bit old now), discussing Jon Bosak's marked up versions of the complete plays of Shakespeare:
"What does this system offer over a book or even a plain text file? To a human reader, the answer is not much. To a computer doing textual analysis, however,it offers the opportunity to easily distinguish between the different elements into which the plays have been divided. For instance, this system makes it simple to extract all lines spoken by Romeo in Romeo & Juliet."
Then there's stuff like text to speech -- markup would help the reader with intonation, etc.
... and so on.
--
I don't know whether there are any laws forbidding this kind of practice; I'm just saying it's wrong.
Look at it this way -- *some* form of digital medium for the sneakernet distribution of video will become the single de facto standard, and it's likely that DVD will be the one.
With the DVD consortium in control of the keys necessary to create disks and read them, a small number of companies effectively become in control of that significant chunk of media. Free speech? Dead. Indie movies? Dead.
Bah.
--
... but you could also have downloaded IE5 for "free" as in "free beer". But you wouldn't be allowed/able to modify it and pass it on to someone else, the way you are with Slackware.
In reply to the other two posts - it's true that the Jeopardy question was correct. I was pointing out the emphasis built in to the question -- both free speech and free beer are parts of the Free Software appeal, and most people don't get exposed to the Free Speech side of the coin.
--
So DOOM came out in 1989, did it?
Before the SNES came out, people were happily fragging undead marines?
No.
The kind of games people rave about 10+ years later are things like Super Mario Bros (1986). Console games. Games that anyone can play, with minimal pissing about - because the more people actually manage to get the game running the more people there are to continue raving about it 10, 20, 30 years later.
As late as 1996, maybe later still, you had to write a new config.sys and autoexec.bat file for almost every DOS game you owned; and you needed a pretty good working knowledge of XMS and EMS memory (whatever the hell they were), and how to configure them.
To be fair, DOOM was pretty well behaved in that respect.
--
I can't believe, you're here, taking part in an international, quasi-realtime discussion with thousands of people, yet you're extolling the virtues of Sneakernet.
If you can't envisage the kind of cool stuff possible with broadband to a console, you're just not thinking hard enough.
Think of the Ultima-Online-alike games/communities that could be set up, with the huge bandwidth provided by broadband.
Imagine if every time you played Sonic Adventure, the levels were changed - perhaps to suit the time of year, perhaps varying with today's climate in Tokyo, perhaps with references to current affairs. Imagine dropping your virtual pet at a virtual daycare centre, where you can interact with other virtual petowners.
Cheap broadband connectivity is the revolution you're talking about, and it's the home entertainment companies that are going to get it done. Just pray it's the gaming companies (who undertand interactivity) that spearhead it, rather than the TV/movie comapnies, or you'll find that it gets no more exciting than video-on-demand and flawed email implementations (Sky Digital email sucks pole).
--
I'd suggest that rather than being a mistranslation based on language barriers, it's a misunderstanding caused by unintended inferences.
We've all said things that come out wrong, or that people are just too plain stupid to interpret correctly.
Here's a good analogy: IBM has repeatedly announced that its main business interest is solutions and services. The Sega story is kind of like Lou Gerstner saying "IBM will be concentrating on solutions and services", and some reporter rushing off and saying "IBM to stop writing software!".
BTW, the Dreamcast is *superb*. I already feel I've got my money's worth, and I only have two games so far (Power Stone and Sonic Adventure).
--
Why, yes. That would make excellent sense, to follow up the most successful console launch ever.
(I acknowledge that PS2 may well eclipse it)
--
.. but keeping a load of consoles is *cool*.
:)
I have ten
--
If you're talking about the Sonic 1/2/3/knuckles pack for the PC, here's an interesting titbit:
Sega paid the author of the free (gratis not libre, sadly) Genesis emulator KGen to use his work.
The package is actually KGen (hacked a little, I guess), the Genesis ROMS, and a front-end.
Now isn't that a refreshing attitude to emulation, from Sega. Nice to see after all that nastiness from Nintendo.
--
Sure.
But the IGN article contains compelling supporting evidence for the "misunderstanding" theory, whereas the original article just says "this is true" and provides no backup.
I might just about be convinced that Sega would ditch its hardware business (although it seems very unlikely given the tremendous success of the Dreamcast so far), but I can't possibly believe that a company like Sega would actually *tell* the public about such an intention, when they have a two month old (in the West) console to market.
--
Just for those people who never bother reading the links that slashdot links to, the article basically says this is a misunderstanding.
In his speech, the guy basically said that Sega's emphasis would be on software and internet services.
The implication here is that Sega won't stop making consoles -- but that the console is not their business, it is merely an enabler for the *real* business, which is content production and delivery.
--
In strict computer science terms, the kernel is the OS.
However, the common use of the phrase seems to include all the basic tools.
Therefore, the "OS" of the average Linux box could be said to include the kernel, the shell, the basic shell and text utils, filesystem utils etc.
This is why RMS harps on about "GNU/Linux", since the FSF wrote all the GNU stuff to be part of the "GNU Operating System", and it's all in almost every Linux distribution.
IMHO, X, Window managers etc are a bit of a grey area. You *could* say they were part of the OS, but it's pushing it a bit.
As far as Windows is concerned, I the boundaries are harder to see -- isn't the GUI part of the kernel? Whatever, notepad.exe is on the CD, and that is not part of the OS.
--
I was struck by the wording "can be obtained for free".
It's an example of how the general public just haven't been told that GPL'd software is free in that it "has freedom", rather than "can be obtained gratis".
People, when you see this kind of thing, *please* make a point of informing people, so they'll know in future.
--
Following up my own post...
Of course, you could give customers optional levels of security: "You may stick to a login/password, or you may pay $20 for a card reader for your PC"
--
It's difficult to talk about this without seeming like a patronising bastard, so I'll apologise in advance.
There are a lot of stupid people out there, and once you start enforcing password quality rules, they'll get confused. Faced with something like the RedHat password quality checker, which requires a non-dictionary-word, and doesn't allow stuff like "t3th3r" or "gr0up13s" either, many people will either give up, or write the password down.
The more complex the restrictions, the harder the passwords become to remember, and the more likely they are to write them down.
One nice idea would be to make users accept some form of licence, which makes it clear that if *they* compromise their password's secrecy, you're not liable.
For more security, I guess you'd need some form of swipe-card or something (or the calculator thang described elsewhere), which would obviously up the cost of the project.
--
"Free software is about freedom. The only thing that can happen by China's adoption of GNU/Linux is more freedom."
Uh, or millions of people will say "Oh, Free software is written by a load of Commie Red Hippies.", and go off and buy Windows 2000.
One or the other.
--
Communism fails, because it ignores (perfectly natural and acceptable) aspects of human nature which bugger up the machinery.
Have a care for a simple-minded atheist, and reword that so that your point is clearer.
I'm trying to understand what you're getting at.
--
pieces divagating about "open-source communism"; the clumsy rhetoric of some of our
past ambassadors may have made that outcome inevitable."
... so he couldn't resist getting some RMS-bashing in. And he complains about snideness in others !?!
--
There I was, all prepared to slag off ESR for "presuming to speak for the whole Linux community", when he goes and apologises for it in advance.
My only problem is the bit about the "repressive ideals of Communism".
It's worth noting that there *are* *no* communist states in the world today, whatever they choose to call themselves. Every country which has tried to become communist, has ended up being something else. If you want to know why, read Animal Farm.
... and yeah, the Chinese Government sucks, and it'd do Linux a whole lot of harm if people in general thought that the average Linux hacker had any sympathies with them.
--
Sure. Maybe.
Both keyboard and PC share a (pseudo) random number algorithm. When you power on, they negotiate a seed. At every keypress and/or clock tick, they both move on to the next random number, which will stay in sync. Keypresses are XOR'd with the random number before transmission.
Hence, the snooper needs to work out what the pseudo-random number algorithm is, *and* calculate the seed, in order to glean information from the RF emitted by your keyboard.
--
This is old news.
I have an Atari Jaguar with Tempest capabilities...
--
(posting a day late. Will anyone read this?)
There was a recent report (dunno where) which suggested that in two years' time, desktop PCs will not be the most common way of accessing the Internet, with the large number of set-top-box systems on their way.
For example, now I have a Dreamcast, if I just want to check a web page quickly, and I happen to be downstairs, I'll use the DC rather than leave the comfort of my living room.
The DC browser lacks a whole lot of features, which in one way is a shame -- but one positive aspect is that a large population of (potentially money-spending) internet users, stuck with basic HTML renderers and not much else, might encourage content providers to tone down their reliance on obscure plugins.
There's *very little* of real worth that can't be accomplished using a browser something akin to Netscape 2, and the fancy stuff goes on at the server side. That's what made the Web so nice in the first place.
--
The Microsoft's, the IBMs, the Novells of this world have a lot to lose, in terms of customers who are no longer tied to their existing products
The number one reason for a large company like this to go Open Source is customer demand (I'm guessing IBM took on Apache because they realised that Apache was what the customer wanted).
Moral? -- keep evangelising. We have advertising budgets up against us.
--