In the Halloween documents, Microsoft calls Linux development "primitive" (go ahead, look it up... they actually said that) because they don't have drag and drop, wizard, click and code interfaces. I use Emacs and gcc to code, and I'm proud of it. My company gave me a copy of MSVC++, which I have never used. I think I mounted the CD once, but that was it.
Microsoft thinks that anything that requires you to actually think about programming is the past and that their dumbed-down wizards are the future. I happen to like to actually write my own code, thank you. It seems to me that a VC++ clone running under WINE is exactly what I want to avoid.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I like to write code, not fill in forms. What do you think?
Which band do you think is acting more responsibly? The "Let's sell t-shirts" Offspring or the "We Hate Fans" Metallica? Which one do you think will be getting more of my hard earned cash?
I've been shopping for a new hard drive, and this is just what I need. Fast, cost is no object, and works with Linux. All I need is to find an actual product...:-)
Seriously, this is something that could never happen with proprietary software. All that overhead wasted on keeping it closed and under control... kinda sad, huh?
I heard rumors of such a thing. Investigation of the FSF homepage revealev Harmony a "project was born to make KDE free software" that "aims to be API-compatible with Troll Tech's Qt toolkit". Doesn't seem to be very far along (look at current status) but all we have to do is wait and code.
RMS is one of the bravest people I can think of. No matter what thousands of people think about him, he keeps on going. You are absolutly right. He saw a threat to his right to have the code, and he fought for that right. People say he didn't start the free software movement; they use BSD as an example. BSD is making a comeback, but they aren't what I would call strong. RMS fights for his rights and ours, and he has preserved them this far. All of you should hope that he doesn't give up, give in, or be pushed under.
The thing I like about Debian the most is that is is pure. I can rely on not having any non-free software in my GNU/Linux (they use the term!) when I go Debian. If they change that, what is the advantage of Debian? Their frequent releases?
The day the news first hit Slashdot, I wandered over to the Open Group and took a look at this thing. I considered downloading it, but I thought the same thing RMS is saying: why not just use the LessTif I already had?
Well, RMS makes good points. I consider myself a purist, but maybe not a fanatic. I prefer the GPL and the term "free software" but I don't refuse when I find that I have to use Windows at work. I would like to, but I don't. However, Open Motif is something I can live without. Motif is nowhere near as popular as it was even two years ago, and it has a free alternative.
Why would I want to use clickware restricted to certain platforms that uses a screwy definition of open source? It sounds to me like the Open Group wanted all the advatages of "open source" without all the hassel. This isn't really open source. This is just something designed to look like it.
I am vindicated. RMS has spoken, and he is on my side.
In my eyes, art in systems research is defined as writing elegant code and updating it. Who wants to bet that Microsoft's kernel's code is as tangled and unelegant as most of the rest of it? Most of their code has been twisted up by the addtion of numerous layers of "features" piled on top of rather than incorporated into the old code.
Windows is a shell running on DOS. Digging around in COMMAND.COM reveals the text DOS 7 (or 7.1 for 98). Even Windows 2000 is a shell running on top of a beta version of a DOS clone. Windows NT is what Microsoft did with OS/2 after they and IBM parted ways. It is based on version 1 of OS/2, which was basically a rewritten version of DOS.
The history of DOS traces back to something called Quick and Dirty Operating System: a CP/M clone. CP/M was a simplified Unix for home computers. It shares the Unix devices. If you know where to look in the Control Panel, you can find you C: drive refered to as/dev/hda. There's no innovation in Windows. Just stolen concepts and hastily added features few people like.
The innovation is Linux. It may be a Unix clone based on old ideas, but how much of the Linux kernel (which is all Linux is, really, a kernel) is code from AT&T, BSD, Minix, or anywhere else? Yeah, that's what I thought. And how much code in the GNU tools is taken from AT&T or elsewhere? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. So we have a reimplimentation of Unix based on new ideas. Old concepts reborn in new and different ways. Look at the new/dev structure. That's different.
Linux is innovative not because it uses new ideas, but because, unlike Microsoft, it uses artful and elegant code based on a new model and a new view of old ideas. I might even call BSD innovative: there are a lot of old ideas being turned on their heads into something new and wonderful over there. OpenBSD isn't something AT&T ever thought up.
The true innovation is where the old and new meet. Old ideas and new uses for them (the Linux kernel), or new ideas and old uses (such as the unified server in XF4.0).
As for the excitement, well, which gives more of a raw thrill: watching Windows 98 tell you how great it is while it copies files, or compiling that beta kernel?
Maybe the new and the old are meeting in Windows, but it doesn't improve it. When they come together in the Linux and BSD worlds, it creates something artful and exciting. And that's where the innovation comes in.
The lease on our car is winding down right now. We have the option to lease a new car or buy the one we have now. After investigating a little bit, it turns out the leasing a new car is actually less expensive than buying the one we have now. This means something.
What it means is that the car company wants us to lease, not buy. Companies have discovered that consumers don't really need to own things, they just need to feel like they do. As long as the consumer doesn't realize it, the rationale goes, you're free to scew him however you want.
This isn't really related to technology. Maybe it was helped along by old guys in boardrooms noticing that new startups were making millions without actual products. But it's been happening throughout history. Serfdom was a little more direct, maybe, but in a world where even the lower classes have rights you need to be sneaky about how you control their lives. Other wise they'll find out what you're doing and protest.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to say that this is illegal. There aren't many laws that they're breaking, it's just a principle thing (that Apogee trademark thing was unconstitutional.). It should be illegal for a company to be able to say they don't take any responsibility for a product. You bought it, you used it, and you should expect it to work. But they've been doing similar things with clickwrap agreements for years.
It should be illegal to have a contract with penalties for "unusual wear and tear" fees paid to car companies that depend on the opinion of the company's employees when they inspect your vechicle. Shouldn't there be an agency that at least pretends to be independant?
I thing that these things are wrong, and many people would probably agree with me. But until Joe Consumer decides that he wants a product that he can depend on without all sorts of arbitrary limitations, nothing will change. With free software (and that new open softdrink) you get the advantages closed software leaves out. When you buy, someone takes responsibility. If Emacs doesn't work, the FSF won't help, but if you bought in a RedHat box, you can just call them. If you don't like the way it works, you can do something instead of just paying up for the next upgrade or for an Authorized Repairman.
Companies make money by taking away control, so they do it. It's that simple.
The first time I encountered spam (now that requires some digging in the ol' memory) it didn't seem like a problem. How hard was it to delete a few e-mail messages I didn't want?
Then I realized that these email messages were wasteing connect time and bandwidth I would rather be spending on something else. Who says that somebody has the right to waste the (admittedly insignificant) money I pay for the connection and the resources that I use downloading spam that I would like to use for a project of my choice? It's like getting collect calls that demand you mail the caller some random item in exchange for a sales pitch. You pay money, you give up something you own, and you get an ad in return. That's not something I want in my world.
If I had my way, all spammers would be punished fairly and simply: make them listen to a horde of provoked trolls all day.
Good old days? I quote from a newspaper article about Lincon's death: "Details unclear. There is much confusion here."
Thing is, the good old days weren't. There has always been ambition on the part of the media to get the best scoop. Always will be./. is no different. We have a few hundred thousand free software afficandos looking for a data rush or whatever, so/. gives them a chance to get at what they want.
This is no worse than crowds of people flocking around a paperboy who is crying, "Extra! Extra!" It isn't just/., it's just that/. has a larger audience than many sites, so the effect is much more visible. Watch the usage on kernel.org whenever some rumor drifts across the digital wind. While there is something to be said about letting mirrors "gear up", you can always set it up so that the mirror gets priority access to the new version over the anon logins.
/. provides a service: it gives the people what they want when they want it. In this case, "the people" want a peek at the latest software, and/. tells they when they hear it coming.
Actually, you make a good point. One of the very few things I don't like about slack is the KDE default. But I just installed the new gnome from the -current. I've tried RedHat, but it just felt too wierd to an old bsd holdover like me.
They've added Helix stuff, a new QT, XF86 4.0, new versions of the Mandrake tools (DiskDrake, etc.), and better hardware support. Still not enough to make me switch from Slackware. According to P.V., they're getting ready to start testing for a release.
Kerberos was paid for by US taxpayers. Kerberos was intended to remain free. The GPL, is IMHO the best license available. Is it perfect? No. But it ensures that free software remains free. If an open standard is repackaged by a monopolistic corporation as the new "standard", everybody looses. The open version of the standard is "obsolete", as there is a better version available... for a price.
Micro$oft will push W2K to anyone willing to listen to their sales pitch. Some will be stupid enough to listen. Companies that depend on W2K servers will demand programs that use the new features, such as the "improved" Kerberos. The proprietary Kerberos snowballs into a real standard. That's a bad thing.
Micro$oft is trying to seize control of an open standard and replace it with a proprietary one owned by them. In the process, they are ignoring the natural rights of people everywhere. This may seem small, but it can easily become a major problem. Micro$oft is trying to control distribution of their "standards" based on legally questionable assertions.
If they can stop people from reading about their software, or telling others how it works by distributing the spec, could they next target, say, Word Perfect? After all, they use something that a hallucination exec might call a "trade secret" in their program. It can read the Word file format. Imagine where this could go even if the Kerberos spec isn't widely accepted. You better not publish a review they don't like: it might violate the "Use and automatically sign on the dotted line" agreement required to even look at the program.
Speech was also intended to remain free. The day a large corporation takes away my constitutional rights, especially that one, is the day I pack up to leave the US.
I found this quote one day in an article by RMS, and think about it a lot: "Millions for defense, but not a cent for surrender." Sounds brilliant to me. It wouldn't take much money to remove the comments from/. and "solve" the problem. But what is the real cost of that "solution"?
The final cost is terrible: an act of censorship. Censorship==BAD. Call me extreme if you will, but I think it's dangerous to just let things happen. This is wrong. What is wrong must be opposed.
Your rights are in danger. This is not a drill.
Thanks for taking the time to read by boring rant.
We all know what happens to sites linked to in/. stories. Since a (beta) version of/. is now linked from a story, could slashdot be (theoretically) slashdotted? I tried to load it and it looks that way to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft thinks that anything that requires you to actually think about programming is the past and that their dumbed-down wizards are the future. I happen to like to actually write my own code, thank you. It seems to me that a VC++ clone running under WINE is exactly what I want to avoid.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I like to write code, not fill in forms. What do you think?
Which band do you think is acting more responsibly? The "Let's sell t-shirts" Offspring or the "We Hate Fans" Metallica? Which one do you think will be getting more of my hard earned cash?
Seriously, this is something that could never happen with proprietary software. All that overhead wasted on keeping it closed and under control... kinda sad, huh?
I heard rumors of such a thing. Investigation of the FSF homepage revealev Harmony a "project was born to make KDE free software" that "aims to be API-compatible with Troll Tech's Qt toolkit". Doesn't seem to be very far along (look at current status) but all we have to do is wait and code.
Your right to free code depends on it.
The thing I like about Debian the most is that is is pure. I can rely on not having any non-free software in my GNU/Linux (they use the term!) when I go Debian. If they change that, what is the advantage of Debian? Their frequent releases?
Well, RMS makes good points. I consider myself a purist, but maybe not a fanatic. I prefer the GPL and the term "free software" but I don't refuse when I find that I have to use Windows at work. I would like to, but I don't. However, Open Motif is something I can live without. Motif is nowhere near as popular as it was even two years ago, and it has a free alternative.
Why would I want to use clickware restricted to certain platforms that uses a screwy definition of open source? It sounds to me like the Open Group wanted all the advatages of "open source" without all the hassel. This isn't really open source. This is just something designed to look like it.
I am vindicated. RMS has spoken, and he is on my side.
Windows is a shell running on DOS. Digging around in COMMAND.COM reveals the text DOS 7 (or 7.1 for 98). Even Windows 2000 is a shell running on top of a beta version of a DOS clone. Windows NT is what Microsoft did with OS/2 after they and IBM parted ways. It is based on version 1 of OS/2, which was basically a rewritten version of DOS.
The history of DOS traces back to something called Quick and Dirty Operating System: a CP/M clone. CP/M was a simplified Unix for home computers. It shares the Unix devices. If you know where to look in the Control Panel, you can find you C: drive refered to as /dev/hda. There's no innovation in Windows. Just stolen concepts and hastily added features few people like.
The innovation is Linux. It may be a Unix clone based on old ideas, but how much of the Linux kernel (which is all Linux is, really, a kernel) is code from AT&T, BSD, Minix, or anywhere else? Yeah, that's what I thought. And how much code in the GNU tools is taken from AT&T or elsewhere? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. So we have a reimplimentation of Unix based on new ideas. Old concepts reborn in new and different ways. Look at the new /dev structure. That's different.
Linux is innovative not because it uses new ideas, but because, unlike Microsoft, it uses artful and elegant code based on a new model and a new view of old ideas. I might even call BSD innovative: there are a lot of old ideas being turned on their heads into something new and wonderful over there. OpenBSD isn't something AT&T ever thought up.
The true innovation is where the old and new meet. Old ideas and new uses for them (the Linux kernel), or new ideas and old uses (such as the unified server in XF4.0).
As for the excitement, well, which gives more of a raw thrill: watching Windows 98 tell you how great it is while it copies files, or compiling that beta kernel?
Maybe the new and the old are meeting in Windows, but it doesn't improve it. When they come together in the Linux and BSD worlds, it creates something artful and exciting. And that's where the innovation comes in.
What it means is that the car company wants us to lease, not buy. Companies have discovered that consumers don't really need to own things, they just need to feel like they do. As long as the consumer doesn't realize it, the rationale goes, you're free to scew him however you want.
This isn't really related to technology. Maybe it was helped along by old guys in boardrooms noticing that new startups were making millions without actual products. But it's been happening throughout history. Serfdom was a little more direct, maybe, but in a world where even the lower classes have rights you need to be sneaky about how you control their lives. Other wise they'll find out what you're doing and protest.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to say that this is illegal. There aren't many laws that they're breaking, it's just a principle thing (that Apogee trademark thing was unconstitutional.). It should be illegal for a company to be able to say they don't take any responsibility for a product. You bought it, you used it, and you should expect it to work. But they've been doing similar things with clickwrap agreements for years.
It should be illegal to have a contract with penalties for "unusual wear and tear" fees paid to car companies that depend on the opinion of the company's employees when they inspect your vechicle. Shouldn't there be an agency that at least pretends to be independant?
I thing that these things are wrong, and many people would probably agree with me. But until Joe Consumer decides that he wants a product that he can depend on without all sorts of arbitrary limitations, nothing will change. With free software (and that new open softdrink) you get the advantages closed software leaves out. When you buy, someone takes responsibility. If Emacs doesn't work, the FSF won't help, but if you bought in a RedHat box, you can just call them. If you don't like the way it works, you can do something instead of just paying up for the next upgrade or for an Authorized Repairman.
Companies make money by taking away control, so they do it. It's that simple.
Then I realized that these email messages were wasteing connect time and bandwidth I would rather be spending on something else. Who says that somebody has the right to waste the (admittedly insignificant) money I pay for the connection and the resources that I use downloading spam that I would like to use for a project of my choice? It's like getting collect calls that demand you mail the caller some random item in exchange for a sales pitch. You pay money, you give up something you own, and you get an ad in return. That's not something I want in my world.
If I had my way, all spammers would be punished fairly and simply: make them listen to a horde of provoked trolls all day.
- Linux support (no!)
- Support for other platforms (would it be possible to use Crusoe's capabilities to write a software "translator" to run code from any chip?)
- I won't have to buy another three battries when I get my ThinkPad so I can be sure to always have a spare.
Anything else?Thing is, the good old days weren't. There has always been ambition on the part of the media to get the best scoop. Always will be. /. is no different. We have a few hundred thousand free software afficandos looking for a data rush or whatever, so /. gives them a chance to get at what they want.
This is no worse than crowds of people flocking around a paperboy who is crying, "Extra! Extra!" It isn't just /., it's just that /. has a larger audience than many sites, so the effect is much more visible. Watch the usage on kernel.org whenever some rumor drifts across the digital wind. While there is something to be said about letting mirrors "gear up", you can always set it up so that the mirror gets priority access to the new version over the anon logins.
Actually, you make a good point. One of the very few things I don't like about slack is the KDE default. But I just installed the new gnome from the -current. I've tried RedHat, but it just felt too wierd to an old bsd holdover like me.
Hey... I just noticed that one of the "new features" they're advertising for 7.1 is ReiserFS, now appearing on /.!
There's (old) news about the beta here.
They've added Helix stuff, a new QT, XF86 4.0, new versions of the Mandrake tools (DiskDrake, etc.), and better hardware support. Still not enough to make me switch from Slackware. According to P.V., they're getting ready to start testing for a release.
Micro$oft will push W2K to anyone willing to listen to their sales pitch. Some will be stupid enough to listen. Companies that depend on W2K servers will demand programs that use the new features, such as the "improved" Kerberos. The proprietary Kerberos snowballs into a real standard. That's a bad thing.
Micro$oft is trying to seize control of an open standard and replace it with a proprietary one owned by them. In the process, they are ignoring the natural rights of people everywhere. This may seem small, but it can easily become a major problem. Micro$oft is trying to control distribution of their "standards" based on legally questionable assertions.
If they can stop people from reading about their software, or telling others how it works by distributing the spec, could they next target, say, Word Perfect? After all, they use something that a hallucination exec might call a "trade secret" in their program. It can read the Word file format. Imagine where this could go even if the Kerberos spec isn't widely accepted. You better not publish a review they don't like: it might violate the "Use and automatically sign on the dotted line" agreement required to even look at the program.
Speech was also intended to remain free. The day a large corporation takes away my constitutional rights, especially that one, is the day I pack up to leave the US.
I found this quote one day in an article by RMS, and think about it a lot: "Millions for defense, but not a cent for surrender." Sounds brilliant to me. It wouldn't take much money to remove the comments from /. and "solve" the problem. But what is the real cost of that "solution"?
The final cost is terrible: an act of censorship. Censorship==BAD. Call me extreme if you will, but I think it's dangerous to just let things happen. This is wrong. What is wrong must be opposed.
Your rights are in danger. This is not a drill.
Thanks for taking the time to read by boring rant.
We all know what happens to sites linked to in /. stories. Since a (beta) version of /. is now linked from a story, could slashdot be (theoretically) slashdotted? I tried to load it and it looks that way to me.