The fact that Hitler targeted commies doesn't mean anything. So did Stalin...
Nothing I've read has suggested that Stalin was any more socialist than the Nazis. Both were essentially oppressive toliterantian regimes which wrapped themselves in ideology to try to keep the people's loyalty.
Someone please moderate this guy's posts up -- they're about twice as insightful and well-written as 90-95% of the stuff that gets posted here (and often up-moderated), yet he only has a karma of 11. I want a new button that lets me give karma points to someone else:) [ yes, it's called 'moderation', but I seem to be banned from moderating. Dunno why, I only ever had time to moderate one or two posts, hardly enough of a sample to be marked an abuser ]
In a lot of people's minds, the rules change when someone makes themselves a public figure. I'm not sure this is right, but it's certainly pervasive and I'm not immune to it (check my recent postings:-/ ) ESR's tendency to insult other people in public doesn't really inspire feelings of charity either. So a reminder that public attacks are not so good is always welcome.
I liked a lot of what you said, just a few comments (because I don't have time to post a full reply myself:) )
I looked at it from a purely academic standpoint. Very strong solid arguments, that added a lot to the paper.
Interesting; while I have no particular liking for ESR, I personally felt the original paper was poorly-written, had some very wooly logic, and was generally something I think my professors would flay me for turning in.
...ESR is totally uncompromising unless it's going to further him personally, from what I have seen and heard.
The man is a dedicated Libertarian, from stuff that I've read by them it appears to be a tenet of the philosophy.
Functionality should always come before whether or not it's "free" software by anyone's definition.
If that were true, there would quite likely be no free software, since you need at least some users to do feature-requesting and bug-finding. IT isn't the beginning and the end of the computer-using world, whatever it might think:)
My God, I don't believe anyone still doesn't know this.. one of the primary targets (after Jews and Gypsies) of National Sozialismus was the left wing, particularly socialists and communists. I've never understood why they incorporated socialism into their name (maybe to get more working-class support? I dunno), but it certainly wasn't out of any ideological affection. In fact, it's interesting to note that many governments with obvious ideological or political styles in their names aren't in fact (perhaps in theory); examples: The People's Republic of China, The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, The United Kingdom, and I don't remember the government of France during the Revolution but it had a similarly ostentatious name. Daniel
That's funny. I don't know about you, but the sarcasm and character assasination ESR has perpetrated on this subject (GNU/Linux) have pretty much convinced me of what the previous poster said. He disagrees with RMS politically, that's no reason to go out of his way to personally attack and ridicule him in public. "shut up and show me the code" to the man responsible for the program ESR uses to compile HIS CODE? Even if he had to disagree, there are better (read: politer, less personal) ways to do it. The way Raymond handled that was more like certain regimes which have ostracized people for their political views and which Raymond claims to be absolutely opposed to.
I just noticed that there's a link to a homepage at the bottom and other people can run the demo. So it's not a hoax, but I stand by my other comments -- the journalist is confused:) Fractal graphics are, as many other people have said, interesting but not revolutionary. I personally doubt they work well in the general case; unless you can get a fractal that looks just like any given object (say, a car), you'll have to start building objects up from fractals, at which point you run into the same problem that we have with polys: if you look close enough the illusion of an object vanishes. The only difference is that instead of turning into flat polys close up, the objects will turn into fractals close up. (and no, reality is not made of fractals so this won't really work that much better) OTOH for things that this works well for (trees, waves, clouds) it might be interesting to have a fractal-rendering subsystem added to a 'traditional' graphics system -- only problem is, how do you do the Z-buffering? But I'm sure someone can work that out.. Or maybe he's talking about procedural textures -- again, neat but not particularly new..my university actually has a research group looking into the possibilities of these things to do 'non-photorealistic rendering'. Daniel
This sounds like a hoax. A big hoax. Here's the giveaway: He decided to use the Nintendo GameBoy as a standard for how much computing power a machine should have...and developed a series of simple equations that can be used to generate waves, textures, and shapes. Does anyone here know why polys, especially triangles, are the basis of most modern graphics systems? No? I'll tell you: it's because they're *EASY TO DRAW*. The equations are as simple as you can get; almost everything becomes linear interpolation and therefore only needs a single addition per pixel line. Waves are likely to need some sort of transcendental function (such as sine or cosine) to function properly -- something that requires either a massive hardcoded table, or a LOT of CPU time. Not to mention the need to toss either fixed-point or floating-point numbers around. GameBoys are 8-bit, aren't they? That doesn't give you much precision. Remember how you used to draw parabolas and ellipses in maths class? Um. There are three possibilities for drawing these: -> Use the equation directly. This involves a square root. Square roots are slow. -> For the ellipse, you can generate it using sines and cosines with a parameterized equation. The resolution on the parameter will determine how choppy the outside looks; even a resolution of 1 degree took a while on my TI-85 back in high school:) -> Iterate over the ENTIRE DISPLAY, applying the generic conic equation to each point; use this to find boundaries. Incredibly tricky, requires a square or two for each pixel, and is generally going to be a pain. (for the ellipses this is a little simpler, since you can bound it by the major and minor axes) Each element of such a display will require much more computation that a polygon; you could save a few polys this way, but I don't see it being the sort of revolutionary jump they describe. The article then goes on to state some fluff about plants and carbon atoms, claiming that quantum equations are 'simple' (I wish!) and suggesting that "Barbalet"'s stuff is built "from the ground up, just like nature does it." This isn't true, even if what they said is true, and has nothing to do with molecules and plants; he would be building his images up from shapes -- different shapes than are standard now, perhaps, but still just shapes. No image built "from the ground up, like nature does it," requiring the transmission of every molecule, is going to even be manageable by modern computers, let alone result in stuff that can be transmitted over modems and wires more easily than graphics images.
The more charitable explanation is that this is a highly confused journalist who has run into ellipsoid 3D graphics or something similar and thinks it's cool.
Huh? Does something prevent you from buying one of these and installing your favorite Linux distribution on it? Is there fine print requiring the use of Solaris?
> encapsulation and modularization are your friends.. OO is a good paradigm yes, but it has some glaring problems.
This strikes me as..well..a really strange response. Object Orientation is certainly meant as a way of encapsulating and modularizing code -- but so is everything else under the sun! I can write modularized code in C, C++, Python, or Scheme if I feel like it; those cover about as wide a range of programming paradigms as I can think of. Modularity has a lot more to do with finding the right abstractions for your problem than with the specific way of programming you choose. Heck, I bet you could even write modular code in assembler (I'm not going to volunteer to try it though:-) ) The problem with any encapsulation is finding the right one: one that's as simple as possible but no simpler. As you observed, object-orientation is just as susceptible to programmer error as anything else. I believe that the Linux kernel may actually be fairly modular for such a beast, and the Hurd certainly is -- both of these are written in C. Emacs is an unholy mixture of C and Lisp; I haven't closely examined the source but given that so much functionality is available as Lisp hooks I don't see how it can help but be well-written internally. (I've embedded scripting languages into some of my code -- it really makes you break stuff up in a better way) Shall I go on? Have I demonstrated my total cluelessness?:P Do you believe that modularity and the particular programming paradigm used are orthogonal? Daniel
Why can't he just dual-license it? Cygnus does this, I believe. Release a GPLed version, charge for a different license. (Note: I suspect there is a reason -- from what I understand of game companies, many would just steal the source and try to disguise the fact -- catching them would be a major pain. And of course Carmack probably doesn't want them to see how he does what he does..)
What if someone had posted this article with the following text, and sans the huge "YOUR RIGHTS ONLINE!!" heading?
DOJ to Sponsor Anti-Cracking program
The Justice department announced today that it would sponser a program to discourage children from attempting to circumvent the security of other people's computers. Press release available here.
The only 'brainwashing' I see here is in the/. headlines.
So far, the main reaction I've seen is fear that the DOJ will lump all slightly 'non-conformist' computer uses in with script kiddies and crackers. However, I see no evidence for this in the press release, apart from the fact that the 'wrong term' was used (and seriously, how many people would understand if they had substituted "crackers" for every instance of "hackers"?) Consider this. Most young children don't deal well with ambiguities. How often do you hear them told "don't get near the fire -- unless you don't touch any of the coals or the flames; you can get close enough to warm your hands up, but don't burn them -- and if a stick is burning on one end you can hold that end but not the other!" I may be about to tromp on lots of child-development theory, but I think that children and early adolescents tend to form very polarized opinions about things which become more complex as they gain experience and knowledge enough to recognize where the ambiguities fall. I believe that in the absence of a continuous stream of information tailored to continue this black-and-white picture of things, this early opinionation decays, having served its purpose already. What purpose is that? Simple. Keeping children from blundering into fires, from doing things, the gray areas of which they are unable to calculate. And on top of that, the sort of stuff discussed in the article -- particularly spam and computer cracking -- isn't much of a gray area; on the contrary, these are almost universally seen as negative activities. (with the possible exception of breaking-and-informing -- "free security audits" -- but I don't think that happens much in practice. It's more: (1) A breaks into B's computer, messes things up; (2) B gets mad at A; (3) A says "hey, I was trying to help!") Daniel
This does not fail the DFSG in any way. There is a GPLed version; it trivially is DFSG-compatible. It is also possible to purchase, from the authors, a special dispensation to modify the code for use in a proprietary program. Note that the authors can give out the code under as many different licenses as they feel like. I'm not sure how they'll deal with third-party modifications to the code, though.
Is it just me, or have we gotten..um..more disasters than usual this year? I mean..
-> Severe doughts on the eastern coast of the US. Floods in the midwest. Floods in the East from Floyd (a good bit of New Jersey and North Carolina was still underwater last I heard). -> Three major earthquakes almost on top of one another: Turkey, Greece, Taiwan. -> Political unrest and instability in Russia. Political unrest in the Middle East. Kosovo. East Timor. Other places that haven't gotten so much coverage (which I naturally can't remember) -> More stuff I've forgotten. -> This.
And the following events haven't even happened yet!
-> Massive civil disruption by Christian fundamentalists and cults of all descriptions who believe the end of the world is imminent. -> Computeres miscalculating the date and causing planes to fall out of the sky, eletricity to shut off. -> Microsoft releasing Windows '00.
Clearly these are Signs! The only thing for sensible people to do is to get a lifetime's supply of cookies and HIDE UNDER THE BED until the clock rolls over!
</SILLY>
Sorry, just trying to lighten the mood a little..
But in all seriousness this has not been a good year. I think the only disaster that hasn't happened yet is launching of nukes -- or perhaps a tornado in downtown NYC.
it's still a gaping security hole that got installed with the default RedHat distro. The crontab exploit, perhaps, but 90% of the breakin was conducted by exploiting sloppy programming in a commercial ad-banner package. The crontab explot was just the last step; in fact, I missed the crontab on the first read because I stopped paying attention once he got an arbitrary executable to run! Which isn't to say that there aren't bugs, but this sounds like a problem with commercial software and default RedHat. Personally I'm impressed that both of them held up for as long as they did:-P Daniel
Probably Linux would not see the widespread use it does, but I think some people will always want to tweak and twiddle with their own project just for the fun and learning experience. Writing a real OS kernel from scratch is Way Cool[tm]. On the other hand, maybe they would all have started working on the Hurd in a Solaris cross-compilation environment:-P
I've always wondered why so much effort is spent in AI and trying to develop a computer that can think. What's the point? Computers are useful precisely *because* they are deterministic, fast at simple arithmetic and boolean operations, and able to store huge quantities of data -- all categories where the human mind happens to be less than perfect. Personally, I suspect that human intelligence is a design compromise -- that, for example, pattern-recognition and more 'fuzzy' logic needed to deal with ambiguity come at the expense of being a little finite-state machine. (yeah, computers can do this stuff, the same way humans can do coordinate space transformations..) And even if someone does build a intelligent machine, what's the point? It just seems like a big gee-whiz project to me. Maybe it's created 'incidental' advances in other areas of computing, but I think that once someone gets voice recognition working, the only AI project -that I'm aware of- which seems to have really interesting possibilities (dictating code would be cool) will be done.
The current potato has a Netscape which is linked against libc5, which has at least substantially reduced if not eliminated this problem for me (it hasn't happened since that change, but that says nothing..:) ). A bit of a kludge (I think probably the actual problem is binary incompatibility with glibc2.1) but it works.
You should update your system more often if you want to live on the bleeding edge:-P
I've read your message several times now, and I still don't see what your complaint is. Which 'arcane commands' are you talking about? I can type M-x compile to..well..compile! I can even type 'make' if I feel like it, how's that for arcaneness! And..and, hey, I have to list my source files! I mean, this is pretty tough: foo_SOURCES = foo.c foo.h bar.c bar.h Yep, I see the arcaneness right there.. So it needs a few scripts to run. So? You appear to have defined running some scripts in the build process as being a priori an evil thing. How about if I define reliance on nonportable binary 'project files' as being a priori an evil thing? How would that change your argument? Maybe you don't see things this way. Fine, go ahead and use an IDE, I don't care. I'm not going to use one. Are you so insecure that everyone else in the world needs to do things your way for you to feel justified? (in case you didn't notice the tone of..erm..mild annoyance there, your insistence on bashing all things non-IDE simply because they aren't IDEs is getting on my nerves. If you insist on doing it again I will do my best to ignore your messages:P ) Daniel
Since I obviously don't have access to the Windows source code, and in fact haven't even seen Windows 2000, I'm going out on a limb here:P However, I can answer in one word: Modular.
Most free software projects I'm aware of are highly modular and compartmentalized. This is obviously nice aesthetically, but also necessary for the project to even exist: if the developers are geographically dispersed and working in their free time, no-one (well, almost no-one) can be an expert in every part of the system. It is therefore *essential* that the program be broken down into bite-sized pieces, or no-one will be able to comprehend it, much less work on it. Keeping a clean separation between components has the side effect of tending to contain bugs within a code module, therefore making debugging much easier. My feeling just from using Windows is that things are much more tied together -- 'integrated' if you will. There is an effort to divvy things up, but it feels like this division isn't clear enough, especially in Win9x (where you have all sorts of weird hacks involving DOS programs interacting in strange ways with Windows programs..) Small discrete programs lend themselves really well to free software development, perhaps one reason that free software has been traditionally associated with UNIX-like systems. Daniel
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, c'mon; it's in the Guiness Book of World Records, how authoritative :-P
a source do you need?
Daniel
Ouch. Someone please whack my above comment down a few points :/
Daniel
The fact that Hitler targeted commies doesn't mean anything. So did Stalin ...
Nothing I've read has suggested that Stalin was any more socialist than the Nazis. Both were essentially oppressive toliterantian regimes which wrapped themselves in ideology to try to keep the people's loyalty.
Daniel
our decision to stay an armed populace is a free choice which we've already made.
It certainly wasn't mine, I was just born here.
Daniel
Someone please moderate this guy's posts up -- they're about twice as insightful and well-written as 90-95% of the stuff that gets posted here (and often up-moderated), yet he only has a karma of 11. I want a new button that lets me give karma points to someone else :) [ yes, it's called 'moderation', but I seem to be banned from moderating. Dunno why, I only ever had time to moderate one or two posts, hardly enough of a sample to be marked an abuser ]
Daniel
Very good point.
:-/ ) ESR's tendency to insult other people in public doesn't really inspire feelings of charity either. So a reminder that public attacks are not so good is always welcome.
In a lot of people's minds, the rules change when someone makes themselves a public figure. I'm not sure this is right, but it's certainly pervasive and I'm not immune to it (check my recent postings
Daniel
I liked a lot of what you said, just a few comments (because I don't have time to post a full reply myself :) )
...ESR is totally uncompromising unless it's going to further him personally, from what I have seen and heard.
:)
I looked at it from a purely academic standpoint. Very strong solid arguments, that added a lot to the paper.
Interesting; while I have no particular liking for ESR, I personally felt the original paper was poorly-written, had some very wooly logic, and was generally something I think my professors would flay me for turning in.
The man is a dedicated Libertarian, from stuff that I've read by them it appears to be a tenet of the philosophy.
Functionality should always come before whether or not it's "free" software by anyone's definition.
If that were true, there would quite likely be no free software, since you need at least some users to do feature-requesting and bug-finding. IT isn't the beginning and the end of the computer-using world, whatever it might think
Daniel
My God, I don't believe anyone still doesn't know this.. one of the primary targets (after Jews and Gypsies) of National Sozialismus was the left wing, particularly socialists and communists. I've never understood why they incorporated socialism into their name (maybe to get more working-class support? I dunno), but it certainly wasn't out of any ideological affection.
In fact, it's interesting to note that many governments with obvious ideological or political styles in their names aren't in fact (perhaps in theory); examples: The People's Republic of China, The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, The United Kingdom, and I don't remember the government of France during the Revolution but it had a similarly ostentatious name.
Daniel
That's funny. I don't know about you, but the sarcasm and character assasination ESR has perpetrated on this subject (GNU/Linux) have pretty much convinced me of what the previous poster said.
He disagrees with RMS politically, that's no reason to go out of his way to personally attack and ridicule him in public. "shut up and show me the code" to the man responsible for the program ESR uses to compile HIS CODE? Even if he had to disagree, there are better (read: politer, less personal) ways to do it. The way Raymond handled that was more like certain regimes which have ostracized people for their political views and which Raymond claims to be absolutely opposed to.
Daniel
I just noticed that there's a link to a homepage at the bottom and other people can run the demo. So it's not a hoax, but I stand by my other comments -- the journalist is confused :) Fractal graphics are, as many other people have said, interesting but not revolutionary. I personally doubt they work well in the general case; unless you can get a fractal that looks just like any given object (say, a car), you'll have to start building objects up from fractals, at which point you run into the same problem that we have with polys: if you look close enough the illusion of an object vanishes. The only difference is that instead of turning into flat polys close up, the objects will turn into fractals close up. (and no, reality is not made of fractals so this won't really work that much better) OTOH for things that this works well for (trees, waves, clouds) it might be interesting to have a fractal-rendering subsystem added to a 'traditional' graphics system -- only problem is, how do you do the Z-buffering? But I'm sure someone can work that out.. Or maybe he's talking about procedural textures -- again, neat but not particularly new..my university actually has a research group looking into the possibilities of these things to do 'non-photorealistic rendering'. Daniel
He decided to use the Nintendo GameBoy as a standard for how much computing power a machine should have...and developed a series of simple equations that can be used to generate waves, textures, and shapes.
Does anyone here know why polys, especially triangles, are the basis of most modern graphics systems? No? I'll tell you: it's because they're *EASY TO DRAW*. The equations are as simple as you can get; almost everything becomes linear interpolation and therefore only needs a single addition per pixel line. Waves are likely to need some sort of transcendental function (such as sine or cosine) to function properly -- something that requires either a massive hardcoded table, or a LOT of CPU time. Not to mention the need to toss either fixed-point or floating-point numbers around. GameBoys are 8-bit, aren't they? That doesn't give you much precision.
Remember how you used to draw parabolas and ellipses in maths class?
Um. There are three possibilities for drawing these:
-> Use the equation directly. This involves a square root. Square roots are slow.
-> For the ellipse, you can generate it using sines and cosines with a parameterized equation. The resolution on the parameter will determine how choppy the outside looks; even a resolution of 1 degree took a while on my TI-85 back in high school
-> Iterate over the ENTIRE DISPLAY, applying the generic conic equation to each point; use this to find boundaries. Incredibly tricky, requires a square or two for each pixel, and is generally going to be a pain. (for the ellipses this is a little simpler, since you can bound it by the major and minor axes)
Each element of such a display will require much more computation that a polygon; you could save a few polys this way, but I don't see it being the sort of revolutionary jump they describe.
The article then goes on to state some fluff about plants and carbon atoms, claiming that quantum equations are 'simple' (I wish!) and suggesting that "Barbalet"'s stuff is built "from the ground up, just like nature does it." This isn't true, even if what they said is true, and has nothing to do with molecules and plants; he would be building his images up from shapes -- different shapes than are standard now, perhaps, but still just shapes. No image built "from the ground up, like nature does it," requiring the transmission of every molecule, is going to even be manageable by modern computers, let alone result in stuff that can be transmitted over modems and wires more easily than graphics images.
The more charitable explanation is that this is a highly confused journalist who has run into ellipsoid 3D graphics or something similar and thinks it's cool.
Daniel
Huh? Does something prevent you from buying one of these and installing your favorite Linux distribution on it? Is there fine print requiring the use of Solaris?
Daniel
> encapsulation and modularization are your friends..
:-) ) :P Do you believe that modularity and the particular programming paradigm used are orthogonal?
OO is a good paradigm yes, but it has some glaring problems.
This strikes me as..well..a really strange response. Object Orientation is certainly meant as a way of encapsulating and modularizing code -- but so is everything else under the sun! I can write modularized code in C, C++, Python, or Scheme if I feel like it; those cover about as wide a range of programming paradigms as I can think of. Modularity has a lot more to do with finding the right abstractions for your problem than with the specific way of programming you choose. Heck, I bet you could even write modular code in assembler (I'm not going to volunteer to try it though
The problem with any encapsulation is finding the right one: one that's as simple as possible but no simpler. As you observed, object-orientation is just as susceptible to programmer error as anything else. I believe that the Linux kernel may actually be fairly modular for such a beast, and the Hurd certainly is -- both of these are written in C. Emacs is an unholy mixture of C and Lisp; I haven't closely examined the source but given that so much functionality is available as Lisp hooks I don't see how it can help but be well-written internally. (I've embedded scripting languages into some of my code -- it really makes you break stuff up in a better way) Shall I go on? Have I demonstrated my total cluelessness?
Daniel
People don't link their program with libdoom.so
Actually, this is an interesting idea. Why not, especially now that the source is available?
Daniel
Why can't he just dual-license it? Cygnus does this, I believe. Release a GPLed version, charge for a different license.
(Note: I suspect there is a reason -- from what I understand of game companies, many would just steal the source and try to disguise the fact -- catching them would be a major pain. And of course Carmack probably doesn't want them to see how he does what he does..)
Daniel
DOJ to Sponsor Anti-Cracking program
The Justice department announced today that it would sponser a program to discourage children from attempting to circumvent the security of other people's computers. Press release available here.
The only 'brainwashing' I see here is in the
So far, the main reaction I've seen is fear that the DOJ will lump all slightly 'non-conformist' computer uses in with script kiddies and crackers. However, I see no evidence for this in the press release, apart from the fact that the 'wrong term' was used (and seriously, how many people would understand if they had substituted "crackers" for every instance of "hackers"?)
Consider this. Most young children don't deal well with ambiguities. How often do you hear them told "don't get near the fire -- unless you don't touch any of the coals or the flames; you can get close enough to warm your hands up, but don't burn them -- and if a stick is burning on one end you can hold that end but not the other!"
I may be about to tromp on lots of child-development theory, but I think that children and early adolescents tend to form very polarized opinions about things which become more complex as they gain experience and knowledge enough to recognize where the ambiguities fall. I believe that in the absence of a continuous stream of information tailored to continue this black-and-white picture of things, this early opinionation decays, having served its purpose already. What purpose is that? Simple. Keeping children from blundering into fires, from doing things, the gray areas of which they are unable to calculate.
And on top of that, the sort of stuff discussed in the article -- particularly spam and computer cracking -- isn't much of a gray area; on the contrary, these are almost universally seen as negative activities. (with the possible exception of breaking-and-informing -- "free security audits" -- but I don't think that happens much in practice. It's more: (1) A breaks into B's computer, messes things up; (2) B gets mad at A; (3) A says "hey, I was trying to help!")
Daniel
This does not fail the DFSG in any way. There is a GPLed version; it trivially is DFSG-compatible. It is also possible to purchase, from the authors, a special dispensation to modify the code for use in a proprietary program. Note that the authors can give out the code under as many different licenses as they feel like.
I'm not sure how they'll deal with third-party modifications to the code, though.
Daniel
Is it just me, or have we gotten..um..more disasters than usual this year? I mean..
-> Severe doughts on the eastern coast of the US. Floods in the midwest. Floods in the East from Floyd (a good bit of New Jersey and North Carolina was still underwater last I heard).
-> Three major earthquakes almost on top of one another: Turkey, Greece, Taiwan.
-> Political unrest and instability in Russia. Political unrest in the Middle East. Kosovo. East Timor. Other places that haven't gotten so much coverage (which I naturally can't remember)
-> More stuff I've forgotten.
-> This.
And the following events haven't even happened yet!
-> Massive civil disruption by Christian fundamentalists and cults of all descriptions who believe the end of the world is imminent.
-> Computeres miscalculating the date and causing planes to fall out of the sky, eletricity to shut off.
-> Microsoft releasing Windows '00.
Clearly these are Signs! The only thing for sensible people to do is to get a lifetime's supply of cookies and HIDE UNDER THE BED until the clock rolls over!
</SILLY>
Sorry, just trying to lighten the mood a little..
But in all seriousness this has not been a good year. I think the only disaster that hasn't happened yet is launching of nukes -- or perhaps a tornado in downtown NYC.
Daniel
it's still a gaping security hole that got installed with the default RedHat distro. :-P
The crontab exploit, perhaps, but 90% of the breakin was conducted by exploiting sloppy programming in a commercial ad-banner package. The crontab explot was just the last step; in fact, I missed the crontab on the first read because I stopped paying attention once he got an arbitrary executable to run!
Which isn't to say that there aren't bugs, but this sounds like a problem with commercial software and default RedHat. Personally I'm impressed that both of them held up for as long as they did
Daniel
Probably Linux would not see the widespread use it does, but I think some people will always want to tweak and twiddle with their own project just for the fun and learning experience. Writing a real OS kernel from scratch is Way Cool[tm]. :-P
On the other hand, maybe they would all have started working on the Hurd in a Solaris cross-compilation environment
Daniel
I've always wondered why so much effort is spent in AI and trying to develop a computer that can think. What's the point? Computers are useful precisely *because* they are deterministic, fast at simple arithmetic and boolean operations, and able to store huge quantities of data -- all categories where the human mind happens to be less than perfect. Personally, I suspect that human intelligence is a design compromise -- that, for example, pattern-recognition and more 'fuzzy' logic needed to deal with ambiguity come at the expense of being a little finite-state machine. (yeah, computers can do this stuff, the same way humans can do coordinate space transformations..) And even if someone does build a intelligent machine, what's the point?
It just seems like a big gee-whiz project to me. Maybe it's created 'incidental' advances in other areas of computing, but I think that once someone gets voice recognition working, the only AI project -that I'm aware of- which seems to have really interesting possibilities (dictating code would be cool) will be done.
Daniel
The current potato has a Netscape which is linked against libc5, which has at least substantially reduced if not eliminated this problem for me (it hasn't happened since that change, but that says nothing.. :) ). A bit of a kludge (I think probably the actual problem is binary incompatibility with glibc2.1) but it works.
:-P
You should update your system more often if you want to live on the bleeding edge
Daniel
I've read your message several times now, and I still don't see what your complaint is. Which 'arcane commands' are you talking about? I can type M-x compile to..well..compile! I can even type 'make' if I feel like it, how's that for arcaneness! And..and, hey, I have to list my source files! I mean, this is pretty tough: :P )
foo_SOURCES = foo.c foo.h bar.c bar.h
Yep, I see the arcaneness right there..
So it needs a few scripts to run. So? You appear to have defined running some scripts in the build process as being a priori an evil thing. How about if I define reliance on nonportable binary 'project files' as being a priori an evil thing? How would that change your argument?
Maybe you don't see things this way. Fine, go ahead and use an IDE, I don't care. I'm not going to use one. Are you so insecure that everyone else in the world needs to do things your way for you to feel justified?
(in case you didn't notice the tone of..erm..mild annoyance there, your insistence on bashing all things non-IDE simply because they aren't IDEs is getting on my nerves. If you insist on doing it again I will do my best to ignore your messages
Daniel
Linux can live without GNU.
/bin/* /lib/libc.*'
su -c 'rm -f
Daniel
Since I obviously don't have access to the Windows source code, and in fact haven't even seen Windows 2000, I'm going out on a limb here :P However, I can answer in one word:
Modular.
Most free software projects I'm aware of are highly modular and compartmentalized. This is obviously nice aesthetically, but also necessary for the project to even exist: if the developers are geographically dispersed and working in their free time, no-one (well, almost no-one) can be an expert in every part of the system. It is therefore *essential* that the program be broken down into bite-sized pieces, or no-one will be able to comprehend it, much less work on it. Keeping a clean separation between components has the side effect of tending to contain bugs within a code module, therefore making debugging much easier.
My feeling just from using Windows is that things are much more tied together -- 'integrated' if you will. There is an effort to divvy things up, but it feels like this division isn't clear enough, especially in Win9x (where you have all sorts of weird hacks involving DOS programs interacting in strange ways with Windows programs..)
Small discrete programs lend themselves really well to free software development, perhaps one reason that free software has been traditionally associated with UNIX-like systems.
Daniel