The moral high ground would be to ensure some way of getting all the information out of BK DBs (which I gather McVoy was going to provide), and then write a free tool, servers and clients, to do the same job -- with its own, separate protocols.
Yes, *if* that had happened, that would have been great.
But Larry's positions has consistently been, for more than three years, that the kernel repositories are *his* proprietary information and he would never entertain the idea of exporting the information. If you read the BKL carefully, you'll see that it claims even the commit messages become his IP. So that was never going to happen. Shame.
2: Some bk repositories are republished by rsync on kernel.org. The bk licence doesn't require users not to disclose their source to third parties.
3/4: BitMover are not the only people in the world to operate a server; in any case they operate a public server to which anyone may connect. You do not need to sign a contract to use it (afaik, i've never done it.)
someone was working their hardest to steal the design of Bitkeeper
They were working their hardest to get their own data back out of a proprietary data jail. Is that so wrong? What started this was an export tool, *not* a bk clone.
The reason Larry got pissed off is that he sees the history of the kernel (and other projects in bk) as his proprietary information, not the property of the original authors. If he was worried that in the course of getting their data out people would discover his secrets then he should have provided a decent export tool in the first place. (Practically every other version control system does, including Clearcase and p4 IIRC.)
This is like Microsoft cancelling your whole company's Office licences because somebody tried to decode a.DOC file -- leaving you with all your documents unusable, and many people saying "I told you so."
In a few projects I'm involved, compared to other distributed Apple are far less likely to send back useful bug reports or patches.
This is surprising because you'd think they actually generate *more* patches, being on a non-Linux platform and all. And indeed if you look at their source you find they actually did make lots of changes, they just didn't feed them back, which as we know is not really optimal.
Just my experience, ymmv, etc.
Not that this makes Apple evil, they just aren't as experienced in how to make open source work as folks at other companies. But they are learning, and trying to learn.
A bona-fide miracle would be evidence against materialism. Suppose the ex-pope jumped up from his slab, reincarnated, and started walking around shaking hands and telling jokes. Such an occurrence can't easily be accomodated in our understanding of biology; we'd need to either massively rethink things in a materialist worldview (he's a clone? a robot? his death was faked?) or assume divine intervention. But this is very unlikely...
I'm a materialist, but I see that as a theory not a religion. I'm open to contrary evidence, but I just haven't heard of anything credible yet. There are certainly lots of ways in which materialism could potentially be falsified.
Is there anything which would convince ID proponent's they're wrong, short of an infinitely detailed materialistic explanation of everything in the world?
On the other hand, most of the ID organizations have a statement of faith that they are not prepared to consider changing, no matter what. It is a point of pride that they are not interested in contrary evidence. This insistence that their doctrine is right and above questioning is fundamentally antiscientific, and a pretty good demonstration of the difference between religion (assertion of authority) and science (search for truth).
The other wierd thing is that in Australia and to a lesser extent elsewhere the word "liberal" is being badly distorted in the opposite direction, as the Liberal party becomes a Tory party.
I think the grandparent was pretty silly describing it as a right-wing rag, but even if they were thinking of only economic matters it's not particularly accurate. They're moderately free-market but not ultracorporatist.
Free speech does not imply that any particular publisher is obliged to carry your ideas. If you don't like SciAm, try to get into New Scientist, or start your own magazine and try to get equal credibility. Bear in mind the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
This is not censorship: they just have the right not to publish what they consider bullshit. The foundation of the rationalist method is that you have the right to try to prove them wrong.
If this is suppression of heresy, it's pretty mild compared to most religions. Two hundred years ago in the west, or today in other countries, you could be fined or imprisioned or worse for publishing blasphemous material: anything that questions accepted dogma. People were burned for possessing forbidden books.
From a brief look at the orion web site it would seem that Gentry was booted for basically spamming the archive with ten variations of the same paper. All LANL wanted him to do was integrate them into a single one, and it seems he didn't because he wants to be a martyr. There is the same ridiculous confusion of "one publisher won't take my work" with "I'm being persecuted!" Typical.
Catholics and Muslisms (at the extreme) set off bombs; rationalists refuse to indulge cranks. How is that just as bad? Few religions respect freedom of conscience to the same extent as the modern western materialist-with-christian-undertones amalgum.
So how *did* the kidneys get there? Don't just say "ID", tell me: what would a hypothetical martian have observed if they had been present and watching at the time?
Yes, nobody disagrees that she did a lot of work to advance the Catholic church, and on those grounds deserved recognition. She was probably the best PR for them in the whole century.
The problem is the widespread but erroneous assumption that she was actually doing "good" in any way other than promoting catholicism. Many people who are not Catholics have this idea that she was helping people in India, but as Hitchens documents, she really didn't do that at all.
If she had been a devout catholic while giving medical care to the poor I would have admired her. But the truth, it seems, is the opposite: she withheld care while sending money to Rome. The whole point is that she was not selfish, but entirely partisan.
I donate from every pay to a charity that helps the disadvantaged, without any religious agenda. I could give more, but at least I am not actively doing harm. From the linked essay:
Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.
This idea that "advancing catholic dogma" is exactly equivalent to "helping people" is precisely the same hook seen in other cults.
Proves that shell is not a good choice. Now they [arch] are having trouble evolving it and fixing scalability problems, and they are wasting time reinventing hash tables and memory allocators, which (to me) indicates that they went too far in the other direction and C is not a good choice either.
As I recall, QNX does have routines or patterns that let you send a message but not immediately wait for a reply. But this is the exception, much as asynchronous or nonblocking IO is the exception. The straightforward way to write most programs is to block while waiting for an external request.
Even if the microkernel does not support this, you can build async RPC on top of sync RPC by having the recipient just start something in the background and return immediately.
You cannot optimize the fast path without kernel support -- letting the scheduler know that control has passed from one task to another.
Yes, I think Wikipedia has the reputation of containing a lot of techy content. The whole Internet is biased towards techy content: search for any word and you tend to get software projects or similar things that happen to contain that word (e.g. 'cult of the dead cow'). But so what? It doesn't mean any other content is excluded.
No, that's not what it says. It is much broader. The licence (no longer shown on their web site) says
Notwithstanding any other terms in this License, this License is not available to You if You and/or your employer develop, produce, sell, and/or resell a product which contains substantially similar capabilities of the BitKeeper Software, or, in the reasonable opinion of BitMover, competes with the BitKeeper Software.
I keep beer in a fridge, because I bought it outright and can do whatever I want with it. If the fridge vendor had sold it on the condition I not whine about it, that they can come and look in it anytime, can take it away if they want, and can lock me out, well... I might use an esky or I might get the fridge and suffer, but either way I'd be pissed off.
Ideology doesn't have to come into it. Making sure you won't be locked out of your SCM system is simple risk management.
Nobody is asking you to run an experimental system that hasn't even made a release let. Years down the track when other people have used it happily for repositories of similar size and importance then sure, why not? This is exactly the same adoption curve Subversion had to climb.
Arguing whether Python can or can't scale is less interesting than showing that bazaar-ng does or doesn't scale in practice. Being skeptical about python performance is OK, but don't jump to conclusions.
The current pre-release bazaar-ng code can manage kernel-sized trees faster than arch (written in C) or darcs, and comparably fast to svn. So far, so good. Will it still be fast enough when it's feature-complete and when there are proper benchmarks? We will see.
Again, so what? A G5 probably won't boot a five year old Linux distribution either. My new i386 laptop probably wouldn't boot a three-year-old copy of either windows or linux, because of its crazy hardware.
My point is that the mere fact that a system started out on platform X says nothing about how well or poorly it will now support platform Y.
Windows NT originally started out on an intel risc machine (i860). Sun started on m68k and is now on ultrasparc. HP-UX started on PA-RISC and is now primarily on ia64. PalmOS started on motorola m68881(?) and is now on ARM. Staying on the same set of processors over ten years is the exception.
Mac OS was designed for the 68000 platform first and then ported to PowerPC later. So what? In both cases the ports happened over 7(?) years ago, and there are few x86 or m68k peculiarities left.
Slashdot Mirror
The moral high ground would be to ensure some way of getting all the information out of BK DBs (which I gather McVoy was going to provide), and then write a free tool, servers and clients, to do the same job -- with its own, separate protocols.
Yes, *if* that had happened, that would have been great.
But Larry's positions has consistently been, for more than three years, that the kernel repositories are *his* proprietary information and he would never entertain the idea of exporting the information. If you read the BKL carefully, you'll see that it claims even the commit messages become his IP. So that was never going to happen. Shame.
Whether or not such a clause in the EULA is valid is irrelevant: tridge never signed or agreed to the EULA, so he is not bound by it.
Wrong:
2: Some bk repositories are republished by rsync on kernel.org. The bk licence doesn't require users not to disclose their source to third parties.
3/4: BitMover are not the only people in the world to operate a server; in any case they operate a public server to which anyone may connect. You do not need to sign a contract to use it (afaik, i've never done it.)
someone was working their hardest to steal the design of Bitkeeper
.DOC file -- leaving you with all your documents unusable, and many people saying "I told you so."
They were working their hardest to get their own data back out of a proprietary data jail. Is that so wrong? What started this was an export tool, *not* a bk clone.
The reason Larry got pissed off is that he sees the history of the kernel (and other projects in bk) as his proprietary information, not the property of the original authors. If he was worried that in the course of getting their data out people would discover his secrets then he should have provided a decent export tool in the first place. (Practically every other version control system does, including Clearcase and p4 IIRC.)
This is like Microsoft cancelling your whole company's Office licences because somebody tried to decode a
*Did* anyone violate their licence? That doesn't seem to be the case here, at any rate there is no public evidence for it yet.
In a few projects I'm involved, compared to other distributed Apple are far less likely to send back useful bug reports or patches.
This is surprising because you'd think they actually generate *more* patches, being on a non-Linux platform and all. And indeed if you look at their source you find they actually did make lots of changes, they just didn't feed them back, which as we know is not really optimal.
Just my experience, ymmv, etc.
Not that this makes Apple evil, they just aren't as experienced in how to make open source work as folks at other companies. But they are learning, and trying to learn.
A bona-fide miracle would be evidence against materialism. Suppose the ex-pope jumped up from his slab, reincarnated, and started walking around shaking hands and telling jokes. Such an occurrence can't easily be accomodated in our understanding of biology; we'd need to either massively rethink things in a materialist worldview (he's a clone? a robot? his death was faked?) or assume divine intervention. But this is very unlikely...
I'm a materialist, but I see that as a theory not a religion. I'm open to contrary evidence, but I just haven't heard of anything credible yet. There are certainly lots of ways in which materialism could potentially be falsified.
Is there anything which would convince ID proponent's they're wrong, short of an infinitely detailed materialistic explanation of everything in the world?
On the other hand, most of the ID organizations have a statement of faith that they are not prepared to consider changing, no matter what. It is a point of pride that they are not interested in contrary evidence. This insistence that their doctrine is right and above questioning is fundamentally antiscientific, and a pretty good demonstration of the difference between religion (assertion of authority) and science (search for truth).
Zeta is not the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Omega is. The next letter after Zeta would be Eta.
I think he understood the pressures, he just wrote unclearly.
Thus the great Economist article a while ago: Theres's a word for that (and we want it back).
The other wierd thing is that in Australia and to a lesser extent elsewhere the word "liberal" is being badly distorted in the opposite direction, as the Liberal party becomes a Tory party.
I think the grandparent was pretty silly describing it as a right-wing rag, but even if they were thinking of only economic matters it's not particularly accurate. They're moderately free-market but not ultracorporatist.
Free speech does not imply that any particular publisher is obliged to carry your ideas. If you don't like SciAm, try to get into New Scientist, or start your own magazine and try to get equal credibility. Bear in mind the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
This is not censorship: they just have the right not to publish what they consider bullshit. The foundation of the rationalist method is that you have the right to try to prove them wrong.
If this is suppression of heresy, it's pretty mild compared to most religions. Two hundred years ago in the west, or today in other countries, you could be fined or imprisioned or worse for publishing blasphemous material: anything that questions accepted dogma. People were burned for possessing forbidden books.
From a brief look at the orion web site it would seem that Gentry was booted for basically spamming the archive with ten variations of the same paper. All LANL wanted him to do was integrate them into a single one, and it seems he didn't because he wants to be a martyr. There is the same ridiculous confusion of "one publisher won't take my work" with "I'm being persecuted!" Typical.
Catholics and Muslisms (at the extreme) set off bombs; rationalists refuse to indulge cranks. How is that just as bad? Few religions respect freedom of conscience to the same extent as the modern western materialist-with-christian-undertones amalgum.
So how *did* the kidneys get there? Don't just say "ID", tell me: what would a hypothetical martian have observed if they had been present and watching at the time?
Yes, nobody disagrees that she did a lot of work to advance the Catholic church, and on those grounds deserved recognition. She was probably the best PR for them in the whole century.
The problem is the widespread but erroneous assumption that she was actually doing "good" in any way other than promoting catholicism. Many people who are not Catholics have this idea that she was helping people in India, but as Hitchens documents, she really didn't do that at all.
If she had been a devout catholic while giving medical care to the poor I would have admired her. But the truth, it seems, is the opposite: she withheld care while sending money to Rome. The whole point is that she was not selfish, but entirely partisan.
I donate from every pay to a charity that helps the disadvantaged, without any religious agenda. I could give more, but at least I am not actively doing harm. From the linked essay:
Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.
This idea that "advancing catholic dogma" is exactly equivalent to "helping people" is precisely the same hook seen in other cults.
Proves that shell is not a good choice. Now they [arch] are having trouble evolving it and fixing scalability problems, and they are wasting time reinventing hash tables and memory allocators, which (to me) indicates that they went too far in the other direction and C is not a good choice either.
As I recall, QNX does have routines or patterns that let you send a message but not immediately wait for a reply. But this is the exception, much as asynchronous or nonblocking IO is the exception. The straightforward way to write most programs is to block while waiting for an external request.
Even if the microkernel does not support this, you can build async RPC on top of sync RPC by having the recipient just start something in the background and return immediately.
You cannot optimize the fast path without kernel support -- letting the scheduler know that control has passed from one task to another.
Yes, I think Wikipedia has the reputation of containing a lot of techy content. The whole Internet is biased towards techy content: search for any word and you tend to get software projects or similar things that happen to contain that word (e.g. 'cult of the dead cow'). But so what? It doesn't mean any other content is excluded.
No, that's not what it says. It is much broader. The licence (no longer shown on their web site) says
Notwithstanding any other terms in this License, this License is not available to You if You and/or your employer develop, produce, sell, and/or resell a product which contains substantially similar capabilities of the BitKeeper Software, or, in the reasonable opinion of BitMover, competes with the BitKeeper Software.
I keep beer in a fridge, because I bought it outright and can do whatever I want with it. If the fridge vendor had sold it on the condition I not whine about it, that they can come and look in it anytime, can take it away if they want, and can lock me out, well... I might use an esky or I might get the fridge and suffer, but either way I'd be pissed off.
Ideology doesn't have to come into it. Making sure you won't be locked out of your SCM system is simple risk management.
Nobody is asking you to run an experimental system that hasn't even made a release let. Years down the track when other people have used it happily for repositories of similar size and importance then sure, why not? This is exactly the same adoption curve Subversion had to climb.
Arguing whether Python can or can't scale is less interesting than showing that bazaar-ng does or doesn't scale in practice. Being skeptical about python performance is OK, but don't jump to conclusions.
The current pre-release bazaar-ng code can manage kernel-sized trees faster than arch (written in C) or darcs, and comparably fast to svn. So far, so good. Will it still be fast enough when it's feature-complete and when there are proper benchmarks? We will see.
Again, so what? A G5 probably won't boot a five year old Linux distribution either. My new i386 laptop probably wouldn't boot a three-year-old copy of either windows or linux, because of its crazy hardware.
My point is that the mere fact that a system started out on platform X says nothing about how well or poorly it will now support platform Y.
Windows NT originally started out on an intel risc machine (i860). Sun started on m68k and is now on ultrasparc. HP-UX started on PA-RISC and is now primarily on ia64. PalmOS started on motorola m68881(?) and is now on ARM. Staying on the same set of processors over ten years is the exception.
People always use that as a strawman, but I've never seen a comment like that, and I've seen some pretty bad code.
I agree about flamebait... but it is possible for a fp to be redundant, if it just repeats content from the article, and that happens often enough.
Mac OS was designed for the 68000 platform first and then ported to PowerPC later. So what? In both cases the ports happened over 7(?) years ago, and there are few x86 or m68k peculiarities left.