With a Mac base you've got better cross-platform options than anything... you've got UNIX at the base, and a decent and consistent GUI, and two virtual machine vendors tripping over each other trying to give you the best Windows experience, and for Linux development... well, it's UNIX. UNIX is UNIX is UNIX. Portable apps run on OS X with "./configure; make install" and if you need something that's written to "all the world's Red Hat" standards... well, Linux runs REALLY well inside virtual machines.
Dev tools, libraries, and compilers? You have the same GNU toolchain you have on Linux.
Yes, Apple bears watching, but for something that right now Just Works, get a Mac. And if you write portable code, if Apple decides to rip its belly out on DRM and wander around bleating and tripping over its own entrails? You can still jump ship to Linux, BSD, or even (if you're a masochist) Vista and Cygwin.
Don't misquote him and then argue against the misquotation.
Sorry, I've seen too many people arguing that the GPL was THE free software license and before the GPL there was nothing but darkness... including RMS himself back in the dark days of the '80s... that I jumped to conclusions.
However, the GPLv2 was critical in getting open source to the masses (Linux).
I don't agree. Linus has said that if the BSD effort had been a year sooner he'd have been working on that, rather than Linux, and I don't believe things would have been much different if that had happened. Apple and Microsoft and IBM and others have all used software from BSD, from post-Net/2 and Post-4.4-Lite releases (Apple used FreeBSD, Microsoft and IBM use OpenBSD), without having to have anyone "protect the license" (the only substantial change in the BSD license in the past 20 years was forced by Richard Stallman, not Apple or IBM or Microsoft), and without closing off the open source tree.
Free software is not as fragile as people think.
I do not believe that Stallman's position has significantly changed since he started, nor do I believe that his position is as *necessary*, and I think it has damaged the growth and development (and certainly the diversity) of free software.
I meant people who really wanted open software and were willing to create software and share it with others. I was talking about like-minded individuals who wanted to make sure they could use software without being forced to abide by anybody else rules.
People like Eric Allman and Kirk McKusick? People like Chuck Moore and David Ahl? People like John S. James and Ron Cain? Do you know who these people are, and what their relationship to free software is?
Unfortunately, Stallman has gradually become less and less "pro-open software" and more and more "anti-corpoate".
Richard has always been like that. The rift he talks about opening up in the '90s was opened, by him, in the early '80s. The people who were more interested in the software instead of the politics just didn't really get together all that quickly. Programmers don't herd very well.
In the 1990s, there was a philosophical split in the free software community between those of us who wanted freedom and those who only appreciated the practical by-products of free software.
In the 1980s there was a philosophical split in the free software community between those of us who wanted to write and share good code, and those who wanted to make a political movement out of it. The split was created by the GNU Manifesto, long before one group of people in the 1990s decided to pull together in response to the Free Software Foundation's politicization of the community.
The licence criteria of open source are almost the same as those of free software, because they were derived indirectly from ours.
Richard, you're rewriting history. The licenses of open source software are more often derived from sources like the BSD and MIT licnses, which are at least as old as the GPL.
Back in the day when FOSS was getting started, people like Stallman were critical. The community needed people like him to ensure that FOSS started free and stayed free.
Back in the day when FOSS was getting started, Richard Stallman was still working on Emacs and the Free Software Foundation wasn't even a twinkle in his eye. It wasn't yet called any single name, let alone "free software" or "open source software", but it was incredibly common and was being promoted and distributed without restrictions by companies like AT&T (the Software Tools virtual operating system grew out of code published in Software Tools) as well as individuals and user groups like DECUS and FIG.
It is a reaction, a defense, which people in poor countries are trying to mount against incoming "Trojan horse" of good ideas from more advanced parts with greed and violence inside.
So why, again, is this defense being mounted in support of the ideas with the greed inside, like proprietary platforms like Mono?
whereas on a phone it's more convenient to speak your commands
You're missing the point of my message. This is not about voice commands, which I agree are daft: I've got a phone with voice command support and it's a LOT more convenient to hit "5" than to say "delete" and have it respond with "saved". This is about voice transcription. Completely different problem space.
For the same reasons all the nerds despise the iPhone: because of it's uniformity right across the board, powerful graphics and CPU and consistent user experience.
I really wish that instead of copying failed technology from Microsoft (like the whole travesty of their 'you downloaded this file from the interwebs, oh noes!' security dialogs) they would recognize when something is "security theatre" and NOT follow the crowd. What's next, antivirus?
How do you turn their "anti phishing" bloatware off?
I'm not sure if you're aggressively agreeing with me or just trying to confuse me, so I'll just take your word for it that the universe uses IEEE floating point.
Simple. If there is no other intelligent life in the universe, then we are the only way the universe can say "who cares?"... therefore we have value. If there is, we're replaceable, thus our value is reduced.
What I mean is that from the point of view of this kind error correction mechanism, all mutations (good or bad) are errors to be corrected. It can't distinguish between harmful and helpful ones. There's no mechanism for that.
People who call themselves hackers because they know how to crack into computers are almost always using skript kiddie tricks like this. It's what they were doing in the '80s, except it was easier than. I *accidentally* found myself talking to the monitor on a PR1ME mainframe once when I hit ^C at the wrong time when logging on to an online service I had an account on.
Slashdot Mirror
Now suddenly there are complaints about sluggish virtual memory handling and other ills?
Compared to Linux or FreeBSD, OS X is still kinda sluggish.
Compared to Vista? Who can tell, if your virtual memory is full of predictively loaded copies of applications you last used six months ago?
With a Mac base you've got better cross-platform options than anything... you've got UNIX at the base, and a decent and consistent GUI, and two virtual machine vendors tripping over each other trying to give you the best Windows experience, and for Linux development... well, it's UNIX. UNIX is UNIX is UNIX. Portable apps run on OS X with "./configure; make install" and if you need something that's written to "all the world's Red Hat" standards... well, Linux runs REALLY well inside virtual machines.
Dev tools, libraries, and compilers? You have the same GNU toolchain you have on Linux.
Yes, Apple bears watching, but for something that right now Just Works, get a Mac. And if you write portable code, if Apple decides to rip its belly out on DRM and wander around bleating and tripping over its own entrails? You can still jump ship to Linux, BSD, or even (if you're a masochist) Vista and Cygwin.
Don't misquote him and then argue against the misquotation.
Sorry, I've seen too many people arguing that the GPL was THE free software license and before the GPL there was nothing but darkness... including RMS himself back in the dark days of the '80s... that I jumped to conclusions.
Is it just me, or does it just seem that if you need a 64-bit address space for your web browser, you're doing something totally wrong
They're just trying to stay ahead of Google.
However, the GPLv2 was critical in getting open source to the masses (Linux).
I don't agree. Linus has said that if the BSD effort had been a year sooner he'd have been working on that, rather than Linux, and I don't believe things would have been much different if that had happened. Apple and Microsoft and IBM and others have all used software from BSD, from post-Net/2 and Post-4.4-Lite releases (Apple used FreeBSD, Microsoft and IBM use OpenBSD), without having to have anyone "protect the license" (the only substantial change in the BSD license in the past 20 years was forced by Richard Stallman, not Apple or IBM or Microsoft), and without closing off the open source tree.
Free software is not as fragile as people think.
I do not believe that Stallman's position has significantly changed since he started, nor do I believe that his position is as *necessary*, and I think it has damaged the growth and development (and certainly the diversity) of free software.
I meant people who really wanted open software and were willing to create software and share it with others. I was talking about like-minded individuals who wanted to make sure they could use software without being forced to abide by anybody else rules.
People like Eric Allman and Kirk McKusick? People like Chuck Moore and David Ahl? People like John S. James and Ron Cain? Do you know who these people are, and what their relationship to free software is?
Unfortunately, Stallman has gradually become less and less "pro-open software" and more and more "anti-corpoate".
Richard has always been like that. The rift he talks about opening up in the '90s was opened, by him, in the early '80s. The people who were more interested in the software instead of the politics just didn't really get together all that quickly. Programmers don't herd very well.
In the 1990s, there was a philosophical split in the free software community between those of us who wanted freedom and those who only appreciated the practical by-products of free software.
In the 1980s there was a philosophical split in the free software community between those of us who wanted to write and share good code, and those who wanted to make a political movement out of it. The split was created by the GNU Manifesto, long before one group of people in the 1990s decided to pull together in response to the Free Software Foundation's politicization of the community.
Richard, you're rewriting history. The licenses of open source software are more often derived from sources like the BSD and MIT licnses, which are at least as old as the GPL.
Back in the day when FOSS was getting started, people like Stallman were critical. The community needed people like him to ensure that FOSS started free and stayed free.
Back in the day when FOSS was getting started, Richard Stallman was still working on Emacs and the Free Software Foundation wasn't even a twinkle in his eye. It wasn't yet called any single name, let alone "free software" or "open source software", but it was incredibly common and was being promoted and distributed without restrictions by companies like AT&T (the Software Tools virtual operating system grew out of code published in Software Tools) as well as individuals and user groups like DECUS and FIG.
It is a reaction, a defense, which people in poor countries are trying to mount against incoming "Trojan horse" of good ideas from more advanced parts with greed and violence inside.
So why, again, is this defense being mounted in support of the ideas with the greed inside, like proprietary platforms like Mono?
whereas on a phone it's more convenient to speak your commands
You're missing the point of my message. This is not about voice commands, which I agree are daft: I've got a phone with voice command support and it's a LOT more convenient to hit "5" than to say "delete" and have it respond with "saved". This is about voice transcription. Completely different problem space.
For the same reasons all the nerds despise the iPhone: because of it's uniformity right across the board, powerful graphics and CPU and consistent user experience.
Oh you mean like the Macintosh?
Why are the communists promoting proprietary technologies at a "free software" conference? Why are they suppressing dissenting voices?
I really wish that instead of copying failed technology from Microsoft (like the whole travesty of their 'you downloaded this file from the interwebs, oh noes!' security dialogs) they would recognize when something is "security theatre" and NOT follow the crowd. What's next, antivirus?
How do you turn their "anti phishing" bloatware off?
I'm not sure if you're aggressively agreeing with me or just trying to confuse me, so I'll just take your word for it that the universe uses IEEE floating point.
(peeks)
They have a desktop version?
YHBT, HAND. :)
Works pretty well for me, I can type at slow speaking speed.
Yep, I can talk a lot faster than I can type too. That's why I'd be excited if Google would release this goldarn software for the rest of us.
My point isn't "oh noes, this is for the iPhone", it's "why don't they let more than just iPhone users take advantage of this, dagnabbit?"
Simple. If there is no other intelligent life in the universe, then we are the only way the universe can say "who cares?"... therefore we have value. If there is, we're replaceable, thus our value is reduced.
If I could get good voice transcription on my computer by installing Google Desktop, THAT would make it worthwhile.
Something for iPhone users? I could care less.
If there's no intelligence in the universe, what is saying "so what"?
The value of humanity depends on the probability of there being other intelligent life in the universe.
Experimental evidence is as yet inconclusive on this subject.
What I mean is that from the point of view of this kind error correction mechanism, all mutations (good or bad) are errors to be corrected. It can't distinguish between harmful and helpful ones. There's no mechanism for that.
Is this what they call hacking these days?
People who call themselves hackers because they know how to crack into computers are almost always using skript kiddie tricks like this. It's what they were doing in the '80s, except it was easier than. I *accidentally* found myself talking to the monitor on a PR1ME mainframe once when I hit ^C at the wrong time when logging on to an online service I had an account on.
I'm thinking something like lint.
Lint doesn't distinguish between harmful and dangerous mutations, it treats all changes to the code alike.
It will happily pass system("rm -rf /");
You know, I bet if we follow THESE planets, we can't help but reach Planet X!
I don't know how you do it Dodgers.