'No one should be forced to choose open source, any more than they should be forced to choose proprietary software.'
Michael, you're being way too hard on Tim O'Reilly: I think he's enunciated an important moral principle here. You wouldn't think a professional business man would be the one to finally state the principle of absolute anarchy so clearly and succinctly, but how could you do much better than "no one should be forced to do x, any more than they should be forced to do not x? This is especially brave since Tim's business becomes irrelevant: no one should be forced to obey the boss, any more than they should be forced to ignore the boss.
I mean, with this principle, the legal choices of the government about free software really become irrelevant: no one should be forced to follow the law, any more than they should be forced to break the law.
In fact, pretty much everything becomes irrelevant. No one should be forced to respect the public interest, any more than they should be forced to ignore the public interest. Heck, no one should be forced to build good, cheap software, anymore than they should be forced to build shoddy, overpriced software.
In short, nobody should be prevented from doing evil, any more than they should be prevented from doing good.
--po8, who thinks that nobody should be forced to listen to pseudo-philosophical drivel any more than they should be forced to spew pseudo-philosophical drivel.
I'm not so certain that the adware and spyware programs can be "reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves." Certainly they are packaged with the CDEX code as "a program" rather than as a package (heh), and the installation of the CDEX code automatically, unpreventably and irrevocably installs the other components. Indeed, the makers of this sleazeware went to some trouble to ensure that these pieces were not "identifiable sections". This seems to me to be quite different from a "linux distro" type of situation.
IMHO they're more components of "NeoNapster" than programs in their own right, but as I said, IANAL. It will be interesting to see what position the FSF takes on this.
My reading of the GPL suggests that they can't be in conformance unless they also provide the source for the adware and spyware: a quick glance through their sources didn't show any. IANAL: YMMV.
My impression is that the ISP association would seek legislation to enforce the "tax" on every ISP, whether a member or not. This is certainly how such things are done in the US (Internet radio tax, blank CDR tax, etc.). Presumably the bad-guy ISPs would be both good at and motivated to assist the Indian government with enforcement.
About 1/5 of it is devoted to the idea of making more bandwidth at 2.4GHz through the magic of "spread spectrum". "Wi-Fi" (and as far as I know, no one who actually understands 802.11b calls it Wi-Fi) has always been spread spectrum. The technological advance they seem actually to be talking about is automated bandwidth allocation. (Call me when my "cognitive radio" is ready.)
The article also seems to have no clue about the higher-frequency bands used by 802.11a, that are so far pretty empty, or about the more efficient use of spectrum with 802.11g. Either of
these things could make a huge difference in 802.11
bandwidth availability in the short term.
Indeed, the authors seem to have some kind of corporate want-to-see-it-fail axe to grind. Consider the introduction. IMHO that Doonesbury cartoon was as non-insightful as most of Trudeau's recent comments on bits and ownership in the digital age. (Hint: he's a cartoonist. He's one of my
favorites in general, but on certain subjects, his job gives him a vested interest.) If I'm paying flat-rate, as many folks are, I could care less who borrows my unused 802.11 and net connection bandwidth: it's not hurting me an iota. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who feels otherwise should review their social contract carefully.
In sum, I think there are far better places to get your Wi-Fi report than the referenced article.
Required background reading for this/. story: the late, great Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore's Gallegher
series of stories. (You may remember the authors from such sci-fi classics as The Twonky or All Mimsy Were The Borogoves.)
Although I'm afraid I've given a punchline away just via the pointer here...
I've been known to put a bit of work into X myself, so calling me an "asshole" is probably not productive.
OTOH, perhaps I misunderstand the Debian software distribution model. The way I always thought it was supposed to work, the downstream maintainer dumps things into unstable ASAP so that folks can start using them. Then they work
on getting them ready for inclusion in testing.
I've never heard of "experimental" as a standard part of the Debian distribution process
for an incorporated package. Indeed, I note that Branden has had to put together his own set of mirrors to distribute his experimental XFree86 release. IMHO his acknowledgedly valuable
time and energy would have been better spent by letting the standard Deb mirroring process take care of this, by making 4.2 the unstable build
at that point. But again, perhaps there is something I am missing about the process.
I understand that building X for Deb is a lot of work. And "bogus" was a poorly chosen word for the frustration I'm feeling: my apologies. But I am, to choose a better word, frustrated.
I install Debian on
others' boxes frequently (a few times a week lately). For a substantial fraction of those installs over the last 6 months, I have had to
build X from XFree86.org source to get folks' video cards working properly. And for 5 of those months, I didn't even have the option of trying
an experimental 4.2 build out of Branden's home directory.
For my own home boxes, I long ago put holds on most of the x-related packages and just build XFree86 from CVS when it seems like I need to. That's part of my frustration: I know that Branden's work is helping XFree86 to work a lot better for folks on non-x86 platforms and with unusual problems. But I am not (and I think many others are not) in this situation, and
I've generally had awfully good luck with
XFree86 top-of-tree. I wish someone would Deb that regularly: I wish I had time to do it, or that I could find someone willing whom I could help.
So yes, I apologize for the pejorative tone of "bogus". But no, I'm not willing to drink "a nice cup of shut the f*** up" at this point. I and others have real problems; it is increasingly difficult for us to support other Debian users and our own X-related work.
I'm not unhappy because XFree86 4.2 is not in Debian stable. I'm not even unhappy because it is not in testing. I'm unhappy because XFree86 4.2, after 6 months, is not even in unstable. That's just bogus.
You seem to be a GP. I would assume your patients routinely report with nonspecific back pain, or with headaches.
The data I've seen suggests that these two symptoms in particular are both pervasive in
the patient population and routinely undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. It would be interesting to run a double-blind comparative study of diagnostic efficiency of physicians and laypeople with and without the database...
I would gladly locate the national nuclear waste repository within 1/2 mile of my home if the alternative is to leave it where it is. My home town of Portland, OR is about 30 miles from the
Trojan nuclear power plant, a now-defunct power reactor whose pool is being used as its spent-fuel storage facility. The pool is a few hundred yards from the Columbia river. Given that situation, IMHO almost any sensible thing one could do would be an improvement.
Must be the middle of the night,
because I'm struck by the beautiful improbability
of the phrase "real world scientific [computing] application". Looking at the article, I note
that the phrase is stolen from it, and that the
article also mentions that the app is "Cactus". Looking
at the pages for that project, I note that Cactus is a computational framework, not an actual application. Further, there seems to be no
indication which app was actually run.
However, most of the Cactus apps seem to
be in astrophysics. Sigh. Maybe it's "real-world" astrophysics. Or maybe it's just bedtime.
In a way. Qwerty was designed to keep mechanical typewriters from jamming, which
meant physically separating the keys for
common digraphs. This requirement is somewhat
incompatible with the requirement that common
digraphs be quickly typeable, hence some slowndown.
If Sholes and Densmore had just had computers to run evolutionary algorithms on, they presumably could have designed a better layout for mechanical typewriters...:-)
In a world where users are deluged with new
things, your new thing must be of one of two
kinds. It might be so important to the
user that they are willing to put substantial
initial and ongoing effort into understanding
it (e.g., the
telephone). Otherwise, it must
not require much
initial or ongoing effort to understand (e.g.
fluorescent replacement bulbs).
The TiVo, for example, is not a
such a huge improvement over the VCR (something
many users already know) that
users would be willing to spend a week
learning it and a few hours a week maintaining
it. Fortunately, the TiVo is easy to learn
and easy to use. This is one reason why it has
held on when other PVRs have fallen by the
wayside. It will be interesting to see if
the MS X Box PVR stuff does as well: I doubt
it.
Forgetting for a moment the risk to
your own life, what sort of safety analysis
have you done to ensure that you don't
hurt or kill spectators or the public
in the neighborhood of your
launch site, damage property, start fires,
etc.?
Oh man. Yet another "X sucks" troll.
I have no idea why I waste my time with these,
but here goes... (and in HTML, no less:-)
Font support: Been out for a year.
See Xft. Easier to use now with Xft2 and
fontconfig.
Color management: Been in Xlib for
15 freaking years. See XCMS in the documentation.
Application developers never use it, because
users never cal their monitors on PC hardware.
But it works fine.
Alpha blending support: Documentation
on the Render extension has been
out for a year. Implementation got done two
weeks ago. Will be mainstream in a couple of
months.
Usable configuration: Working on
it. "XFree86 -configure" is a step in the right
direction. This is probably the most valid
complaint on the list, but note that
PC graphics and input hardware is notoriously hard to configure, even with Windows.
Changing resolutions on the fly:
part of the ResizeAndRotate extension. A
working implementation of this part is done.
Will be released shortly, when the rest of
R&R is stable. Note that the ability
to change resolutions on the fly has been around
for as long as XFree86 via <ctrl><alt><keypad-+>,
although the viewport property and the
fact that existing apps don't rescale has made
it less useful for some needs. It is
fairly useful for accessability, though.
VNC (or other RFB) server support:
This wants to be done via client-side replication, not by bitmap-copying, which is wrong on
so many levels. This work is starting now: I would guess about a year to completion. In
the meantime, there are plenty of solutions
for replicating the server side to another
X display: do a web search if you are serious about this.
I could really stand folks spending 15
minutes doing research before writing these
critiques. OTOH, I guess I was successfully
trolled, so what do I know?
...you may also like the fantasy-role-playing
game Paranoia: a
classic with a somewhat similar setting
and feel. The well-written rulebook begins this
way...
Ky Michaelson and his team are for real, and
it will be interesting to see if they make it work:
our group will be out at Black Rock cheering
them on.
That said, as far as I know, this rocket lacks what
is known in the trade as "active guidance": i.e.,
it cannot steer itself. This leads to two big
problems. First, it is very hard to build a
rocket that will go up very straight to
100km. Large fins are required for the
upper atmosphere, but they cause tremendous
drag near the ground. (Also, BTW, the
potential landing radius of the debris
in the event of failure of the airframe
or parachutes is huge: part of why
the FAA is so nervous about the whole thing.)
Second, even if the rocket does make it
"into space", it is essentially impossible
to make it into orbit. To orbit something,
you need to go up and then sideways: this requires
steering.
Imagine putting a car out on a salt flat,
tying the wheels down, aiming it north, and
letting it travel for 50 miles. It would
probably end up somewhere north of where it
started. More than that, it would be difficult
to say. This rocket is aimed 50 miles
up. With luck, it will end up falling from above us somewhere.
More than that...
Slashdot Mirror
'No one should be forced to choose open source, any more than they should be forced to choose proprietary software.'
Michael, you're being way too hard on Tim O'Reilly: I think he's enunciated an important moral principle here. You wouldn't think a professional business man would be the one to finally state the principle of absolute anarchy so clearly and succinctly, but how could you do much better than "no one should be forced to do x, any more than they should be forced to do not x? This is especially brave since Tim's business becomes irrelevant: no one should be forced to obey the boss, any more than they should be forced to ignore the boss.
I mean, with this principle, the legal choices of the government about free software really become irrelevant: no one should be forced to follow the law, any more than they should be forced to break the law.
In fact, pretty much everything becomes irrelevant. No one should be forced to respect the public interest, any more than they should be forced to ignore the public interest. Heck, no one should be forced to build good, cheap software, anymore than they should be forced to build shoddy, overpriced software.
In short, nobody should be prevented from doing evil, any more than they should be prevented from doing good.
--po8, who thinks that nobody should be forced to listen to pseudo-philosophical drivel any more than they should be forced to spew pseudo-philosophical drivel.
I'm not so certain that the adware and spyware programs can be "reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves." Certainly they are packaged with the CDEX code as "a program" rather than as a package (heh), and the installation of the CDEX code automatically, unpreventably and irrevocably installs the other components. Indeed, the makers of this sleazeware went to some trouble to ensure that these pieces were not "identifiable sections". This seems to me to be quite different from a "linux distro" type of situation.
IMHO they're more components of "NeoNapster" than programs in their own right, but as I said, IANAL. It will be interesting to see what position the FSF takes on this.
My reading of the GPL suggests that they can't be in conformance unless they also provide the source for the adware and spyware: a quick glance through their sources didn't show any. IANAL: YMMV.
My impression is that the ISP association would seek legislation to enforce the "tax" on every ISP, whether a member or not. This is certainly how such things are done in the US (Internet radio tax, blank CDR tax, etc.). Presumably the bad-guy ISPs would be both good at and motivated to assist the Indian government with enforcement.
IMHO this article seems less-than-clueful.
About 1/5 of it is devoted to the idea of making more bandwidth at 2.4GHz through the magic of "spread spectrum". "Wi-Fi" (and as far as I know, no one who actually understands 802.11b calls it Wi-Fi) has always been spread spectrum. The technological advance they seem actually to be talking about is automated bandwidth allocation. (Call me when my "cognitive radio" is ready.)
The article also seems to have no clue about the higher-frequency bands used by 802.11a, that are so far pretty empty, or about the more efficient use of spectrum with 802.11g. Either of these things could make a huge difference in 802.11 bandwidth availability in the short term.
Indeed, the authors seem to have some kind of corporate want-to-see-it-fail axe to grind. Consider the introduction. IMHO that Doonesbury cartoon was as non-insightful as most of Trudeau's recent comments on bits and ownership in the digital age. (Hint: he's a cartoonist. He's one of my favorites in general, but on certain subjects, his job gives him a vested interest.) If I'm paying flat-rate, as many folks are, I could care less who borrows my unused 802.11 and net connection bandwidth: it's not hurting me an iota. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who feels otherwise should review their social contract carefully.
In sum, I think there are far better places to get your Wi-Fi report than the referenced article.
Required background reading for this /. story: the late, great Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore's Gallegher
series of stories. (You may remember the authors from such sci-fi classics as The Twonky or All Mimsy Were The Borogoves.)
Although I'm afraid I've given a punchline away just via the pointer here...
Doesn't work now for c values > 1. The whole
point in the first place was to do all the bits in parallel. Consider
c = 0b10
a = 0b11
b = 0b00
c ? a | b : a & b == 0b11
which is "half right".
In short, ?: is not a bitwise operator.
Nah. In this formula, 0 bits in C "outvote" bits that are 1 in both a and b: e.g., let
a = 1
b = 1
c = 0
and note that the answer is wrong.
OK, very nice clean proof that just & and | won't
work. Does allowing yourself & | ^ + - help?
You're neither one as 1334 as you think.
Here's 4 operations:
return (a ^ b) & c | a & b;
(Extra parens are for wimps.)
Show that it can be done in 3 C ops, or
prove it impossible.
I've been known to put a bit of work into X myself, so calling me an "asshole" is probably not productive.
OTOH, perhaps I misunderstand the Debian software distribution model. The way I always thought it was supposed to work, the downstream maintainer dumps things into unstable ASAP so that folks can start using them. Then they work on getting them ready for inclusion in testing.
I've never heard of "experimental" as a standard part of the Debian distribution process for an incorporated package. Indeed, I note that Branden has had to put together his own set of mirrors to distribute his experimental XFree86 release. IMHO his acknowledgedly valuable time and energy would have been better spent by letting the standard Deb mirroring process take care of this, by making 4.2 the unstable build at that point. But again, perhaps there is something I am missing about the process.
I understand that building X for Deb is a lot of work. And "bogus" was a poorly chosen word for the frustration I'm feeling: my apologies. But I am, to choose a better word, frustrated.
I install Debian on others' boxes frequently (a few times a week lately). For a substantial fraction of those installs over the last 6 months, I have had to build X from XFree86.org source to get folks' video cards working properly. And for 5 of those months, I didn't even have the option of trying an experimental 4.2 build out of Branden's home directory.
For my own home boxes, I long ago put holds on most of the x-related packages and just build XFree86 from CVS when it seems like I need to. That's part of my frustration: I know that Branden's work is helping XFree86 to work a lot better for folks on non-x86 platforms and with unusual problems. But I am not (and I think many others are not) in this situation, and I've generally had awfully good luck with XFree86 top-of-tree. I wish someone would Deb that regularly: I wish I had time to do it, or that I could find someone willing whom I could help.
So yes, I apologize for the pejorative tone of "bogus". But no, I'm not willing to drink "a nice cup of shut the f*** up" at this point. I and others have real problems; it is increasingly difficult for us to support other Debian users and our own X-related work.
I'm not unhappy because XFree86 4.2 is not in Debian stable. I'm not even unhappy because it is not in testing. I'm unhappy because XFree86 4.2, after 6 months, is not even in unstable. That's just bogus.
4.2.99.1? Forget about it.
You seem to be a GP. I would assume your patients routinely report with nonspecific back pain, or with headaches.
The data I've seen suggests that these two symptoms in particular are both pervasive in the patient population and routinely undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. It would be interesting to run a double-blind comparative study of diagnostic efficiency of physicians and laypeople with and without the database...
I'm glad I don't live in Nevada.
I would gladly locate the national nuclear waste repository within 1/2 mile of my home if the alternative is to leave it where it is. My home town of Portland, OR is about 30 miles from the Trojan nuclear power plant, a now-defunct power reactor whose pool is being used as its spent-fuel storage facility. The pool is a few hundred yards from the Columbia river. Given that situation, IMHO almost any sensible thing one could do would be an improvement.
We're massively offtopic at this point, but one standard thing to do here is use ssh to become root just to get the X11 port forwarding.
I understand that this is just a gag, and a fine one!
But for anyone who is seriously wondering about an answer: if you are user jane, then as root (using a shell that supports ~user) type
Everything should now work seamlessly.Thanks, I missed this in the article. I guess this is real-world binary black-hole coalescence in action. :-)
Must be the middle of the night, because I'm struck by the beautiful improbability of the phrase "real world scientific [computing] application". Looking at the article, I note that the phrase is stolen from it, and that the article also mentions that the app is "Cactus". Looking at the pages for that project, I note that Cactus is a computational framework, not an actual application. Further, there seems to be no indication which app was actually run.
However, most of the Cactus apps seem to be in astrophysics. Sigh. Maybe it's "real-world" astrophysics. Or maybe it's just bedtime.
In a way. Qwerty was designed to keep mechanical typewriters from jamming, which meant physically separating the keys for common digraphs. This requirement is somewhat incompatible with the requirement that common digraphs be quickly typeable, hence some slowndown.
If Sholes and Densmore had just had computers to run evolutionary algorithms on, they presumably could have designed a better layout for mechanical typewriters... :-)
In a world where users are deluged with new things, your new thing must be of one of two kinds. It might be so important to the user that they are willing to put substantial initial and ongoing effort into understanding it (e.g., the telephone). Otherwise, it must not require much initial or ongoing effort to understand (e.g. fluorescent replacement bulbs).
The TiVo, for example, is not a such a huge improvement over the VCR (something many users already know) that users would be willing to spend a week learning it and a few hours a week maintaining it. Fortunately, the TiVo is easy to learn and easy to use. This is one reason why it has held on when other PVRs have fallen by the wayside. It will be interesting to see if the MS X Box PVR stuff does as well: I doubt it.
Forgetting for a moment the risk to your own life, what sort of safety analysis have you done to ensure that you don't hurt or kill spectators or the public in the neighborhood of your launch site, damage property, start fires, etc.?
Oh man. Yet another "X sucks" troll. I have no idea why I waste my time with these, but here goes... (and in HTML, no less :-)
I could really stand folks spending 15 minutes doing research before writing these critiques. OTOH, I guess I was successfully trolled, so what do I know?
...you may also like the fantasy-role-playing game Paranoia: a classic with a somewhat similar setting and feel. The well-written rulebook begins this way...
Forget categories like "Stanislaw Lem" or "Science Fiction": The Cyberiad is unquestionably one of the all-time great works of literature.
Ky Michaelson and his team are for real, and it will be interesting to see if they make it work: our group will be out at Black Rock cheering them on.
That said, as far as I know, this rocket lacks what is known in the trade as "active guidance": i.e., it cannot steer itself. This leads to two big problems. First, it is very hard to build a rocket that will go up very straight to 100km. Large fins are required for the upper atmosphere, but they cause tremendous drag near the ground. (Also, BTW, the potential landing radius of the debris in the event of failure of the airframe or parachutes is huge: part of why the FAA is so nervous about the whole thing.)
Second, even if the rocket does make it "into space", it is essentially impossible to make it into orbit. To orbit something, you need to go up and then sideways: this requires steering.
Imagine putting a car out on a salt flat, tying the wheels down, aiming it north, and letting it travel for 50 miles. It would probably end up somewhere north of where it started. More than that, it would be difficult to say. This rocket is aimed 50 miles up. With luck, it will end up falling from above us somewhere. More than that...