I didn't read the article, I'm just responding to the slashpost.
Since when is it all free software/open source's obligation to satisfy the needs of people who aren't writing it?
The point of free software is whatever the author(s) say(s) it is. For Gnome/KDE, it's UI. For vim it's being an improvement on vi. For emacs it's being a programmer's workspace. For enlightenment it's configurability (not necessarily ease of use).
If someone created a volunteer effort to put a colony on the moon, would uninvolved parties then complain that the accomodations at the colony were too spartan?
I've seen it said a few times in this discussion already, but not loudly enough: if you don't like free software, fix it yourself or don't use it.
I certainly won't contribute to any of these efforts, but I won't write another CD player either. However, there are projects I am interested in for which comercial solutions exist, and I would contribute to those projects if they were opened up.
With as many people online as their are, there is no question that some people will be interested enough to commit time and resources to these projects. If you have any doubts, look a little more closely at Mozilla. For an even better example, look at the projects people work on which interact with closed software, but are themselves open (wine comes to mind).
Your point is excellent. Some slashdoters clamor for large projects to open up, when they themselves probably wouldn't contribute. Actions do speak louder than words, and a lot of energy could be wasted trying to patch a huge beast instead of replacing it. On the other hand, any step towards more freedom is a step in the right direction. Would you condemn a nation for improving its laws rather than starting from scratch? Would you criticize those who encouraged the nation to open up?
This is not a disagreement, merely a clarification of the situation as I know it.
My suggestions - this may be redundant
on
Suing the Spammers
·
· Score: 1
I didn't read through all 130+ comments before posting this. I appologize.
The best way to fight spam is to make it prohibitively expensive. That means increase the costs and decrease the return on investment.
I have two suggestions. Don't respond in the first place. I'm sure noone reading this comment ever responds to spam, but I have friends who DO respond to spam (especially chain letters), and I tell them over and over not to. Ah well... My other suggestion is to come up with a way for the recipient of a message to "charge" the sender if the sender doesn't have some kind of proof that the recipient approved the sender for sending at some time. Cryptography could help out with this stuff. Of course, if we all used PGP or GPG and refused unsigned mail, that would pretty much cinch it. What spammer is going to identify themselves? Unfortunately noone I know uses either of these.
At a threshold of 3 I saw a lot of "so what" posts. Here's my response.
Naturally, I'm all for a "let's just see when it comes out" attitude, but to answer the "oh great, even more texels" argument, remember that a massive fill rate means your geometry engine can have more overdraw without hurting performance. (Overdraw is where you "draw" multiple pixels into the frame buffer at the same place, and the one with the lowest "z" or distance from the observer is the one that actually shows up). If you had an infinite fill rate, you could draw the entire world as fast as your geometry setup would give you vertexes. Up until now engine designers have had to use tricks like BSP trees (ala DOOM) and Portals (Decent) to get overdraw as close to 0 as possible. With a high enough fill rate, you can get sloppy with your hidden surface removal and focus on other things. Of course, this is an over-simplication, but the point remains that more texels/s is not a bad thing.
Also, CPUs are still getting faster and cheaper. It will not be unusual to see dual-processor machines in homes next year. With Athalon using Digital's bus technology, quad processor machines could become Christmas pressents in 2000.
To answer the "what do I need 2G of textures for" question, think computed textures and textures with more information than use colors. If a texture has depth (bump mapping) or material information (alpha channel, refraction), it adds up. quake 3 uses 32-bit textures: 8 bits each for red, green, blue and alpha (transparency). Now let's immagine what we could do with another 32 bits: 8 bits of depth, 8 bits of reflection (I forget what this is called), and 16 bits for whatever effects would look good if they varied over the face of a polygon. Also, animated textures will quickly use up texture memory.
Yes, what we have now is pretty cool. Yes, 3DFX is being unfriendly to open standards. Yes, other cards may be a better bet. No, this is not the end-all-be-all of real-time scene rendering. Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on almost any of the cards that's going to be coming out next year.
Disclaimer: I do not work for or even know anyone who works for 3DFX. I know two people who work for Creative Labs, and they hate 3DFX.
Maybe the chips are 1000 times larger! Maybe the new athalon will be the size of your desktop! The one you put your monitor on! It would be hard to get a high yeild that way, though. The wafers would probably have to be 1000 times larger,or about 18000 inches in diameter. What is that, 1500 feet? You could fit 9 wafers in the area of Hoboken, NJ. (But why would you want to?)
To echo someone elses's point, a 100Mhz Pentium w/ 16M ram and a 1G hard drive was plenty of machine 4 years ago. Now it's a boat anchor.
Also, faster computers lower the cost of slower computers. A 1Ghz computer is probably faster than a dual 500Mhz machine, or if not, it's certainly cheaper per amount of work done.
But more importantly, don't forget that a lot of comprimises have been and continute to be made in software because hardware can't keep up.
In the 60's that meant no graphics. In the 70's that meant no solid 3d graphics. In the 80's that meant no real-time 3d graphics. In the 90's that meant no dynamic real-time 3d graphics (lighting and visibility information is precalculated).
Perhaps Quake 4 or Trinity or whatever won't need to have pre-compiled maps. Perhaps they will be downloaded as the player approaches the part of the map they don't have. That would rock.
Perhaps in 2010 we'll all have 256 node beawulf clusters with each node running and 10Ghz, and scenes will be photo-realistic in games. Perhaps these machines will cost $1000 and the machine will be smaller than our coffee cup.
Innevitably, when they come up with a way to break the 10Ghz barrier, someone will ask, "What's the point?"
In the short term (next two generations?) yes, but so what? We have it right now, and by the time that class grows old and dies, we won't need it. I seriously believe if technology is allowed to progress naturally it is possible for everyone to be working voluntarily and only in service and maintenance positions. People will be entertainers, fixers, thinkers, teachers, or just dead weight. I exagerate to make my point clear.
"Smarter is often crazier"
I believe this is entirely society driven. People fear the other people who are smarter because they have freedoms the less smart people can't even understand. The smart people feel alone because they see a bigger picture that so few others can see. The less smart people ridicule the more smart people in defense of themselves. If we can just grow up as a whole I think we can shed this idea that math or any other intellectual persuit has to be hard. So yes, right now smart people are less stable. Right now ignorance is bliss. This isn't natural, any more than racism is natural. Let's move on.
Finally, I agree that fixing things that scare us because we don't understand them is just as dangerous as not fixing them. If we don't understand things how can we know if/how they are wrong? I say, let's take our time, but move forward carefully, thoughtfully, and with love and respect for the world we are in and the entities we share it with.
"This really is a sad state of affairs, and is a problem that must be fixed."
Why? Free software isn't commercial software that's given away. If you want to write free software, write it. If you want to be paid, and you can't find someone to pay you to write what you want to write, do something else for money, and write the free software in your spare time. If you don't have any spare time because you work 80 hours doing something else, just be patient. Save your money. Write free software when you retire.
Freedom is not a "god given right". We have to want it and be willing to work for it. There is no obligation involved.
"Who wins?"
If the authors aren't winning, they will quit playing. Authors will find a way to win, just as companies will find a way to make a profit. They aren't going to go away if noone pays them. Noone ever paid them. That's not what it's about.
The thing about free software projects that seems to escape some people is that there's no rush. Linux doesn't have to beat Windows. It has nothing to lose. Apache doesn't have to beat IIS. We're all eager to see Gnome, KDE, and other projects succeed, but there's no deadline because there's no such thing as competition. If something better comes along, then the project was still a success.
It is possible to make money developing free software. Technically, VA research and RHAT are demonstrating that. However, it's not necessary. There is no reason why free software has to make someone money. As long as there are people who enjoy developing things for themselves and sharing them with other people, there will be continued free software development.
Yes, companies like IBM have a lot to gain by contributing to and supporting free software. That's because an investment in free software gives returns to the entire world every time it is copied and improved. Everyone has something to gain. It's not always money, and it doesn't have to be.
I'm sorry you're still broke. I'm not much better off. Personally, I'm a lot more concerned with the wastes of resources in big corporations and government institutions than I am with the apparent lack of parity for free software developers. For now, I'm just going to work on the things that interest me and hope someone else likes what I've done.
The MiB wanted to make sure people didn't freak out if they see MiB on confidential documents, and they decided the Kids in Black and the Girls in Black needed the same protection!
"The obvious downside of this, from a user point of view, is that you may have a number of friends scattered across different servers, who may in turn be stuck using their owns servers because of what their friends have been using."
That's easy to fix with an update to the namespace. Treat it the way you do email: include a domain in the name. Instead of being ICQ# NNNNN, you'd be icq://mirabilis.com/NNNNN. Using URL syntax would allow clients to support more protocols and complex names (instead of just numbers).
I suppose you could even have DNS records for instant messaging servers. Just as you have MX records for domains pointing to mail servers, you could have IM records point to messaging servers.
This is not a terribly hard problem. Someone just has to go do it.:)
I'm intrigued by your hypothetical ISDN replacement. How did you estimate the cost of laying the fiber? Did you put it on poles or underground? What hardware does the "bridging" (or whatever they do) from the DSL media in your house to the nearest fiber switch? Did you figure in the cost of getting the local zoning committee to approve all your new developments? Did you figure in the cost of getting permits for any new wiring? Did you figure in the cost of making sure installing the new hardware wouldn't break existing phone service?
I'd like to believe it's just greed that's holding us back, because that means that a less greedy group of individuals might be able to break down the barriers and even make money at it. However, I don't think this is strictly the case.
"to be able to kill" != "to kill" "Having the right to be able to kill" != "having the right to kill"
The right to bare arms does not imply the right to use them indiscriminently.
So now you ask, why would I want to have a gun if I can't use it? Think of a martial artist, trained 30 years in all forms of weapon-less self-defense. He/she can probably kill an aggressor any number of ways, but will not want to. Likewise with owning a gun or any other dangerous device. You don't _want_ to be forced to use it, but if your rights are being threatened by circumstances beyond your control, you want to have the right to be prepared to defend those rights.
Your comment is almost akin to "Why should the right to oppress the populace (what else can a police force be used for?) come before other government rights?"
"You are automatically assuming everyone wants to learn..."
Even if only a tiny fraction want to learn, better that the "ugly guts of how things really are" be available (but not necessarily in the way).
"I don't want to know how the microwave works... I just want to nuke the ham sandwich for lunch. That doesn't make me ignorant...just hungry."
There's a difference between allowing you to know how it works and requiring you to. Early cars and computers demanded an understanding of the mechanics of how they worked if you wanted to get anything done. As they develop this is less necessary.
These days, you don't have to understand, remember, or type find -type f -exec grep -i "meeting notes" '{}' ';' to find a file containing "meeting notes" on a *nix machine, but you CAN'T get the same kind of interaction from MacOS or Windows without a third-party utility. More to the point, you can't alter or ammend how a Mac or Windows performs these kinds of search. Why would I want to, you ask? That's my business. It's ease of use doesn't stem from that I can't change it.
As I see it, the age-old argument has always been about whether ease-of-use and freedom-of-use were mutually exclusive. I never thought the argument was about whether the user was ignorant or hungry. I also never thought freedom-of-use meant requiring the user to learn how their tool works.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't read the article, I'm just responding to the slashpost.
Since when is it all free software/open source's obligation to satisfy the needs of people who aren't writing it?
The point of free software is whatever the author(s) say(s) it is. For Gnome/KDE, it's UI. For vim it's being an improvement on vi. For emacs it's being a programmer's workspace. For enlightenment it's configurability (not necessarily ease of use).
If someone created a volunteer effort to put a colony on the moon, would uninvolved parties then complain that the accomodations at the colony were too spartan?
I've seen it said a few times in this discussion already, but not loudly enough: if you don't like free software, fix it yourself or don't use it.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1 005-200-335915.html?tag=
I certainly won't contribute to any of these efforts, but I won't write another CD player either. However, there are projects I am interested in for which comercial solutions exist, and I would contribute to those projects if they were opened up.
With as many people online as their are, there is no question that some people will be interested enough to commit time and resources to these projects. If you have any doubts, look a little more closely at Mozilla. For an even better example, look at the projects people work on which interact with closed software, but are themselves open (wine comes to mind).
Your point is excellent. Some slashdoters clamor for large projects to open up, when they themselves probably wouldn't contribute. Actions do speak louder than words, and a lot of energy could be wasted trying to patch a huge beast instead of replacing it. On the other hand, any step towards more freedom is a step in the right direction. Would you condemn a nation for improving its laws rather than starting from scratch? Would you criticize those who encouraged the nation to open up?
This is not a disagreement, merely a clarification of the situation as I know it.
I appologize if this is redundant, and I forget how to preserve indentation.
#!/bin/bash
prefix="Pent It Max Ath Cort Trit"
suffix="ium alon ex anium oricon agon on eres obos ymede itan erion"
taggix="II III IV Pro MMX Deluxe"
function randmember {
members=($*)
idx=$[ $RANDOM % ${#members[*]} ]
echo ${members[$idx]}
}
printf "%s%s %s\n" `randmember "$prefix"` \
`randmember "$suffix"` \
`randmember "$taggix"`
I didn't read through all 130+ comments before posting this. I appologize.
The best way to fight spam is to make it prohibitively expensive. That means increase the costs and decrease the return on investment.
I have two suggestions. Don't respond in the first place. I'm sure noone reading this comment ever responds to spam, but I have friends who DO respond to spam (especially chain letters), and I tell them over and over not to. Ah well... My other suggestion is to come up with a way for the recipient of a message to "charge" the sender if the sender doesn't have some kind of proof that the recipient approved the sender for sending at some time. Cryptography could help out with this stuff. Of course, if we all used PGP or GPG and refused unsigned mail, that would pretty much cinch it. What spammer is going to identify themselves? Unfortunately noone I know uses either of these.
At a threshold of 3 I saw a lot of "so what" posts. Here's my response.
Naturally, I'm all for a "let's just see when it comes out" attitude, but to answer the "oh great, even more texels" argument, remember that a massive fill rate means your geometry engine can have more overdraw without hurting performance. (Overdraw is where you "draw" multiple pixels into the frame buffer at the same place, and the one with the lowest "z" or distance from the observer is the one that actually shows up). If you had an infinite fill rate, you could draw the entire world as fast as your geometry setup would give you vertexes. Up until now engine designers have had to use tricks like BSP trees (ala DOOM) and Portals (Decent) to get overdraw as close to 0 as possible. With a high enough fill rate, you can get sloppy with your hidden surface removal and focus on other things. Of course, this is an over-simplication, but the point remains that more texels/s is not a bad thing.
Also, CPUs are still getting faster and cheaper. It will not be unusual to see dual-processor machines in homes next year. With Athalon using Digital's bus technology, quad processor machines could become Christmas pressents in 2000.
To answer the "what do I need 2G of textures for" question, think computed textures and textures with more information than use colors. If a texture has depth (bump mapping) or material information (alpha channel, refraction), it adds up. quake 3 uses 32-bit textures: 8 bits each for red, green, blue and alpha (transparency). Now let's immagine what we could do with another 32 bits: 8 bits of depth, 8 bits of reflection (I forget what this is called), and 16 bits for whatever effects would look good if they varied over the face of a polygon. Also, animated textures will quickly use up texture memory.
Yes, what we have now is pretty cool. Yes, 3DFX is being unfriendly to open standards. Yes, other cards may be a better bet. No, this is not the end-all-be-all of real-time scene rendering. Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on almost any of the cards that's going to be coming out next year.
Disclaimer:
I do not work for or even know anyone who works for 3DFX. I know two people who work for Creative Labs, and they hate 3DFX.
Maybe it's for real!
Maybe the chips are 1000 times larger! Maybe the new athalon will be the size of your desktop! The one you put your monitor on! It would be hard to get a high yeild that way, though. The wafers would probably have to be 1000 times larger,or about 18000 inches in diameter. What is that, 1500 feet? You could fit 9 wafers in the area of Hoboken, NJ. (But why would you want to?)
To echo someone elses's point, a 100Mhz Pentium w/ 16M ram and a 1G hard drive was plenty of machine 4 years ago. Now it's a boat anchor.
Also, faster computers lower the cost of slower computers. A 1Ghz computer is probably faster than a dual 500Mhz machine, or if not, it's certainly cheaper per amount of work done.
But more importantly, don't forget that a lot of comprimises have been and continute to be made in software because hardware can't keep up.
In the 60's that meant no graphics.
In the 70's that meant no solid 3d graphics.
In the 80's that meant no real-time 3d graphics.
In the 90's that meant no dynamic real-time 3d graphics (lighting and visibility information is precalculated).
Perhaps Quake 4 or Trinity or whatever won't need to have pre-compiled maps. Perhaps they will be downloaded as the player approaches the part of the map they don't have. That would rock.
Perhaps in 2010 we'll all have 256 node beawulf clusters with each node running and 10Ghz, and scenes will be photo-realistic in games. Perhaps these machines will cost $1000 and the machine will be smaller than our coffee cup.
Innevitably, when they come up with a way to break the 10Ghz barrier, someone will ask, "What's the point?"
"We need a worker class"
In the short term (next two generations?) yes, but so what? We have it right now, and by the time that class grows old and dies, we won't need it. I seriously believe if technology is allowed to progress naturally it is possible for everyone to be working voluntarily and only in service and maintenance positions. People will be entertainers, fixers, thinkers, teachers, or just dead weight. I exagerate to make my point clear.
"Smarter is often crazier"
I believe this is entirely society driven. People fear the other people who are smarter because they have freedoms the less smart people can't even understand. The smart people feel alone because they see a bigger picture that so few others can see. The less smart people ridicule the more smart people in defense of themselves. If we can just grow up as a whole I think we can shed this idea that math or any other intellectual persuit has to be hard. So yes, right now smart people are less stable. Right now ignorance is bliss. This isn't natural, any more than racism is natural. Let's move on.
Finally, I agree that fixing things that scare us because we don't understand them is just as dangerous as not fixing them. If we don't understand things how can we know if/how they are wrong? I say, let's take our time, but move forward carefully, thoughtfully, and with love and respect for the world we are in and the entities we share it with.
"This really is a sad state of affairs, and is a problem that must be fixed."
Why? Free software isn't commercial software that's given away. If you want to write free software, write it. If you want to be paid, and you can't find someone to pay you to write what you want to write, do something else for money, and write the free software in your spare time. If you don't have any spare time because you work 80 hours doing something else, just be patient. Save your money. Write free software when you retire.
Freedom is not a "god given right". We have to want it and be willing to work for it. There is no obligation involved.
"Who wins?"
If the authors aren't winning, they will quit playing. Authors will find a way to win, just as companies will find a way to make a profit. They aren't going to go away if noone pays them. Noone ever paid them. That's not what it's about.
The thing about free software projects that seems to escape some people is that there's no rush. Linux doesn't have to beat Windows. It has nothing to lose. Apache doesn't have to beat IIS. We're all eager to see Gnome, KDE, and other projects succeed, but there's no deadline because there's no such thing as competition. If something better comes along, then the project was still a success.
It is possible to make money developing free software. Technically, VA research and RHAT are demonstrating that. However, it's not necessary. There is no reason why free software has to make someone money. As long as there are people who enjoy developing things for themselves and sharing them with other people, there will be continued free software development.
Yes, companies like IBM have a lot to gain by contributing to and supporting free software. That's because an investment in free software gives returns to the entire world every time it is copied and improved. Everyone has something to gain. It's not always money, and it doesn't have to be.
I'm sorry you're still broke. I'm not much better off. Personally, I'm a lot more concerned with the wastes of resources in big corporations and government institutions than I am with the apparent lack of parity for free software developers. For now, I'm just going to work on the things that interest me and hope someone else likes what I've done.
It's far more nefarious than that!
The MiB wanted to make sure people didn't freak out if they see MiB on confidential documents, and they decided the Kids in Black and the Girls in Black needed the same protection!
"The obvious downside of this, from a user point of view, is that you may have a number of friends scattered across different servers, who may in turn be stuck using their owns servers because of what their friends have been using."
:)
That's easy to fix with an update to the namespace. Treat it the way you do email: include a domain in the name. Instead of being ICQ# NNNNN, you'd be icq://mirabilis.com/NNNNN. Using URL syntax would allow clients to support more protocols and complex names (instead of just numbers).
I suppose you could even have DNS records for instant messaging servers. Just as you have MX records for domains pointing to mail servers, you could have IM records point to messaging servers.
This is not a terribly hard problem. Someone just has to go do it.
I'm intrigued by your hypothetical ISDN replacement. How did you estimate the cost of laying the fiber? Did you put it on poles or underground? What hardware does the "bridging" (or whatever they do) from the DSL media in your house to the nearest fiber switch? Did you figure in the cost of getting the local zoning committee to approve all your new developments? Did you figure in the cost of getting permits for any new wiring? Did you figure in the cost of making sure installing the new hardware wouldn't break existing phone service?
I'd like to believe it's just greed that's holding us back, because that means that a less greedy group of individuals might be able to break down the barriers and even make money at it. However, I don't think this is strictly the case.
Create an interactive, real-time, ray-traced...
Pengiun porn! (With cameos by the BSD Daemon)
From the article:
"At this rate, customers will be able to transmit the data contained on 15 CD ROMs through the air in less than a second."
CD capacity is ~600M, right? 15*600 is 9000, or 9G. Isn't 10Gbps, ~1Gbyte/s? Did they confuse GBit and GByte?
On the other hand, either way it's faster than PCI, so I won't be using up all that bandwidth by myself...
"With the news of a new low cost Be system, I'm gonna have to look closely at getting one."
$500 for a Cyrix MII 333, 32M, 3.2G, unnamed video and sound cards, and no monitor? That's not much of a bargain.
A true "MediaOS" machine should have dual processors, gobs of RAM and high end video/audio hardware. And a monitor.
They seem to be moving from
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/ to
http://openbios.org/.
"to be able to kill" != "to kill"
"Having the right to be able to kill" != "having the right to kill"
The right to bare arms does not imply the right to use them indiscriminently.
So now you ask, why would I want to have a gun if I can't use it? Think of a martial artist, trained 30 years in all forms of weapon-less self-defense. He/she can probably kill an aggressor any number of ways, but will not want to. Likewise with owning a gun or any other dangerous device. You don't _want_ to be forced to use it, but if your rights are being threatened by circumstances beyond your control, you want to have the right to be prepared to defend those rights.
Your comment is almost akin to "Why should the right to oppress the populace (what else can a police force be used for?) come before other government rights?"
"You are automatically assuming everyone wants to learn..."
Even if only a tiny fraction want to learn, better that the "ugly guts of how things really are" be available (but not necessarily in the way).
"I don't want to know how the microwave works... I just want to nuke the ham sandwich for lunch.
That doesn't make me ignorant...just hungry."
There's a difference between allowing you to know how it works and requiring you to. Early cars and computers demanded an understanding of the mechanics of how they worked if you wanted to get anything done. As they develop this is less necessary.
These days, you don't have to understand, remember, or type
find -type f -exec grep -i "meeting notes" '{}' ';'
to find a file containing "meeting notes" on a *nix machine, but you CAN'T get the same kind of interaction from MacOS or Windows without a third-party utility. More to the point, you can't alter or ammend how a Mac or Windows performs these kinds of search. Why would I want to, you ask? That's my business. It's ease of use doesn't stem from that I can't change it.
As I see it, the age-old argument has always been about whether ease-of-use and freedom-of-use were mutually exclusive. I never thought the argument was about whether the user was ignorant or hungry. I also never thought freedom-of-use meant requiring the user to learn how their tool works.
Or is that what Half-Life is?