Thse two mentalities point to two very different outcomes. To the GPL worldview, Microsoft is a thief who will steal their hard work. To the BSD/MIT world view, Apple is a friend who contributes back valuable code without having to be asked.
I did. But I'm not sure how well the open source driver will work with Xgl. Right now using X Composite doesn't work right with this driver, and I fear all the new pie in the sky features Nat is promising will be just the same.
then.. buy one of the experimental cards from The Open Graphics Project.. when it's available.
It is just an Xserver. But the article also makes it clear that the movement is away from raster operations. This implies a change in the X11 protocol. When X clients start requesting 3D vector services from the X server, you are going to have problems if that X server can only handle the X11R6 protocol.
The proprietary nvidia driver for FreeBSD was panicking my kernel every couple of days two years ago. It caused me to switch to Radeon and the open source driver for it. The nvidia driver panics have been the ONLY kernel panics I have EVER seen in 25+ years of Unix computing.
From the article: "...we're not going to cede 3D graphics acceleration to proprietary software."
But will we be required to use a proprietary video driver to get it? It would be nice if Novell were putting its resources behind open source drivers or pressuring the release of hardware specs. Proprietary firmware doesn't bother me at all, but the drivers (both kernel and user mode) for open source systems need to be open source themselves.
Could this actually mean that well intentioned christians are actually beginning to crawl out from under the thumb of the right-wing extremists like Dobson, Robertson, Bush, etc?
Not everyone who is "right-wing" is an "extremist". Dobson is not an extremist. If you think he is, it's either because you believe the media lies about him, or are so far to the left that even the middle looks reactionary. And while Bush is definitely rght-wing, he isn't extremist. When you take off your Bush-is-Evil tinted glasses and actually look at his policies, he's rather moderate.
Robertson, however, is an extremist. Unfortunately the media gives him far more attention than he deserves.
By comparison, Creative Commons licenses seem like little more than tools for helping people navigate the status quo.
The status quo is that you may not copy creative works and give them to your friends. Every license in the CC suite allows you to do that. Every one. That is not the status quo.
RMS needs to get his head out of software. Way back at the beginning of the Free Software movement, he said that his idea should be applied to software only, and not to other copyrightable materials. Now it appears that he has changed his mind and wants people to use a software-specific license on non-software products.
CC licenses are not meant for software.
A novel that is released under a CC NonCommercial or NonDeriv license might not meet the definition of Free Software, but who the fsck cares? It ain't *software*! Ditto for videos, music, websites, etc. Hell, not even his own GFDL documentatoin meets the Free Software definition!
On Unix, to create a new process, you fork(). That creates a copy-on-write image of your process, e.g. when one of the processes changes something, it gets its own copy of the data, but stuff that is not changed stays shared between them.
But afterwards you almost always do an exec(), which conceptually "loads" the executable.
That's rather tortured. In order for your condition of no government interference to hold, we'd need no government at all. Go look at Russia for that, back after the USSR fell. There you'll see what happens with zero government.
Yes, it was somewhat tortured. But this isn't about anarchy versus good government. it's about keeping the government off the playing field. That's because whenever the government gets on the playing field we end up with coercive monopolies. I used this railroad example because it demonstrates the uneven playing field. Some members of the market are given special privileges by the government.
In this case, the level playing field is common law, especially with respect to right of ways. But the government gave the railroads privileges over and above what common law provides. Standard Oil used this to oppose a competitor.
Before that, they dispensed with competitors fairly handily.
No they didn't! Their top market share was 90%. That's it! To the anti-freedom crowd, that may sound like a horribly malevolent percentage, but it really isn't. One out of ten barrels of oil came from one of their competitors. Microsoft has a larger market share, yet we still have Apple, Linux, Solaris, AIX, BSD, etc.
The original claim was that "the market, left to its own devices, will often produce gargantuan companies that exclude any potential competitor from entering". Standard Oil is NOT a case of this.
Huh? There's not much difference between HTML and XHTML. The latter is essentially just the former converted to valid XM. You have to close your tags, but that's about it.
If you can't "harvest data" from HTML's <h1> tag, you're still not going to be able to harvest data from XHTML's <h1> tag.
A good textbook case of a monopoly. But it doesn't meet all three criteria:
2) No government interference/involvement
Here is one example. Rockefeller pressured a railroad into preventing a rival oil pipeline from crossing its property. But wait! It was only because of prior government interference that the railroad had such long narrow swaths of inviolate property and right of ways! The government had granted railroads the property and right to build legal fences baring the transport of goods they didn't want transported. Common law would have allowed the passage of that pipeline.
This government interference wasn't designed to specifically advantage Rockefeller, just as the government interference in creating software copyrights wasn't designed to specifically advantage Microsoft. But it was still government interference in the free market.
Of course, this is not to deny that Standard Oil was not a "gargantuan" company. It certainly was. The real question is whether such a gargantuan company is harmful to the economy. This leads to the next point:
3) Zero competition
The claim is that free markets will lead to gargantuan companies who will "exclude any potential competitor". This did not happen in Standard Oil's case.
The mythology of anti-freedom is that monopolies can lower their prices such that their competitors will be run out of business, after which they can jack up their prices to extreme levels. But this doesn't match Standard Oil's history. They consistantly kept their prices low. Never did they raise them to exorbitant levels.
While it may have been Rockefeller's plan to do that, he was never able to, because he was never able to eliminate the competition. His highest market share was 90%, meaning that one out of every ten barrels of oil was from someone else. If he had jacked up his prices, his competitors would have eaten his lunch. So he had to keep them low. This was a nearly pure commodity market, and price was paramount. Even a price one cent above his competitors would have lost him market share.
Notice how I'm talking about competitors? That's because THEY EXISTED. That 90% was a *peak* market share! Their share was only 64% at the time of their anti-trust trial. How can there be a *continuous* history of competitor buyouts if there were no competitors? How can that 34% not be considered competition.
Sidenote. Also note that the breakup occured in 1911. The Standard Oil monopoly MISSED the huge consumer demand of the automobile era. Think about that one.
I'm sorry, but Standard Oil does not meet the criteria. Its existance did not exclude competition in the marketplace. While it did exploit the power of government on occasion, overall it is an example of efficiency, not of coercive malignancy.
The market, left to its own devices, will often produce gargantuan companies that exclude any potential competitor from entering--we have seen plenty of examples of that throughout the 20th century.
Please name one. You said there are "plenty", but I'll make it easy as ask for just one. But you must use YOUR criteria:
1) A market economy ("the market")
2) No government interference/involvement ("left to its own devices")
3) Zero competition ("exclude any potential competitor")
If it turns out that hobbyists are a bad thing, then the market will demonstrate that.
Ummm, Microsoft *IS* still a part of the market, and it *IS* demonstrating that. The question is whether or not it will make a difference to the market as a whole.
A tangental question: What do people use to backup nowadays? Everyone says to backup early and often, but what do ordinary everyday people actually use? The only consumer devices appropriate for this are CDs, so are people using CDs? Are they backing up every night? The old days where you stuck a tape in the drive and it backed up at 1:00am while you slept was great. But having to take a fifteen minutes out of every day to perform the backup sounds tedious.
I'm using FreeBSD, am I safe? I think I am, but with all the panic swirling around over this issue, I'm not sure. Some guy just ran past my cubicle screaming, "no one is safe!"
By completely and utterly failing to see the sarcasm in my post, you have demonstrated a key Slashdot stereotype, and thus your argument that Slashdotters are not stereotyped clones soars like a lead balloon.
Sigh. As a department head, the department and its budget is yours. Of course, I also presume you would also tell the VP above you that you're doing it.
We do this at our work for some machines. We would have to go out of business otherwise. We are not a small company, we're a division of one of world's ten largest corporations. I remember one instance when a newb IT flunky got delusions of godhood and wiped and unplugged a machine that wasn't under IT control. He's not here anymore.
If there's a silly policy in the way of doing your job, get the policy changed. An ordinary employee won't be able to do this, but a department head does have the ability to apply some pressure. Unless you like sitting around with your thumb up your ass for nine months waiting for RAM, that is.
It sounds like your management needs to take ownership if their department computer. In far too many companies IT goons act like they own they place. Here's news to them, they're employees just like everyone else.
So take control of your own computers. Put them behind a department firewall. Put big stickers on them saying "Not IT Controlled" or "Keep your hands off!" Then if you need some more RAM, all you need to do is to go down to the store and buy some. If you need a department webpage, go buy a cheap eMachine and slap on Debian. Of course, you will need your own guy in the department to manage all of this stuff, but surely that's cheaper than sitting on your butts for nine months waiting for RAM.
It goes without saying that all ordinary desktops should still be IT controlled. Why waste your time on this penny ante stuff. But keep your servers, development workstations, and special systems your own.
This is slashdot. Why we didn't invent the double standard, we did manage to patent it!
Let me clue you in. Microsoft, Corporations and Bush are Evil(tm). Keep that simple fact in mind and you will be able to easily understand the apparent contradictions in the Slashdot psyche. Genetically altered foods are bad because Evil(tm) Agribusiness Corporations are behind it. Genetically altered humans are good because Evil(tm) Bush doesn't want them. See, it's simple!
Slashdot Mirror
Got it?
And yet Apple contributes code back to the BSD communities... without having to be asked.
Thse two mentalities point to two very different outcomes. To the GPL worldview, Microsoft is a thief who will steal their hard work. To the BSD/MIT world view, Apple is a friend who contributes back valuable code without having to be asked.
Buy ATI Radeon cards.
I did. But I'm not sure how well the open source driver will work with Xgl. Right now using X Composite doesn't work right with this driver, and I fear all the new pie in the sky features Nat is promising will be just the same.
then.. buy one of the experimental cards from The Open Graphics Project.. when it's available.
Believe me, I will.
It is just an Xserver. But the article also makes it clear that the movement is away from raster operations. This implies a change in the X11 protocol. When X clients start requesting 3D vector services from the X server, you are going to have problems if that X server can only handle the X11R6 protocol.
The proprietary nvidia driver for FreeBSD was panicking my kernel every couple of days two years ago. It caused me to switch to Radeon and the open source driver for it. The nvidia driver panics have been the ONLY kernel panics I have EVER seen in 25+ years of Unix computing.
From the article: "...we're not going to cede 3D graphics acceleration to proprietary software."
But will we be required to use a proprietary video driver to get it? It would be nice if Novell were putting its resources behind open source drivers or pressuring the release of hardware specs. Proprietary firmware doesn't bother me at all, but the drivers (both kernel and user mode) for open source systems need to be open source themselves.
Could this actually mean that well intentioned christians are actually beginning to crawl out from under the thumb of the right-wing extremists like Dobson, Robertson, Bush, etc?
Not everyone who is "right-wing" is an "extremist". Dobson is not an extremist. If you think he is, it's either because you believe the media lies about him, or are so far to the left that even the middle looks reactionary. And while Bush is definitely rght-wing, he isn't extremist. When you take off your Bush-is-Evil tinted glasses and actually look at his policies, he's rather moderate.
Robertson, however, is an extremist. Unfortunately the media gives him far more attention than he deserves.
By comparison, Creative Commons licenses seem like little more than tools for helping people navigate the status quo.
The status quo is that you may not copy creative works and give them to your friends. Every license in the CC suite allows you to do that. Every one. That is not the status quo.
RMS needs to get his head out of software. Way back at the beginning of the Free Software movement, he said that his idea should be applied to software only, and not to other copyrightable materials. Now it appears that he has changed his mind and wants people to use a software-specific license on non-software products.
CC licenses are not meant for software.
A novel that is released under a CC NonCommercial or NonDeriv license might not meet the definition of Free Software, but who the fsck cares? It ain't *software*! Ditto for videos, music, websites, etc. Hell, not even his own GFDL documentatoin meets the Free Software definition!
The author also needs to consider multiple user systems. When malware trashes the husband's home directory, the wife's is still intact.
On Unix, to create a new process, you fork(). That creates a copy-on-write image of your process, e.g. when one of the processes changes something, it gets its own copy of the data, but stuff that is not changed stays shared between them.
But afterwards you almost always do an exec(), which conceptually "loads" the executable.
The grandparent was claiming you could extra structure from XHTML but not from HTML, yet both have the same structure. That's my point.
That's rather tortured. In order for your condition of no government interference to hold, we'd need no government at all. Go look at Russia for that, back after the USSR fell. There you'll see what happens with zero government.
Yes, it was somewhat tortured. But this isn't about anarchy versus good government. it's about keeping the government off the playing field. That's because whenever the government gets on the playing field we end up with coercive monopolies. I used this railroad example because it demonstrates the uneven playing field. Some members of the market are given special privileges by the government.
In this case, the level playing field is common law, especially with respect to right of ways. But the government gave the railroads privileges over and above what common law provides. Standard Oil used this to oppose a competitor.
Before that, they dispensed with competitors fairly handily.
No they didn't! Their top market share was 90%. That's it! To the anti-freedom crowd, that may sound like a horribly malevolent percentage, but it really isn't. One out of ten barrels of oil came from one of their competitors. Microsoft has a larger market share, yet we still have Apple, Linux, Solaris, AIX, BSD, etc.
The original claim was that "the market, left to its own devices, will often produce gargantuan companies that exclude any potential competitor from entering". Standard Oil is NOT a case of this.
If you choose to shackle yourself to that hardware, be my guest. Just remember that it is your choice that's doing the shackling.
WTF is the point of the GPL then? Where is the freedom?
You have the freedom not to use that hardware.
Huh? There's not much difference between HTML and XHTML. The latter is essentially just the former converted to valid XM. You have to close your tags, but that's about it.
If you can't "harvest data" from HTML's <h1> tag, you're still not going to be able to harvest data from XHTML's <h1> tag.
A good textbook case of a monopoly. But it doesn't meet all three criteria:
2) No government interference/involvement
Here is one example. Rockefeller pressured a railroad into preventing a rival oil pipeline from crossing its property. But wait! It was only because of prior government interference that the railroad had such long narrow swaths of inviolate property and right of ways! The government had granted railroads the property and right to build legal fences baring the transport of goods they didn't want transported. Common law would have allowed the passage of that pipeline.
This government interference wasn't designed to specifically advantage Rockefeller, just as the government interference in creating software copyrights wasn't designed to specifically advantage Microsoft. But it was still government interference in the free market.
Of course, this is not to deny that Standard Oil was not a "gargantuan" company. It certainly was. The real question is whether such a gargantuan company is harmful to the economy. This leads to the next point:
3) Zero competition
The claim is that free markets will lead to gargantuan companies who will "exclude any potential competitor". This did not happen in Standard Oil's case.
The mythology of anti-freedom is that monopolies can lower their prices such that their competitors will be run out of business, after which they can jack up their prices to extreme levels. But this doesn't match Standard Oil's history. They consistantly kept their prices low. Never did they raise them to exorbitant levels.
While it may have been Rockefeller's plan to do that, he was never able to, because he was never able to eliminate the competition. His highest market share was 90%, meaning that one out of every ten barrels of oil was from someone else. If he had jacked up his prices, his competitors would have eaten his lunch. So he had to keep them low. This was a nearly pure commodity market, and price was paramount. Even a price one cent above his competitors would have lost him market share.
Notice how I'm talking about competitors? That's because THEY EXISTED. That 90% was a *peak* market share! Their share was only 64% at the time of their anti-trust trial. How can there be a *continuous* history of competitor buyouts if there were no competitors? How can that 34% not be considered competition.
Sidenote. Also note that the breakup occured in 1911. The Standard Oil monopoly MISSED the huge consumer demand of the automobile era. Think about that one.
I'm sorry, but Standard Oil does not meet the criteria. Its existance did not exclude competition in the marketplace. While it did exploit the power of government on occasion, overall it is an example of efficiency, not of coercive malignancy.
The market, left to its own devices, will often produce gargantuan companies that exclude any potential competitor from entering--we have seen plenty of examples of that throughout the 20th century.
Please name one. You said there are "plenty", but I'll make it easy as ask for just one. But you must use YOUR criteria:
1) A market economy ("the market")
2) No government interference/involvement ("left to its own devices")
3) Zero competition ("exclude any potential competitor")
If it turns out that hobbyists are a bad thing, then the market will demonstrate that.
Ummm, Microsoft *IS* still a part of the market, and it *IS* demonstrating that. The question is whether or not it will make a difference to the market as a whole.
A tangental question: What do people use to backup nowadays? Everyone says to backup early and often, but what do ordinary everyday people actually use? The only consumer devices appropriate for this are CDs, so are people using CDs? Are they backing up every night? The old days where you stuck a tape in the drive and it backed up at 1:00am while you slept was great. But having to take a fifteen minutes out of every day to perform the backup sounds tedious.
I'm using FreeBSD, am I safe? I think I am, but with all the panic swirling around over this issue, I'm not sure. Some guy just ran past my cubicle screaming, "no one is safe!"
Stop modding this shit up! It's just not true.
By completely and utterly failing to see the sarcasm in my post, you have demonstrated a key Slashdot stereotype, and thus your argument that Slashdotters are not stereotyped clones soars like a lead balloon.
Sigh. As a department head, the department and its budget is yours. Of course, I also presume you would also tell the VP above you that you're doing it.
We do this at our work for some machines. We would have to go out of business otherwise. We are not a small company, we're a division of one of world's ten largest corporations. I remember one instance when a newb IT flunky got delusions of godhood and wiped and unplugged a machine that wasn't under IT control. He's not here anymore.
If there's a silly policy in the way of doing your job, get the policy changed. An ordinary employee won't be able to do this, but a department head does have the ability to apply some pressure. Unless you like sitting around with your thumb up your ass for nine months waiting for RAM, that is.
It sounds like your management needs to take ownership if their department computer. In far too many companies IT goons act like they own they place. Here's news to them, they're employees just like everyone else.
So take control of your own computers. Put them behind a department firewall. Put big stickers on them saying "Not IT Controlled" or "Keep your hands off!" Then if you need some more RAM, all you need to do is to go down to the store and buy some. If you need a department webpage, go buy a cheap eMachine and slap on Debian. Of course, you will need your own guy in the department to manage all of this stuff, but surely that's cheaper than sitting on your butts for nine months waiting for RAM.
It goes without saying that all ordinary desktops should still be IT controlled. Why waste your time on this penny ante stuff. But keep your servers, development workstations, and special systems your own.
This is slashdot. Why we didn't invent the double standard, we did manage to patent it!
Let me clue you in. Microsoft, Corporations and Bush are Evil(tm). Keep that simple fact in mind and you will be able to easily understand the apparent contradictions in the Slashdot psyche. Genetically altered foods are bad because Evil(tm) Agribusiness Corporations are behind it. Genetically altered humans are good because Evil(tm) Bush doesn't want them. See, it's simple!