The more heated the debates over the teaching of creationism/evolution get, the more I worry that it's actually education itself that's being threatened.
The real problem here, the elephant in the living room everyone pretends isn't there, is that we've given over the education of our children to the government. It arises out of the need for lowest-common-denominator conformist policies. Al children must be taught the same thing and it must not offend any of their parents. As long as there are parents who do not want their children being taught a particular thing, but who are being taxed for the purpose of teaching that thing, you will have these kinds of complaints.
This rears its head most with religious issues simply because there is a religous establishment clause in the Constitition. But it happens with other issues as well. Remember when sex education first got rolled out into schools? The issue isn't abstinence versus condoms, the issue is whose job it is to teach this stuff. Or what about capitalism verus socialism? There's no defined curricula for this in the US, but imagine that there were. Imagine every student had to study Marx in civics class. Hell, we see this in history all the time, particularly in regards to how Columbus is presented, or the crusades, or the bombing of Hiroshima, or the Civil War, etc.
The solution is to have a separation of school and state. But it's a solution that hated even more than the two sides of the creation/evolution debate hate each other. Public funded conformist education is THE DIETY of modern society. But just because it's a sacred and white doesn't mean it still isn't an elephant in the living room.
Or we could just wait a few more generations until everyone thinks only what the government wants them to think...
As for the scripting comment what admin in his right mind allows his Windows users to do anything but plain text only e-mailing?
The problem is that only a handful of Windows admins worldwide are in their right minds. The Microsoft way to do things is to keep the factory defaults (which are rich text email, embedded scripts and autorun executables).
I agree. I use KMail and it's a great email client. But even as a part of Kontact, it's still not going to replace Outlook.
The problem isn't the email client, the problem is the email server. For whatever stupid reason, Exchange has become a business standard. Companies are even more locked into Exchange than they are MSWord. It doesn't matter that there are plugins and shit for Kontact, Evolution, etc., until there's a no-config drop-in replacement that works seamlessly with Exchange, big businesses won't switch.
The only thing that will change this is for Exchange to stop being the standard. That means something else will have to trickle-up from small businesses. We should stop trying to convert the Fortune 500 and start selling Open Source to the mom and pops.
I hear you. People keep blaming Microsoft for Microsoft's monopoly, but that doesn't explain why organizations sometimes suddenly get into a "replace everything with Windows" frenzy. My own company replaced a development lab full of dumb terminals with new WinDells ($1500 each for twenty system doing nothing more than running HyperTerm). We also replaced a working Solaris network infrastructure with a Windows/Exchange instrastructure that has managed to go down at least once a week for the past four years. As a system software developer for a realtime embedded product, I am being migrated over to WinXPe/C#/.NET. I have dozens more stories like this.
Do you really think if Microsoft COULD do it, they wouldn't.
No they wouldn't. Several years ago there was an interview with Bill Gates where he admitted that bug fixes are very low on their priority. He said that people will buy new features but that they will not buy bug fixes.
The longer I program the more I understand how right he was. Even in Open Source, where we pride ourselves on bug fixing, our users still behave as if they prefer features over fixes. For example, if I add a new feature to my software I get a lot of positive feedback. If I fix a bug all I get is silence.
This is not to excuse Microsoft. But until we as software consumers start demanding bug fixes, we are not going to get them. We think we are demanding them, but our actions say otherwise. We are not giving developers any incentives to fix bugs. We're unwilling to pay for them, and we keep right on using the software when we don't get them. The only thing that can rouse us out of our stupor is the announcement of a new feature.
The ability for idiots to troll on Wikipedia is simply part of its nature, and (unless fundamentally changed) means that it can never be viewed as an objective, neutral, authoritative, comprehensive, or in any way lasting resource.
And yet every Wikipedia advocate argues strongly that it is objective, neutral, and authoritative. Until Wikipedia disallows anonymous editing and starts vetting contributions, it will never have credibility.
Wikipedia needs to attribute all edits to a person.
I agree 100%. Wikipedia advocates keep telling us how it's "Open Source" and just like Linux. But could you imagine Linux being programmed this way? Imagine thousands of anonymous contributors, no vetting of code, and no release gating. The result would be utter chaos. But Wikipedia is worse, because it's errors aren't quite as obvious as a kernel panic.
I find it frightening that anyone still considers Wikipedia an authoritative reference source. When a major piece of slander and disinformation like this stupid conspiracy theory can be excused with a mere "just edit it!", then it's time to sprinkle some lime on the rotting corpse of Wikipedia's credibility. Spray it with Lysol while you're at it, because it's starting to stink.
HTML and CSS are not the (perceived) problem. Just slap a GPL on those files and you're fine. There is a slight problem with runtime linkage to java applets and similar, but these items are still covered by the GPL since they are indeed being distributed. Where one (small) concern in this area is one party linking to a runtime component distributed by another party. But the FSF and RMS do not consider this a problem, and in fact consider such a requirement to be quite onerous. Why should you be required to distribute the source code for a component you yourself did not distribute? Also, copyright law (US at least) allows copying for the purpose of execution.
These things are minor. The REAL impetus behind a new network clause are network appliations. Specifically, the back end of network applications that never get distributed. People are bitching about the "unfairness" of the GPL not regulating usage. If distribution covered this situation they wouldn't be calling it a "loophole". I
Here's an example. Imagine someone took GIMP (which is under the GPL), stuck it on their server, then dished out an HTML front end to let people fiddle with their images online. GIMP itself is not being distributed in any form, only an HTML file and the finished images are. Should the server owner be required to distribute the GIMP source code? Is it "unfair" if he doesn't?
Personally I side with freedom and fewer restrictions. It's no one's business what I do on my own server.
Look at the Bison problem, it's similar.
Bison has an explicit exception to allow this. This is also known as the Macro Problem. While it may be interesting to argue whether Fair Use gives a pass to macros and boilerplate, it's a completely separate topic from network apps.
It only applies to them when they decide to become distributers.
There are several cases where the GPL applies to end users. The particuarly onerous case is the application developer using a GPL library. He does not distribute the library in any form, but must still agree to the license before using it (at least according to the FSF). He is indeed the end user of the library, and thus the GPL is a EULA for him. There's also the case of an end user wishing to copy the software to use on a different machine. Non-archival copying is not allowed by copyright law, thus one needs to agree to the GPL in order to do so.
If it were only the case of downloading a binary and executing it on one system, you would be correct, but that's only one case.
p.s. Don't get mad at me for calling a spade a spade. It was the FSF that decided to make the GPL a license agreement, so blame them. Personally I prefer simple permission statements, with or without warranty disclaimers, such as the BSD or MIT licenses.
Just giving the code away for free would allow an evil company to take somebodies hard work and lock it up in an exe shell with a squad of lawyers protecting the source.
People keep saying this, but no one yet has bothered to explain the mechanism by which this would be possible. How can Microsoft (for an example of an "evil" possessing squads of lawyers) lock up the the public domain software residing on my harddrive? They can do whatever they want with their copy, but my copy is fully intact. Software can be perfectly copied infinitely at zero cost, so it doesn't matter one whit what someone does with their copies because your copies are wholly unaffected.
Your argument would make sense if software were a finite resource, but it is not. It makes sense that someone should remain in control of the village commons, because there's only one commons per village and you can only fit so many sheep in it. But when everyone can have as many copies of the software as they desire, there's no need for authoritarian controls over it.
I EULA is an "End User License Agreement". Hence the acronym. It doesn't matter if a license adds are removes restrictions, if you have to agree to it before you receive any of its grants, privileges or permissions, it's a EULA. The GPL specifically says you must agree to it before you get any of its permissions. Thus, the GPL is a EULA.
Actually, there's no ambiguity there at all. Using an application over a network is not distribution. The reason people want this new restriction in the GPL is so that they can control the behavior of other people.
The current GPL works perfectly well and I don't see any reason to bother using the new license at all.
The GPL is in a curious situation. It is the license most associated with free software, yet it itself is very restrictive in relation to all other free software licenses. It's very near the encumbered boundary.
The result of this has been to skew people's perceptions of Free Software away from freedom. It's still free, of course, but the idea that the GPL represents a median for acceptable encumbrance is wrong. In short, the GPL has moved the definition of Free Software over towards encumbered and restricted softwware.
Thus, there's this strange idea floating about that the GPL is too free, that it isn't restrictive enough. If various "loopholes" aren't closed then someone might come along and "steal" the software or otherwise use it in a manner someone else might not like.
Since day one of the consumer era of computing, the industry has insisted on teaching us which buttons to push instead of what the concepts behind them mean. For the most part this makes sense, because the average consumer could care less about the "why", wanting to know only the immediate "how". But not everyone is this way. Surely there's a small market out there for the "why" of computing.
Remember back to the 80's. Remember when people used to take classes in WordPerfect, or Lotus 1-2-3? Hell, I know one guy who actually got an A.S. degree in DOS! Ten years later that knowledge is worthless. Ten years from now these current classes in MSOffice will be worthless as well. Tears still come to my eyes whenever I see a 1980's office secretary passed out in the gutter and clutching a decrepit WP5.1 keyboard overlay...
There are tons of filters for image processing, but I'll be damned if I know what they all mean. Instead of telling us which buttons to push in Photoshop, maybe they could stop and tell us the concepts behind them. What exactly is a convolution matrix? What is an unsharp mask? What's a gaussian blur? What is laplace edge detection? Etc, etc.
Filters are but one example. I would also like to know how to lighten an underexposed picture without making it look washed out. And other things like that.
In KDE they don't appear as "disks" (I'm not sure what that means). You don't even need to mount them, just browse to them and they're there. FTP is just one example, there's also sftp, ssh, scp, as well as several specialized kioslaves (imap, audiocd, webdavs, etc).
While I am somewhat familiar with Windows (and it's horrid anti-integration), I am less so with OSX. When I see my friend explicitly "publish" his webpage from within a specialized html editor, I can only assume that ftp access isn't completely transparent in OSX. To my mind, integration with ftp means you "save" your html just like any other file, and don't "publish" it.
My original point stands: RAIInit is not a good argument for abandoning GC.
Ummm, that wasn't your original point. You may have meant it to be, but it wasn't. Besides, you can't abandon GC if you've never adopted it...
For the majority of applications it isn't necessary to have completely predictable object destruction (which is why GC can be used), but predictable file and lock release is a necessity
Sometimes predictable object destruction IS necessary. But if your language doesn't support it because it considers memory to be a second class resource taking a hind seat to files and locks, then you're screwed.
One size does not fit all. That's all I'm saying. Right now as I type I should instead be finishing coding on this hardware device driver I'm getting paid to write. I'm trying to wrack my brains figuring out how total control over memory allocation and deallocation isn't necessary for this project, and I can't figure it out. The problem is not that I'm an exception to the rule, the problem is that you're trying to fit a rule to everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike Unix, it has an honest-to-goodness "Restart Manager"!
The more heated the debates over the teaching of creationism/evolution get, the more I worry that it's actually education itself that's being threatened.
The real problem here, the elephant in the living room everyone pretends isn't there, is that we've given over the education of our children to the government. It arises out of the need for lowest-common-denominator conformist policies. Al children must be taught the same thing and it must not offend any of their parents. As long as there are parents who do not want their children being taught a particular thing, but who are being taxed for the purpose of teaching that thing, you will have these kinds of complaints.
This rears its head most with religious issues simply because there is a religous establishment clause in the Constitition. But it happens with other issues as well. Remember when sex education first got rolled out into schools? The issue isn't abstinence versus condoms, the issue is whose job it is to teach this stuff. Or what about capitalism verus socialism? There's no defined curricula for this in the US, but imagine that there were. Imagine every student had to study Marx in civics class. Hell, we see this in history all the time, particularly in regards to how Columbus is presented, or the crusades, or the bombing of Hiroshima, or the Civil War, etc.
The solution is to have a separation of school and state. But it's a solution that hated even more than the two sides of the creation/evolution debate hate each other. Public funded conformist education is THE DIETY of modern society. But just because it's a sacred and white doesn't mean it still isn't an elephant in the living room.
Or we could just wait a few more generations until everyone thinks only what the government wants them to think...
What is going on with Slashdot? Why do they keep duplicating stories all over the board and ignoring the demand to stop it?
Sure they would. Kill off old product -> sell new product. Fix old product -> no one cares.
As for the scripting comment what admin in his right mind allows his Windows users to do anything but plain text only e-mailing?
The problem is that only a handful of Windows admins worldwide are in their right minds. The Microsoft way to do things is to keep the factory defaults (which are rich text email, embedded scripts and autorun executables).
I agree. I use KMail and it's a great email client. But even as a part of Kontact, it's still not going to replace Outlook.
The problem isn't the email client, the problem is the email server. For whatever stupid reason, Exchange has become a business standard. Companies are even more locked into Exchange than they are MSWord. It doesn't matter that there are plugins and shit for Kontact, Evolution, etc., until there's a no-config drop-in replacement that works seamlessly with Exchange, big businesses won't switch.
The only thing that will change this is for Exchange to stop being the standard. That means something else will have to trickle-up from small businesses. We should stop trying to convert the Fortune 500 and start selling Open Source to the mom and pops.
I hear you. People keep blaming Microsoft for Microsoft's monopoly, but that doesn't explain why organizations sometimes suddenly get into a "replace everything with Windows" frenzy. My own company replaced a development lab full of dumb terminals with new WinDells ($1500 each for twenty system doing nothing more than running HyperTerm). We also replaced a working Solaris network infrastructure with a Windows/Exchange instrastructure that has managed to go down at least once a week for the past four years. As a system software developer for a realtime embedded product, I am being migrated over to WinXPe/C#/.NET. I have dozens more stories like this.
Do you really think if Microsoft COULD do it, they wouldn't.
No they wouldn't. Several years ago there was an interview with Bill Gates where he admitted that bug fixes are very low on their priority. He said that people will buy new features but that they will not buy bug fixes.
The longer I program the more I understand how right he was. Even in Open Source, where we pride ourselves on bug fixing, our users still behave as if they prefer features over fixes. For example, if I add a new feature to my software I get a lot of positive feedback. If I fix a bug all I get is silence.
This is not to excuse Microsoft. But until we as software consumers start demanding bug fixes, we are not going to get them. We think we are demanding them, but our actions say otherwise. We are not giving developers any incentives to fix bugs. We're unwilling to pay for them, and we keep right on using the software when we don't get them. The only thing that can rouse us out of our stupor is the announcement of a new feature.
The ability for idiots to troll on Wikipedia is simply part of its nature, and (unless fundamentally changed) means that it can never be viewed as an objective, neutral, authoritative, comprehensive, or in any way lasting resource.
And yet every Wikipedia advocate argues strongly that it is objective, neutral, and authoritative. Until Wikipedia disallows anonymous editing and starts vetting contributions, it will never have credibility.
Wikipedia needs to attribute all edits to a person.
I agree 100%. Wikipedia advocates keep telling us how it's "Open Source" and just like Linux. But could you imagine Linux being programmed this way? Imagine thousands of anonymous contributors, no vetting of code, and no release gating. The result would be utter chaos. But Wikipedia is worse, because it's errors aren't quite as obvious as a kernel panic.
This was modded "insightful"? What the fuck?!?!
I find it frightening that anyone still considers Wikipedia an authoritative reference source. When a major piece of slander and disinformation like this stupid conspiracy theory can be excused with a mere "just edit it!", then it's time to sprinkle some lime on the rotting corpse of Wikipedia's credibility. Spray it with Lysol while you're at it, because it's starting to stink.
HTML and CSS are not the (perceived) problem. Just slap a GPL on those files and you're fine. There is a slight problem with runtime linkage to java applets and similar, but these items are still covered by the GPL since they are indeed being distributed. Where one (small) concern in this area is one party linking to a runtime component distributed by another party. But the FSF and RMS do not consider this a problem, and in fact consider such a requirement to be quite onerous. Why should you be required to distribute the source code for a component you yourself did not distribute? Also, copyright law (US at least) allows copying for the purpose of execution.
These things are minor. The REAL impetus behind a new network clause are network appliations. Specifically, the back end of network applications that never get distributed. People are bitching about the "unfairness" of the GPL not regulating usage. If distribution covered this situation they wouldn't be calling it a "loophole". I
Here's an example. Imagine someone took GIMP (which is under the GPL), stuck it on their server, then dished out an HTML front end to let people fiddle with their images online. GIMP itself is not being distributed in any form, only an HTML file and the finished images are. Should the server owner be required to distribute the GIMP source code? Is it "unfair" if he doesn't?
Personally I side with freedom and fewer restrictions. It's no one's business what I do on my own server.
Look at the Bison problem, it's similar.
Bison has an explicit exception to allow this. This is also known as the Macro Problem. While it may be interesting to argue whether Fair Use gives a pass to macros and boilerplate, it's a completely separate topic from network apps.
It only applies to them when they decide to become distributers.
There are several cases where the GPL applies to end users. The particuarly onerous case is the application developer using a GPL library. He does not distribute the library in any form, but must still agree to the license before using it (at least according to the FSF). He is indeed the end user of the library, and thus the GPL is a EULA for him. There's also the case of an end user wishing to copy the software to use on a different machine. Non-archival copying is not allowed by copyright law, thus one needs to agree to the GPL in order to do so.
If it were only the case of downloading a binary and executing it on one system, you would be correct, but that's only one case.
p.s. Don't get mad at me for calling a spade a spade. It was the FSF that decided to make the GPL a license agreement, so blame them. Personally I prefer simple permission statements, with or without warranty disclaimers, such as the BSD or MIT licenses.
Just giving the code away for free would allow an evil company to take somebodies hard work and lock it up in an exe shell with a squad of lawyers protecting the source.
People keep saying this, but no one yet has bothered to explain the mechanism by which this would be possible. How can Microsoft (for an example of an "evil" possessing squads of lawyers) lock up the the public domain software residing on my harddrive? They can do whatever they want with their copy, but my copy is fully intact. Software can be perfectly copied infinitely at zero cost, so it doesn't matter one whit what someone does with their copies because your copies are wholly unaffected.
Your argument would make sense if software were a finite resource, but it is not. It makes sense that someone should remain in control of the village commons, because there's only one commons per village and you can only fit so many sheep in it. But when everyone can have as many copies of the software as they desire, there's no need for authoritarian controls over it.
I EULA is an "End User License Agreement". Hence the acronym. It doesn't matter if a license adds are removes restrictions, if you have to agree to it before you receive any of its grants, privileges or permissions, it's a EULA. The GPL specifically says you must agree to it before you get any of its permissions. Thus, the GPL is a EULA.
Actually, there's no ambiguity there at all. Using an application over a network is not distribution. The reason people want this new restriction in the GPL is so that they can control the behavior of other people.
I don't trust them because they're human beings. Moreover, I trust them even less because they're human beings on a moral crusade.
The current GPL works perfectly well and I don't see any reason to bother using the new license at all.
The GPL is in a curious situation. It is the license most associated with free software, yet it itself is very restrictive in relation to all other free software licenses. It's very near the encumbered boundary.
The result of this has been to skew people's perceptions of Free Software away from freedom. It's still free, of course, but the idea that the GPL represents a median for acceptable encumbrance is wrong. In short, the GPL has moved the definition of Free Software over towards encumbered and restricted softwware.
Thus, there's this strange idea floating about that the GPL is too free, that it isn't restrictive enough. If various "loopholes" aren't closed then someone might come along and "steal" the software or otherwise use it in a manner someone else might not like.
You're either surrounded by complete idiots, or elite programmers making jokes that are flying above your head.
Since he's seeing them all the time, my assumption is that he's teaching first semester Java programming at a junior college.
Everybody knows that good code is self documenting
But self-documenting code is not sufficient. It is very important but it's not an excuse to ignore comments.
Since day one of the consumer era of computing, the industry has insisted on teaching us which buttons to push instead of what the concepts behind them mean. For the most part this makes sense, because the average consumer could care less about the "why", wanting to know only the immediate "how". But not everyone is this way. Surely there's a small market out there for the "why" of computing.
Remember back to the 80's. Remember when people used to take classes in WordPerfect, or Lotus 1-2-3? Hell, I know one guy who actually got an A.S. degree in DOS! Ten years later that knowledge is worthless. Ten years from now these current classes in MSOffice will be worthless as well. Tears still come to my eyes whenever I see a 1980's office secretary passed out in the gutter and clutching a decrepit WP5.1 keyboard overlay...
There are tons of filters for image processing, but I'll be damned if I know what they all mean. Instead of telling us which buttons to push in Photoshop, maybe they could stop and tell us the concepts behind them. What exactly is a convolution matrix? What is an unsharp mask? What's a gaussian blur? What is laplace edge detection? Etc, etc.
Filters are but one example. I would also like to know how to lighten an underexposed picture without making it look washed out. And other things like that.
Scolded by misspeelings...
In KDE they don't appear as "disks" (I'm not sure what that means). You don't even need to mount them, just browse to them and they're there. FTP is just one example, there's also sftp, ssh, scp, as well as several specialized kioslaves (imap, audiocd, webdavs, etc).
While I am somewhat familiar with Windows (and it's horrid anti-integration), I am less so with OSX. When I see my friend explicitly "publish" his webpage from within a specialized html editor, I can only assume that ftp access isn't completely transparent in OSX. To my mind, integration with ftp means you "save" your html just like any other file, and don't "publish" it.
My original point stands: RAIInit is not a good argument for abandoning GC.
Ummm, that wasn't your original point. You may have meant it to be, but it wasn't. Besides, you can't abandon GC if you've never adopted it...
For the majority of applications it isn't necessary to have completely predictable object destruction (which is why GC can be used), but predictable file and lock release is a necessity
Sometimes predictable object destruction IS necessary. But if your language doesn't support it because it considers memory to be a second class resource taking a hind seat to files and locks, then you're screwed.
One size does not fit all. That's all I'm saying. Right now as I type I should instead be finishing coding on this hardware device driver I'm getting paid to write. I'm trying to wrack my brains figuring out how total control over memory allocation and deallocation isn't necessary for this project, and I can't figure it out. The problem is not that I'm an exception to the rule, the problem is that you're trying to fit a rule to everyone.