Re:Why not the FSF/Emacs/GCC/GDB month?
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Every event indelibly casts its mark on all of history. But to assume that time itself would come to a standstill if a particular event did not occur is wrong. If RMS had never got off his butt and scratched a moral itch back in 1984, the world today would certainly be different. But to assume that it would be just like 1984 is a fallacy.
Let's look at one of these events: GCC. RMS did not start out writing GCC because there were no free compilers. There were. But he rejected them because of technical issues. There would indeed be a free C compiler today, and it might very well meet the current definition of "Free Software". It just wouldn't be GCC.
Let's look at another: FreeBSD. There probably would not be a FreeBSD, to be sure. But there would still be a Free Software version of BSD. BSD source code was free from day one, encumbered only by the AT&T code that you needed to use it. The impetus to make BSD AT&T free would still have been there.
RMS was a spark that got a lot of things burning. But if a spark that started a forest fire did not happen, it's folly to assume that that particular forest is flame proof. Let's give RMS the credit he deserves, but don't place the mantle of god of History upon him. No man is that great.
I think you missed the point of my high standard deduction, with no other deductions. It removes the burden of taxation from the poor. I should also clarify that this deduction is for each dependent. If make $40,000 a year with a spouse and two kids, you don't pay any taxes. If you make $80,000 with a spouse and two kids, you effectivly pay only %5 in taxes ($4,000). And if you make $400,000 a year under the same circumstances, you effectively pay %9 in taxes ($36,000).
The only reason a graduated tax makes sense is because the current situation gives more deduction possibilities to the rich than to the middle class and poor. Do you think the rich actually pay a full %33? Hah! Eliminating all deductions but the standard levels the field.
Yeah, way off topic. But I'll answer anyway. Short of abolishing the income tax, I would prefer a flat tax of 10%, a standard $10,000 deductable for everyone (and no other deductions). Fit the 1040 onto a postcard.
Monday - Mailing list FAQ is automatically sent out Tuesday - Question covered in the FAQ is asked Wednesday - 50 answers, ten of which are complete and detailed are sent Thursday - The same damn fscking question is asked again
I will be more than happy to tell someone how to access the handbook, how to use man pages, where online documentation resides, etc. But if you don't even try to help yourself, don't expect me to be patient with you.
Unless you pay me $35 an hour. If you pay me $35 an hour I will patiently look up the information you need in a manual and recite it to you, just so you don't have to bother knowing what a manual is. For $55 dollars and hour I will even do it cheefully.
All of them! That's why they call it Free Software! Sheesh...
Re:If i'm not mistaken...
on
SuSE 8.2 Announced
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've heard of not reading the article, but not reading the/. writeup? Come on!
It apparently has nothing to do with not reading the writeup. It apparently has everything to do with Slashdot lameness. Let me translate the writeup do you can understand how apparently lame it really is:
"Among other nifty features, Gnome 2.2 apparently includes a file manager, the ability to grab mail from IMAP servers, a new administration tool that let's you change your desktop wallpaper."
Okay, maybe not as bad as that, but you get the point. The writeup wasn't about a future release of SuSE, it was about a several month old release of KDE.
Apparently...someone is behind the times
on
SuSE 8.2 Announced
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· Score: 4, Informative
Amongst other nifty features, KDE 3.1 apparently includes tabbed browsing, the ability to sync with Exchange servers, a new administration tool called "Desktop sharing" that allows remote control of other desktops, and several interesting new crypto/security features.
Wake up and smell the coffee! All these nifty new features are standard in KDE 3.1. Nothing apparent about it. You might have just as well said "SuSE will include KDE" and be done with it.
I wouldn't want to run into a swarm of them migrating, like the Mormon Crickets in Idaho.
No need to go to Idaho to see swarms of bugs. I've seen three give-me-the-heebie-jeebies swarms in my life, all in California. Something about the ten year drought cycle we get here.
First was a cricket swarm in Los Banos. These were your ordinary black garden cricket. Just millions of them. I missed the actual invasion, but I did see mounds and mounds of them swept up into piles. You crunched when you walked down the sidewalk.
The second was a caterpillar invasion of cotton country down by Corcoran. Eeeyeew! They were crawling across the road like a wriggling green carpet. Farmers were digging ditches to catch them all then, dousing them with kerosene, then having caterpillar roasts. Ever smelled a billion burning caterpillars?
The third was a tarantula migration in the Sierra foothills. Usually it's a ho-hum affair that hardly anyone notices. This time it was a HUGE migration. Millions! Yet again, more wriggling carpets, but this time they're black so you can't tell the road from the spiders. Drive slow or you'll lose traction. The best thing was, the next year had an explosion of tarantula wasps (four inches long with bright red wings). Not millions, but still enough to make hymenopteraphobes to go catatonic.
Finally there was the swarm of alfalfa butterflies by Visalia. There were enough that you had to drive slow to see where you were going. Then you had to drive even slower because your car was overheating because the grill was clogged. Then you had to drive even slower than that because it was getting too gross using your windshield wipers.
Re:Separating Content from Presentation a Good Thi
on
Office 2003 and XML
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, Manny Manager and Sarah Secretary are now very used to depending on the formatting and presentation information.
My example may not be exactly what you mean, but it does demonstrate how many MSWord users approach documents. Just today I had to add some information to a document to update it for a new project. It was in MSWord. No styles were used. None at all. Every paragraph was individually formatted. From the title to the signature, to even table content, every paragraph had the style "body". Bullet lists were created by individually indenting paragraphs, changing their spacings, and inserting wingding bullets.
This made it extremely painful to add in the new stuff, especially since I don't know MSWord very well. I pulled up FrameMaker, opened the document as plain text, and applied a few styles. Twenty minutes later I was done, and with a document that looked twenty times more professional.
Now take that FrameMaker document and export it as XML. What do you get? Every bit of your original information. It's fully structured. It is fully usable given a DTD. Now export the MSWord document to XML. What would you get? Garbage that doesn't mean much. Even if you managed to export all the formatting information, it will only make sense after importing it back into MSWord.
Because graphics/drm-kmod is sort of deprecated. It only exists for the 4.x tree, because the drm stuff is now in the kernel sources for the 5.x tree. I noticed that the kernel sources weren't updated either, so maybe an update just isn't needed.
Amazing? Maybe if you've never seen it before. Maybe if you think the Free Unix world consists only of Linux. It's like saying "my new Sony television has this remote control feature that's amazing!" Yes it's amazing if you're never seen a remote control before. But it's still old hat. Yawn.
Now please excuse me, I need to upgrade a new set of ports that just arrived for my FreeBSD machine.
I have 109 g* possibilities, and I do NOT have GNOME installed. Is your 209 including just GNOME? GNOME + Fifth Toe?
In any case, KDE may be winning, but just barely. And let's not forget to call all the other kettles black as well! They may not be as big, but they're still kettles and they're still black. Even though there are very few Enlightenment applications written, every one that I know starts with "e". How man wm* dock applets are there? How many py* modules and scripts? Etc.
I hope GNU drops that whole G-naming gimmick. Although I love GNU, and I use it every day, it's the one thing that I find downright irritating.
So, I plea to everyone that develops new GNU apps, _DON'T_ use that silly G-ism shtick. It was fun the first two versions. It's getting old. Be original for a change, okay? Thanks.
And that's the reason I love it! No Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to tell me how I have to do my work. I can choose to use KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Windowmaker, Blackbox, Enlightenment or just a plain text console. This is a Good Thing(tm).
If you want there to be a standard, then simply pretend that there is one. Choose a "GUI" and go blissfully ignorant about your day.
Why can't Linux just be on one CD? Why do we need to cram things just so we can fill two CDs?
Try FreeBSD. Everything you need is on one CD. Heck, if you don't need XFree86, there's an ISO that's only 100Megs. And if even that's too much, just download two floppy disk images and install via FTP!
There simply isn't any value added by any of these distributions.
Hey! One of these distros is Slackware!
If you're going to bitch about too many distros not differentiating themselves, then bitch about SuSE, Redhat, Mandrake, Lindows, etc., because Slackware was there first.
That's right, Slackware was around before any of these other newcomers were even thought of. It wasn't the first distro, but those one or two that were older are no longer around.
Why is it good for you to write proprietary software and demand payment for it, but it is bad for Trolltech to do the same? What possible logic can justify this dual-morality?
The Qt licensing scheme looks like this:
It's free software if you write free software It's open source if you write open source It's closed source if you write closed source It's proprietary if your write proprietary
How much more fair can you get!!!
But let me quote Richard Stallman, the leader of the organization to which GNOME belongs:
"we are now seeking more libraries to release under the ordinary GPL."
"We free software developers should support one another. By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other's free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition."
The fact that Trolltech controls the licensing for any commercial apps I find very disturbing also.
But they don't! Go reread the licenses! If you wish to write a proprietary application, you can purchase a license to do so, and license it any damn way you want. If you don't want to pay a fee, then you don't have to and still get a choice of several dozen licenses to use.
The GPL is not as free as the LGPL. I've been saying this for years. But when I say it out of context of Qt versus GTK+, I am shouted down. When GNU releases all of their libraries under the LGPL, then, and only then, will GNOME developers (which operate under the aegis of GNU) have the moral authority to complain about Trolltech's use of the GPL. GNU can't have it both ways and expect people to take them seriously in issue of morality.
p.s. Unlike Miguel's memo, there is no "royalty". It's a per developer license to write proprietary apps.
As Havoc points out in his reply, Konqueror is confusing to newcomers as well
It's confusing to those coming from the Windows world. As you also say, it's not confusing to those coming from the Mac world.
The default for Konqueror should be (IMHO) to have the sidebar off, but other than that it's quite straightforward... as long as you're not expecting a Windows clone. It's much more powerful than Windows Explorer but just as easy, and I see no reason to dumb it down just to cater to the transient creature known as "Windows Nube".
Whats wrong with the consumer wanting to know how pricing is done?
Well, if you're in a bargaining position, you certainly don't want them to know. Conversely, they won't want you to know how much discretionary income they have.
I've seen this happen before. I'm figuring out a price for a home contracting job, the customer catches a glimpse of my figures, then wants to know why I'm using a xx% margin. It doesn't matter how low your margin is, it's never low enough for the other person. I remember a store owner bitching about my 24% margin. He had the same bookkeeper as me. She told me that his margins were 79%.
My own father didn't want to do business anymore with the auto dealership that he had been doing business with for twenty years. He learned that they made netted $50 off his last $15,000 purchase, and was mad about them making that much money off of him. They didn't even earn enough back on that purchase to pay the detail guy to clean it up for delivery! Aaaargh! They gave him such a good price because he was such a good customer. I had a long hard talk with my dad then, like those he used to give me. He bought his next car from them too, and I hope he remembered to tip the detail guy $50. Sheesh.
Slashdot Mirror
Every event indelibly casts its mark on all of history. But to assume that time itself would come to a standstill if a particular event did not occur is wrong. If RMS had never got off his butt and scratched a moral itch back in 1984, the world today would certainly be different. But to assume that it would be just like 1984 is a fallacy.
Let's look at one of these events: GCC. RMS did not start out writing GCC because there were no free compilers. There were. But he rejected them because of technical issues. There would indeed be a free C compiler today, and it might very well meet the current definition of "Free Software". It just wouldn't be GCC.
Let's look at another: FreeBSD. There probably would not be a FreeBSD, to be sure. But there would still be a Free Software version of BSD. BSD source code was free from day one, encumbered only by the AT&T code that you needed to use it. The impetus to make BSD AT&T free would still have been there.
RMS was a spark that got a lot of things burning. But if a spark that started a forest fire did not happen, it's folly to assume that that particular forest is flame proof. Let's give RMS the credit he deserves, but don't place the mantle of god of History upon him. No man is that great.
most of the time. they just run an attack and see if it happens to work.
/winnt/system32/cmd.exe.
True. Taking a look at this months logs, the number one requested document not found was
I think you missed the point of my high standard deduction, with no other deductions. It removes the burden of taxation from the poor. I should also clarify that this deduction is for each dependent. If make $40,000 a year with a spouse and two kids, you don't pay any taxes. If you make $80,000 with a spouse and two kids, you effectivly pay only %5 in taxes ($4,000). And if you make $400,000 a year under the same circumstances, you effectively pay %9 in taxes ($36,000).
The only reason a graduated tax makes sense is because the current situation gives more deduction possibilities to the rich than to the middle class and poor. Do you think the rich actually pay a full %33? Hah! Eliminating all deductions but the standard levels the field.
Yeah, way off topic. But I'll answer anyway. Short of abolishing the income tax, I would prefer a flat tax of 10%, a standard $10,000 deductable for everyone (and no other deductions). Fit the 1040 onto a postcard.
Don't you know? All conservatives are racist.
Monday - Mailing list FAQ is automatically sent out
Tuesday - Question covered in the FAQ is asked
Wednesday - 50 answers, ten of which are complete and detailed are sent
Thursday - The same damn fscking question is asked again
I will be more than happy to tell someone how to access the handbook, how to use man pages, where online documentation resides, etc. But if you don't even try to help yourself, don't expect me to be patient with you.
Unless you pay me $35 an hour. If you pay me $35 an hour I will patiently look up the information you need in a manual and recite it to you, just so you don't have to bother knowing what a manual is. For $55 dollars and hour I will even do it cheefully.
It's free for anyone that plays by the rules.
I just don't get this new liberalism. Why, when I was a kid, it was only free for anyone that obeyed the king's dictates.
All of them! That's why they call it Free Software! Sheesh...
I've heard of not reading the article, but not reading the /. writeup? Come on!
It apparently has nothing to do with not reading the writeup. It apparently has everything to do with Slashdot lameness. Let me translate the writeup do you can understand how apparently lame it really is:
"Among other nifty features, Gnome 2.2 apparently includes a file manager, the ability to grab mail from IMAP servers, a new administration tool that let's you change your desktop wallpaper."
Okay, maybe not as bad as that, but you get the point. The writeup wasn't about a future release of SuSE, it was about a several month old release of KDE.
Amongst other nifty features, KDE 3.1 apparently includes tabbed browsing, the ability to sync with Exchange servers, a new administration tool called "Desktop sharing" that allows remote control of other desktops, and several interesting new crypto/security features.
Wake up and smell the coffee! All these nifty new features are standard in KDE 3.1. Nothing apparent about it. You might have just as well said "SuSE will include KDE" and be done with it.
I wouldn't want to run into a swarm of them migrating, like the Mormon Crickets in Idaho.
No need to go to Idaho to see swarms of bugs. I've seen three give-me-the-heebie-jeebies swarms in my life, all in California. Something about the ten year drought cycle we get here.
First was a cricket swarm in Los Banos. These were your ordinary black garden cricket. Just millions of them. I missed the actual invasion, but I did see mounds and mounds of them swept up into piles. You crunched when you walked down the sidewalk.
The second was a caterpillar invasion of cotton country down by Corcoran. Eeeyeew! They were crawling across the road like a wriggling green carpet. Farmers were digging ditches to catch them all then, dousing them with kerosene, then having caterpillar roasts. Ever smelled a billion burning caterpillars?
The third was a tarantula migration in the Sierra foothills. Usually it's a ho-hum affair that hardly anyone notices. This time it was a HUGE migration. Millions! Yet again, more wriggling carpets, but this time they're black so you can't tell the road from the spiders. Drive slow or you'll lose traction. The best thing was, the next year had an explosion of tarantula wasps (four inches long with bright red wings). Not millions, but still enough to make hymenopteraphobes to go catatonic.
Finally there was the swarm of alfalfa butterflies by Visalia. There were enough that you had to drive slow to see where you were going. Then you had to drive even slower because your car was overheating because the grill was clogged. Then you had to drive even slower than that because it was getting too gross using your windshield wipers.
Unfortunately, Manny Manager and Sarah Secretary are now very used to depending on the formatting and presentation information.
My example may not be exactly what you mean, but it does demonstrate how many MSWord users approach documents. Just today I had to add some information to a document to update it for a new project. It was in MSWord. No styles were used. None at all. Every paragraph was individually formatted. From the title to the signature, to even table content, every paragraph had the style "body". Bullet lists were created by individually indenting paragraphs, changing their spacings, and inserting wingding bullets.
This made it extremely painful to add in the new stuff, especially since I don't know MSWord very well. I pulled up FrameMaker, opened the document as plain text, and applied a few styles. Twenty minutes later I was done, and with a document that looked twenty times more professional.
Now take that FrameMaker document and export it as XML. What do you get? Every bit of your original information. It's fully structured. It is fully usable given a DTD. Now export the MSWord document to XML. What would you get? Garbage that doesn't mean much. Even if you managed to export all the formatting information, it will only make sense after importing it back into MSWord.
Anybody know why not?
Because graphics/drm-kmod is sort of deprecated. It only exists for the 4.x tree, because the drm stuff is now in the kernel sources for the 5.x tree. I noticed that the kernel sources weren't updated either, so maybe an update just isn't needed.
...the amazing Emerge package management tool.
Amazing? Maybe if you've never seen it before. Maybe if you think the Free Unix world consists only of Linux. It's like saying "my new Sony television has this remote control feature that's amazing!" Yes it's amazing if you're never seen a remote control before. But it's still old hat. Yawn.
Now please excuse me, I need to upgrade a new set of ports that just arrived for my FreeBSD machine.
I have 109 g* possibilities, and I do NOT have GNOME installed. Is your 209 including just GNOME? GNOME + Fifth Toe?
In any case, KDE may be winning, but just barely. And let's not forget to call all the other kettles black as well! They may not be as big, but they're still kettles and they're still black. Even though there are very few Enlightenment applications written, every one that I know starts with "e". How man wm* dock applets are there? How many py* modules and scripts? Etc.
I hope GNU drops that whole G-naming gimmick. Although I love GNU, and I use it every day, it's the one thing that I find downright irritating.
So, I plea to everyone that develops new GNU apps, _DON'T_ use that silly G-ism shtick. It was fun the first two versions. It's getting old. Be original for a change, okay? Thanks.
gcc, gdb, gimp, glibc, gnats, gnome, gnotepad, grub, gnumeric, gnupg, gnustep, gphoto, grep, groff, gtk, guile, gzip, getc, getc, getc.
Unix is the ONLY OS without a standard GUI.
And that's the reason I love it! No Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to tell me how I have to do my work. I can choose to use KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Windowmaker, Blackbox, Enlightenment or just a plain text console. This is a Good Thing(tm).
If you want there to be a standard, then simply pretend that there is one. Choose a "GUI" and go blissfully ignorant about your day.
Don't upgrade to 2.4! If you do, then Linux will never beat FreeBSD in the uptime department!
Actually, Linux used to use the BSD TCP/IP stack. Linus was fine with it. But Alan was tired of the ragging he used to get at LUGs.
Why can't Linux just be on one CD? Why do we need to cram things just so we can fill two CDs?
Try FreeBSD. Everything you need is on one CD. Heck, if you don't need XFree86, there's an ISO that's only 100Megs. And if even that's too much, just download two floppy disk images and install via FTP!
There simply isn't any value added by any of these distributions.
Hey! One of these distros is Slackware!
If you're going to bitch about too many distros not differentiating themselves, then bitch about SuSE, Redhat, Mandrake, Lindows, etc., because Slackware was there first.
That's right, Slackware was around before any of these other newcomers were even thought of. It wasn't the first distro, but those one or two that were older are no longer around.
Why is it good for you to write proprietary software and demand payment for it, but it is bad for Trolltech to do the same? What possible logic can justify this dual-morality?
The Qt licensing scheme looks like this:
It's free software if you write free software
It's open source if you write open source
It's closed source if you write closed source
It's proprietary if your write proprietary
How much more fair can you get!!!
But let me quote Richard Stallman, the leader of the organization to which GNOME belongs:
"we are now seeking more libraries to release under the ordinary GPL."
"We free software developers should support one another. By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other's free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition."
The fact that Trolltech controls the licensing for any commercial apps I find very disturbing also.
But they don't! Go reread the licenses! If you wish to write a proprietary application, you can purchase a license to do so, and license it any damn way you want. If you don't want to pay a fee, then you don't have to and still get a choice of several dozen licenses to use.
The GPL is not as free as the LGPL. I've been saying this for years. But when I say it out of context of Qt versus GTK+, I am shouted down. When GNU releases all of their libraries under the LGPL, then, and only then, will GNOME developers (which operate under the aegis of GNU) have the moral authority to complain about Trolltech's use of the GPL. GNU can't have it both ways and expect people to take them seriously in issue of morality.
p.s. Unlike Miguel's memo, there is no "royalty". It's a per developer license to write proprietary apps.
As Havoc points out in his reply, Konqueror is confusing to newcomers as well
It's confusing to those coming from the Windows world. As you also say, it's not confusing to those coming from the Mac world.
The default for Konqueror should be (IMHO) to have the sidebar off, but other than that it's quite straightforward... as long as you're not expecting a Windows clone. It's much more powerful than Windows Explorer but just as easy, and I see no reason to dumb it down just to cater to the transient creature known as "Windows Nube".
Whats wrong with the consumer wanting to know how pricing is done?
Well, if you're in a bargaining position, you certainly don't want them to know. Conversely, they won't want you to know how much discretionary income they have.
I've seen this happen before. I'm figuring out a price for a home contracting job, the customer catches a glimpse of my figures, then wants to know why I'm using a xx% margin. It doesn't matter how low your margin is, it's never low enough for the other person. I remember a store owner bitching about my 24% margin. He had the same bookkeeper as me. She told me that his margins were 79%.
My own father didn't want to do business anymore with the auto dealership that he had been doing business with for twenty years. He learned that they made netted $50 off his last $15,000 purchase, and was mad about them making that much money off of him. They didn't even earn enough back on that purchase to pay the detail guy to clean it up for delivery! Aaaargh! They gave him such a good price because he was such a good customer. I had a long hard talk with my dad then, like those he used to give me. He bought his next car from them too, and I hope he remembered to tip the detail guy $50. Sheesh.