I agree completely with you. I lean slightly towards the "but can't you just see that this is right?" end of the personality disorder spectrum and have found that careful presentation which gives people the space to see that they could be mistaken without having to admit that they're wrong is important. I suspect Zed is a very difficult person to work with, which is a shame because he seems damn smart.
I didn't RTFA either because "Science" as a publication is practically useless to me until they publish the papers available for all to read for free. The AAAS is disgustingly hypocritical in supporting the existence of a journal which restricts access to information which ought to be available to all the members of a modern society. In contrast the physics community with arXiv.org and the people behind the Public Library of Science (PLoS) http://www.plos.org/ are to be congratulated for sharing their work with the world.
In short: fuck "Science" and the AAAS, especially because of the dismay (commonly expressed by scientists) that the public is ill-informed and under educated about science.
Apparently the EeePC has an Atheros wifi chipset which can only be run using the hacky "ndiswrapper". There's a good FSDaily post detailing some of those issues including an apparent claim that if you replace the RAM then you void your warranty. Why Asus weren't smart enough to choose a wireless chipset with Free drivers boggles the mind. There's hope that a Free driver will appear "soon", but having been in the situation of playing with proprietary modules for hardware which I bought hoping that someone would reverse-engineer the driver sometime soon I'd rather not touch this. Ndiswrapper sucks if you're going to be keeping your machine reasonably current for security reasons. Too bad. I love the look of these things.
You don't trust Debian enough, because it's a binary distro and who knows what they secretly put in there?
Emmm... WTF!? Debian supplies sources just like every other distro and if you really want to you could rebuild every single piece of it yourself after reviewing the code. Or... you could just take the reasonable risk that the hundreds of disparate Freedom-loving Debian developers are more likely and more expert at noticing weirdness than you yourself can be. Chances are that a binary version of Debian is more secure than some Gentoo shit cobbled together by an arrogant newbie.
I know that's why they did it, which is why I posted this comment. I'm also aware that people inside Sun have been trying to streamline Java SE further. I think it's pretty clear that Google is working hard to facilitate the creation of non-Free software by mobile phone makers. I guess the company slogan changed to "Do lots of evil". Meet the new Microsoft, happily embracing and extending Java.
Whoever modded this as "redundant" is on crack. There was absolutely nothing else posted on this thread about the JavaSE exception licensing and it's the heart of the matter.
As I've said before, I think you're missing the point. And having read a bit more about Dalvik I think that Google needed their own fragmented platform because the GPLv2 (sans-exception) license of JavaME/PhoneME meant that if they want to encourage partners to write proprietary, non-Free code then they had to get their own JVM. See my post here for more information. This is a license war. It has fuck all to do with technical excellence or the ease-of-development on the platform. The only reason I care is that I don't like non-Free stuff. It doesn't really matter a fuck to me whether I get proprietary apps from the OHA or from Microsoft. I also dislike fragmentation of Java, especially when it has the chance of being an even more viable platform.
Whoever modded him offtopic was either being childish or desperate to hide the information. Probably just a fanboy.
Reading further on this, the interesting thing about Dalvik is that it's a non-Sun-controlled JVM. The thing about JavaME (aka PhoneME) is that although it (like JavaSE and JavaEE (Glassfish)) is released under GPLv2, there is no exception clause (there is for JavaSE). This means that you can only run GPLv2 code on PhoneME. Obviously Google and it's partners didn't like this, so they wrote their own JVM. In order to avoid infringing on Sun's IP they've made the bytecode unique to Dalvik. So Java goes in ---> Dalvik bytecode comes out, runs on Dalvik. Very clever.
And I could respond that again you're missing the point which is that there are very significant recent moves towards unifying the java platform which had mostly fragmented because of Sun's licensing policies which have now changed. There is significant potential right now to create Free software community around Sun's version and yet right at this time Google chooses to make this move.
That's fine, but you're avoiding the central point: Google are causing further fragmentation and forking within Java at a time when there are significant efforts being made to re-unify and stabilize the platform. Also they've chosen a license which has the potential to allow leachers to benefit from any work anyone does on the distributed code. A pity that they didn't put their efforts into improving J2ME instead.
Agreed 100% about the unfair commentary that there usually is on Java. But, Google are behaving rather bizarrely by on the one hand warning about the problems of forking and then on the other releasing their own JVM Dalvik instead of using JavaME. So they're going with Apache's dodgy non-GPL approach and further causing fragmentation of the Java platform right when sun is doing the right thing by releasing a GPL'ed Java and Red Hat and others have stepped up to the plate to integrate the OpenJDK work with IcedTea. Google aren't stupid, I wonder what they're game is? I suspect they're trying to GPLv3-proof themselves.
The CentOS Project is a completely independent organization, separate from Red Hat, so it's not really accurate to say that it's under the "same umbrella" in the way that the Microsoft OSes are.
Also, Fedora differs greatly in that it has a very rapid development cycle and effectively acts as a preview and test-bed for features which often make it into RHEL.
Your statement that "CentOS is good for people who desire the better tested software. RHEL is targeted at enterprises (hence the 'E' in the acronym) who need things working all the time (99.9999%)" implies that CentOS is not an enterprise distribution... and nothing could be further from the truth, in fact its very name is "The Community enterprise OS"
I wasn't talking to you. Your vapid content-free contributions aren't welcome Ms. Kindergarten Teacher. Now, do you have an uninteresting bet to propose with absolutely no evidence to back up your supposition? If so you're in!
Your criticism is mostly fair. I do however have severe problems with Smith's abstractions of human society and I suspect that much of what he argues is invalidated by more recent work in game theory. As you say though I should go back and read TWON again, and probably other work.
Meanwhile he continues to be (mis)used by von Mises fans trying to project US power onto 3rd world markets. I'll be willing to give free markets a try once corporations and the state are severly curtailed or eliminated.
It has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software.
Anyone that things that the above specs are unacceptably low-end had better specify exactly what software they're considering running: weather simulations? 3-d compositing of movies? factoring Mersenne primes?
There is no problem running Firefox on a 500MHz CPU with 256Mb of RAM. You can even run a full-featured office suite such as Abiword on it. This hardware inflation for mundane tasks is insane.
There/never/ is or has been a situation where the imaginary ideal conditions for laissez faire economics have obtained. I completely agree with your analysis which is why I used scare quotes. The point is that the ideal of free market economics is used time and time again to justify inequality and massive interference on behalf of the priveleged minorities. Adam Smith's work I refer to as raving because he completely ignores the reality of power in human societies. Nice idea, shame about reality.
According to Fedora Weekly News Alan Cox and others say that it's definitely down to how the BIOS is set to handle things and that's the same on Ubuntu, Fedora and Windows.
Not to forget that huge quantities of corn (not the same thing as US corn, but what we would call wheat) were exported from Ireland from the estates of the English absentee landlords while the population starved. An extremist "laissez faire" freemarket ideology was used at the time to explain the situation (especially by the eminent philospher Burke) similar to the approach taken across several centuries of famines in India by the English Imperialists). These market experiments on millions of starving people were directly justified by Adam Smith's ravings in _The Wealth Of Nations_ "famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth". Lots of good stuff about this (from an ultra-left perspective) in Mike Davis' _Late Victorian Holocausts_
Anyway, it pisses me off to see statement's like Theo's. Your own lesson/analogy is much more exact and appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely with you. I lean slightly towards the "but can't you just see that this is right?" end of the personality disorder spectrum and have found that careful presentation which gives people the space to see that they could be mistaken without having to admit that they're wrong is important. I suspect Zed is a very difficult person to work with, which is a shame because he seems damn smart.
He's also completely right about the widespread ignorance of statistics which more of should really be concerned about.
I didn't RTFA either because "Science" as a publication is practically useless to me until they publish the papers available for all to read for free. The AAAS is disgustingly hypocritical in supporting the existence of a journal which restricts access to information which ought to be available to all the members of a modern society. In contrast the physics community with arXiv.org and the people behind the Public Library of Science (PLoS) http://www.plos.org/ are to be congratulated for sharing their work with the world.
In short: fuck "Science" and the AAAS, especially because of the dismay (commonly expressed by scientists) that the public is ill-informed and under educated about science.
Apparently the EeePC has an Atheros wifi chipset which can only be run using the hacky "ndiswrapper". There's a good FSDaily post detailing some of those issues including an apparent claim that if you replace the RAM then you void your warranty. Why Asus weren't smart enough to choose a wireless chipset with Free drivers boggles the mind. There's hope that a Free driver will appear "soon", but having been in the situation of playing with proprietary modules for hardware which I bought hoping that someone would reverse-engineer the driver sometime soon I'd rather not touch this. Ndiswrapper sucks if you're going to be keeping your machine reasonably current for security reasons. Too bad. I love the look of these things.
You don't trust Debian enough, because it's a binary distro and who knows what they secretly put in there?
... you could just take the reasonable risk that the hundreds of disparate Freedom-loving Debian developers are more likely and more expert at noticing weirdness than you yourself can be. Chances are that a binary version of Debian is more secure than some Gentoo shit cobbled together by an arrogant newbie.
Emmm... WTF!? Debian supplies sources just like every other distro and if you really want to you could rebuild every single piece of it yourself after reviewing the code. Or
That's one of the more thoughtful posts on this topic that I've read. It's also optimistic which is nice.
I know that's why they did it, which is why I posted this comment. I'm also aware that people inside Sun have been trying to streamline Java SE further. I think it's pretty clear that Google is working hard to facilitate the creation of non-Free software by mobile phone makers. I guess the company slogan changed to "Do lots of evil". Meet the new Microsoft, happily embracing and extending Java.
Whoever modded this as "redundant" is on crack. There was absolutely nothing else posted on this thread about the JavaSE exception licensing and it's the heart of the matter.
As I've said before, I think you're missing the point. And having read a bit more about Dalvik I think that Google needed their own fragmented platform because the GPLv2 (sans-exception) license of JavaME/PhoneME meant that if they want to encourage partners to write proprietary, non-Free code then they had to get their own JVM. See my post here for more information. This is a license war. It has fuck all to do with technical excellence or the ease-of-development on the platform. The only reason I care is that I don't like non-Free stuff. It doesn't really matter a fuck to me whether I get proprietary apps from the OHA or from Microsoft. I also dislike fragmentation of Java, especially when it has the chance of being an even more viable platform.
Whoever modded him offtopic was either being childish or desperate to hide the information. Probably just a fanboy.
Reading further on this, the interesting thing about Dalvik is that it's a non-Sun-controlled JVM. The thing about JavaME (aka PhoneME) is that although it (like JavaSE and JavaEE (Glassfish)) is released under GPLv2, there is no exception clause (there is for JavaSE). This means that you can only run GPLv2 code on PhoneME. Obviously Google and it's partners didn't like this, so they wrote their own JVM. In order to avoid infringing on Sun's IP they've made the bytecode unique to Dalvik. So Java goes in ---> Dalvik bytecode comes out, runs on Dalvik. Very clever.
Well, if the licensing of the SDK is anything to go by it seems more like it's a case of Google vs. Free Software.
And I could respond that again you're missing the point which is that there are very significant recent moves towards unifying the java platform which had mostly fragmented because of Sun's licensing policies which have now changed. There is significant potential right now to create Free software community around Sun's version and yet right at this time Google chooses to make this move.
That's fine, but you're avoiding the central point: Google are causing further fragmentation and forking within Java at a time when there are significant efforts being made to re-unify and stabilize the platform. Also they've chosen a license which has the potential to allow leachers to benefit from any work anyone does on the distributed code. A pity that they didn't put their efforts into improving J2ME instead.
Agreed 100% about the unfair commentary that there usually is on Java. But, Google are behaving rather bizarrely by on the one hand warning about the problems of forking and then on the other releasing their own JVM Dalvik instead of using JavaME. So they're going with Apache's dodgy non-GPL approach and further causing fragmentation of the Java platform right when sun is doing the right thing by releasing a GPL'ed Java and Red Hat and others have stepped up to the plate to integrate the OpenJDK work with IcedTea. Google aren't stupid, I wonder what they're game is? I suspect they're trying to GPLv3-proof themselves.
There you go, spoiling speculation with empirical evidence ;)
The CentOS Project is a completely independent organization, separate from Red Hat, so it's not really accurate to say that it's under the "same umbrella" in the way that the Microsoft OSes are.
Also, Fedora differs greatly in that it has a very rapid development cycle and effectively acts as a preview and test-bed for features which often make it into RHEL.
Your statement that "CentOS is good for people who desire the better tested software. RHEL is targeted at enterprises (hence the 'E' in the acronym) who need things working all the time (99.9999%)" implies that CentOS is not an enterprise distribution ... and nothing could be further from the truth, in fact its very name is "The Community enterprise OS"
Explain. I'm actually running it on a 466Mhz Celeron with 192Mb of RAM here. Please specify your problems.
I wasn't talking to you. Your vapid content-free contributions aren't welcome Ms. Kindergarten Teacher. Now, do you have an uninteresting bet to propose with absolutely no evidence to back up your supposition? If so you're in!
I bet you're wrong. .... Any other vapid content-free speculation you'd like to make?
True. s/Abiword/KOffice/ or you can use Abiword with Agnubis and Gnumeric
Your criticism is mostly fair. I do however have severe problems with Smith's abstractions of human society and I suspect that much of what he argues is invalidated by more recent work in game theory. As you say though I should go back and read TWON again, and probably other work.
Meanwhile he continues to be (mis)used by von Mises fans trying to project US power onto 3rd world markets. I'll be willing to give free markets a try once corporations and the state are severly curtailed or eliminated.
Anyone that things that the above specs are unacceptably low-end had better specify exactly what software they're considering running: weather simulations? 3-d compositing of movies? factoring Mersenne primes?
There is no problem running Firefox on a 500MHz CPU with 256Mb of RAM. You can even run a full-featured office suite such as Abiword on it. This hardware inflation for mundane tasks is insane.
There /never/ is or has been a situation where the imaginary ideal conditions for laissez faire economics have obtained. I completely agree with your analysis which is why I used scare quotes. The point is that the ideal of free market economics is used time and time again to justify inequality and massive interference on behalf of the priveleged minorities. Adam Smith's work I refer to as raving because he completely ignores the reality of power in human societies. Nice idea, shame about reality.
According to Fedora Weekly News Alan Cox and others say that it's definitely down to how the BIOS is set to handle things and that's the same on Ubuntu, Fedora and Windows.
Not to forget that huge quantities of corn (not the same thing as US corn, but what we would call wheat) were exported from Ireland from the estates of the English absentee landlords while the population starved. An extremist "laissez faire" freemarket ideology was used at the time to explain the situation (especially by the eminent philospher Burke) similar to the approach taken across several centuries of famines in India by the English Imperialists). These market experiments on millions of starving people were directly justified by Adam Smith's ravings in _The Wealth Of Nations_ "famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth". Lots of good stuff about this (from an ultra-left perspective) in Mike Davis' _Late Victorian Holocausts_
Anyway, it pisses me off to see statement's like Theo's. Your own lesson/analogy is much more exact and appropriate.