I dont think it is all that great
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 1
While Ender's game certainly gets the most publicity, I feel that the later books in the series are far better. It is quite evident that Ender's Game is a book that was expanded from a short story into a novel. 'Speaker for the Dead' on the other hand was a more complex book and certainly a more interesting read.
I mean, if you want to read about war and technology, and warriors under battle conditions - go read Tom Clancy, or even Robert Ludlum who (sarcastic mode on) writes good science fiction (sarcastic mode off). 'Speaker for the Dead' and the subsequent books have more of a story and are much more well written than 'Enders Game'.
... the difference in the case of relativity and quanum mechanics being that nobody was disputing the experimental results being obtained. Such is not the case here.
The FSF might resort to rhetoric, and so could the people responsible for the BSD licenses. The point that I was trying to make was that rhetoric has no place in what claims to be an independant assessment of the two licenses to determine which one is better.
Whatever the philosophies and motivation of Stallman et al, they are totally irrelevant to determining the efficacy of the license. Karl Marx himself could have written the BSD license, but it wouldnt matter a damn as to how it could be used. And the same is true for the GPL. The uses a license can be put to depend soley upon the clauses of the license. So why resort to this mudslinging unless one wanted to obscure the truth?
I happen to agree with Stephen's assessment that this is very biased. Worse, the author appears to be flaming. Any unbiased comparision of the licenses would have to stick to the points of the licences itself and show that the conclusions drawn from the clauses are good or bad. The author definitely goes beyond this by resorting to name calling in an effort to sling mud at the GPL (Communistic philosophies?).
Rhetoric, is useful for swaying the illiterate masses. As far as determining the truth, it is absolutely useless. At best, things can be stated more simply without resorting to rhetoric. At worst, rhetoric can be used to dress up falsehood in the garb of truth. So when the author started slinging rhetorical barbs at the opposing camp, he exposed his own intellectual dishonesty.
Most techies have a very short-sighted and narrow minded impression of their place in the universe. They think that just because that they know something well, everyone else should be equally familiar with the same topics. Wake up! The purpose of life is not to work on computers.
Unless Greg had agreed to let you publish his email address, it was most irresponsible of you to publish it in a public forum. Now his Inbox could get flooded with flames.
The correct way would have been to ask people to email you, and then you should have forwarded the relevant emails.
If, of course, Greg, had indeed asked you to publish his email address, please accept my apologies in advance.
Some of the conclusions drawn in the article are not valid because they are based on statistics based on a sample of one. For instance, the author says that he didnt have any trouble hooking up a dialup connection, therefore, installation ease in Linux is good.
False! One only has to look at comp.os.linux.setup or the linux-newbie list. A huge number of help requests are from newbies having trouble with (a) PPP or (b) configuring X for their video adapters.
Of course, this installation ease also seems to be distribution specific. For instance, the Debian PPP install (pppconfig) is so painless, that I rarely see any Debian users cry out for PPP configuration help.
So how is one to make an assessment of whether the installation procedure is good, bad, or ugly? A fair assessment could only come from a large number of samples. For Linux, this is pretty easy to gather as all / most cries for help are in the public domain. This is not true for other operating systems. So I dont think that it is possible to get a meaningful comparison of ease of install between operating systems. An objective assessment for Linux only, should however be possible.
There is very little difference between this and the policies currently followed by Microsoft, IBM et al. If you shell out a (very large) bundle, you will have access to the source code of Microsoft products. Its true that you will get slapped with an NDA, and hence you wont be allowed to redistribute, but your customers could make the same deal with Microsoft that you could, and thus obtain the source.
Indeed, under the NCL, why would anyone want to contribute any code to software written by someone else? The other person would end up making the profit for work that you did.
If you want to charge for a product, charge for whatever you think it is worth, or charge for support. Charging for the source code goes against all the tenets of free software. IMHO, this new license must be quashed like the termite that it is - designed to bring down the house of free software.
I dont know... I wrestle with CICS on MVS, and it is anything but trivial to use. But maybe what I am seeing is the complexity of a transaction manager - so any such product would be as complex.
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While Ender's game certainly gets the most publicity, I feel that the later books in the series are far better. It is quite evident that Ender's Game is a book that was expanded from a short story into a novel. 'Speaker for the Dead' on the other hand was a more complex book and certainly a more interesting read.
I mean, if you want to read about war and technology, and warriors under battle conditions - go read Tom Clancy, or even Robert Ludlum who (sarcastic mode on) writes good science fiction (sarcastic mode off). 'Speaker for the Dead' and the subsequent books have more of a story and are much more well written than 'Enders Game'.
I didnt know about this feature. Where do I find more info about it? Whats the connection to VFS?
The FSF might resort to rhetoric, and so could the people responsible for the BSD licenses. The point that I was trying to make was that rhetoric has no place in what claims to be an independant assessment of the two licenses to determine which one is better.
Whatever the philosophies and motivation of Stallman et al, they are totally irrelevant to determining the efficacy of the license. Karl Marx himself could have written the BSD license, but it wouldnt matter a damn as to how it could be used. And the same is true for the GPL. The uses a license can be put to depend soley upon the clauses of the license. So why resort to this mudslinging unless one wanted to obscure the truth?
I happen to agree with Stephen's assessment that this is very biased. Worse, the author appears to be flaming. Any unbiased comparision of the licenses would have to stick to the points of the licences itself and show that the conclusions drawn from the clauses are good or bad. The author definitely goes beyond this by resorting to name calling in an effort to sling mud at the GPL (Communistic philosophies?).
Rhetoric, is useful for swaying the illiterate masses. As far as determining the truth, it is absolutely useless. At best, things can be stated more simply without resorting to rhetoric. At worst, rhetoric can be used to dress up falsehood in the garb of truth. So when the author started slinging rhetorical barbs at the opposing camp, he exposed his own intellectual dishonesty.
Well said!
Most techies have a very short-sighted and narrow minded impression of their place in the universe. They think that just because that they know something well, everyone else should be equally familiar with the same topics. Wake up! The purpose of life is not to work on computers.
Gumpy,
Unless Greg had agreed to let you publish his email address, it was most irresponsible of you to publish it in a public forum. Now his Inbox could get flooded with flames.
The correct way would have been to ask people to email you, and then you should have forwarded the relevant emails.
If, of course, Greg, had indeed asked you to publish his email address, please accept my apologies in advance.
Some of the conclusions drawn in the article are not valid because they are based on statistics based on a sample of one. For instance, the author says that he didnt have any trouble hooking up a dialup connection, therefore, installation ease in Linux is good.
False! One only has to look at comp.os.linux.setup or the linux-newbie list. A huge number of help requests are from newbies having trouble with (a) PPP or (b) configuring X for their video adapters.
Of course, this installation ease also seems to be distribution specific. For instance, the Debian PPP install (pppconfig) is so painless, that I rarely see any Debian users cry out for PPP configuration help.
So how is one to make an assessment of whether the installation procedure is good, bad, or ugly? A fair assessment could only come from a large number of samples. For Linux, this is pretty easy to gather as all / most cries for help are in the public domain. This is not true for other operating systems. So I dont think that it is possible to get a meaningful comparison of ease of install between operating systems. An objective assessment for Linux only, should however be possible.
Gates seems to be sitting on the bridge of the Enterprise. I guess that makes him a good guy?
He states that ' Yggdrasil may be the only distribution containing only free software'.
Hello? Debian?
There is very little difference between this
and the policies currently followed by Microsoft,
IBM et al. If you shell out a (very large)
bundle, you will have access to the source code
of Microsoft products. Its true that you will get
slapped with an NDA, and hence you wont be
allowed to redistribute, but your customers could
make the same deal with Microsoft that you could,
and thus obtain the source.
Indeed, under the NCL, why would anyone want
to contribute any code to software written by
someone else? The other person would end up
making the profit for work that you did.
If you want to charge for a product, charge
for whatever you think it is worth, or charge for
support. Charging for the source code goes
against all the tenets of free software. IMHO,
this new license must be quashed like the termite
that it is - designed to bring down the house of
free software.
I just called them. It appears that they are going through an upgrade, and everything will be fine by 2:00 PM EST.
I dont know... I wrestle with CICS on MVS, and it is anything but trivial to use. But maybe what I am seeing is the complexity of a transaction manager - so any such product would be as complex.