If we all wanted it our own way, we wouldn't need Open Source. We'd just write all of our software ourselves. Really, everybody wants to tweak a couple of things slightly, and leave the vast majority of everything entirely unchanged. The point of Open Source is that we can make just a couple of slight modifications, and we don't need to start from scratch. But this, then, relies on there being software that is close to solving our problems.
It's the bikeshed problem: everybody agrees that we want a bikeshed, and that it needs to be painted to keep from rotting, and nobody has a particular color it has to be, but nobody feels empowered to go out and buy paint, in case somebody turns out to be deeply offended by the color choice. Someone needs to take the initiative and pick something, and if anyone turns out to care, they can repaint it later.
It would be great if the reason you can't get to the second area at the start of the game were that there was an injunction in frivolous litigation preventing it, until the case is dropped at some convenient time in the story.
The fee arrangement isn't covered by attorney-client privilege. An attorney and a client conducting a business transaction (i.e., paying for the legal work) aren't protected, because it is only legal advice and the information the legal advice is based on that is protected.
I'd be happy if they shipped it with an unmodified Knoppix disc that would demonstrate that all of the hardware works. If there's a problem with the hardware, you reboot with the Knoppix disc to demonstrate it. If it's a problem that only happens with the distro you've got on there, get distro support with the Knoppix configuration results as reference.
For convenience, Dell could offer machines with hard drives preimaged with arbitrary distros, and include whatever media the distro wants included. But they should pass off all support issues for this aspect to the respective distros, and only address problems with the Knoppix live CD (or rather, with the machine, as demonstrated by the disc) as their own responsibility. Personally, I'd be really amused to see Dells with Gentoo preinstalled (with few packages, but all of the ones you could hardly avoid using), and completely up-to-date as of the day the machine was assembled. And, of course, each machine would come with only the appropriate kernel drivers built.
So far, Google hasn't made any physical products. They haven't sold anything to consumers (except for Google Earth Plus, which Keyhold was already selling when they bought them). They haven't designed or produced any custom hardware.
Google is almost certainly working on mobile phone stuff, because, by policy, people work on random stuff part of the time, and mobile phones aren't quite so uninteresting that nobody at Google would care about them at all. But they don't have the right skill set to be trying to make their own phone. I'd say what this is about is trying to make a standard Google Talk program for a range of phones. And I could see them doing something where you can link your Google Talk account to your cell phone so your contacts can start a voice call on your phone by selecting your Google account.
Having read the ECMA response, I think that it should be taken as gospel. OpenXML should be ratified as a standard for "faithfully representing the majority of existing office documents in form and functionality", and it can therefore peacefully coexist with the use of ODF for all newly created documents. In fact, all of these countries are giving entirely inappropriate comments, because they seem to be thinking that this is a proposed standard for office documents, when it is actually a proposed standard for representing old office documents written in other formats. Furthermore, a number of vendors have been similarly confused, because it is inappropriate to write software to create OpenXML documents, aside from the case of converting older documents while preserving the exact text, down to the kerning of the text. The appropriate use of software for OpenXML is to convert older formats to OpenXML for archival, and to print these documents and embed sections of them verbatim in new (ODF) documents, when it is necessary to cite the exact formatting of the original document.
I expect that Microsoft will be removing OpenXML support from Microsoft Office shortly, in accordance with the clarified goals of OpenXML as a standardized format, and, instead, implementing ODF for newly created documents and for documents which only need to retain the content of imported documents.
RMS isn't directly involved in particularly much GNU development, as far as I can tell, at this point. I think he mainly works on emacs (and does a lot of non-development arguing with people).
Linus is extremely blunt, but he's almost always right, and he's as free with praise as with flamage. For kernel development, he and Andrew Morton have a good dynamic: Linus tells you your code sucks (or that it's great, if you've done something amazing), and Andrew leads you through improving it. Linus, remarkably, also occasionally appologizes for flaming people.
Unless you're scheduling meetings a year in advance (or in the UK), neither has to change, because the time zone data was changed by law in 2005 for a difference which affects 2007 and later, so chances are that both sides had had the correct data for March 25, 2007 for a while already when you scheduled the meeting.
The real issue is that, if you've got a meeting set for this afternoon, and another one set for a week later at the same time, "at the same time" is not consistent.
One thing that's been under-reported is that the switch is actually to either PDF or ODF as appropriate. For most things posted on a website, PDF is more appropriate. Also, the directive only applies to documents prepared by the executive office, which is not going to include most of the government documents. (Both of these points were mentioned in the original FAQ, as reasons that the public shouldn't panic about not being able to deal with ODF yet.)
But if you go to the budget downloads section, you'll find that all of the available documents are available in either PDF or HTML (or both), in addition to some being available in MS formats, except for two Excel files, and both of these are from last year.
Generics are really the important feature. Replacing "Map" with "Map>" is really significant for being able to tell what the code is supposed to be doing and making it work correctly and reliably. For that matter, I had a problem with a commercial J2EE implementation back in the 1.3 days that was returning a Map when it was supposed to return a Map, which was not obvious because it was just returning a Map.
Of course, this depends on figuring out how all your current code actually works, which can be a major undertaking.
<div class="commentTop"> <div class="title"> <h4>Re:<xml>we should do this too</xml></h4> </div> <div class="details"> by iabervon (1971) </div> </div> <div class="commentBody"> <div id="comment_body_n">Slashdot posts are already xml, you know. Using a targetted schema like XMPP would actually be simpler than the status quo.</div> </div>
For Red Hat and IBM, it's not really any more "volunteer" work than any corporate development work. Nobody pays Microsoft to write new versions of Office; they write them so that they can try to sell them. Big Roy's H&P and Google are unusual in contributing changes they made for internal use.
Actually, the Windows API (everything is a HANDLE) is a better fit for *nix (everything is a file descriptor) than the pthreads API. In fact, the thing that's really a pain about pthreads is that WaitForMul^W select doesn't work on pthreads objects, so there's no way for a thread to block on whichever happens first of a file descriptor being readable or a condition variable being signalled.
You had 128k? I'm working on a machine that has 32k, and that's plenty. Sure, I can't just arbitrarily allocate 4k buffers whenever I want, but it's actually in some ways easier to know if your program is going to work when you can decide what to do with all of the available memory.
(Of course, the machine is a $12 microcontroller, but it would probably actually be good for monitoring nuclear reactors.)
The kill switch, and whether there is one, is controlled by whoever bought the laptops. The OLPC project is based on governments buying laptops and distributing them to children. The governments care a whole lot about whether the laptops they are giving to children in public schools are going to tempt bands of dissidents to pillage schools for the black-market resale value of the spoils. They also care about whether the shipments of laptops are going to make it to the schools at all without being hijacked by dissidents.
The OLPC is designed for use by kids. The keyboard isn't even big enough for adults to use comfortably. It makes sense to try to make control of the system not depend on physical security, because the intended users are easy to rob. It's like if you were giving kids in the Bronx $100 bills to carry around for school all the time.
These sorts of abbreviations are often idiomatic and literally incoherent. For example, "PIN" stands for "Personal Identification Number", but it doesn't actually identify you; the account number identifies you, and the PIN authenticates you (if you were to type your PIN into a terminal without putting in a card, it would have no idea who you were). So, if people have to ignore part of the expansion to understand the term, it makes sense that they'd ignore the whole expansion, and then want a simple noun to say what they're talking about. And, of course, the last word of the expansion is a noun that sticks in people's heads as being related.
Also, in the case of TCBY, "TCBY" is actually a company, not yogurt. For that matter, using the abbreviation as if it were the expansion would be very strange; you'd have to say "I bought some of TCBY", because "I bought some the country's best yogurt" is clearly ungrammatical. If you're ignoring the fact that it starts with "the", you have to ignore the fact that it ends with "yogurt", too, and treat the term as unanalyzable.
The whole point of DST is that a lot of things that matter depend on the local time. Like when business hours are, when TV shows are, when regular meetings are held, etc. If DST were only for display, it would be useless, because people who work 9-5 during the winter would work 10-6 during the summer, and, in general, sleep through an hour of sunlight like they would otherwise.
So look at it this way: this year, the stock markets will be open for a different set of hours of absolute time than they would be according to the rules in place when the software was written. It's not just what you tell users that changes; it's what times (UTC) trades are allowed. Also, what times airports are open, trains are running, and the Daily Show is broadcast. Effectively, every organization is going to chance its schedule and none of them are going to announce this explicitly.
Sun chairs the technical committee for ODF, and the Open Document Foundation has the plurality of the membership. IBM is one of the medium-sized players. Most of the organizations that Microsoft claims were part of ECMA's work on OpenXML were actually working on ODF, too. Now, it is true that there's a global campaign against OpenXML, because everybody who Microsoft doesn't specifically fund hates it and can list a dozen reasons that ECMA shouldn't have touched it before getting bored. But I don't see any reason to single out IBM as leading the global conspiracy.
Well, you have to accept that the bible isn't literally true. But you can't really help but accept that the bible isn't literally true, because it contains Jesus giving parables, and either the contents of the parable aren't literally true or the frame narrative is actually false, because the frame says the contents were made up to illustrate a lesson.
If the bible can have explicitly-marked parables, why can't the older portion have implicit parables? The Garden of Eden story makes sound theological and psychological sense, despite the fact that there are plenty of problems with the stories being literally true. But if you look at Genesis as a set of parables God told to the Israelites that lost a lot of the irrelevant details before they were recorded, it's not a bad explanation, considering that God didn't have laptops to hand out to all of the kids.
The reason an epidemic came up is that they'd like everybody to work from quarantine. If every office worker in your city were telecommuting, would the network support it? For that matter, checking your myspace may be important to your sanity, because you're not allowed to have any face-to-face social contact for a while. And, of course, how effective the quarantines are depends entirely on how much people comply with them, which, in turn, depends on how well people can deal with only having electronic communciations.
On the other hand, if somebody was actually charged nothing at all, the contract isn't valid, because a contract requires consideration on both sides. At that point, the customer doesn't actually own the DVDs; those are actually still Amazon's DVDs, which they've essentially misplaced. So Amazon has a right to ask for them back (paying shipping, presumably). If they charged the customer something, but less than they meant to, that's their problem, legally. If you get something for nothing, it has to be arranged as a gift, not as a contract. And, if you want to have a strong claim on ownership of something, you have to pay for it, which is why people sell each other used cars for $1 instead of not worrying about money (and the Feynman story about selling patents for a dollar, and demanding the dollar, etc). If you really want, you can sell something for a dollar and cancel the debt, but the deal itself has to not be entirely one-sided to be valid.
Slashdot Mirror
If we all wanted it our own way, we wouldn't need Open Source. We'd just write all of our software ourselves. Really, everybody wants to tweak a couple of things slightly, and leave the vast majority of everything entirely unchanged. The point of Open Source is that we can make just a couple of slight modifications, and we don't need to start from scratch. But this, then, relies on there being software that is close to solving our problems.
It's the bikeshed problem: everybody agrees that we want a bikeshed, and that it needs to be painted to keep from rotting, and nobody has a particular color it has to be, but nobody feels empowered to go out and buy paint, in case somebody turns out to be deeply offended by the color choice. Someone needs to take the initiative and pick something, and if anyone turns out to care, they can repaint it later.
It would be great if the reason you can't get to the second area at the start of the game were that there was an injunction in frivolous litigation preventing it, until the case is dropped at some convenient time in the story.
It's clearly their more business-friendly name for ADamn, which the EU has been trying, unsuccessfully, to make them give.
The fee arrangement isn't covered by attorney-client privilege. An attorney and a client conducting a business transaction (i.e., paying for the legal work) aren't protected, because it is only legal advice and the information the legal advice is based on that is protected.
I'd be happy if they shipped it with an unmodified Knoppix disc that would demonstrate that all of the hardware works. If there's a problem with the hardware, you reboot with the Knoppix disc to demonstrate it. If it's a problem that only happens with the distro you've got on there, get distro support with the Knoppix configuration results as reference.
For convenience, Dell could offer machines with hard drives preimaged with arbitrary distros, and include whatever media the distro wants included. But they should pass off all support issues for this aspect to the respective distros, and only address problems with the Knoppix live CD (or rather, with the machine, as demonstrated by the disc) as their own responsibility. Personally, I'd be really amused to see Dells with Gentoo preinstalled (with few packages, but all of the ones you could hardly avoid using), and completely up-to-date as of the day the machine was assembled. And, of course, each machine would come with only the appropriate kernel drivers built.
So far, Google hasn't made any physical products. They haven't sold anything to consumers (except for Google Earth Plus, which Keyhold was already selling when they bought them). They haven't designed or produced any custom hardware.
Google is almost certainly working on mobile phone stuff, because, by policy, people work on random stuff part of the time, and mobile phones aren't quite so uninteresting that nobody at Google would care about them at all. But they don't have the right skill set to be trying to make their own phone. I'd say what this is about is trying to make a standard Google Talk program for a range of phones. And I could see them doing something where you can link your Google Talk account to your cell phone so your contacts can start a voice call on your phone by selecting your Google account.
Having read the ECMA response, I think that it should be taken as gospel. OpenXML should be ratified as a standard for "faithfully representing the majority of existing office documents in form and functionality", and it can therefore peacefully coexist with the use of ODF for all newly created documents. In fact, all of these countries are giving entirely inappropriate comments, because they seem to be thinking that this is a proposed standard for office documents, when it is actually a proposed standard for representing old office documents written in other formats. Furthermore, a number of vendors have been similarly confused, because it is inappropriate to write software to create OpenXML documents, aside from the case of converting older documents while preserving the exact text, down to the kerning of the text. The appropriate use of software for OpenXML is to convert older formats to OpenXML for archival, and to print these documents and embed sections of them verbatim in new (ODF) documents, when it is necessary to cite the exact formatting of the original document.
I expect that Microsoft will be removing OpenXML support from Microsoft Office shortly, in accordance with the clarified goals of OpenXML as a standardized format, and, instead, implementing ODF for newly created documents and for documents which only need to retain the content of imported documents.
RMS isn't directly involved in particularly much GNU development, as far as I can tell, at this point. I think he mainly works on emacs (and does a lot of non-development arguing with people).
Linus is extremely blunt, but he's almost always right, and he's as free with praise as with flamage. For kernel development, he and Andrew Morton have a good dynamic: Linus tells you your code sucks (or that it's great, if you've done something amazing), and Andrew leads you through improving it. Linus, remarkably, also occasionally appologizes for flaming people.
Unless you're scheduling meetings a year in advance (or in the UK), neither has to change, because the time zone data was changed by law in 2005 for a difference which affects 2007 and later, so chances are that both sides had had the correct data for March 25, 2007 for a while already when you scheduled the meeting.
The real issue is that, if you've got a meeting set for this afternoon, and another one set for a week later at the same time, "at the same time" is not consistent.
One thing that's been under-reported is that the switch is actually to either PDF or ODF as appropriate. For most things posted on a website, PDF is more appropriate. Also, the directive only applies to documents prepared by the executive office, which is not going to include most of the government documents. (Both of these points were mentioned in the original FAQ, as reasons that the public shouldn't panic about not being able to deal with ODF yet.)
But if you go to the budget downloads section, you'll find that all of the available documents are available in either PDF or HTML (or both), in addition to some being available in MS formats, except for two Excel files, and both of these are from last year.
Generics are really the important feature. Replacing "Map" with "Map>" is really significant for being able to tell what the code is supposed to be doing and making it work correctly and reliably. For that matter, I had a problem with a commercial J2EE implementation back in the 1.3 days that was returning a Map when it was supposed to return a Map, which was not obvious because it was just returning a Map.
Of course, this depends on figuring out how all your current code actually works, which can be a major undertaking.
<div class="commentTop">
<div class="title">
<h4>Re:<xml>we should do this too</xml></h4>
</div>
<div class="details">
by iabervon (1971)
</div>
</div>
<div class="commentBody">
<div id="comment_body_n">Slashdot posts are already xml, you know. Using a targetted schema like XMPP would actually be simpler than the status quo.</div>
</div>
For Red Hat and IBM, it's not really any more "volunteer" work than any corporate development work. Nobody pays Microsoft to write new versions of Office; they write them so that they can try to sell them. Big Roy's H&P and Google are unusual in contributing changes they made for internal use.
Not so. A real model M won't be damaged by being cut to bits and partially reassembled.
Actually, the Windows API (everything is a HANDLE) is a better fit for *nix (everything is a file descriptor) than the pthreads API. In fact, the thing that's really a pain about pthreads is that WaitForMul^W select doesn't work on pthreads objects, so there's no way for a thread to block on whichever happens first of a file descriptor being readable or a condition variable being signalled.
You had 128k? I'm working on a machine that has 32k, and that's plenty. Sure, I can't just arbitrarily allocate 4k buffers whenever I want, but it's actually in some ways easier to know if your program is going to work when you can decide what to do with all of the available memory.
(Of course, the machine is a $12 microcontroller, but it would probably actually be good for monitoring nuclear reactors.)
Looks like the terminal was doing fine, but the server was down so it didn't have anything to run.
The living stealing from the dead is very traditional. But it's just not right for the dead to steal from the living.
The kill switch, and whether there is one, is controlled by whoever bought the laptops. The OLPC project is based on governments buying laptops and distributing them to children. The governments care a whole lot about whether the laptops they are giving to children in public schools are going to tempt bands of dissidents to pillage schools for the black-market resale value of the spoils. They also care about whether the shipments of laptops are going to make it to the schools at all without being hijacked by dissidents.
The OLPC is designed for use by kids. The keyboard isn't even big enough for adults to use comfortably. It makes sense to try to make control of the system not depend on physical security, because the intended users are easy to rob. It's like if you were giving kids in the Bronx $100 bills to carry around for school all the time.
These sorts of abbreviations are often idiomatic and literally incoherent. For example, "PIN" stands for "Personal Identification Number", but it doesn't actually identify you; the account number identifies you, and the PIN authenticates you (if you were to type your PIN into a terminal without putting in a card, it would have no idea who you were). So, if people have to ignore part of the expansion to understand the term, it makes sense that they'd ignore the whole expansion, and then want a simple noun to say what they're talking about. And, of course, the last word of the expansion is a noun that sticks in people's heads as being related.
Also, in the case of TCBY, "TCBY" is actually a company, not yogurt. For that matter, using the abbreviation as if it were the expansion would be very strange; you'd have to say "I bought some of TCBY", because "I bought some the country's best yogurt" is clearly ungrammatical. If you're ignoring the fact that it starts with "the", you have to ignore the fact that it ends with "yogurt", too, and treat the term as unanalyzable.
The whole point of DST is that a lot of things that matter depend on the local time. Like when business hours are, when TV shows are, when regular meetings are held, etc. If DST were only for display, it would be useless, because people who work 9-5 during the winter would work 10-6 during the summer, and, in general, sleep through an hour of sunlight like they would otherwise.
So look at it this way: this year, the stock markets will be open for a different set of hours of absolute time than they would be according to the rules in place when the software was written. It's not just what you tell users that changes; it's what times (UTC) trades are allowed. Also, what times airports are open, trains are running, and the Daily Show is broadcast. Effectively, every organization is going to chance its schedule and none of them are going to announce this explicitly.
Sun chairs the technical committee for ODF, and the Open Document Foundation has the plurality of the membership. IBM is one of the medium-sized players. Most of the organizations that Microsoft claims were part of ECMA's work on OpenXML were actually working on ODF, too. Now, it is true that there's a global campaign against OpenXML, because everybody who Microsoft doesn't specifically fund hates it and can list a dozen reasons that ECMA shouldn't have touched it before getting bored. But I don't see any reason to single out IBM as leading the global conspiracy.
Well, you have to accept that the bible isn't literally true. But you can't really help but accept that the bible isn't literally true, because it contains Jesus giving parables, and either the contents of the parable aren't literally true or the frame narrative is actually false, because the frame says the contents were made up to illustrate a lesson.
If the bible can have explicitly-marked parables, why can't the older portion have implicit parables? The Garden of Eden story makes sound theological and psychological sense, despite the fact that there are plenty of problems with the stories being literally true. But if you look at Genesis as a set of parables God told to the Israelites that lost a lot of the irrelevant details before they were recorded, it's not a bad explanation, considering that God didn't have laptops to hand out to all of the kids.
The reason an epidemic came up is that they'd like everybody to work from quarantine. If every office worker in your city were telecommuting, would the network support it? For that matter, checking your myspace may be important to your sanity, because you're not allowed to have any face-to-face social contact for a while. And, of course, how effective the quarantines are depends entirely on how much people comply with them, which, in turn, depends on how well people can deal with only having electronic communciations.
On the other hand, if somebody was actually charged nothing at all, the contract isn't valid, because a contract requires consideration on both sides. At that point, the customer doesn't actually own the DVDs; those are actually still Amazon's DVDs, which they've essentially misplaced. So Amazon has a right to ask for them back (paying shipping, presumably). If they charged the customer something, but less than they meant to, that's their problem, legally. If you get something for nothing, it has to be arranged as a gift, not as a contract. And, if you want to have a strong claim on ownership of something, you have to pay for it, which is why people sell each other used cars for $1 instead of not worrying about money (and the Feynman story about selling patents for a dollar, and demanding the dollar, etc). If you really want, you can sell something for a dollar and cancel the debt, but the deal itself has to not be entirely one-sided to be valid.