I for one hope we see a Solaris kernel in Leopard, if nothing else for ZFS support, but having better kernel tracing and swapping routines would be nice as well.
Firstly, KHTML is LGPL, which is a very different beast from GPL, being non-viral, among other things, allowing its use in proprietary software.
Secondly, I looked on the FSF site and BSD is "free software", but seems to be far less "free" (according to Stallman, with whom I disagree vigorously) than the GPL.
That's gotta be one of the most helpful responses I've ever received on slashdot, I don't know why I've never even heard of them - probably because most of the people I work with use Fink. Thanks!
I'd claim that 5 years is isolated... but once again, what is the solution? Democrats tend not to solve much... just about all Bill Clinton accomplished was riding the top end of the Business Cycle (though I don't really blame him, he wasn't asked to do much by the population). The two party system, and its entrenched and seemlying unwrestable control of the federal government seems to be at the root of all these problems, not a mere symptom such as Bush.
Well they are very careful with the viral (yes, I feel it's appropriate) nature of the GPL, and are careful to never put GPL stuff (at least that we know of) anywhere inside the OS directly, where it would be linked with something proprietary. So GPL utilities are fine for them, but not drivers or other kernel goodies, unfortunately.
Sometimes I wonder, no matter what its intentions, if GPL is actually helping the masses much (vs BSD liscensed software, etc), or mostly idealists/software purists and those whose situation affords the effective running of Linux-based OSes.
What liscenses are "free software" other than GPL/LGPL? As I understand it, BSD does nothing to ensure many of these rights, and plenty of creative commons, or anti-government/anti-corporate/anti-military clauses also restrict these fundamental "rights."
Here's a question: If you create a derivative work, but in such a way that no "useful" information about the original work(s) upon which it was based can be reconstructed, can it still be sued over? For instance, if I took The DaVinci Code book, and rearranged all of the letters in it to be in alphabetical order, and published it (with no references ot The DaVinci Code, except perhaps a small disclaimer in the aknowledgements section), would this be illegal without permission? I see this art as the same type of thing - sure it's based on someone else's work, but there's no way in hell I can figure out what the spammers were writing from those pictures, in fact I'm not even sure it's possible that examining pictures made by this process could determine whether the process was fed with spam or non-spam emails of similar length!
What APIs out there are people really wanting to be openned? What would be useful to have? How can the FOSS community come together to help provide direction for companies wishing to open APIs, and incentives to help corporations along in doing so?
I'm certainly no marketing expert, however it seems that some (though not all) of these "mashups" may potentially dilute the brand of the services being provided, by adding an extra layer of abstraction/"confusion" overtop of the data.
Personally I see nothing wrong with this, but will this prevent some companies from releasing their API? Flickr seemed to have an interesting solution to the problem of API release, in that it would share its photos with other sites if and only if they shared theirs back... maybe like patent cross-licensing, API-cross liscensing will become the norm.
P.S. Anyone who's interested in checking out the limits of Google Maps' API, check out Power Map, a simple webapp my friend put together to give direct access to almost all Google Maps features. It was featured on BoingBoing, so you know it must be good:)
Generally you must get permission from the school involved to use/release anything you create in Grad School during or afterwards, especially for business purposes.
I personally intend on releasing the "channels" architecture for Java that I developed during my masters degree, which encourages strict partitioning of threads (almost as entirely separate processes) on sourceforge, however I will have to get the permission of my former advisor (should not be a problem, it's nothing worth any money, just something nice to help OSS).
Perhaps you'd like to name drop a few more companies while you're at it!
Well, I thought some/.ers might actually be interested in what OS(es) we're running at Maas Digital, as just about everyone here has seen the Mars Rover Animation, and I'm sure a few fortunate/.ers have even seen the IMAX Film we animated... People here like to imagine a beowolf cluster, but we actually had one, running a weird Debian/RedHat mashup. Granted 30 CPUs is hardly what it once was, but at ~1 hour a frame for 10 minutes of video in Renderman, it was exactly what we needed to finish on time.
The Lylix namedropping, well, my friend/collegue who runs Lylix was the first person to even expose me to Debian (he's since moved onto Gentoo, also the first person to get me to use that distribution), so it seemed apropos (afterall, I've been sigvertising it for a few months now... it really is great for Asterisk VPS if that's what you need).
I must say that when I was working on MER at JPL, I was surprised the mission critical computers all ran Red Hat 7 and MySQL instead of something like Debian Stable and a "real" database (DB2 maybe?) It ended up not being too much of a problem, as the environment was very homogeneous, but I think part of it was that Debian Stable really was just a little bit too stable, even for conservative operations folks.
I've never seen the point of using Debian Unstable - you get none of the reliability guarantees of Debian Stable, and it's not as current as Ubuntu. To each his own, I guess.
Debian has always been more towards the stability end of the stability/feature curve. For many folks running a production server, being on the bleeding edge is very undesireable.
I for one hope that Debian never "catches up" to Ubuntu, because while Ubuntu is fantastic for desktop linux users, it's not clear that it can provide the stability needed for some production servers the way that Debian Stable does.
This is great news! I do contracting work for Maas Digital, and we have a 30-CPU renderfarm running a weird combination of Debian-32 and Red Hat 64 bit binary overlays. This should simplify things immensely!
At my other job (lylix.net), we had to move away from Debian to Gentoo for this reason (among others), so it's good to see it finally being
Thanks, I misunderstood the announcment. Still sad though, Apple should be giving more back to OSS - it owes much of its comeback to OSS (though not Free Software because it doesnt' seem to like GPL stuff much, like many corporations).
It hasn't been? What life do you know of that's unchanged by the Internet?
The internet has changed just about everyone's life (including my grandparents), however I think very little of this is the "democratization" of the internet, and more of it caused by the efforts of large corporations (amazon, google, microsoft, etc) and the technocrats that run many of the more valuable recesses of the web.
who made you judge and jury of "good" content? Ok, in your opinion MySpace has no good content. I'd call you an elitist jerk again, but you've already admitted to it.
Human beings are programmed to judge things. This is an important survival trait (should I trust/rely on this person? Should they be included or excluded from a given social group? What are they likely to do or not do?). I couldn't precisely quantify my definition of what is "good" but I am sure that I have one, and that you also have one that you apply, whether you admit to it or not. I know relativism is in vogue right now, despite the many logical contradictions that arise, but even people that pretend to be complete moral/cultural relativists oppose things like slavery (despite the fact that many cultures throughout history thought it was a vital part of society). I'm not saying that MySpace shouldn't be allowed to exist, but I really don't think it has a high utility to society at large - it's just like saying "there's nothing worth watching on TV."
Yeah I have a friend in a metal band that uses myspace for those purposes, and I must say it's rather impressive - anyone that says myspace is 100% awful is totally wrong, however it's still not quite enough to prevent me from gouging my eyes out whenever I see it:)
The US has seen worse times in the past, from concentration camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, to the two seditionacts, to the first and only use of nuclear weapons, deserved or not. The good news is that so far we've always managed to bounce back. It's possible that some day the masses will realize that we're heading the wrong direction... does anyone know of a way to hasten the coming of this day, or plan for what to do if it does not happen?
I personally use Fink (and love it, for all of its flaws), but it's sad to me to see a good alternative source for OSS on OS X bite the dust. The only reason I'm able to enjoy a proprietary OS like OS X is because of the availability of many of the best OSS packages (if not all), and the compatability this affords me with linux-based environments. Hopefully Gentoo on OS X will go somewhere - does anyone know how it stacks up against Fink right now?
For me right now, RoR is a great prototyping system... I'd probably use J2EE in real life, but it's also possible that RoR will pan out. If nothing else, it's great for internal webapps that need set up quickly and don't need to scale.
Yes, that's why I qualified my comment with the statement that it was good promotion, as long as the cut material was also good, which, in the case of LOTR, it very much was.
Alright, I'm really tired of this "cell phones as bad as being drunk." Does being on a cell phone distract you sometimes? Absolutely. Does it also help you stay awake on long drives? You bet. But what impact is it actually having on accidents?
I think most people would agree (and yes, I'm making presumptions based on my own experiences and those I know) that they are able to identify more individuals who are obviously driving while on a cell phone (via visual inspection) than individuals who are obviously impared by alcohol (from swerving or some such). I would make the educated guess that this means that there are more cell phone drivers out there than drunks. Now, considering how many accidents are alcohol related (I've heard around 50% but even 10% is enough to make my point), one would expect a very, very sharp rise in the number of accidents as cell phones became popular in the last few years.
Of course, nothing like this has happenned. If you do not believe me (and also as a good Karma whoring measure) check out US Bureau of Transportation Statistics Report. I cannot extract any sudden rise from those numbers, or any significant average rise whatsoever (apart from the obvious increase corresponding to population increase in the last 15 years).
I'm pretty sure if cell phones were as bad as drunk driving, hundreds of thousands more people would be dead now, and they would be banned.
I think it would be cool if more authored did this - releasing the "deleted scenes", so to speak, of their works for free, as a promotion for what they kept... especially if they were still high quality. It probably increases sales quite a bit (I wasn't even considering buying this book until after looking at the sample), and gives something useful directly to the community.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one hope we see a Solaris kernel in Leopard, if nothing else for ZFS support, but having better kernel tracing and swapping routines would be nice as well.
Firstly, KHTML is LGPL, which is a very different beast from GPL, being non-viral, among other things, allowing its use in proprietary software.
Secondly, I looked on the FSF site and BSD is "free software", but seems to be far less "free" (according to Stallman, with whom I disagree vigorously) than the GPL.
That's gotta be one of the most helpful responses I've ever received on slashdot, I don't know why I've never even heard of them - probably because most of the people I work with use Fink. Thanks!
I'd claim that 5 years is isolated... but once again, what is the solution? Democrats tend not to solve much... just about all Bill Clinton accomplished was riding the top end of the Business Cycle (though I don't really blame him, he wasn't asked to do much by the population). The two party system, and its entrenched and seemlying unwrestable control of the federal government seems to be at the root of all these problems, not a mere symptom such as Bush.
Well they are very careful with the viral (yes, I feel it's appropriate) nature of the GPL, and are careful to never put GPL stuff (at least that we know of) anywhere inside the OS directly, where it would be linked with something proprietary. So GPL utilities are fine for them, but not drivers or other kernel goodies, unfortunately.
Sometimes I wonder, no matter what its intentions, if GPL is actually helping the masses much (vs BSD liscensed software, etc), or mostly idealists/software purists and those whose situation affords the effective running of Linux-based OSes.
What liscenses are "free software" other than GPL/LGPL? As I understand it, BSD does nothing to ensure many of these rights, and plenty of creative commons, or anti-government/anti-corporate/anti-military clauses also restrict these fundamental "rights."
Here's a question: If you create a derivative work, but in such a way that no "useful" information about the original work(s) upon which it was based can be reconstructed, can it still be sued over? For instance, if I took The DaVinci Code book, and rearranged all of the letters in it to be in alphabetical order, and published it (with no references ot The DaVinci Code, except perhaps a small disclaimer in the aknowledgements section), would this be illegal without permission? I see this art as the same type of thing - sure it's based on someone else's work, but there's no way in hell I can figure out what the spammers were writing from those pictures, in fact I'm not even sure it's possible that examining pictures made by this process could determine whether the process was fed with spam or non-spam emails of similar length!
What APIs out there are people really wanting to be openned? What would be useful to have? How can the FOSS community come together to help provide direction for companies wishing to open APIs, and incentives to help corporations along in doing so?
I'm certainly no marketing expert, however it seems that some (though not all) of these "mashups" may potentially dilute the brand of the services being provided, by adding an extra layer of abstraction/"confusion" overtop of the data.
:)
Personally I see nothing wrong with this, but will this prevent some companies from releasing their API? Flickr seemed to have an interesting solution to the problem of API release, in that it would share its photos with other sites if and only if they shared theirs back... maybe like patent cross-licensing, API-cross liscensing will become the norm.
P.S. Anyone who's interested in checking out the limits of Google Maps' API, check out Power Map, a simple webapp my friend put together to give direct access to almost all Google Maps features. It was featured on BoingBoing, so you know it must be good
Generally you must get permission from the school involved to use/release anything you create in Grad School during or afterwards, especially for business purposes.
I personally intend on releasing the "channels" architecture for Java that I developed during my masters degree, which encourages strict partitioning of threads (almost as entirely separate processes) on sourceforge, however I will have to get the permission of my former advisor (should not be a problem, it's nothing worth any money, just something nice to help OSS).
Perhaps you'd like to name drop a few more companies while you're at it!
/.ers might actually be interested in what OS(es) we're running at Maas Digital, as just about everyone here has seen the Mars Rover Animation, and I'm sure a few fortunate /.ers have even seen the IMAX Film we animated... People here like to imagine a beowolf cluster, but we actually had one, running a weird Debian/RedHat mashup. Granted 30 CPUs is hardly what it once was, but at ~1 hour a frame for 10 minutes of video in Renderman, it was exactly what we needed to finish on time.
Well, I thought some
The Lylix namedropping, well, my friend/collegue who runs Lylix was the first person to even expose me to Debian (he's since moved onto Gentoo, also the first person to get me to use that distribution), so it seemed apropos (afterall, I've been sigvertising it for a few months now... it really is great for Asterisk VPS if that's what you need).
I must say that when I was working on MER at JPL, I was surprised the mission critical computers all ran Red Hat 7 and MySQL instead of something like Debian Stable and a "real" database (DB2 maybe?) It ended up not being too much of a problem, as the environment was very homogeneous, but I think part of it was that Debian Stable really was just a little bit too stable, even for conservative operations folks.
I've never seen the point of using Debian Unstable - you get none of the reliability guarantees of Debian Stable, and it's not as current as Ubuntu. To each his own, I guess.
That's true, however I was a little annoyed with the slowness of Debian Stable until Sarge... I do like to run software written in this century :)
Debian has always been more towards the stability end of the stability/feature curve. For many folks running a production server, being on the bleeding edge is very undesireable.
I for one hope that Debian never "catches up" to Ubuntu, because while Ubuntu is fantastic for desktop linux users, it's not clear that it can provide the stability needed for some production servers the way that Debian Stable does.
This is great news! I do contracting work for Maas Digital, and we have a 30-CPU renderfarm running a weird combination of Debian-32 and Red Hat 64 bit binary overlays. This should simplify things immensely!
At my other job (lylix.net), we had to move away from Debian to Gentoo for this reason (among others), so it's good to see it finally being
Thanks, I misunderstood the announcment. Still sad though, Apple should be giving more back to OSS - it owes much of its comeback to OSS (though not Free Software because it doesnt' seem to like GPL stuff much, like many corporations).
It hasn't been? What life do you know of that's unchanged by the Internet?
The internet has changed just about everyone's life (including my grandparents), however I think very little of this is the "democratization" of the internet, and more of it caused by the efforts of large corporations (amazon, google, microsoft, etc) and the technocrats that run many of the more valuable recesses of the web.
who made you judge and jury of "good" content? Ok, in your opinion MySpace has no good content. I'd call you an elitist jerk again, but you've already admitted to it.
Human beings are programmed to judge things. This is an important survival trait (should I trust/rely on this person? Should they be included or excluded from a given social group? What are they likely to do or not do?). I couldn't precisely quantify my definition of what is "good" but I am sure that I have one, and that you also have one that you apply, whether you admit to it or not. I know relativism is in vogue right now, despite the many logical contradictions that arise, but even people that pretend to be complete moral/cultural relativists oppose things like slavery (despite the fact that many cultures throughout history thought it was a vital part of society). I'm not saying that MySpace shouldn't be allowed to exist, but I really don't think it has a high utility to society at large - it's just like saying "there's nothing worth watching on TV."
Yeah I have a friend in a metal band that uses myspace for those purposes, and I must say it's rather impressive - anyone that says myspace is 100% awful is totally wrong, however it's still not quite enough to prevent me from gouging my eyes out whenever I see it :)
The US has seen worse times in the past, from concentration camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, to the two sedition acts, to the first and only use of nuclear weapons, deserved or not. The good news is that so far we've always managed to bounce back. It's possible that some day the masses will realize that we're heading the wrong direction... does anyone know of a way to hasten the coming of this day, or plan for what to do if it does not happen?
I personally use Fink (and love it, for all of its flaws), but it's sad to me to see a good alternative source for OSS on OS X bite the dust. The only reason I'm able to enjoy a proprietary OS like OS X is because of the availability of many of the best OSS packages (if not all), and the compatability this affords me with linux-based environments. Hopefully Gentoo on OS X will go somewhere - does anyone know how it stacks up against Fink right now?
For me right now, RoR is a great prototyping system... I'd probably use J2EE in real life, but it's also possible that RoR will pan out. If nothing else, it's great for internal webapps that need set up quickly and don't need to scale.
Yes, that's why I qualified my comment with the statement that it was good promotion, as long as the cut material was also good, which, in the case of LOTR, it very much was.
Wow, alright that fixed me up good and fast, thanks!
P.S. Shouldn't it be "nothing shared"?
Alright, I'm really tired of this "cell phones as bad as being drunk." Does being on a cell phone distract you sometimes? Absolutely. Does it also help you stay awake on long drives? You bet. But what impact is it actually having on accidents?
I think most people would agree (and yes, I'm making presumptions based on my own experiences and those I know) that they are able to identify more individuals who are obviously driving while on a cell phone (via visual inspection) than individuals who are obviously impared by alcohol (from swerving or some such). I would make the educated guess that this means that there are more cell phone drivers out there than drunks. Now, considering how many accidents are alcohol related (I've heard around 50% but even 10% is enough to make my point), one would expect a very, very sharp rise in the number of accidents as cell phones became popular in the last few years.
Of course, nothing like this has happenned. If you do not believe me (and also as a good Karma whoring measure) check out US Bureau of Transportation Statistics Report. I cannot extract any sudden rise from those numbers, or any significant average rise whatsoever (apart from the obvious increase corresponding to population increase in the last 15 years).
I'm pretty sure if cell phones were as bad as drunk driving, hundreds of thousands more people would be dead now, and they would be banned.
I think it would be cool if more authored did this - releasing the "deleted scenes", so to speak, of their works for free, as a promotion for what they kept... especially if they were still high quality. It probably increases sales quite a bit (I wasn't even considering buying this book until after looking at the sample), and gives something useful directly to the community.