My info about this subject is about half a year out of date, but as I understand it, WinCE is only one of about two or three different OSes a Dreamcast game can run on. (The others, I think, are Sega proprietary OSes.)
I have absolutely no idea what proportion of Dreamcast games use WinCE as opposed to the other ones.
I appreciate your sentiments, but what can we do about it? This is not a flame or snide remark; I genuinely wish there were some way to improve this situation. The best I can think to do is agitate against our wrongheaded interventions in other countries...
According to the official Weird Al website, or at least according to documents linked from there, Al is not related to Frankie. Just thought I'd mention it.
KDE depends on a toolkit known as QT, which is not, and has not ever been, licensed under the GPL. Originally QT's license was not, so far as I know, considered Open Source; recently a new version has come out under something called the QPL, which if I understand correctly RMS has seen and pronounced it tolerable. Nevertheless, it still isn't GPL.
I still haven't decided where I stand on the philosophical issues, but I try to stay on top of the technical details, so I know what's which when I'm ready to take a stand.
Well, any positive benefit from that would tend to be outweighed by the outages and downtime caused by the virus... a virus that only affects someone running Microsoft Windows, Word and Outlook. (Though maybe if you have Eudora or something and open the attachment, your Word can still get infected; it just won't spread automatically like it will with Outlook.)
On the bright side, he no longer has as much grounds for complaining that Slashdot has ignored him. Next time anyone encounters his arguments, we can say, "yes, I read about it on slashdot, looked it up, it was nonsense." And for maximum effect, we can even say why it's nonsense. Won't help him any, but it'll at least make him look like the whiner he is to anyone else who's reading.
The usual response to this point, I think, is that Linux users (or rather that proportion of them that are also coders) are your testers. They run the program, make it do something it doesn't want to do, then root around in the source to fix it.
That's the theory, anyway. In practice, this debugging model will miss lots of edge cases and stuff. And anything that involves race conditions or other synchronization issues doesn't get found easily by this model (though in fairness, it's exceedingly hard to even find, much less debug, race conditions by any means). The details of this debate I'll leave to people more knowledgeable than myself.
Serious testing is certainly vital for mission-critical apps. I don't want the code that controls the airplane I'm riding in, or the control tower directing my airplane, to have been tested with the "bazaar" model of testing. But then, that sort of thing is almost the canonical example of code that should be developed cathedral-style anyway; and people don't write ATC software for kicks.
I had a point when I started writing this, but I've forgotten what it was.
And this is why past (and conceivably present, I wouldn't know the details) OEM licensing that effectively prevents PC distributors from installing whatever OS they want is particularly pernicious.
It could be that the people managing Slate have enough sense to realize that their success depends on credibility, which means not being seen as under the thumb of their sponsors.
Of course, compatible with this notion is the idea that this is a sort of intellectual tokenism. Let the occasional anti-MS tidbit by, so Slate can say "Look, we're objective, we can say bad things about MS if we want!"
Furthermore, I predict that UF, Segfault, Be Dope, and whoever else got this letter will receive letters exactly one week from today, with a two-word message.
Here's a thought, and I wonder if it's been discussed enough:
The Free Software philosophy needs to appeal to programmers if it is to succeed (since it is programmers who must produce GPL'ed software with enough functionality to compete with commercial offerings)... but programmers often end up having an economic stake in the continuation of the present Intellectual Property regime, because their wages are paid by corporations who depend on restrictive licenses to create (artificial?) scarcity.
I recognize that the FSF describes other ways for programmers to make a living, but to someone "dependent" on the corporate life, there's too much uncertainty involved in these alternatives. (On the other hand, the FSF could probably draw lots of recruits from programmers who're laid off because their company went bust...)
I guess I didn't have much of a point, other than that a lot of the emotional resistance to RMS's ideas (including, possibly, my own) may be simple fear for our salaries.
The post was a parody of the reactionary fringe of American politics. Look up Pat Buchanan sometime -- he's spoken in derogatory terms about all three. (Well, okay, I haven't seen a specific quote of him denouncing gays...)
If you want to understand the free software position, I suggest you go to the Free Software Foundation website and read about it for yourself.
I'm not sure if I agree with Richard Stallman yet, but his ideas are sufficiently well-considered, IMHO, to not be dismissed with a simple "It's socialism!" or "He doesn't understand the Real World", whatever the h*** the Real World is supposed to be.
Actually, RMS may become our equivalent of Samuel Adams. From what I remember of my Am. Hist, Sam Adams was considered a firebrand -- rather more vocal and immoderate than a lot of his contemporaries. I can't help but think that at least a few of the other Founding Fathers (tm) thought he was a bit of a flake. Nevertheless, we remember and quote him today.
I just had a thought. Perhaps he posts these articles in here to get perspectives from the/. community. It could be that an article like one of these would indeed be submitted to a broader forum, all the better for its underlying ideas having been pulled apart and put back together by slashdotters. Isn't it nice to imagine a popular writer actually might do some actual research before writing articles on a tech subject?
Compare this with the article about GNOME in the Philly News, quoted in another/. article today (3/21). That author may have meant well, but Katz has more knowledge of Linux in his little finger than that poor fellow had in his whole body.
Of course, maybe I'm mixed up about what Katz is trying to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Had you noticed that the nations you mention have dramatically lower instances of all other kinds of violence?
The US has some sort of violence problem, certainly, but gun control would, at best, be like a band-aid. On a severed artery.
My info about this subject is about half a year out of date, but as I understand it, WinCE is only one of about two or three different OSes a Dreamcast game can run on. (The others, I think, are Sega proprietary OSes.)
I have absolutely no idea what proportion of Dreamcast games use WinCE as opposed to the other ones.
I appreciate your sentiments, but what can we do about it? This is not a flame or snide remark; I genuinely wish there were some way to improve this situation. The best I can think to do is agitate against our wrongheaded interventions in other countries...
According to the official Weird Al website, or at least according to documents linked from there, Al is not related to Frankie. Just thought I'd mention it.
KDE depends on a toolkit known as QT, which is not, and has not ever been, licensed under the GPL. Originally QT's license was not, so far as I know, considered Open Source; recently a new version has come out under something called the QPL, which if I understand correctly RMS has seen and pronounced it tolerable. Nevertheless, it still isn't GPL.
I still haven't decided where I stand on the philosophical issues, but I try to stay on top of the technical details, so I know what's which when I'm ready to take a stand.
I'll be damned. I was right the first time.
Well, any positive benefit from that would tend to be outweighed by the outages and downtime caused by the virus... a virus that only affects someone running Microsoft Windows, Word and Outlook. (Though maybe if you have Eudora or something and open the attachment, your Word can still get infected; it just won't spread automatically like it will with Outlook.)
OK, so I was wrong.
This sucks.
On the bright side, he no longer has as much grounds for complaining that Slashdot has ignored him. Next time anyone encounters his arguments, we can say, "yes, I read about it on slashdot, looked it up, it was nonsense." And for maximum effect, we can even say why it's nonsense. Won't help him any, but it'll at least make him look like the whiner he is to anyone else who's reading.
Who'd notice?
Or, for that matter, comparing a "you install" Linux system with a "you install" Win98 system. Or indeed, any comparison of apples to apples.
The usual response to this point, I think, is that Linux users (or rather that proportion of them that are also coders) are your testers. They run the program, make it do something it doesn't want to do, then root around in the source to fix it.
That's the theory, anyway. In practice, this debugging model will miss lots of edge cases and stuff. And anything that involves race conditions or other synchronization issues doesn't get found easily by this model (though in fairness, it's exceedingly hard to even find, much less debug, race conditions by any means). The details of this debate I'll leave to people more knowledgeable than myself.
Serious testing is certainly vital for mission-critical apps. I don't want the code that controls the airplane I'm riding in, or the control tower directing my airplane, to have been tested with the "bazaar" model of testing. But then, that sort of thing is almost the canonical example of code that should be developed cathedral-style anyway; and people don't write ATC software for kicks.
I had a point when I started writing this, but I've forgotten what it was.
And this is why past (and conceivably present, I wouldn't know the details) OEM licensing that effectively prevents PC distributors from installing whatever OS they want is particularly pernicious.
It could be that the people managing Slate have enough sense to realize that their success depends on credibility, which means not being seen as under the thumb of their sponsors.
Of course, compatible with this notion is the idea that this is a sort of intellectual tokenism. Let the occasional anti-MS tidbit by, so Slate can say "Look, we're objective, we can say bad things about MS if we want!"
Furthermore, I predict that UF, Segfault, Be Dope, and whoever else got this letter will receive letters exactly one week from today, with a two-word message.
What message? Guess.
Isn't fax spamming actually specifically illegal?
Why do we have the GIMP but no GPL'ed office suite?
This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm curious.
Seventy-third post!
Here's a thought, and I wonder if it's been discussed enough:
The Free Software philosophy needs to appeal to programmers if it is to succeed (since it is programmers who must produce GPL'ed software with enough functionality to compete with commercial offerings)... but programmers often end up having an economic stake in the continuation of the present Intellectual Property regime, because their wages are paid by corporations who depend on restrictive licenses to create (artificial?) scarcity.
I recognize that the FSF describes other ways for programmers to make a living, but to someone "dependent" on the corporate life, there's too much uncertainty involved in these alternatives. (On the other hand, the FSF could probably draw lots of recruits from programmers who're laid off because their company went bust...)
I guess I didn't have much of a point, other than that a lot of the emotional resistance to RMS's ideas (including, possibly, my own) may be simple fear for our salaries.
The post was a parody of the reactionary fringe of American politics. Look up Pat Buchanan sometime -- he's spoken in derogatory terms about all three. (Well, okay, I haven't seen a specific quote of him denouncing gays...)
If you want to understand the free software position, I suggest you go to the Free Software Foundation website and read about it for yourself.
I'm not sure if I agree with Richard Stallman yet, but his ideas are sufficiently well-considered, IMHO, to not be dismissed with a simple "It's socialism!" or "He doesn't understand the Real World", whatever the h*** the Real World is supposed to be.
Actually, RMS may become our equivalent of Samuel Adams. From what I remember of my Am. Hist, Sam Adams was considered a firebrand -- rather more vocal and immoderate than a lot of his contemporaries. I can't help but think that at least a few of the other Founding Fathers (tm) thought he was a bit of a flake. Nevertheless, we remember and quote him today.
So it may be with Stallman. Or maybe not.
Compare this with the article about GNOME in the Philly News, quoted in another /. article today (3/21). That author may have meant well, but Katz has more knowledge of Linux in his little finger than that poor fellow had in his whole body.
Of course, maybe I'm mixed up about what Katz is trying to do.
How dare BillG try to steal the credit from Al Gore! :)
No associative array type.
It's called java.util.Ha shtable.