Re:Another day, another stupid false hope.
on
Possible Cure For Autism
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· Score: 1, Interesting
As stupid as this might sound, I do genuinely believe that marijuana is viable as at least a partial treatment for some forms of autism, if not a total cure.
I was diagnosed at 16 with Nonverbal Learning Disability, a condition on the spectrum which mimics both generic HFA and Asperger's in some respects. I had the usual types of social problems at school, although they weren't as severe as those encountered by most, and in hindsight I've realised that at school I was actually considered highly charismatic by some, but that I was simply too focused on my own pain at the time to see that.
However, one thing I was never able to do until the age of 26 was develop any kind of relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Then in 2001 I was introduced to marijuana, which in addition to reading certain texts on social interaction, I believe greatly assisted me in becoming someone who a larger group of people could relate to more easily than previously. I became more capable of diplomacy, and less insistent on pointing things out to people in the misguided interests of honesty, as I had previously. I also gradually began to shed the Stallmanite tendency to believe in the comparitive superiority of my own morality, or to insist that others adopt it.
I believe myself that in the case of many people at least, there is a correlation between autism and abnormally high intelligence. That is not always the case, but it very often is. I also believe that marijuana reduces intelligence, if enough of it is consumed over a sufficiently long period of time. A reduction of intelligence in a person with high functioning autism (HFA) in my own observation is very likely to also cause a reduction in autistic symptoms as well.
Because of the other problems marijuana can use, as well as its' illegality in many jurisdictions, I do not advocate partaking of it in excessive amounts. However, anyone here with HFA who is finding that they are suffering due to autistic symptoms could perhaps try the odd medicinal joint for a few months to a year or so. You possibly won't be able to code as well at the end of it, but you might find that your ability to relate to the neurotypical population has increased as well.
Now all we need is for the pseudo-empiricist bigots to stop posthumously calling Stanley Meyer a charlatan as well, especially considering that he was poisoned in order to get him to stop engaging in his research.
There are a lot of things going on at the moment, research wise, which are outside the orthodoxy...and that doesn't mean they're not possible.
One of Einstein's most redeeming characteristics was his degree of humility. There are a lot of scientists who would do well to follow his example in that regard, and to acknowledge that there is still so much that they do not know.
You get the diversity of development that comes from the different groups producing distros, but to the public who might want to try linux, it gets very confusing to sort between them if they are not technical.
Some of us realise that ultimately, we are the only people who are likely to have our best interests at heart. Steve Ballmer would not consider my life or my wellbeing to be worth a blade of grass, most likely...and so he isn't a good person to entrust my wellbeing to as far as using a computer is concerned. If I want to make sure I have a computing environment that I can really trust, I have to do it for myself.
You might not enjoy having to think, but the alternative is that people who do not care about you will make the same decisions for you. You not making choices doesn't mean that they don't get made. It simply means that they get made for you by people who have their own welfare in mind. Not yours.
Slackware, last I knew, had an installation system that wasn't much improved from it's humble beginnings as the original Linux distro, SLS.
Yeah, but one benefit is it doesn't need to go into X.;-)
As far as X crashing goes...you'd need to know which server it's running. The generic first guess I think is normally fbdev (framebuffer) if the system can't work out what type of card you've got. Some of the live cds you've tried to use might be thinking that because you've got a GeForce 6200, the nv server that comes with X would work...and from memory at least once version of nv was known to have problems with the newer GeForce cards. I had issues myself trying to get X working with Slackware a bit back...I should have remembered that.
If you haven't already, try Ubuntu Edgy Eft...Ubuntu has the best hardware detection/setup I've seen for Linux. If that doesn't work, and if you still want to get something going, if you've got an onboard video card on your motherboard I'd suggest taking your seperate video card out of the system temporarily and seeing if the onboard video card has the same problems. That will either tell you if there's something potentially wrong with the card itself, or at the very least it will give you something that you can at least use when you want to use Linux.
You however do seem to have deeply strange hardware...I've honestly never heard of anyone else having problems as severe as what you're describing.
Big Media is going to eventually sink YouTube. The irony is that if Google hadn't acquired them, that probably would not have happened.
Enjoy it while you can, and remember that there'll still be archive.org, videobomb, and p2p. Participatory media in general won't die when YouTube does.
I've often observed that the archetypical Slashbot is a brighter shade of red than the average radish; unfortunately, they are also normally extremely reluctant to admit such.
I have no real problem with people being Commies if that's what turns them on, but get out of the closet, guys. If you are demonstrably and visibly Communist, have the courage to admit it.
I probably have a few socialist tendencies left myself, but I've moved a lot further towards the right in recent years, and ironically it's been the behaviour of groups like the FSF that has caused most of that. They've made me realise that in reality, leftist collectivism of the type that FOSS is generally associated with is just another form of centralised authoritarianism...the FSF have set themselves up as the controllers of a mountain of code, and they expect to be able to grant or deny access to that code to people based on whether or not you're doing something that they don't like. Hence, I might as well be right wing...because at least the right are direct about their tyranny. Stallman is a tyrant who constantly tries to make out that he is the opposite...and I'm very, very sick of that.
Stallman isn't an anarchist...he isn't anything remotely close, and while a lot of other people might have been fooled on that score, I never have been. The FSF is a centralised heirarchy with leaders and formalised philosophies and all the other usual monolithic crap, and it issues decrees and in other ways tries to behave as much like a sovereign government as it can. That is not anarchy...it's the exact type of system that real anarchists throughout history have wanted to abolish.
If anyone here is truly dumb enough to believe that FOSS has anything to do with genuine anarchism, go to debian.org and study the beurecratic nightmare that is their "policy" sometime...then come back and try telling me that that is decentralised. Ditto for Ubuntu...you don't need to look very far through their site to start finding references to the word "governance" at all.
I find it deliciously refreshing to find that a person who claims to believe in freedom and distribution is willing to advocate it to all peoples, rather than restricting the distribution of that freedom.
What...you mean like the way he wants to restrict it to Novell?
If he was really the being of light you're making him out to be, I'd be singing his praises too. Too bad he isn't, though.
Not sure I entirely understand how Stallman isn't getting slagged for this
Stallman gets criticised by some people, but the majority of those who dislike him are generally too scared of his followers (with good reason, to a degree) to really speak their minds. His congregation here on Slashdot (and on other sites) not only refrain entirely from engaging in critical thought themselves, but also serve quite willingly as human shields in that regard, and they seem to have mod points on a routine basis. Thus, anyone who makes any serious effort to find fault with him usually simply gets modded down to the point where there is little danger of what they write being read.
*spent 4 hours last night getting my cd-rom to work right in linux*
This is extremely odd. Of all the hardware problems I've had/heard of with Linux, cd-rom drives aren't normally among them. Which distribution are you using?
Granted though, sound and 3d can be tricky at times. What hardware have you got?
When Microsoft does buisness with the Chinese government, it is "corporation is evil for selling OS to repressive government. When OSS does does the same thing, "oh, this is great, more countries using OSS".
Shhhhh. We're not supposed to point out logical inconsistencies like that. It makes Stallman's worshippers get very upset. You don't want that, do you?
...is that around here it seems to be the articles about other operating systems which attract the most trolls, incoherent offtopic posts, lame, unfunny attempts at humour, and other such rubbish.
I've noticed how much flotsam is usually attached to articles about *BSD releases in particular, and now a story about Haiku seems to be attracting a fair amount of drek as well.
Maybe this is just the paranoid conspiracy theorist in me, but I'm suspecting that my nemeses on Slashdot, the perennial GNU/cultists, feel an urgent need to try and make sure than any operating system in existence other than Linux is discredited/trashed to the point that nobody will dream of using it, thus continuing the work that their unholy Messiah began in slandering the BSD license.
If one of the faithful are willing to indulge me, would you also be willing to explain how the word "freedom" is in fact *not* a mere euphemism in this case?
I'm going to attempt to struggle past my usually uncontrollable need to troll here in order to point out something important, and positive.
I've used a few Linux distributions. I won't say I've used everything out there by any stretch of the imagination, but I started with Slackware, eventually moved to Red Hat, then to an earlier version of Mandrake, and from there to Linux From Scratch. Along the way I briefly experimented with Fedora Core, Xandros, Debian, and Knoppix, as well as having very briefly installed Gentoo. Not long ago, I first installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake.
Of all of these, Ubuntu is the only distro I've used which, right from when I started using it, I slowly began to develop the sneaking gut feeling that it just might have a chance on the mainstream desktop...and Gnome is part of the reason for that.
Yes, there are things I don't like about Gnome...one of which, GConf, I feel represents a fundamental technical flaw in the whole environment...but then again, that's part of the point.
Gnome is the one Linux DE which has the strongest resemblance to Windows. KDE might be nice, but it just isn't really all that much like Windows at all, at least from my perspective...and the issue here is that that is what the mainstream end user overwhelmingly wants. They don't care how technologically inferior it might be; they will only accept something which apes Windows as closely as possible. Gnome has a much better chance of effectively doing that.
Linus is right when he says Gnome sucks, but the point is that that is what allows it to most closely resemble Windows, which is spartan to a very similar degree. KDE might have a lot of additional functionality and be way more configurable, but being better than Windows means being different from Windows, and end users will not accept that. Hence, Gnome isn't technically better, but it is more fit from an evolutionary point of view.
"We don't give a shit about our customers and we don't want to see them as anything more than cows to be economically milked, but we can't let them know that because if they do find out, they have a tendency to jump the fences we're trying to build around them. The only thing we care about is money. We don't care about our own lives, the lives of anyone else, or anything else. The only thing that matters is getting as much money as possible. We don't even care if we destroy the world sufficiently that we won't be alive to do anything with our billions of dollars after we've made it...the only thing that matters is making it."
It's times like these that I am in danger of almost vaguely starting to believe that at least some of Stallman's paranoia and relentless fanaticism is justified...it becomes momentarily seductive, anywayz. I may not appreciate the FSF's desire to dominate people to the extent they seem to want to, but I sure as hell don't advocate demoniacs like the author of this article, either.
Here's the dichotomy, and it's also why "Linux" and "mainstream," usually don't go together in the same sentence. "Mainstream," means (among other things) "non-autistic." For those of you who've accused me of resorting to stereotypes here, let's see Linus go and have diagnostic tests for autism...as well as pretty much everyone else who's commonly considered a "senior developer," with Linux. I'll bet money that they test positive in 90+% of cases. It's the same characteristics which allow them to be such brilliant programmers on the one hand, that cause them to fight about things which normal people would not even remotely consider on the other.
I'm not of course implying for one minute that neurotypical individuals don't fight...but they generally fight about different things, and which window environment to use on their computers wouldn't be one of said things. Autism can often be a truly crippling social disability, and one of the main reasons why is because autistics tend to care about things that most non-autistics don't...like engaging in holy wars about which is the *one true* graphical environment, which is the *one true* text editor, or which is the *one true* license.
Autism in the case of Linux is, as I said, a tremendously double edged sword...because on the one hand autistic characteristics are arguably a pre-requisite for being a truly great programmer.
On the other hand, the socially disabling aspects of autism are the single main thing holding Linux back, because of the obsession with abstractions that neurotypical individuals do not care about.
I've made analogies between the Linux community and the X-Men before, and as crazy as it initially seems, once you think about it for a while it's not as outlandish as it sounds. Most of you genuinely *are* mutants, and incidents like this one make that fact plain for all to see. The main reason why the average guy on the street is having such difficulty adopting Linux is because, when he looks at the people developing it, he can't help feeling more or less exactly the same way towards you as Senator Kelly would have.
I'm genuinely asking, what common set of tools do you generally get with a typical BSD flavor?
The BSDs do have ports of the text utilities, yes...as well as tar and a number of other things. They also have their own libc. They do have to rely on gcc as a compiler, and although bmake exists, installation of gmake is also more or less mandatory because even though BSD base doesn't use it, of course a heap of the Linux apps in ports do.
In terms of a replacement FOSS compiler, there's TenDRA, and it seems that the BSD people have the kernel compiling with it to at least an experimental degree. A lot of apps would probably need some GCC quirks removed to work with TenDRA though...that's the main problem associated with the Linux kernel, as far as getting free of the GNU toolchain there is concerned.
Caldera also released source of a lot of the old sysv commercial versions of the core utilities a while back under the BSD license; you can find those here if you're interested.
The single biggest problem we'd have in creating a non-GNU/GPL/FSF FOSS UNIX would be ironically the same one Stallman himself had before Linus showed up; there doesn't seem to currently be a non-GPL licensed kernel in existence which is independent of gcc...the BSD kernels rely on it as well. From my own digging on the subject, a kernel is overwhelmingly the single most difficult part of an operating system to write...you're basically looking at the programmatic equivalent of building Stonehenge or the pyramids.
Linux surviving and then thriving in the marketplace isn't as much about it's technical superiority, we've seen over and over how that doesn't mean a win in the market[place, its success is largely due to the license.
Linux's adoption (to the extent that it has been adopted) has come down to a couple of different things:-
Being zero cost in many instances.
The (erroneous) perception on the part of Windows users that Linux can enable them to have a zero cost (or close) clone of Windows that will also allow them to no longer be affected by Microsoft's traditional corporate misbehaviour. The importance of this particular factor cannot be over-emphasised. Linux will eventually reach a point I believe where it will have very little individuality in its' own right; Windows refugees are still totally uncompromising in their insistence that Linux become a Windows clone that is simply removed from Microsoft, and they will do whatever they need to in order to ensure that ultimately, this desire is met. Ubuntu's resemblance to Windows is only the tip of the iceberg.
Linux has consistently had wider hardware support than the BSDs. (Which is one reason why it's been more widely adopted than them)
Being a free UNIX clone means that people who are already using commercial UNIX can get what they need done with Linux in many instances, while forgoing commercial UNIX's price.
User friendliness is the paramount concern in lay end users' minds, but if that need is met, they will also favour a platform with greater security and stability as secondary concerns. Those two issues mean nothing however if a certain level of perceived user friendliness is not present first.
In terms of corporate environments, the sysadmins of many companies are often members of Stallman's ideological cult. Although it can, it also often has nothing to do with Linux's technical superiority; using Linux can simply be a matter of doing what they're told by their fellow zealots.
Software being open source and under liberal licenses is a factor which is of primary appeal to either programmers or the autistic. Neurotypical end users have no regard for it whatsoever.
...but Vista was dead on arrival, and such was entirely predictable. Microsoft need to come up with an alternative, and fast...if they don't, they're going to be in serious trouble soon.
Look at what happened with OpenSSH late last year with the OpenBSD community up in arms
Granted, but if flaps/controversy/general heat and noise get generated anywhere in the BSD world in my observation, it will nearly always be the OpenBSD people. Theo would get angry about not having anything to get angry about.;-)
The BSD people believe they shouldn't HAVE TO tell others to share back, because it is the right thing to do. Lead by example.
I also believe what Larry Wall said once that using the law to force people to do so undermines the entire point.
I get the feeling though that fundamentally, my attitude is fairly close to that of what Linus said about it...that I have no problem with the GPL v2...I just am damn sick of the FSF (and camp followers like Bruce Perens) acting like a sovereign government, when they're not. It's not the actual license *on it's own* that I have a real problem with...it's the way Stallman has taught people to think in a broader sense. It's dominant, cripplingly autistic, and tries to tell other people what they *should* want, rather than acknowledging what they *do* want.
...I could care less if the company cares about the community or its values, and that's the point.
Yes, yes, YES!
GNU/drones, take note. THIS is precisely the attitude that the non-autistic demographic of the human population has towards software. It's why you can't win, and it's also why for the sake of Linux becoming more widely adopted, I anyway am fervently hoping and praying that eventually you'll stop trying.
Sure, the smart thing for me to do, some would argue, would simply be to walk away from Linux and forget that you exist. However, the reason why I can't do that now is because of the degree to which I now emotionally *need* to see the FSF as an organisation die, and anyone else who feels remotely positive towards Stallman fade into irrelevant obscurity. Once that happens, I'll probably be satisfied, and move on...but until it does, I'm staying.
Not to sound like Stallman here, but there have always been two camps - those who think software should be Free as in "we should be able to do what we want with the code for moral/ethical reasons" and those who see practical benefits as in "when people can do what they want with the code everyone benefits."
The GPL stipulates downstream use. That's not "doing what we want with the code," to a complete degree; it's conditional, and it's actually the only manner in which the GPL is described as being conditional in a formal, honest sense. It's the unwritten, informal rules which are a lot more interesting (and restrictive) than the written ones.
Stallman is a tyrant who is gifted when it comes to making his tyranny look like something else. Verifying the truth of that statement is simplicity itself; just watch virtually any article relating to Linux here where the wild eyed GNU/trolls routinely pour out the woodwork and start hoarsely screeching at everyone else about how the rest of us should think and act. These cultists are simply following their Messiah's megalomaniacal example.
The ideology of the "free software camp," as you call it is the memetic equivalent of bird flu. It's arguably even more contagious, and has roughly the same effect on the minds and intellects of the people who end up infected by it. The thing that it kills is a person's desire or capacity for thinking independently.
This is an extremely broad, simplistic generalisation.
Anything designed with the principal intention of controlling masses of humanity, has to be wicked.
This depends on whether or not said religion was specifically designed with that purpose in mind. The monotheistic religions tend towards it, yes...but I'd question whether *all* religions were created with that intent.
Realise that most of the problems you get with Christianity and Islam in particular are primarily associated with monotheism...they don't tend to be present (or at least nowhere near as strongly) in religions where monotheism isn't the major theme.
I don't believe that the negative attitudes that I've seen as being so prevalent within the "Linux community," affect Open Source as a whole. Some of us think that the attitude among the BSD developers of refusing to try and dictate downstream use is a much more enlightened way of thinking...and in my own mind, the only real reason why anyone associated with Linux thinks that dictating downstream use is a good thing is because Stallman thought it first, and they've swallowed his ideas whole...not because they've actually bothered to think about the consequences of it.
I've said before that with most of the little people associated with Linux, there isn't a problem...they're just doing their thing each day, maybe contributing patches to a few different projects here and there, and generally living quietly and agreeably. The "leaders" of the "community" on the other hand, are people who I really wish would crawl into a hole in the ground somewhere and die, to be honest. (Bruce Perens, I'm talking to you, among others) That also includes a number of ACs I've had replying to me on here recently who don't even have the basic courage to put their name to what they write, and then expect others to care about their opinions.
I've realised that one of the main differences between Linux people and the BSD developers is actually posessiveness. The gift culture that ESR wrote about doesn't actually exist with Linux. The BSD people *do* give away their work, genuinely and completely, with no strings attached. The GPL on the other hand encourages an attitude which basically says, "We wrote this, but we'll let you use it...but on the other hand, we don't ever want you to forget that we wrote it, and we also want you to know that we feel that because we wrote it and you are using it, you are forever beholden to us, and we have the right to dominate you in more or less any manner we see fit."
I want to suggest to Jeremy Ellison and a few of the Debian people in particular that maybe you're nowhere near as high minded as you think, but that in fact, you're actually a group of extremely selfish, controlling, mean-spirited human beings who get off on the fact that writing FOSS under the GPL allows you to superficially appear to be altruistic when in fact you're the complete opposite.
BSD developers use the BSD license to completely give away software without stipulation in order to benefit other human beings. *Some* GPL developers at least use the GPL to write software which they can then try and use to *control* other human beings...because they have the attitude that if people who use said software start doing things they don't like, the access to the software for said users will be removed.
You can try and justify this as much as you want, (and doubtless you will) but I think it sucks, that you're completely rotten human beings, and that you're made all the more rotten by the fact that you try and make out that morality is something that you actually are concerned about. You're confusing your own morality with a desire to control what it is that *other* people do. Although again, that's merely an idea that you picked up from the usual source...the root of most of Linux's fundamental problems: Richard Stallman.
Slashdot Mirror
As stupid as this might sound, I do genuinely believe that marijuana is viable as at least a partial treatment for some forms of autism, if not a total cure.
I was diagnosed at 16 with Nonverbal Learning Disability, a condition on the spectrum which mimics both generic HFA and Asperger's in some respects. I had the usual types of social problems at school, although they weren't as severe as those encountered by most, and in hindsight I've realised that at school I was actually considered highly charismatic by some, but that I was simply too focused on my own pain at the time to see that.
However, one thing I was never able to do until the age of 26 was develop any kind of relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Then in 2001 I was introduced to marijuana, which in addition to reading certain texts on social interaction, I believe greatly assisted me in becoming someone who a larger group of people could relate to more easily than previously. I became more capable of diplomacy, and less insistent on pointing things out to people in the misguided interests of honesty, as I had previously. I also gradually began to shed the Stallmanite tendency to believe in the comparitive superiority of my own morality, or to insist that others adopt it.
I believe myself that in the case of many people at least, there is a correlation between autism and abnormally high intelligence. That is not always the case, but it very often is. I also believe that marijuana reduces intelligence, if enough of it is consumed over a sufficiently long period of time. A reduction of intelligence in a person with high functioning autism (HFA) in my own observation is very likely to also cause a reduction in autistic symptoms as well.
Because of the other problems marijuana can use, as well as its' illegality in many jurisdictions, I do not advocate partaking of it in excessive amounts. However, anyone here with HFA who is finding that they are suffering due to autistic symptoms could perhaps try the odd medicinal joint for a few months to a year or so. You possibly won't be able to code as well at the end of it, but you might find that your ability to relate to the neurotypical population has increased as well.
It's an encouraging first step.
Now all we need is for the pseudo-empiricist bigots to stop posthumously calling Stanley Meyer a charlatan as well, especially considering that he was poisoned in order to get him to stop engaging in his research.
There are a lot of things going on at the moment, research wise, which are outside the orthodoxy...and that doesn't mean they're not possible.
One of Einstein's most redeeming characteristics was his degree of humility. There are a lot of scientists who would do well to follow his example in that regard, and to acknowledge that there is still so much that they do not know.
Why should I adhere to this if nobody else does?
You get the diversity of development that comes from the different groups producing distros, but to the public who might want to try linux, it gets very confusing to sort between them if they are not technical.
Some of us realise that ultimately, we are the only people who are likely to have our best interests at heart. Steve Ballmer would not consider my life or my wellbeing to be worth a blade of grass, most likely...and so he isn't a good person to entrust my wellbeing to as far as using a computer is concerned. If I want to make sure I have a computing environment that I can really trust, I have to do it for myself.
You might not enjoy having to think, but the alternative is that people who do not care about you will make the same decisions for you. You not making choices doesn't mean that they don't get made. It simply means that they get made for you by people who have their own welfare in mind. Not yours.
Slackware, last I knew, had an installation system that wasn't much improved from it's humble beginnings as the original Linux distro, SLS.
;-)
Yeah, but one benefit is it doesn't need to go into X.
As far as X crashing goes...you'd need to know which server it's running. The generic first guess I think is normally fbdev (framebuffer) if the system can't work out what type of card you've got. Some of the live cds you've tried to use might be thinking that because you've got a GeForce 6200, the nv server that comes with X would work...and from memory at least once version of nv was known to have problems with the newer GeForce cards. I had issues myself trying to get X working with Slackware a bit back...I should have remembered that.
If you haven't already, try Ubuntu Edgy Eft...Ubuntu has the best hardware detection/setup I've seen for Linux. If that doesn't work, and if you still want to get something going, if you've got an onboard video card on your motherboard I'd suggest taking your seperate video card out of the system temporarily and seeing if the onboard video card has the same problems. That will either tell you if there's something potentially wrong with the card itself, or at the very least it will give you something that you can at least use when you want to use Linux.
You however do seem to have deeply strange hardware...I've honestly never heard of anyone else having problems as severe as what you're describing.
Big Media is going to eventually sink YouTube. The irony is that if Google hadn't acquired them, that probably would not have happened.
Enjoy it while you can, and remember that there'll still be archive.org, videobomb, and p2p. Participatory media in general won't die when YouTube does.
I would recommend Slackware, but I'd probably also get flamed for doing so. Other people here might recommend Ubuntu.
Personally I'd never use pure Debian, myself.
I've often observed that the archetypical Slashbot is a brighter shade of red than the average radish; unfortunately, they are also normally extremely reluctant to admit such.
I have no real problem with people being Commies if that's what turns them on, but get out of the closet, guys. If you are demonstrably and visibly Communist, have the courage to admit it.
I probably have a few socialist tendencies left myself, but I've moved a lot further towards the right in recent years, and ironically it's been the behaviour of groups like the FSF that has caused most of that. They've made me realise that in reality, leftist collectivism of the type that FOSS is generally associated with is just another form of centralised authoritarianism...the FSF have set themselves up as the controllers of a mountain of code, and they expect to be able to grant or deny access to that code to people based on whether or not you're doing something that they don't like. Hence, I might as well be right wing...because at least the right are direct about their tyranny. Stallman is a tyrant who constantly tries to make out that he is the opposite...and I'm very, very sick of that.
Stallman isn't an anarchist...he isn't anything remotely close, and while a lot of other people might have been fooled on that score, I never have been. The FSF is a centralised heirarchy with leaders and formalised philosophies and all the other usual monolithic crap, and it issues decrees and in other ways tries to behave as much like a sovereign government as it can. That is not anarchy...it's the exact type of system that real anarchists throughout history have wanted to abolish.
If anyone here is truly dumb enough to believe that FOSS has anything to do with genuine anarchism, go to debian.org and study the beurecratic nightmare that is their "policy" sometime...then come back and try telling me that that is decentralised. Ditto for Ubuntu...you don't need to look very far through their site to start finding references to the word "governance" at all.
I find it deliciously refreshing to find that a person who claims to believe in freedom and distribution is willing to advocate it to all peoples, rather than restricting the distribution of that freedom.
What...you mean like the way he wants to restrict it to Novell?
If he was really the being of light you're making him out to be, I'd be singing his praises too. Too bad he isn't, though.
Not sure I entirely understand how Stallman isn't getting slagged for this
Stallman gets criticised by some people, but the majority of those who dislike him are generally too scared of his followers (with good reason, to a degree) to really speak their minds. His congregation here on Slashdot (and on other sites) not only refrain entirely from engaging in critical thought themselves, but also serve quite willingly as human shields in that regard, and they seem to have mod points on a routine basis. Thus, anyone who makes any serious effort to find fault with him usually simply gets modded down to the point where there is little danger of what they write being read.
*spent 4 hours last night getting my cd-rom to work right in linux*
This is extremely odd. Of all the hardware problems I've had/heard of with Linux, cd-rom drives aren't normally among them. Which distribution are you using?
Granted though, sound and 3d can be tricky at times. What hardware have you got?
When Microsoft does buisness with the Chinese government, it is "corporation is evil for selling OS to repressive government. When OSS does does the same thing, "oh, this is great, more countries using OSS".
Shhhhh. We're not supposed to point out logical inconsistencies like that. It makes Stallman's worshippers get very upset. You don't want that, do you?
...is that around here it seems to be the articles about other operating systems which attract the most trolls, incoherent offtopic posts, lame, unfunny attempts at humour, and other such rubbish.
I've noticed how much flotsam is usually attached to articles about *BSD releases in particular, and now a story about Haiku seems to be attracting a fair amount of drek as well.
Maybe this is just the paranoid conspiracy theorist in me, but I'm suspecting that my nemeses on Slashdot, the perennial GNU/cultists, feel an urgent need to try and make sure than any operating system in existence other than Linux is discredited/trashed to the point that nobody will dream of using it, thus continuing the work that their unholy Messiah began in slandering the BSD license.
If one of the faithful are willing to indulge me, would you also be willing to explain how the word "freedom" is in fact *not* a mere euphemism in this case?
I don't have points currently or I'd do it myself.
I'm going to attempt to struggle past my usually uncontrollable need to troll here in order to point out something important, and positive.
I've used a few Linux distributions. I won't say I've used everything out there by any stretch of the imagination, but I started with Slackware, eventually moved to Red Hat, then to an earlier version of Mandrake, and from there to Linux From Scratch. Along the way I briefly experimented with Fedora Core, Xandros, Debian, and Knoppix, as well as having very briefly installed Gentoo. Not long ago, I first installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake.
Of all of these, Ubuntu is the only distro I've used which, right from when I started using it, I slowly began to develop the sneaking gut feeling that it just might have a chance on the mainstream desktop...and Gnome is part of the reason for that.
Yes, there are things I don't like about Gnome...one of which, GConf, I feel represents a fundamental technical flaw in the whole environment...but then again, that's part of the point.
Gnome is the one Linux DE which has the strongest resemblance to Windows. KDE might be nice, but it just isn't really all that much like Windows at all, at least from my perspective...and the issue here is that that is what the mainstream end user overwhelmingly wants. They don't care how technologically inferior it might be; they will only accept something which apes Windows as closely as possible. Gnome has a much better chance of effectively doing that.
Linus is right when he says Gnome sucks, but the point is that that is what allows it to most closely resemble Windows, which is spartan to a very similar degree. KDE might have a lot of additional functionality and be way more configurable, but being better than Windows means being different from Windows, and end users will not accept that. Hence, Gnome isn't technically better, but it is more fit from an evolutionary point of view.
TFA is the usual corporate snake oil.
"We don't give a shit about our customers and we don't want to see them as anything more than cows to be economically milked, but we can't let them know that because if they do find out, they have a tendency to jump the fences we're trying to build around them. The only thing we care about is money. We don't care about our own lives, the lives of anyone else, or anything else. The only thing that matters is getting as much money as possible. We don't even care if we destroy the world sufficiently that we won't be alive to do anything with our billions of dollars after we've made it...the only thing that matters is making it."
It's times like these that I am in danger of almost vaguely starting to believe that at least some of Stallman's paranoia and relentless fanaticism is justified...it becomes momentarily seductive, anywayz. I may not appreciate the FSF's desire to dominate people to the extent they seem to want to, but I sure as hell don't advocate demoniacs like the author of this article, either.
Here's the dichotomy, and it's also why "Linux" and "mainstream," usually don't go together in the same sentence. "Mainstream," means (among other things) "non-autistic." For those of you who've accused me of resorting to stereotypes here, let's see Linus go and have diagnostic tests for autism...as well as pretty much everyone else who's commonly considered a "senior developer," with Linux. I'll bet money that they test positive in 90+% of cases. It's the same characteristics which allow them to be such brilliant programmers on the one hand, that cause them to fight about things which normal people would not even remotely consider on the other.
I'm not of course implying for one minute that neurotypical individuals don't fight...but they generally fight about different things, and which window environment to use on their computers wouldn't be one of said things. Autism can often be a truly crippling social disability, and one of the main reasons why is because autistics tend to care about things that most non-autistics don't...like engaging in holy wars about which is the *one true* graphical environment, which is the *one true* text editor, or which is the *one true* license.
Autism in the case of Linux is, as I said, a tremendously double edged sword...because on the one hand autistic characteristics are arguably a pre-requisite for being a truly great programmer.
On the other hand, the socially disabling aspects of autism are the single main thing holding Linux back, because of the obsession with abstractions that neurotypical individuals do not care about.
I've made analogies between the Linux community and the X-Men before, and as crazy as it initially seems, once you think about it for a while it's not as outlandish as it sounds. Most of you genuinely *are* mutants, and incidents like this one make that fact plain for all to see. The main reason why the average guy on the street is having such difficulty adopting Linux is because, when he looks at the people developing it, he can't help feeling more or less exactly the same way towards you as Senator Kelly would have.
The BSDs do have ports of the text utilities, yes...as well as tar and a number of other things. They also have their own libc. They do have to rely on gcc as a compiler, and although bmake exists, installation of gmake is also more or less mandatory because even though BSD base doesn't use it, of course a heap of the Linux apps in ports do.
In terms of a replacement FOSS compiler, there's TenDRA, and it seems that the BSD people have the kernel compiling with it to at least an experimental degree. A lot of apps would probably need some GCC quirks removed to work with TenDRA though...that's the main problem associated with the Linux kernel, as far as getting free of the GNU toolchain there is concerned.
Caldera also released source of a lot of the old sysv commercial versions of the core utilities a while back under the BSD license; you can find those here if you're interested.
The single biggest problem we'd have in creating a non-GNU/GPL/FSF FOSS UNIX would be ironically the same one Stallman himself had before Linus showed up; there doesn't seem to currently be a non-GPL licensed kernel in existence which is independent of gcc...the BSD kernels rely on it as well. From my own digging on the subject, a kernel is overwhelmingly the single most difficult part of an operating system to write...you're basically looking at the programmatic equivalent of building Stonehenge or the pyramids.
Linux surviving and then thriving in the marketplace isn't as much about it's technical superiority, we've seen over and over how that doesn't mean a win in the market[place, its success is largely due to the license.
Linux's adoption (to the extent that it has been adopted) has come down to a couple of different things:-
...but Vista was dead on arrival, and such was entirely predictable. Microsoft need to come up with an alternative, and fast...if they don't, they're going to be in serious trouble soon.
Look at what happened with OpenSSH late last year with the OpenBSD community up in arms
;-)
Granted, but if flaps/controversy/general heat and noise get generated anywhere in the BSD world in my observation, it will nearly always be the OpenBSD people. Theo would get angry about not having anything to get angry about.
The BSD people believe they shouldn't HAVE TO tell others to share back, because it is the right thing to do. Lead by example.
I also believe what Larry Wall said once that using the law to force people to do so undermines the entire point.
I get the feeling though that fundamentally, my attitude is fairly close to that of what Linus said about it...that I have no problem with the GPL v2...I just am damn sick of the FSF (and camp followers like Bruce Perens) acting like a sovereign government, when they're not. It's not the actual license *on it's own* that I have a real problem with...it's the way Stallman has taught people to think in a broader sense. It's dominant, cripplingly autistic, and tries to tell other people what they *should* want, rather than acknowledging what they *do* want.
...I could care less if the company cares about the community or its values, and that's the point.
Yes, yes, YES!
GNU/drones, take note. THIS is precisely the attitude that the non-autistic demographic of the human population has towards software. It's why you can't win, and it's also why for the sake of Linux becoming more widely adopted, I anyway am fervently hoping and praying that eventually you'll stop trying.
Sure, the smart thing for me to do, some would argue, would simply be to walk away from Linux and forget that you exist. However, the reason why I can't do that now is because of the degree to which I now emotionally *need* to see the FSF as an organisation die, and anyone else who feels remotely positive towards Stallman fade into irrelevant obscurity. Once that happens, I'll probably be satisfied, and move on...but until it does, I'm staying.
Not to sound like Stallman here, but there have always been two camps - those who think software should be Free as in "we should be able to do what we want with the code for moral/ethical reasons" and those who see practical benefits as in "when people can do what they want with the code everyone benefits."
The GPL stipulates downstream use. That's not "doing what we want with the code," to a complete degree; it's conditional, and it's actually the only manner in which the GPL is described as being conditional in a formal, honest sense. It's the unwritten, informal rules which are a lot more interesting (and restrictive) than the written ones.
Stallman is a tyrant who is gifted when it comes to making his tyranny look like something else. Verifying the truth of that statement is simplicity itself; just watch virtually any article relating to Linux here where the wild eyed GNU/trolls routinely pour out the woodwork and start hoarsely screeching at everyone else about how the rest of us should think and act. These cultists are simply following their Messiah's megalomaniacal example.
The ideology of the "free software camp," as you call it is the memetic equivalent of bird flu. It's arguably even more contagious, and has roughly the same effect on the minds and intellects of the people who end up infected by it. The thing that it kills is a person's desire or capacity for thinking independently.
There are no good religions.
This is an extremely broad, simplistic generalisation.
Anything designed with the principal intention of controlling masses of humanity, has to be wicked.
This depends on whether or not said religion was specifically designed with that purpose in mind. The monotheistic religions tend towards it, yes...but I'd question whether *all* religions were created with that intent.
Realise that most of the problems you get with Christianity and Islam in particular are primarily associated with monotheism...they don't tend to be present (or at least nowhere near as strongly) in religions where monotheism isn't the major theme.
I don't believe that the negative attitudes that I've seen as being so prevalent within the "Linux community," affect Open Source as a whole. Some of us think that the attitude among the BSD developers of refusing to try and dictate downstream use is a much more enlightened way of thinking...and in my own mind, the only real reason why anyone associated with Linux thinks that dictating downstream use is a good thing is because Stallman thought it first, and they've swallowed his ideas whole...not because they've actually bothered to think about the consequences of it.
I've said before that with most of the little people associated with Linux, there isn't a problem...they're just doing their thing each day, maybe contributing patches to a few different projects here and there, and generally living quietly and agreeably. The "leaders" of the "community" on the other hand, are people who I really wish would crawl into a hole in the ground somewhere and die, to be honest. (Bruce Perens, I'm talking to you, among others) That also includes a number of ACs I've had replying to me on here recently who don't even have the basic courage to put their name to what they write, and then expect others to care about their opinions.
I've realised that one of the main differences between Linux people and the BSD developers is actually posessiveness. The gift culture that ESR wrote about doesn't actually exist with Linux. The BSD people *do* give away their work, genuinely and completely, with no strings attached. The GPL on the other hand encourages an attitude which basically says, "We wrote this, but we'll let you use it...but on the other hand, we don't ever want you to forget that we wrote it, and we also want you to know that we feel that because we wrote it and you are using it, you are forever beholden to us, and we have the right to dominate you in more or less any manner we see fit."
I want to suggest to Jeremy Ellison and a few of the Debian people in particular that maybe you're nowhere near as high minded as you think, but that in fact, you're actually a group of extremely selfish, controlling, mean-spirited human beings who get off on the fact that writing FOSS under the GPL allows you to superficially appear to be altruistic when in fact you're the complete opposite.
BSD developers use the BSD license to completely give away software without stipulation in order to benefit other human beings. *Some* GPL developers at least use the GPL to write software which they can then try and use to *control* other human beings...because they have the attitude that if people who use said software start doing things they don't like, the access to the software for said users will be removed.
You can try and justify this as much as you want, (and doubtless you will) but I think it sucks, that you're completely rotten human beings, and that you're made all the more rotten by the fact that you try and make out that morality is something that you actually are concerned about. You're confusing your own morality with a desire to control what it is that *other* people do. Although again, that's merely an idea that you picked up from the usual source...the root of most of Linux's fundamental problems: Richard Stallman.
And I'm supposed to care about comments from people too gutless to identify themselves...why exactly?