There was a very funerary feeling about the last few minutes of that film for me. The meeting with the Vulcans seemed as though it was meant as one last look at what Trek was about, and I don't think any studio executive can be expected to know what I'm talking about there, either.
Although if they'd wanted to portray it in a humorous manner, (although it would have clashed with the existing vibe at the end of the film, as I said) as the Enterprise left Earth at the end of First Contact it would have been appropriate I think to have a spacebound shark at the bottom of the screen, with the Enterprise entering warp above it.
...would be why the Debian developers need to patch Firefox internally in the first place. I seem to remember that Firefox's usual compile routine is somewhat unorthodox and involves jumping through a few hoops...maybe they're wanting to make it a bit more sane for CD-based installs or somesuch.
Although it's really a moot point for me personally. I'll openly confess to not being a fan of Debian. It's devs seem to have an unhealthy love of beaurecratic formality, and I've also seen way too much genuflection before Comrade Stallman coming from them for my tastes as well.
I also have to wonder why the Mozilla peeps are suddenly so zealous about guarding IP...since maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I haven't heard them making noises about such things before. My guess is that we're seeing the usual human frailty at work, there...be completely open while you're still completely the underdog, and then start being possessive, dictatorial, and obnoxious once you become vaguely popular.
I suspect there is a generous helping of insectoid small-mindedness all around, here...it's usually the way. One thing that a few other people on this thread are right about:-
The constant background noise of neurologically crippled zealotry and divisive, juvenile squabbling associated with Linux isn't helping anyone other than Microsoft. If you want to remain on the lunatic fringe, then fine...keep arguing about license minutiae and Gnome vs. KDE. I happen to know, however, that least some of the people associated with Linux want to see it become genuinely and completely mainstream. That is not going to happen for as long as this sort of mindless, four year old shit keeps making headlines. The autistic neo-Bolshevik fanatic routine got old a long time ago, guys. Try taking an economics course and a prescription for Ritalin.
Apart from anything else, the Debian developers need to make a truly sober re-assessment of their level of relative importance in the world. I'll give you a hint to start the ball rolling; it isn't as high as you think.;)
It isn't. Go to kde.org or trolltech.com. You can download the source for either KDE or the QT library, and the only thing you'll pay for is your bandwidth.
When you cough up however much Red Hat want for a copy of RHEL, the OSS itself isn't what you're paying for. What you're paying for is integration of said software as a service. A person *can* learn to compile both QT and KDE, and build a system around it, the Linux kernel, and all the other disparate elements...but it takes time and gaining that knowledge can be an enormous headache...just like to use another analogy, you can go to a supermarket and buy mince, buns, eggs, sauce, and vegetables, and go home and make yourself a hamburger...or you can go to McDonald's and have a burger handed to you on a tray, with a near-zero investment of time and effort.
Red Hat gather up all of the above-mentioned disparate elements, and do all of the work required to get them to play nicely together. They incorporate all of said elements with a package manager, a shiny covered manual, and a nice solid substantial box that you can hold in your hands, so that you know you've bought something real, rather than just bits of data. In addition, they also give you a support contract so that if something goes wrong, you can ring them up and have them help you solve the problem. There are also those of us who feel that in more ways than one, Red Hat is to Linux what McDonald's is to food, (and interpret that statement however you will) but the point is that it is extremely convenient.
So yeah...that's what you're paying for. You're not paying for OSS. You're paying for OSS delivered in such a way that a) conforms entirely to your expectations, and b) doesn't require you to engage in any effort of your own whatsoever to get it. In such a scenario, a company prepared to satisfy those two criteria absolutely has the right to name their price.
If you don't want to have a company economically holding you over a barrel, you do have options...although said options probably include doing things you aren't going to like.
I realise that the entire tone of this post is deeply obnoxious...there isn't really any way that I can avoid that. The bottom line however is that you do *not* have to pay for OSS at all...it's entirely a choice.
People are going to say that if the FSF do some genuine good with this, then I shouldn't be saying such terrible things...but I think more of us around here have been waking up to Stallman's own veiled autocratic tendencies over the last year or so.
Bush has used the War on Terror to keep people divided and scared, and as an excuse to reprimand anyone who dares question him via the old canard that solidarity must be shown to the Commander in Chief during wartime.
It's interesting...I only just thought of it then, but in reply to a post I made a few weeks ago, one of the FSF attack bots on here actually *did* use that as grounds for reprimanding me...calling me "idiotic," and then going on to mention how RMS was our potential saviour from that dire and persistent bogeyman, DRM. Now that I think of it, it does remind me a lot of the attitude that's been promoted in the US; that Bush must be continually held utterly above reproach because he is supposedly all that stands between the rest of humanity and a group of swarthy, turban-clad phantoms who customarily reside primarily under beds and in dark closets.
It would make a lot of sense for Stallman to want to create an impression among Linux users that they need to be at war with the corporate world, though...People who are scared have a much greater tendency to look for a singular individual to take care of them in a parental sense, and are willing to hand said individual an accordingly high level of authority, pretty much without question.
As we all know however, authority and control are the very last things our Messiah wants. He's dedicated purely and solely to fighting ceaselessly for our FREEDOM. We mustn't ever criticise him or question anything he says in any way, because if we do that, our division will be exploited by the evil corporations that are eternally lurking, waiting, semi-invisibly in the shadows, who will pounce and devour our still-beating hearts directly from our chests.
I seem to remember the word freedom also coming up rather a lot in a certain inauguration speech I heard recently. The similarities between situations are purely coincidental, of course.
It's been proven statistically that birth rates tend to be inversely proportional to literacy rates and the level of both wealth and education within a given population. (If you don't believe me, look it up) Then there's the issue of the average teen mother not usually having more than a ninth grade education. The recent discouragement of birth control can't be helping, either.
Overpopulation is a problem in most places these days, it seems...it worries me what the outcome of it could be.
Not *everyone* who reads/. is a rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth Communist.
I'm aware that mine is a minority opinion around here, but I feel that capitalism has its' place just as much as socialism/communism does. The keyword is balance...like any other problems, financial/sociological ones need to be solved on a case by case basis. Sometimes that calls for a capitalist solution...other times it can call for a more Marxist one...sometimes something in between. Both philosophies are equally useful in different situations...it's identifying which is the right one for each given scenario that's the trick.
The thing to keep in mind is that although it might not seem like it, on the communist side Marx (and to a lesser extent, his intellectual descendants) came from fundamentally the same motivation as Rand and von Mises, et. al, on the capitalist side of the fence; namely, the desire to solve human social and economic problems, and the belief that they could do so. The founders of these philosophies in most cases weren't the people who went on to cause problems by engaging in an unbalanced persuit of them.
The pendulum has been swinging back towards communism to something of an unhealthy degree these days...but that is because in some areas, (namely the American government) capitalism is likewise being persued in an unbalanced and unenlightened way...hence a popular backlash to try and correct the situation.
Social/economic thought IMHO exists as a fairly complex ecosystem that is quite similar to many others...each element is ultimately dependent on the rest. Unfortunately, your extremists on either side don't tend to recognise that, and thus have the attitude that their way is the only right one and the other school/s of thought need to be erradicated.
I'm aware that that itself probably sounds like quite a leftist statement...but only if you think of environmentalism (or the recognition of complex, interdependent systems) as being exclusively the domain of the left. I find myself hoping that such is not the exclusive domain of the left...because if it is, we're in very serious trouble.
We have such a scenario along these lines in the Linux world currently. On the more leftist side we have the FSF, whereas ESR and the OSI are more representative of capitalism and corporate interests. On the FSF side, Richard Stallman continually implicitly attempts to deny that perspectives other than his own are valid or acceptable. On the OSI/corporate side, we have corporations developing plastic, mass-market distributions which comparitively speaking lack technical integrity and are at times developed by individuals who apparently have little knowledge of or regard for Linux/UNIX history or traditional methodology.
Both of these groups can and should act as effective counterweights for each other, but in order to do so, they both (particularly the FSF here) need to acknowledge the other's right to exist. The FSF needs to recognise that corporations aren't going anywhere any time soon, and that because programmers need to eat, (among other things) corporate sponsorship can not only help to keep FOSS alive, but can also assist in moving it forward. Stallman needs to ditch the reflexive idea that all corporations by definition want to destroy FOSS. What corporations want more than anything else is to make money, and they will either help preserve or attempt to destroy FOSS purely based on the extent to which they perceive that FOSS will contribute to their ability to make money. IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and several other companies apparently have found ways in which FOSS can help them make money...and so they are not trying to destroy it. Microsoft might be, but Microsoft are a unique case...the proverbial full spectrum dominance is something they've always wanted.
On the opposite side of the coin, although the existence of standards such as the LSB, FHS, and even POSIX itself are a great start, we need to find ways to give corporations more concrete incentives to actuall
I would like to suggest that you look at the above link, and the documents it references...I think there are some ideas there that you and perhaps every other advocate of Richard Stallman should know about.
I know I have been hostile here in the past and still am, but as you yourself are not hostile and seem to have only positive intentions, I wish to do likewise in this case myself.
(Comments in brackets are generally not directed at this post's author, but rather members of the usual/. peanut gallery who are likely to flame me for deviating from standard groupthink)
2. Migration. What to do with mailbox files that go back to 1993, for example, or more importantly, other documents created in Windows-only programs? I could save a computer just for Windows, of course, but how would I migrate these documents that are historical and artistic in nature if I need to update them?
For word processor documents, you'd need to figure out whether said file formats are binary, or primarily textual. If they're binary, there probably isn't a whole lot you can do...if however they're primarily text with proprietary markup, opening them in a hex editor or possibly even plain Notepad will allow you to get the text out of them. From there you can simply paste it into whatever other application you want. For graphics you should be fine, as there aren't a lot of completely unreadable proprietary Windows graphics formats about that I know of. (Unless we're talking about vectors, of course)
1. Inertia. There are six machines in the house and we both work at home. As longtime computer users, we have habits. Linux means re-learning a lot of those habits, from mousing styles to keyboard shortcuts. And it would mean learning how to connect the whole mess together and have it work -- without massively losing productivity in the meantime. That potential loss matters when you're self-employed and depend on your own knowledge and learning to get you through.
You need to figure out specifically what it is that you want/need to do before you can solve this problem one way or the other. Form a list of your usual tasks, and then do some research to find out how Linux handles those specific tasks. That in turn will tell you how difficult adapting is likely to be.
3. Applications. This is talked about over and over, but the dicussion often ends up with the most popular office-style applications. There are clones (and improvements) of these, and the graphics software is improving. But there are not yet functional equivalents to programs like Sonar, Finale, Sibelius, and Adobe Audition -- nor the literally hundreds of small applications that I use, some only for a few minutes each day.
Two websites can help here. The Wine website, which is about a Windows emulator for Linux that can run a large number of Windows programs, with varying degrees of success, (it has a database of known apps) and Freshmeat, which is more or less an OSS equivalent of Download.com, and can thus help you find Linux native applications that do the same or similar things to those you use on Windows.
Also, in terms of "small applications," you might want to consider learning some shell scripting. You may well find that not only can you write shell scripts which duplicate the functionality of your small Windows apps, but that even more, they can potentially do so without you needing to be in front of the keyboard.
4. Hardware. After total failure trying to get Red Hat to work about three years ago, I gave Ubuntu a run last week. It only recognized about half my hardware (but not any of the pro sound hardware, just the low-grade onboard audio), saw all my hard drives and network but none of the other computers on the network (all set up via TCP/IP). This was pretty darn good, but not good enough -- because the sound hardware doesn't have Linux drivers, it turns out, and without those, there was no point to pursuing it until that hardware investment is obsolete.
Red Hat is to be avoided, as is anything rpm based. Mr Shuttleworth's heart might be in the right place, but Ubuntu also seems to have some fairly serious problems as well, from what I've been hearing lately.
I'm going to get flamed for this, but it's good advice, so I don't car
>I have no idea of what a kernel is, and from reading posts on Slashdot I know it's something I >houldn't try touching with a ten foot pole.
I don't have a computer science degree, but the way I think of it is of the kernel as the primary co-ordinator of the operating system; the "brain" if you will. It is also what is responsible for the loading of drivers that talk to the hardware, so it's very important.
As for not touching it, the kernel is not the bogeyman people seem to like making it out to be. It's complex, yes, because it more or less has to be...but choosing which hardware you want included for support in it and which you don't is a fairly straightforward process...or at least I've always found it to be. This could be enormously beneficial to you.
Or, how about a computer with a TCM chip on the motherboard which checks the operating system on boot-up, and refuses to boot an "unauthorized" OS? Yep, there's plans in the works for this too. That's DRM.
Gee...you mean like the encryption chips and various other forms of hardware protection that console makers have used, which have been fairly easily subverted? Or perhaps like the hardware dongles as a means of copy protection that have been used by a number of software companies, which have been subverted in around a day and a half, on average?
The day corporations come up with a means of copy protection or hardware control that some renegade 14 year old from Vladivostok can't get around is the day the world literally will end...and I don't mean simply in terms of politically, either...I mean the planet literally blowing up.;)
If you're in such desperate need to be afraid of something, then do yourself a favour and at least find something remotely credible.
DRM is a bogeyman, in exactly the same sense as Communists and men with turbans and large quantities of C4 strapped to their chests. For all the fear, wailing and gnashing of teeth they generate, they're seen maybe 1% of the times they're expected.
Basically, the argument comes down to whether Linux will attempt to retain user's freedom by limiting DRM as much as possible, but at least with the option to mix licenses the individual parts licensed under GPLv3 would outlive the DRM demise of this hypothetical Linux.
You're making a couple of implicit assumptions, here.
a) That DRM is ever going to become a truly serious threat in the first place. Despite all the talk about it, where I'm sitting anyway, it hasn't. (And I seriously doubt that it's going to) The only real forms of DRM that I know about are those that are used on a couple of different proprietary sound file codecs...and they're rediculously easy to avoid. Yes, I know the suggestion of dreaded CPU locks has come up a couple of times, but it gets slapped down again...because the public aren't quite as stupid as RMS thinks they are. Companies might try and fool themselves otherwise, but within capitalism, the only thing they can really control is supply...trying to control demand simply means that they lose it. Hence one area where the system genuinely is at least partly self-regulating. If companies want to continue to make money, they need to pay at least some attention to public opinion...and even among the ignorant, hardware DRM has around the same level of popularity as bird flu.;)
b) That RMS (by himself) has even the slightest chance of being able to issue any decrees regarding the use of DRM (and have them stick) whatsoever. The GPL v2 might very well be legally enforceable, but any concrete attempt on the part of the GPL v3 to prevent corporate world domination most certainly will *not* be. There are any number of bigger fish (both legally and financially) than the FSF swimming around, and if Stallman thinks he is going to be able to dictate their actions, he is, in a word, delusional. It would also prove what I've suspected for the last year or two; namely, that his ego has grown completely out of control.
In my own mind, the whole DRM flap in the GPL v3 isn't actually *about* DRM at all...DRM is to Stallman what the War on Terror is to George Bush; namely a wedge issue which he can use to generate fear and division, and which he hopes he can also use to gain control over people. But, as with the War on Terror itself, once you look under the white sheet that is madly floating around, you quickly realise that (for the most part, anyway) the only thing that is in fact holding it up is hot air.
This follows on from my last post on here, and it was something I was thinking about only a few moments before I saw the article.
AFAIK, Autoconf's version number hasn't changed in at least two years. I can also remember looking into it a few months back and discovering that at the time anyway, GNU Make only had two maintainers.
The FSF has completely lost focus, IMHO. Core elements of the toolchain are not being actively maintained, and several of the people who were maintaining them have been employed by Red Hat, causing a conflict of interest which cannot be conducive to Linux's long-term wellbeing...or at least that of the GNU project, for those of you who like to split hairs.
I've had FSF advocates reply to me before and talk about how the anti-DRM crusade is important...fine and good, but let me mention something which I think is even more important.
For all that Stallman has written and said, and continues to say, about software freedom, said freedom isn't going to matter much if the software itself ceases to exist. I'm also not talking about KDE or anything on the surface, either...I'm talking about the core knowledge behind how to assemble a Linux system, and the tools themselves which are used to do that. Yes, I know the Linux From Scratch project will immediately be pointed to, perhaps...but aside from them and perhaps Gentoo, who else is there?
Aside from Debian, Gentoo, and Slackware, the rest of the major distributions are corporate, and created by people with far more interest in imitating Windows as closely as possible than in technical integrity. You only need to visit their forums or look at the track record for security of some of them to know that. Red Hat began Linux's decomposition process, but the other companies are continuing it. It's happened quietly, but on a number of levels, I honestly believe that Linux's roots are seriously endangered, currently...and as any botanist will be able to tell you, if the roots are compromised, although it won't happen overnight, there's a very good chance that the entire tree will eventually die.
I'd ask anyone who reads this and who cares about Linux's future to go and build Linux From Scratch at least once...as that information will only survive if it exists within a large enough group of people. I've heard about the concepts of installfests, which are great...but if it could be arranged, I think source installfests, or "compilefests" could be fantastic as well. I feel that on a technical level, rather than on a political one, there needs to be a return to some core principles:-
a) Compilation from source, so that we're actually *using* source code rather than just talking about it. Source code availability is Linux's fundamental strength...there are any number of people in the corporate world who'd love a scenario where Linux was purely binary only, a la Windows, because they know how much that would disempower Linux users if they could bring it about. For all the talk about the convenience of binary rpms and debs, use of these is actually "helping" Linux to death. Whining about binary drivers on the one hand and using apt on the other is simply rank hypocrisy, IMHO...and it also doesn't genuinely solve either problem.
b) Individuals with sufficient technical ability once more creating their own systems on a wide basis, and not merely relying on predigested, corporate distributions which are often severely crippled for the purposes of compiling source, use deeply unreliable and broken package management systems, and which do not adhere to standards. Decentralisation used to be another of Linux's major strengths...again, something else which we're losing. The ability to "roll your own," is still there, but if we don't keep using it, we *will* lose it...there are a lot of people out there who as I said are waiting for any opportunity they can get to take such an ability away from us.
c) A commitment as individuals to the adherence to such basic things a
Anyone trying to have technical discussion is called out and accused of flaming by the once great Seemant (who has not done any development himself for years) and his horde of fanboy minions (most noticably, Jakub)
This sounds to me like the same old story with regards to any form of participation in the terminal sociological disease we call "the Linux community" in general.
Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, and Bruce Perens are the broader community's resident egomaniacs. RMS in particular considers anyone who comes anywhere near Linux to automatically become his bitch by default. The other two aren't quite as bad, but they're not much better. From what I'm seeing here, it seems the seperate communities of some distros have the same type of "celebrity" problem...people whose output of actual work ceased years ago, but who insist on staying around and trying to demand that those who actually *are* working bow down and worship them on the basis of *past* accomplishments. Stallman is the single biggest example of what I mean, here...you need to go back *at least* 15 years to point to any of his programmatic contributions, and yet he still hangs around now, shooting his mouth off, demanding credit for things that don't belong to him, and causing nothing but problems generally.
I'm working on something almost entirely alone as a way of avoiding this type of garbage. If I need to deal with anyone, I talk to the people who are doing the various sub-projects' actual gruntwork, direct on Freenode...the proverbial people in the trenches. They're the ones who really build Linux, day in and day out, and they generally get zero credit for it. I remember what ESR once said about this, and I'm going to expand on it:- If you're not producing actual code, but are simply looking to build your own ego or a clique, then kindly sit down and shut the fuck up so that the rest of us who *are* doing something useful can concentrate.
The various social, psychiatric, and neurological disabilities of a number of people associated with Linux by themselves constitute the operating system's main problem...nothing else. Said people need to get over themselves, and above all, quite honestly disappear if they're not willing to do anything genuinely constructive.
That is who gets my own respect, though...people doing actual work. Linux's "celebrities" are formally invited to go and perform anatomically impossible acts with various sharp-edged gardening implements, as far as I'm concerned...and that goes triple for RMS.
Second, even if they wanted to move to Linux, those still running Win9x are on hardware that is simply too weak to run today's Linux distros.
There are any number of distributions around which are specifically targetted towards older hardware. Sure, they don't use KDE as the default UI, and they might not go over too well with the drag-and-drool crowd, but there are a number of usage scenarios (word processing, http file serving, even playing mp3s) where they work just fine. You could also even run a stripped KDE on anything down to about 400 Mhz or so...I used to run Enlightenment DR 14 on a Celeron 400.
Running on limited hardware is one of the things which Linux *is* still renowned for in some circles...and it's very, very possible...you just need to do some research.
The UNIX geek's equivalent of the Rolex watch. More than perhaps any other program than I can think of, it's been considered a badge of honour if a person has the terminal degree of autism required to understand it. I think that also is the main thing about the application that I resent...I don't consider it to be genuinely useful, but simply so abstract, intentionally user-hostile, and obtuse that it confers bragging rights to anybody who is actually able to use it. I also strongly suspect that that is the primary reason why it has endured.
Some of us prefer applications that don't require the accompaniment of controlled substances for us to be able to comprehend them.;-)
Julian Murdoch over at Gamers With Jobs thinks that this is the best time ever to be a gamer.
In other news, dairy farmers throughout the world wish to remind the public of the miraculous health properties of milk and cheese, and potato farmers, noting the potato's abundance of Vitamin C, have also made an announcement that a diet rich in potatoes is a great way to avoid any possibility of scurvy.
This story has been kicked back and forth in a lot of different places ever since the events in question took place. But to answer some questions...
1. Were the 2000 and 2004 American elections both illegitimate? Completely. 2. Is Bush a fascist monster who took advantage not only of the above, but also of 9/11, and whose goal is the complete dismantling of the American system of government? Same answer. 3. Do Americans care? For the most part, not at all.
Bush *is* an illegitimately elected aspirant dictator, a large scale mass murderer, and a war criminal. I'm not trying to insist that anyone even care about that...but one thing I do wish people would stop doing is denying it.
I went to the site and had a read of the proposed rules for the Citizendium.
The thing that immediately struck me is that the only real change (in terms of the role of experts, etc) is that the Citizendium will actually be consciously, formally having exactly the same type of policy which informally exists right now with Wikipedia itself.
With Wikipedia, certain individuals set themselves up as the authority in terms of a given article...if you edit it, and your edit is contrary to their individual bias(es), then you can entirely forget about said edit remaining permanent. The other problem is that Wikipedians then repeatedly lie about the supposedly open nature of Wikipedia, trying to claim that the above does not take place. The Wikipedian claim of neutrality is therefore also, a straight lie.
The degree of fascistic pendantry surrounding the citation of sources issue has also become utterly rediculous, recently. One fool who reverted some of my edits to a particular article did so with the suggestion that I ought to get a magazine article published somewhere, and then simply/purely quote that as a means of editing the article! What he is really saying there is that only academics have the right to edit Wikipedia at all. If that's true, they need to STOP promoting it as something which *anyone* can edit...because it fairly clearly isn't.
The other thing that Larry has done with the Citizendium, which I think Wikipedia should have done a long time ago, is to admit openly that the Citizendium does not have nor will have the same level of credibility as a print encyclopedia, and should not be assumed to have the same level of credibility. Also, I'm entirely open to the idea that Larry may very well not want me editing his wiki at all. All I ask is that if I am in fact not wanted, I am honestly told that up front.
For a moment, let's look below the layers of abstraction and ask ourselves...
At its' core, what is email?
It is an application using a protocol that allows for the two-way transfer of ASCII text files. There is hardly a single transfer protocol in existence on the Internet (in fact if there is one, I don't know about it) that does not allow the same. Granted, not all of them *deliver* said text in exactly the same way, but that's because many of them were primarily designed to do other things...but when you think about it...IRC, NNTP, HTTP, (the Web protocol) and Gopher were all designed primarily to transport text. I've seen IRC/email gateway scripts before...if you know enough about both protocols and the syntax involved, they're actually fairly trivial to write. FTP is probably the only protocol I can think of which was designed specifically for binary transfer, rather than text.
The *only* thing that actually really caused the Internet to become mainstream at all was that HTTP started supporting the transfer of graphic images...and it's worth knowing that Tim Berners-Lee, the protocol's inventor, was (AFAIK anywayz) actually initially opposed to that idea.
So sure...block email, and I could work around it. Block the Web, and it'd be a lot more difficult.
...whether Wales is intentionally dishonest, or simply naive about the reality of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia does not stand for genuine freedom of information at all. There is a very strong, visible bias towards a particularly narrow minded brand of atheistic pedantry. I'm not going to call it rationalism, because it often seems to be more emotively than rationally motivated, and I'm not going to call it empiricism either, because while it is a perspective which its' adherents claim is empirical, the level of cynicism inherent in it goes against Wikipedia's own article on empiricism.
If Mr Wales or anyone else who is instrumental in the governing of Wikipedia happens to read this, then I have a demand to make:- Go one way or the other. Either allow Wikipedia to be something which is universally editable, and rein in the army of pedants arbitrarily reverting edits, or get rid of the universal editing paradigm entirely, and make it so that Wikipedia is only editable by a relatively small group. Given the amount of material which people have tried to add which has been reverted lately anyway, I tend to suspect that the latter scenario is in reality already here, if people were to be truly honest.
Jimbo, either stop lying to people, or get a clue about what actually happens with Wikipedia...not just what you might want to happen.
MS would be in court so fast being accused of trying to monopolize, exploit their "monopoly", etc...
Not under the Bush administration, they wouldn't be. Bush remembers and has honoured the corporate half of Mussolini's definition of fascist government. The antitrust trial against Microsoft was started by the Clinton administration, and was dropped roughly five minutes after Bush arrived in office.
They might be facing antitrust charges in the EU, but in the US at least, the Bush administration means that Microsoft (and any other big corp, for that matter) can do whatever it wants.
1) Games. With Cedega and the Wine project, this hurdle has actually gone close to being cleared. Granted, our own native answer to DirectX would help, but the fact that Wine runs WoW in particular without too much screwing around is a huge plus.
2) Package management that is truly good, and not just "good enough." Contrary to popular belief, this problem still has not been solved. I've written about this in a few other posts.
3) We need something that will poll/dev and update it automagically, a la Windows, since Joe Sixpack cannot be expected to know how to manually send SIGHUP to udev after they've plugged in new hardware. Driver support for individual devices is an ongoing issue, as well.
4) People need to stop caring about the patent issue re mp3 and other file codecs. They might be patented, but it's the proverbial unenforceable, pie crust law. I've never heard of anybody being sued for using mp3, gif, or other codecs anywhere else. Just use them.;)
1) Immediately go here and read the whole thing. Then keep it near you throughout the entire process of developing your product. Although not as strictly necessary, reading this site definitely won't hurt you either.
2) Do not go near rpm. 3) Do not go near dpkg/apt.
I can safely say that there is no packaging system in existence for Linux which I anyway am completely happy with on all fronts. They all have egregious problems, and what is even worse, re-inventing the wheel tends to get virtual tomatoes thrown at you, because people think you're an idiot for trying to solve a problem that has already been solved...the only thing is, it hasn't been. The reasons for the above are similar for both package managers listed, but broadly speaking,
a) The use of subpackaging and package splitting can (and does) cause all manner of headaches. b) Unsigned binary rpms/debs are horrible for security. c) Although dpkg is worse, neither of these systems are particularly robust. I've had them go berserk and trash the entire host distro numerous times when I was trying to uninstall something and the program got the dependencies screwed up. d) The spec/Makefile formats for both are hideous, and encourage false dependencies, and all manner of sloppiness and bad practice. e) *Binary* packaging in general has been a practice adopted purely to satisfy the desires of Windows users, and was not originally a fundamental characteristic of Linux. This was because before people started trying to make Linux mainstream, they were aware that binary packaging was a really bad idea.
What I'm doing for my own system is an adaptation of ports, which isn't exactly the same as BSD's ports given that there are differences between the two operating systems...although I'm still intending it to be as portable as possible. For this reason I also do not recommend portage, because it is Gentoo specific.
4) If you default to runlevel 4 on bootup, (going straight into X Windows, with kdm or gdm) make sure the user is told somewhere how to switch to 3 so he can fix anything in xorg.conf that needs fixing. Yes, I know you're also going to want an automagic GUI element that sets such things up...but things at times can still go wrong.
5) Run an open beta, and give it to people with as many different hardware configurations as possible. You want to know about exotic/weird hardware that people are trying to use with it, so that you can find drivers for it and set up detection for it. The end user isn't going to be able to do that, and if you expect them to, they will simply throw your product away. (Unfortunately, they don't need to be able to do it; windows plug and play hardware detection is taken for granted by users of that system, to a large degree)
6) Figure out very early on what your revenue model is going to be, and realise that because you're using a GPLed system, whatever you're going to make money on, it isn't going to be IP. Either make money on support, or open source all of your unique elements (I'm going to be using the BSD license for anything I write myself which doesn't use GPLed code, and recommend that you do the same, for both widest possible circulation and PR points) and then sell integration of said individual elements as a service and convenience.
7) Focus on people who are entirely new to Linux as a target audience for your product, rather than the established userbase. The reason why is because if you try to sell to the existing userbase, you will attract the inevitable screeching, basement-dwelling, autistic FSF/GNU fanatics who if you try and make any money on the product at all, will endlessly whine that you're not doing enough to "give back to the community", (read: cult) irrespective of how much effort you actually do make on this score by open sourcing all of your product's unique elements. They will also complain if you use Gnome as a UI instead of KDE, if you us
If the program needs the non-GPL binary lib in order to work at all, and the binary lib does not have available source, then yes, that is a violation. Anything being GPLed means that source must be available with binaries for the entire application, including libraries.
However, if the binary lib in question is optional, then no, it is no more a violation than people using binary video card drivers with the Linux kernel. Of course, the FSF attack bots who oppose that practice will probably want the defendant in this case to be successfully made an example of as well.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:- The GPL v2 can be beneficial in *some* contexts. What is *not* beneficial is the autistic fanaticism of most of Stallman's followers.
Unless they can release the game before the end of this year, they should cut their losses and kill development on it, IMHO.
Apart from anything else, the level of expectation about it now means that no matter what they come out with, it's not going to seem good enough to those still waiting for it. The other side of the coin is the degree of apathy which I expect would have set in among the rest of the gaming population who know about it. A level of apathy that big is not something you want to have greet the release of a game. I would also suspect that the number of delays have a lot to do with what they were originally intending for the game...they were aiming far too high, and haven't been able to deliver what they conceptualised. Although creativity is never something I'd try to discourage, trying to bite off more than you can chew can happen...even for people as talented as the ones we're talking about here.
Bottom line...they need a new title of some kind, whether it's DNF or otherwise, and they need it soon. The glory days were quite a while ago now, guys.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a very funerary feeling about the last few minutes of that film for me. The meeting with the Vulcans seemed as though it was meant as one last look at what Trek was about, and I don't think any studio executive can be expected to know what I'm talking about there, either.
Although if they'd wanted to portray it in a humorous manner, (although it would have clashed with the existing vibe at the end of the film, as I said) as the Enterprise left Earth at the end of First Contact it would have been appropriate I think to have a spacebound shark at the bottom of the screen, with the Enterprise entering warp above it.
Star Trek is dead. Let it rest in peace.
...would be why the Debian developers need to patch Firefox internally in the first place. I seem to remember that Firefox's usual compile routine is somewhat unorthodox and involves jumping through a few hoops...maybe they're wanting to make it a bit more sane for CD-based installs or somesuch.
;)
Although it's really a moot point for me personally. I'll openly confess to not being a fan of Debian. It's devs seem to have an unhealthy love of beaurecratic formality, and I've also seen way too much genuflection before Comrade Stallman coming from them for my tastes as well.
I also have to wonder why the Mozilla peeps are suddenly so zealous about guarding IP...since maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I haven't heard them making noises about such things before. My guess is that we're seeing the usual human frailty at work, there...be completely open while you're still completely the underdog, and then start being possessive, dictatorial, and obnoxious once you become vaguely popular.
I suspect there is a generous helping of insectoid small-mindedness all around, here...it's usually the way. One thing that a few other people on this thread are right about:-
The constant background noise of neurologically crippled zealotry and divisive, juvenile squabbling associated with Linux isn't helping anyone other than Microsoft. If you want to remain on the lunatic fringe, then fine...keep arguing about license minutiae and Gnome vs. KDE. I happen to know, however, that least some of the people associated with Linux want to see it become genuinely and completely mainstream. That is not going to happen for as long as this sort of mindless, four year old shit keeps making headlines. The autistic neo-Bolshevik fanatic routine got old a long time ago, guys. Try taking an economics course and a prescription for Ritalin.
Apart from anything else, the Debian developers need to make a truly sober re-assessment of their level of relative importance in the world. I'll give you a hint to start the ball rolling; it isn't as high as you think.
You ask why OSS itself is expensive.
It isn't. Go to kde.org or trolltech.com. You can download the source for either KDE or the QT library, and the only thing you'll pay for is your bandwidth.
When you cough up however much Red Hat want for a copy of RHEL, the OSS itself isn't what you're paying for. What you're paying for is integration of said software as a service. A person *can* learn to compile both QT and KDE, and build a system around it, the Linux kernel, and all the other disparate elements...but it takes time and gaining that knowledge can be an enormous headache...just like to use another analogy, you can go to a supermarket and buy mince, buns, eggs, sauce, and vegetables, and go home and make yourself a hamburger...or you can go to McDonald's and have a burger handed to you on a tray, with a near-zero investment of time and effort.
Red Hat gather up all of the above-mentioned disparate elements, and do all of the work required to get them to play nicely together. They incorporate all of said elements with a package manager, a shiny covered manual, and a nice solid substantial box that you can hold in your hands, so that you know you've bought something real, rather than just bits of data. In addition, they also give you a support contract so that if something goes wrong, you can ring them up and have them help you solve the problem. There are also those of us who feel that in more ways than one, Red Hat is to Linux what McDonald's is to food, (and interpret that statement however you will) but the point is that it is extremely convenient.
So yeah...that's what you're paying for. You're not paying for OSS. You're paying for OSS delivered in such a way that a) conforms entirely to your expectations, and b) doesn't require you to engage in any effort of your own whatsoever to get it. In such a scenario, a company prepared to satisfy those two criteria absolutely has the right to name their price.
If you don't want to have a company economically holding you over a barrel, you do have options...although said options probably include doing things you aren't going to like.
I realise that the entire tone of this post is deeply obnoxious...there isn't really any way that I can avoid that. The bottom line however is that you do *not* have to pay for OSS at all...it's entirely a choice.
DRM has become RMS's answer to the War on Terror.
People are going to say that if the FSF do some genuine good with this, then I shouldn't be saying such terrible things...but I think more of us around here have been waking up to Stallman's own veiled autocratic tendencies over the last year or so.
Bush has used the War on Terror to keep people divided and scared, and as an excuse to reprimand anyone who dares question him via the old canard that solidarity must be shown to the Commander in Chief during wartime.
It's interesting...I only just thought of it then, but in reply to a post I made a few weeks ago, one of the FSF attack bots on here actually *did* use that as grounds for reprimanding me...calling me "idiotic," and then going on to mention how RMS was our potential saviour from that dire and persistent bogeyman, DRM. Now that I think of it, it does remind me a lot of the attitude that's been promoted in the US; that Bush must be continually held utterly above reproach because he is supposedly all that stands between the rest of humanity and a group of swarthy, turban-clad phantoms who customarily reside primarily under beds and in dark closets.
It would make a lot of sense for Stallman to want to create an impression among Linux users that they need to be at war with the corporate world, though...People who are scared have a much greater tendency to look for a singular individual to take care of them in a parental sense, and are willing to hand said individual an accordingly high level of authority, pretty much without question.
As we all know however, authority and control are the very last things our Messiah wants. He's dedicated purely and solely to fighting ceaselessly for our FREEDOM. We mustn't ever criticise him or question anything he says in any way, because if we do that, our division will be exploited by the evil corporations that are eternally lurking, waiting, semi-invisibly in the shadows, who will pounce and devour our still-beating hearts directly from our chests.
I seem to remember the word freedom also coming up rather a lot in a certain inauguration speech I heard recently. The similarities between situations are purely coincidental, of course.
...about American society.
It's been proven statistically that birth rates tend to be inversely proportional to literacy rates and the level of both wealth and education within a given population. (If you don't believe me, look it up) Then there's the issue of the average teen mother not usually having more than a ninth grade education. The recent discouragement of birth control can't be helping, either.
Overpopulation is a problem in most places these days, it seems...it worries me what the outcome of it could be.
Not *everyone* who reads /. is a rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth Communist.
I'm aware that mine is a minority opinion around here, but I feel that capitalism has its' place just as much as socialism/communism does. The keyword is balance...like any other problems, financial/sociological ones need to be solved on a case by case basis. Sometimes that calls for a capitalist solution...other times it can call for a more Marxist one...sometimes something in between. Both philosophies are equally useful in different situations...it's identifying which is the right one for each given scenario that's the trick.
The thing to keep in mind is that although it might not seem like it, on the communist side Marx (and to a lesser extent, his intellectual descendants) came from fundamentally the same motivation as Rand and von Mises, et. al, on the capitalist side of the fence; namely, the desire to solve human social and economic problems, and the belief that they could do so. The founders of these philosophies in most cases weren't the people who went on to cause problems by engaging in an unbalanced persuit of them.
The pendulum has been swinging back towards communism to something of an unhealthy degree these days...but that is because in some areas, (namely the American government) capitalism is likewise being persued in an unbalanced and unenlightened way...hence a popular backlash to try and correct the situation.
Social/economic thought IMHO exists as a fairly complex ecosystem that is quite similar to many others...each element is ultimately dependent on the rest. Unfortunately, your extremists on either side don't tend to recognise that, and thus have the attitude that their way is the only right one and the other school/s of thought need to be erradicated.
I'm aware that that itself probably sounds like quite a leftist statement...but only if you think of environmentalism (or the recognition of complex, interdependent systems) as being exclusively the domain of the left. I find myself hoping that such is not the exclusive domain of the left...because if it is, we're in very serious trouble.
We have such a scenario along these lines in the Linux world currently. On the more leftist side we have the FSF, whereas ESR and the OSI are more representative of capitalism and corporate interests. On the FSF side, Richard Stallman continually implicitly attempts to deny that perspectives other than his own are valid or acceptable. On the OSI/corporate side, we have corporations developing plastic, mass-market distributions which comparitively speaking lack technical integrity and are at times developed by individuals who apparently have little knowledge of or regard for Linux/UNIX history or traditional methodology.
Both of these groups can and should act as effective counterweights for each other, but in order to do so, they both (particularly the FSF here) need to acknowledge the other's right to exist. The FSF needs to recognise that corporations aren't going anywhere any time soon, and that because programmers need to eat, (among other things) corporate sponsorship can not only help to keep FOSS alive, but can also assist in moving it forward. Stallman needs to ditch the reflexive idea that all corporations by definition want to destroy FOSS. What corporations want more than anything else is to make money, and they will either help preserve or attempt to destroy FOSS purely based on the extent to which they perceive that FOSS will contribute to their ability to make money. IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and several other companies apparently have found ways in which FOSS can help them make money...and so they are not trying to destroy it. Microsoft might be, but Microsoft are a unique case...the proverbial full spectrum dominance is something they've always wanted.
On the opposite side of the coin, although the existence of standards such as the LSB, FHS, and even POSIX itself are a great start, we need to find ways to give corporations more concrete incentives to actuall
http://www.craigburton.com/2001/08/17
I would like to suggest that you look at the above link, and the documents it references...I think there are some ideas there that you and perhaps every other advocate of Richard Stallman should know about.
I know I have been hostile here in the past and still am, but as you yourself are not hostile and seem to have only positive intentions, I wish to do likewise in this case myself.
(Comments in brackets are generally not directed at this post's author, but rather members of the usual /. peanut gallery who are likely to flame me for deviating from standard groupthink)
2. Migration. What to do with mailbox files that go back to 1993, for example, or more importantly, other documents created in Windows-only programs? I could save a computer just for Windows, of course, but how would I migrate these documents that are historical and artistic in nature if I need to update them?
For word processor documents, you'd need to figure out whether said file formats are binary, or primarily textual. If they're binary, there probably isn't a whole lot you can do...if however they're primarily text with proprietary markup, opening them in a hex editor or possibly even plain Notepad will allow you to get the text out of them. From there you can simply paste it into whatever other application you want. For graphics you should be fine, as there aren't a lot of completely unreadable proprietary Windows graphics formats about that I know of. (Unless we're talking about vectors, of course)
1. Inertia. There are six machines in the house and we both work at home. As longtime computer users, we have habits. Linux means re-learning a lot of those habits, from mousing styles to keyboard shortcuts. And it would mean learning how to connect the whole mess together and have it work -- without massively losing productivity in the meantime. That potential loss matters when you're self-employed and depend on your own knowledge and learning to get you through.
You need to figure out specifically what it is that you want/need to do before you can solve this problem one way or the other. Form a list of your usual tasks, and then do some research to find out how Linux handles those specific tasks. That in turn will tell you how difficult adapting is likely to be.
3. Applications. This is talked about over and over, but the dicussion often ends up with the most popular office-style applications. There are clones (and improvements) of these, and the graphics software is improving. But there are not yet functional equivalents to programs like Sonar, Finale, Sibelius, and Adobe Audition -- nor the literally hundreds of small applications that I use, some only for a few minutes each day.
Two websites can help here. The Wine website, which is about a Windows emulator for Linux that can run a large number of Windows programs, with varying degrees of success, (it has a database of known apps) and Freshmeat, which is more or less an OSS equivalent of Download.com, and can thus help you find Linux native applications that do the same or similar things to those you use on Windows.
Also, in terms of "small applications," you might want to consider learning some shell scripting. You may well find that not only can you write shell scripts which duplicate the functionality of your small Windows apps, but that even more, they can potentially do so without you needing to be in front of the keyboard.
4. Hardware. After total failure trying to get Red Hat to work about three years ago, I gave Ubuntu a run last week. It only recognized about half my hardware (but not any of the pro sound hardware, just the low-grade onboard audio), saw all my hard drives and network but none of the other computers on the network (all set up via TCP/IP). This was pretty darn good, but not good enough -- because the sound hardware doesn't have Linux drivers, it turns out, and without those, there was no point to pursuing it until that hardware investment is obsolete.
Red Hat is to be avoided, as is anything rpm based. Mr Shuttleworth's heart might be in the right place, but Ubuntu also seems to have some fairly serious problems as well, from what I've been hearing lately.
I'm going to get flamed for this, but it's good advice, so I don't car
>I have no idea of what a kernel is, and from reading posts on Slashdot I know it's something I >houldn't try touching with a ten foot pole.
I don't have a computer science degree, but the way I think of it is of the kernel as the primary co-ordinator of the operating system; the "brain" if you will. It is also what is responsible for the loading of drivers that talk to the hardware, so it's very important.
As for not touching it, the kernel is not the bogeyman people seem to like making it out to be. It's complex, yes, because it more or less has to be...but choosing which hardware you want included for support in it and which you don't is a fairly straightforward process...or at least I've always found it to be. This could be enormously beneficial to you.
Or, how about a computer with a TCM chip on the motherboard which checks the operating system on boot-up, and refuses to boot an "unauthorized" OS? Yep, there's plans in the works for this too. That's DRM.
;)
Gee...you mean like the encryption chips and various other forms of hardware protection that console makers have used, which have been fairly easily subverted? Or perhaps like the hardware dongles as a means of copy protection that have been used by a number of software companies, which have been subverted in around a day and a half, on average?
The day corporations come up with a means of copy protection or hardware control that some renegade 14 year old from Vladivostok can't get around is the day the world literally will end...and I don't mean simply in terms of politically, either...I mean the planet literally blowing up.
If you're in such desperate need to be afraid of something, then do yourself a favour and at least find something remotely credible.
DRM is a bogeyman, in exactly the same sense as Communists and men with turbans and large quantities of C4 strapped to their chests. For all the fear, wailing and gnashing of teeth they generate, they're seen maybe 1% of the times they're expected.
Basically, the argument comes down to whether Linux will attempt to retain user's freedom by limiting DRM as much as possible, but at least with the option to mix licenses the individual parts licensed under GPLv3 would outlive the DRM demise of this hypothetical Linux.
;)
You're making a couple of implicit assumptions, here.
a) That DRM is ever going to become a truly serious threat in the first place. Despite all the talk about it, where I'm sitting anyway, it hasn't. (And I seriously doubt that it's going to) The only real forms of DRM that I know about are those that are used on a couple of different proprietary sound file codecs...and they're rediculously easy to avoid. Yes, I know the suggestion of dreaded CPU locks has come up a couple of times, but it gets slapped down again...because the public aren't quite as stupid as RMS thinks they are. Companies might try and fool themselves otherwise, but within capitalism, the only thing they can really control is supply...trying to control demand simply means that they lose it. Hence one area where the system genuinely is at least partly self-regulating. If companies want to continue to make money, they need to pay at least some attention to public opinion...and even among the ignorant, hardware DRM has around the same level of popularity as bird flu.
b) That RMS (by himself) has even the slightest chance of being able to issue any decrees regarding the use of DRM (and have them stick) whatsoever. The GPL v2 might very well be legally enforceable, but any concrete attempt on the part of the GPL v3 to prevent corporate world domination most certainly will *not* be. There are any number of bigger fish (both legally and financially) than the FSF swimming around, and if Stallman thinks he is going to be able to dictate their actions, he is, in a word, delusional. It would also prove what I've suspected for the last year or two; namely, that his ego has grown completely out of control.
In my own mind, the whole DRM flap in the GPL v3 isn't actually *about* DRM at all...DRM is to Stallman what the War on Terror is to George Bush; namely a wedge issue which he can use to generate fear and division, and which he hopes he can also use to gain control over people. But, as with the War on Terror itself, once you look under the white sheet that is madly floating around, you quickly realise that (for the most part, anyway) the only thing that is in fact holding it up is hot air.
This follows on from my last post on here, and it was something I was thinking about only a few moments before I saw the article.
AFAIK, Autoconf's version number hasn't changed in at least two years. I can also remember looking into it a few months back and discovering that at the time anyway, GNU Make only had two maintainers.
The FSF has completely lost focus, IMHO. Core elements of the toolchain are not being actively maintained, and several of the people who were maintaining them have been employed by Red Hat, causing a conflict of interest which cannot be conducive to Linux's long-term wellbeing...or at least that of the GNU project, for those of you who like to split hairs.
I've had FSF advocates reply to me before and talk about how the anti-DRM crusade is important...fine and good, but let me mention something which I think is even more important.
For all that Stallman has written and said, and continues to say, about software freedom, said freedom isn't going to matter much if the software itself ceases to exist. I'm also not talking about KDE or anything on the surface, either...I'm talking about the core knowledge behind how to assemble a Linux system, and the tools themselves which are used to do that. Yes, I know the Linux From Scratch project will immediately be pointed to, perhaps...but aside from them and perhaps Gentoo, who else is there?
Aside from Debian, Gentoo, and Slackware, the rest of the major distributions are corporate, and created by people with far more interest in imitating Windows as closely as possible than in technical integrity. You only need to visit their forums or look at the track record for security of some of them to know that. Red Hat began Linux's decomposition process, but the other companies are continuing it. It's happened quietly, but on a number of levels, I honestly believe that Linux's roots are seriously endangered, currently...and as any botanist will be able to tell you, if the roots are compromised, although it won't happen overnight, there's a very good chance that the entire tree will eventually die.
I'd ask anyone who reads this and who cares about Linux's future to go and build Linux From Scratch at least once...as that information will only survive if it exists within a large enough group of people. I've heard about the concepts of installfests, which are great...but if it could be arranged, I think source installfests, or "compilefests" could be fantastic as well. I feel that on a technical level, rather than on a political one, there needs to be a return to some core principles:-
a) Compilation from source, so that we're actually *using* source code rather than just talking about it. Source code availability is Linux's fundamental strength...there are any number of people in the corporate world who'd love a scenario where Linux was purely binary only, a la Windows, because they know how much that would disempower Linux users if they could bring it about. For all the talk about the convenience of binary rpms and debs, use of these is actually "helping" Linux to death. Whining about binary drivers on the one hand and using apt on the other is simply rank hypocrisy, IMHO...and it also doesn't genuinely solve either problem.
b) Individuals with sufficient technical ability once more creating their own systems on a wide basis, and not merely relying on predigested, corporate distributions which are often severely crippled for the purposes of compiling source, use deeply unreliable and broken package management systems, and which do not adhere to standards. Decentralisation used to be another of Linux's major strengths...again, something else which we're losing. The ability to "roll your own," is still there, but if we don't keep using it, we *will* lose it...there are a lot of people out there who as I said are waiting for any opportunity they can get to take such an ability away from us.
c) A commitment as individuals to the adherence to such basic things a
Anyone trying to have technical discussion is called out and accused of flaming by the once great Seemant (who has not done any development himself for years) and his horde of fanboy minions (most noticably, Jakub)
This sounds to me like the same old story with regards to any form of participation in the terminal sociological disease we call "the Linux community" in general.
Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, and Bruce Perens are the broader community's resident egomaniacs. RMS in particular considers anyone who comes anywhere near Linux to automatically become his bitch by default. The other two aren't quite as bad, but they're not much better. From what I'm seeing here, it seems the seperate communities of some distros have the same type of "celebrity" problem...people whose output of actual work ceased years ago, but who insist on staying around and trying to demand that those who actually *are* working bow down and worship them on the basis of *past* accomplishments. Stallman is the single biggest example of what I mean, here...you need to go back *at least* 15 years to point to any of his programmatic contributions, and yet he still hangs around now, shooting his mouth off, demanding credit for things that don't belong to him, and causing nothing but problems generally.
I'm working on something almost entirely alone as a way of avoiding this type of garbage. If I need to deal with anyone, I talk to the people who are doing the various sub-projects' actual gruntwork, direct on Freenode...the proverbial people in the trenches. They're the ones who really build Linux, day in and day out, and they generally get zero credit for it. I remember what ESR once said about this, and I'm going to expand on it:- If you're not producing actual code, but are simply looking to build your own ego or a clique, then kindly sit down and shut the fuck up so that the rest of us who *are* doing something useful can concentrate.
The various social, psychiatric, and neurological disabilities of a number of people associated with Linux by themselves constitute the operating system's main problem...nothing else. Said people need to get over themselves, and above all, quite honestly disappear if they're not willing to do anything genuinely constructive.
That is who gets my own respect, though...people doing actual work. Linux's "celebrities" are formally invited to go and perform anatomically impossible acts with various sharp-edged gardening implements, as far as I'm concerned...and that goes triple for RMS.
Second, even if they wanted to move to Linux, those still running Win9x are on hardware that is simply too weak to run today's Linux distros.
There are any number of distributions around which are specifically targetted towards older hardware. Sure, they don't use KDE as the default UI, and they might not go over too well with the drag-and-drool crowd, but there are a number of usage scenarios (word processing, http file serving, even playing mp3s) where they work just fine. You could also even run a stripped KDE on anything down to about 400 Mhz or so...I used to run Enlightenment DR 14 on a Celeron 400.
Running on limited hardware is one of the things which Linux *is* still renowned for in some circles...and it's very, very possible...you just need to do some research.
The UNIX geek's equivalent of the Rolex watch. More than perhaps any other program than I can think of, it's been considered a badge of honour if a person has the terminal degree of autism required to understand it. I think that also is the main thing about the application that I resent...I don't consider it to be genuinely useful, but simply so abstract, intentionally user-hostile, and obtuse that it confers bragging rights to anybody who is actually able to use it. I also strongly suspect that that is the primary reason why it has endured.
;-)
Some of us prefer applications that don't require the accompaniment of controlled substances for us to be able to comprehend them.
Julian Murdoch over at Gamers With Jobs thinks that this is the best time ever to be a gamer.
In other news, dairy farmers throughout the world wish to remind the public of the miraculous health properties of milk and cheese, and potato farmers, noting the potato's abundance of Vitamin C, have also made an announcement that a diet rich in potatoes is a great way to avoid any possibility of scurvy.
This story has been kicked back and forth in a lot of different places ever since the events in question took place. But to answer some questions...
1. Were the 2000 and 2004 American elections both illegitimate? Completely.
2. Is Bush a fascist monster who took advantage not only of the above, but also of 9/11, and whose goal is the complete dismantling of the American system of government? Same answer.
3. Do Americans care? For the most part, not at all.
Bush *is* an illegitimately elected aspirant dictator, a large scale mass murderer, and a war criminal. I'm not trying to insist that anyone even care about that...but one thing I do wish people would stop doing is denying it.
I went to the site and had a read of the proposed rules for the Citizendium.
The thing that immediately struck me is that the only real change (in terms of the role of experts, etc) is that the Citizendium will actually be consciously, formally having exactly the same type of policy which informally exists right now with Wikipedia itself.
With Wikipedia, certain individuals set themselves up as the authority in terms of a given article...if you edit it, and your edit is contrary to their individual bias(es), then you can entirely forget about said edit remaining permanent. The other problem is that Wikipedians then repeatedly lie about the supposedly open nature of Wikipedia, trying to claim that the above does not take place. The Wikipedian claim of neutrality is therefore also, a straight lie.
The degree of fascistic pendantry surrounding the citation of sources issue has also become utterly rediculous, recently. One fool who reverted some of my edits to a particular article did so with the suggestion that I ought to get a magazine article published somewhere, and then simply/purely quote that as a means of editing the article! What he is really saying there is that only academics have the right to edit Wikipedia at all. If that's true, they need to STOP promoting it as something which *anyone* can edit...because it fairly clearly isn't.
The other thing that Larry has done with the Citizendium, which I think Wikipedia should have done a long time ago, is to admit openly that the Citizendium does not have nor will have the same level of credibility as a print encyclopedia, and should not be assumed to have the same level of credibility. Also, I'm entirely open to the idea that Larry may very well not want me editing his wiki at all. All I ask is that if I am in fact not wanted, I am honestly told that up front.
For a moment, let's look below the layers of abstraction and ask ourselves...
At its' core, what is email?
It is an application using a protocol that allows for the two-way transfer of ASCII text files. There is hardly a single transfer protocol in existence on the Internet (in fact if there is one, I don't know about it) that does not allow the same. Granted, not all of them *deliver* said text in exactly the same way, but that's because many of them were primarily designed to do other things...but when you think about it...IRC, NNTP, HTTP, (the Web protocol) and Gopher were all designed primarily to transport text. I've seen IRC/email gateway scripts before...if you know enough about both protocols and the syntax involved, they're actually fairly trivial to write. FTP is probably the only protocol I can think of which was designed specifically for binary transfer, rather than text.
The *only* thing that actually really caused the Internet to become mainstream at all was that HTTP started supporting the transfer of graphic images...and it's worth knowing that Tim Berners-Lee, the protocol's inventor, was (AFAIK anywayz) actually initially opposed to that idea.
So sure...block email, and I could work around it. Block the Web, and it'd be a lot more difficult.
...whether Wales is intentionally dishonest, or simply naive about the reality of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia does not stand for genuine freedom of information at all. There is a very strong, visible bias towards a particularly narrow minded brand of atheistic pedantry. I'm not going to call it rationalism, because it often seems to be more emotively than rationally motivated, and I'm not going to call it empiricism either, because while it is a perspective which its' adherents claim is empirical, the level of cynicism inherent in it goes against Wikipedia's own article on empiricism.
If Mr Wales or anyone else who is instrumental in the governing of Wikipedia happens to read this, then I have a demand to make:- Go one way or the other. Either allow Wikipedia to be something which is universally editable, and rein in the army of pedants arbitrarily reverting edits, or get rid of the universal editing paradigm entirely, and make it so that Wikipedia is only editable by a relatively small group. Given the amount of material which people have tried to add which has been reverted lately anyway, I tend to suspect that the latter scenario is in reality already here, if people were to be truly honest.
Jimbo, either stop lying to people, or get a clue about what actually happens with Wikipedia...not just what you might want to happen.
MS would be in court so fast being accused of trying to monopolize, exploit their "monopoly", etc...
Not under the Bush administration, they wouldn't be. Bush remembers and has honoured the corporate half of Mussolini's definition of fascist government. The antitrust trial against Microsoft was started by the Clinton administration, and was dropped roughly five minutes after Bush arrived in office.
They might be facing antitrust charges in the EU, but in the US at least, the Bush administration means that Microsoft (and any other big corp, for that matter) can do whatever it wants.
...to conquer the desktop, IMHO.
/dev and update it automagically, a la Windows, since Joe Sixpack cannot be expected to know how to manually send SIGHUP to udev after they've plugged in new hardware. Driver support for individual devices is an ongoing issue, as well.
;)
1) Games. With Cedega and the Wine project, this hurdle has actually gone close to being cleared. Granted, our own native answer to DirectX would help, but the fact that Wine runs WoW in particular without too much screwing around is a huge plus.
2) Package management that is truly good, and not just "good enough." Contrary to popular belief, this problem still has not been solved. I've written about this in a few other posts.
3) We need something that will poll
4) People need to stop caring about the patent issue re mp3 and other file codecs. They might be patented, but it's the proverbial unenforceable, pie crust law. I've never heard of anybody being sued for using mp3, gif, or other codecs anywhere else. Just use them.
1) Immediately go here and read the whole thing. Then keep it near you throughout the entire process of developing your product. Although not as strictly necessary, reading this site definitely won't hurt you either.
2) Do not go near rpm.
3) Do not go near dpkg/apt.
I can safely say that there is no packaging system in existence for Linux which I anyway am completely happy with on all fronts. They all have egregious problems, and what is even worse, re-inventing the wheel tends to get virtual tomatoes thrown at you, because people think you're an idiot for trying to solve a problem that has already been solved...the only thing is, it hasn't been. The reasons for the above are similar for both package managers listed, but broadly speaking,
a) The use of subpackaging and package splitting can (and does) cause all manner of headaches.
b) Unsigned binary rpms/debs are horrible for security.
c) Although dpkg is worse, neither of these systems are particularly robust. I've had them go berserk and trash the entire host distro numerous times when I was trying to uninstall something and the program got the dependencies screwed up.
d) The spec/Makefile formats for both are hideous, and encourage false dependencies, and all manner of sloppiness and bad practice.
e) *Binary* packaging in general has been a practice adopted purely to satisfy the desires of Windows users, and was not originally a fundamental characteristic of Linux. This was because before people started trying to make Linux mainstream, they were aware that binary packaging was a really bad idea.
What I'm doing for my own system is an adaptation of ports, which isn't exactly the same as BSD's ports given that there are differences between the two operating systems...although I'm still intending it to be as portable as possible. For this reason I also do not recommend portage, because it is Gentoo specific.
4) If you default to runlevel 4 on bootup, (going straight into X Windows, with kdm or gdm) make sure the user is told somewhere how to switch to 3 so he can fix anything in xorg.conf that needs fixing. Yes, I know you're also going to want an automagic GUI element that sets such things up...but things at times can still go wrong.
5) Run an open beta, and give it to people with as many different hardware configurations as possible. You want to know about exotic/weird hardware that people are trying to use with it, so that you can find drivers for it and set up detection for it. The end user isn't going to be able to do that, and if you expect them to, they will simply throw your product away. (Unfortunately, they don't need to be able to do it; windows plug and play hardware detection is taken for granted by users of that system, to a large degree)
6) Figure out very early on what your revenue model is going to be, and realise that because you're using a GPLed system, whatever you're going to make money on, it isn't going to be IP. Either make money on support, or open source all of your unique elements (I'm going to be using the BSD license for anything I write myself which doesn't use GPLed code, and recommend that you do the same, for both widest possible circulation and PR points) and then sell integration of said individual elements as a service and convenience.
7) Focus on people who are entirely new to Linux as a target audience for your product, rather than the established userbase. The reason why is because if you try to sell to the existing userbase, you will attract the inevitable screeching, basement-dwelling, autistic FSF/GNU fanatics who if you try and make any money on the product at all, will endlessly whine that you're not doing enough to "give back to the community", (read: cult) irrespective of how much effort you actually do make on this score by open sourcing all of your product's unique elements. They will also complain if you use Gnome as a UI instead of KDE, if you us
If the program needs the non-GPL binary lib in order to work at all, and the binary lib does not have available source, then yes, that is a violation. Anything being GPLed means that source must be available with binaries for the entire application, including libraries.
However, if the binary lib in question is optional, then no, it is no more a violation than people using binary video card drivers with the Linux kernel. Of course, the FSF attack bots who oppose that practice will probably want the defendant in this case to be successfully made an example of as well.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:- The GPL v2 can be beneficial in *some* contexts. What is *not* beneficial is the autistic fanaticism of most of Stallman's followers.
Unless they can release the game before the end of this year, they should cut their losses and kill development on it, IMHO.
Apart from anything else, the level of expectation about it now means that no matter what they come out with, it's not going to seem good enough to those still waiting for it. The other side of the coin is the degree of apathy which I expect would have set in among the rest of the gaming population who know about it. A level of apathy that big is not something you want to have greet the release of a game. I would also suspect that the number of delays have a lot to do with what they were originally intending for the game...they were aiming far too high, and haven't been able to deliver what they conceptualised. Although creativity is never something I'd try to discourage, trying to bite off more than you can chew can happen...even for people as talented as the ones we're talking about here.
Bottom line...they need a new title of some kind, whether it's DNF or otherwise, and they need it soon. The glory days were quite a while ago now, guys.