It was a while back but they were talking about the prequal trailer and people paying to see movies just to see the trailer and then walking out.. After the segment they do a segway and say "you're listen to all things considered" but instead of that they had Linda Wertheimer say "Listening to All Things Considered, you are." did anyone else hear it? It was in her normal voice (which made it even funnier) and you had to be paying attention to notice it (a lot of NPR listeners just kind of zone and absorb the info)
I thought it was funny. Those crazy NPR folks, I love 'em but they're a little extra nerdy at times. I can be a hardcore ultra geek, and I usually am, but the NPR folks always make me feel like I'm somehow in the hep crowd of something. Just thought I'd mention that.
When EGCS started, I thought it was awesome because it would be competition and GCC had a lot of shortcommings that some competition might fix (not the GCC isn't great but..)
EGCS had done a lot and it is a great compiler, it has been my main compiler for quite a while and it has been my only compiler since kernel 2.2 came out. I haven't had any problems with it, some of the newer more experimental CVS versions are a little rocky but the release versions are usually pretty stable.
Now what I'd like it better documentation on the compiler, particularly the internals. I've always thought that it was fairly difficult to enhance and contribute to the compilers because none of the internals seem to be documented anywhere. No IR documentation what-so-ever to my knowledge, you just have to look at the source code.
That's kind of been my thinking. I used to experiement but I've been much sharper drug free than I ever was drugged, and that includes a 5 year caffine addiction which was murder to kick.
I understand the desire to mellow out after a really tough week but I'd rather go without the drugs. Don't think pot affects you much cause it's natural? Hang with a person who has been a daily user for 4-5 years and tell me it doesn't do long term damage to your brain, aside from being perpetually lazy...
I guess each person has his own taste and moral standard and drug use may be "right" for some people but I'm convinced that it takes a toll after enough use, if nothing else you condition your mind and body to need the drugs to relax or need them to work long hours. Just like caffine usage, after a while you can't get out of bed unless there is a ready pot of coffee.
Boulder is definitely unique in some ways, anyone who want's to can just go and score some kind or northern light pretty easily. Coke is a little harder to come by from what I've been told, I don't know any programmers who use it but I have other friends who do and it's almost impossible to use it any other way than recreationally because it is so hard to score consistently. (never mind the fact the coke users are almost never social.. you're best friend can be a user for months and months and you'd never know sometimes) The law enforcement is pretty lax on pot as well, I don't know how many times I've sat out on a porch on the hill or on Walnut with a some buddies and a 3 footers and the cops have waved as they drove by.
In boulder, if you sell smack, they will send you to prison for life but if you sell pot or mushrooms you just have to be quite and give the cops a price break... and nobody will ever give you a hard time. On the hill there are some dealers who even put signs up (you know how it works if you've been there, back on pleasant street where the deals go down you can often see a vintage bus with a "kind bud" sign in the back window... )
Also, Boulder was a radical place in the 1960's, it was totally a hippy town. I've been approached at work (the largest employer in Boulder... I won't say any more being as how we're talking about drugs) by 40 year old babyboomers who wanted me to hook them up before.. I'm not really even a user but since I'm younger they expected me to be able to get them some good stuff without having to risk a bad deal. In a lot of towns, pot is something you just sort of grow out of once you get out of college but in Boulder a lot of older people are still users.
From my own perspective, and while I know a lot about the drug culture in Boulder I'm not really a user, pot users are recreational drug users. You work a long hard day writing code and you want to come home and relax so you smoke a bowl and chill out. Coke, meth, ice, etc. users generally aren't rec. users. There are definitley some people who like to snort some coke from time to time just for fun but the industrial programmer types aren't them. I think it is much more habitual usage. If you're a programmer I can't think of any reason why you'd want to sniff coke except to stay up and stay alert for coding, after work I would much rather mellow out with some pot, but that' just me.
It looks like they are going to lose and regardless of your opinions on anti-trust law they should pay for it in some way. Stallman's ideas sound pretty good.
My only concerns are that the documentation probably doesn't exist for a lot of products and would have to be created in a timely manner (that being a concept MS hasn't always understood.) Source code should be an acceptable substitute.
I also think some sort of review process is needed, releasing specs doesn't do a lot of good if MS releases false specs. Then by the time developers can accuse them and notify the regulators or judge MS has had a product in the market for a considerable amount of time. Say MS chooses not to produce such a spec for a product and then goes on to release the product. You or I accuse them of not releasing the spec, lawyers and judges slowly mobilize and eventually tell them they have to do it. Does the product get pulled off the shevles until the spec is ready or are they allowed to sell it for a year and a half while they produce specs? Do they just pay a fine? When IBM was making OS/2 2.0 the problem wasn't so much that they couldn't get API specs but that MS changed them on a monthly basis so that IBM was always left scrambling behind. THey could still use that tactic.
A provision should be made that the hardware interfaces and MS's software documentation need to be made freely available on the internet, just making it "available" isn't good enough because I don't think you'll see too many linux kernel hackers shelling out $10,000 for the specs on some piece of hardware. This is good for hardware companies even though a few don't want to admit it.
I am also a bit concerned that the hardware stipulation, while the best and most beneficial for GNU/Linux, could possibly hurt other companies which might make it unacceptable. For example winmodems and winprinters are by definition "Windows Compatible and certified" but the hardware has a secret interface which belongs to the hardware vendor. Would these vendors be forced to change their product names or to release the specs to their product? Or would they just become confusion for the consumers? Winprinters that aren't "Windows Certified."
Compared to some of the other ideas I have heard, these sound the most fair to MS. MS is still in full control of what the put into their products, how they price their products, who they collaborate with, they aren't forced to do anything other than provide information and they aren't structurally changed.
I also don't think that these ideas are bad because of the way they benefit free software. In the OS world, MS has pretty much driven off their major commercial competitors. There isn't really a good way to introduce parity in that market without benefiting free software.
Breaking MS up into separate divisions might not help or change anything. Breaking them up in to several separate versions of the same company ("baby bills") may not change anything (I can't think of a compelling reason for one office provider to break compatibility with another office provider or to make their product much different...) it would just confuse the customers by creating different versions of the same products. Forcing them to Opensource their code is a very harsh punishment, depending upon how it is licensed. Forcing them to public domain their code is very harsh, that would almost take away their ability to compete.
Publishing full APIs and specs could also benefit MS. Devleopers will be less likely to leave their platform if MS gives them complete specs. It would increase the rift in documentation between MS and free software, which is going to become a bigger blackeye for GNU/Linux as it is.. It could also enable developers to treat many of MS's application components as reusable components for their own software which could make for very competitive products from 3rd party vendors that are all tied to windows.
If you're against the Sherman anti-trust act then that is one thing, we have it and MS is going to lose a case where they are accused of a crime by it. As for their conviction, RMS's ideas sound pretty fair to MS compared to a lot of the other ideas and some of the things that have been done to other monopolies.
If you look back at some other companies, like IBM, they were slapped pretty hard and they never even got convicted! For 35 years IBM was limited in how they could discuss products, when they could announce or discuss future products, how they could charge for service, all sorts of things. Their hands were tied in ways that allowed MS to get to where they are (can you imagine being FUDed by MS and being legally bound from responding? That was IBM in the early 90s. MS is announcing vaporware versions of windows that were 3 years away and IBM couldn't announce a product until 90 days before it shipped and they paid a fine if they missed the ship date.) There is more than enough precedence to take action against MS.
Being against anti-trust law is an entirely different matter. Your stance on the law shouldn't be an issue at this point.
This isn't a "Solar system" this is a "plantary system."
Sol, the Sun, is our's. Not their's. They can't have a "Solar System"
It's just like the Moon. Other planets have moons but "The Moon" is our moon.
This is pretty exciting though, I heard on E-Town that they are building a really wide telescope that uses lot's of little telescope and some computer magic to make them act like a super sized telescope and they are going to launch it into space like Voyager. By the time it get's to Mars they are expecting it to show visual light pictures of planets around other stars. In addition to that, they are going to have photospectroposcyasdf(sp?) equipment on board that can sniff what's in the atmosphere on those planets, that way they can tell if there are the right chemicals to produce life, or if we're lucky they might find smog and pollution.. I think those planets might get a bit close to that star but it's exciting, none the less.
I think it is a combination of price factors. AMD is doing very well considering that they are going against one of the best companies around...
PowerPC and Alpha have trouble because of the full package cost. bang for buck, the PowerPC is about the best processor around for desktop computers but the cost of building an actual PowerPC computer are much higher than for building a pentium machine. There are plenty of cheap chipsets, motherboard, and motherboard components for pentiums. IBM and Motorola make a few PowerPC motherboard products and they cost 10x(!) more that the pentium version because of all the custom work.
What really needs to happen is we need to comoditize the rest of the hardware on a motherboard. Intel has a huge advanatage at this becuase the support hardware for an intel chip is quite a bit different than for most other chips. If you want to plug a PowerPC or Alpha into an intel style board you have to build some custom chips to add that extra logic, custom chips == more cost. I think that as Merced comes out and more and more people consider leaving the ia-32 x86 behind it will become more competitive, I just hope the PowerPC and alpha last that long, neither of them is in the hands of a company that doesn't also benefit from intel.
This just means that they are scared. There are enough independant sources that know the truth, their FUD won't matter much.
They could have hit us a lot harder if they had been smarter about it. Linux does have weaknesses but they aren't attacking them. That mindcraft BS was so clearly fixed, it would have been much more realistic if NT won by just a little bit in most categories and had a big lead in only a few, they made it look like NT bests linux by a lot at everything and everybody knows better than that.
The best way to lie is to tell subtle ones, nobody will believe you if you say you slept with Demi Moore... but you could easily get punched in the mouth by saying you slept with your coworker's wife becuase the guy thinks it's a little more plausible.
What a comet. Apollo asteroids come close periodically but we have had the same orbit for millions of years as have they and I would think that we would have been hit by the ones that will hit us by now, the orbits would have to be just perfectly skewed so that we could orbit for millions and millions of years before an impact. I'd worry more about a comet, they find new ones all the time. A comet has much much more kinetic energy than an asteroid so a smaller comet could hit us and mess things up pretty bad.
Like that Shoemaker-Levy commet, it screwed up Jupiter's crap. The largest recorded explosive release of energy man has ever witnessed (other than the Crab (or was it the horse?) nebula which burned as bright as the sun during day light for a couple weeks a little over 1000 years ago, can you imagine seeing two suns for a couple weeks? That was a spiritual experience back in those days...)
I would think that the odds of a comet hitting the planet would be pretty good compared to asteroids. It would/will be crazy too, people are packing up and heading for the hills because of y2k, imagine what would happen when they get on the news and say a comet is heading for us and it looks like it will get her in about 6 months...
It's true. And if you've spent your whole life looking at the stars waiting to be a real live professional astronomer, are you going to want to look for rocks that might hit the earth or are you going to want to look at starts and galaxies?
Planet killer asteroids only have to be about a cubic mile in size and with the very best telescopes they can be extremely difficult to see. Some of them orbit the sun in really odd planes and we have to practically stare at the sun to see them, it's very difficult to do.
Rename the company. It doesn't generally work, but it get's some short term interest.
SGI should sell cray, buy back mips and start doing what they used to do best, make butt kicking graphical workstations. Anymore they are on the road to becoming another Xeon "workstation" knockoff maker.
They describe the problem with Free software being when thousands of products are built under it and they are all evolving then the market will be chaotic for the consumer and then colapse. The market already functions in those conditions and consumers do fine, it sounds like they are supporting the idea of a big monopoly and one company with control of each particular industry. Heaven forbid that MS has competition and consumers have to choose which products they buy... I wonder how all those car buyers work it out, I mean, there must be 150 different makes and models to choose from but they all some how end up owning a car.
I'd also like to know who their sources are that said Linux can't compete with MS if they win the anti-trust case. All of the big free software king-pins don't seem to even care what happens with MS. It seems really trivial to me, we have more workers, more tallent and motivation. We can out code MS any day of the week. That leaves the market with a situation where all we need to do is provide what MS provides to have every economic edge because our product is free. If that was our goal, we would be there in no time. Instead we've raised the benchmark so we are providing more than MS (stability, choice, better looking, more function, easier to use (it's comming along...)) How can we not compete with MS? They can out market us and they've got a lot of pull with important people and companies but if CRC believes in Adam Smith as much as they act like they do then it's a NOP, GNU/Linux and Free Software will win as long as there are people willing to write it. For a company, excuse me, a foundation, that is supposed to study philanthropy and non-profit organaizations they seem to discount it an awful lot, especially considering the people who are doing it aren't just doing it for the cause but because they love to do it.
That might be the only fad, the number of people willing to write it, but I've seen too much to believe that.
I guess I think this issue is important, in part, because I generally support RMS's cause and admire him. I think he's a little rough around the edge's socially sometimes but he has ideas that are very different for most of us and he's so devoted to them that he comes across like an arrogant, abrasive, lunatic, which isn't really the case. (this stuff is subjective, but RMS is definitely very sane and, from everything I have seen and heard, he is one of the gentalist and nicest people you could be fortunate enough to meet. I don't know how many people routinely call him crazy and have only read interviews or his emails)
The issue has been brought up a number of times that RMS should start his own dist. if he want's to rename it. Is that a right we give to the dist. providers? Do we want to? I don't think the community would be so cavalier about this idea if Redhat, SuSE, Debian or Caldera decided to start calling their dist something else. If "Redhat Linux" became "Redhat OS" people would be blowing gaskets. Caldera has every right to call theirs OpenUNIX instead of OpenLinux, they don't even need to mention "Linux" anywhere. How would that go over? To suggest that RMS start a dist to call it "GNU/Linux" isn't the solution, that may just be the symptom of a future problem.
The other option I have heard a few times is the "Boycott GNU" option. I support this simply because I'd like to see another compiler written for the sake of competition... In reality these efforts are very far from being useful. Subing in the "Experimental GNU compiler system" for the "GNU C Compiler" isn't quite boycotting GNU. If these people are serious, I support their efforts just so that there will be more competition but I haven't heard anything that makes me believe that they understand how large an undertaking it is. FWIW, Stallman is a brilliant hacker and has had a lot of very very sharp people working with him and the GNU project has taken a long time to get to where it is.
What I think this really represents is a change in the community. Free Software isn't a very popular thing and it never has been. There has been a small core of devoted free software people and an increasing user base. GNU/Linux or Linux has long ago reached a critical mass where the number of free software people are out numbered by the users. I think it happened around the time Netscape was ported, it was such a killer app that so many people longed for that once it was ported a lot of people could use Linux or GNU/Linux without needing something else. As soon as the needs are taken care of the community loses a bond that it once had because they aren't all waiting for that magic app to be written. This is exemplified through the KDE vs. GNOME debates, some people just don't have the ideological concern about whether or not QT is free, it works and they have it and that is all they care about. (I think that is also why the debate is so frustrating, people are debating on entirely different levels about entirely different matters.)
Linux has lost its virinity. It's useful to people and businesses now, regardless of what they think about free software, open source software engineering, or community. The majority of the people on linux don't care about free software. Now RMS may seem a little arrogant and he may even be arrogant about wanting to change the name to GNU/Linux but it might be the better thing to do for free software. Free software is bigger than Linux (GNU/Linux) Linux needs free software but free software does not need linux (but it's arguably the best kernel going right now)
How much of our soul are we as a community willing to sell? You can play games on linux, it has 3D acceleration, you can buy and use integrated office suite applications, it has sophisticated GUIs, it's in the media with good hype, big businesses and software companies are paying attention to it and porting software to it. Should it become the next windows or should it be different this time? Some people already see Redhat as the next MS, take out the free software and they might as well be. Our community needs to focus more on the freedom to keep linux from becoming what we all hate. If it's not about freedom then what is the difference between Linux and BSD? (most users aren't technical enough to truely appriciate the real differences other than the license) Or Linux and Apple Darwin? Or Linux and the Solaris with the Sun Community License?
Gore may not have been responisble but he should know what's going on with his campaign and let's not confuse him for anything other than what he is, a tool. He's more of a liability to the democratic party than an asset.
This is just another example of him being far more into the politics of things instead of the issues at hand. He'd rather be percieved to be a technological advocate than to be one. Machivelli wrote about this kind of behavior.
If he's the candidate then it's just going to be another election where everybody loses.
Even if they don't it seems like this could be a grand time to pulloff a huge practical joke.
I can see this screensaver with pictures of Al and nice little anecdotes ("Did you know that Al invented the internet? Well he did when he was in college in...At the age of 21..") And then about 3 months before the election, a date switch flips and the anecdotes change ("Did you know that Al molested his daughters? Well he did and continues to do so.")
This is all economic rhetoric, anything ergonomic?
on
The Myth of QWERTY
·
· Score: 1
It's ironic to hear this kind of argument in a day when ergonomic engineering is as hot and lucrative as it is now.
If your terms are speed and dollars, with a modern keyboard I'm convinced that you won't find a very noticable difference. There might be some but not much and probably not enough to pay for retraining (although I don't know too many people who paid to learn to type anyways..) but what about long-term health concerns. The Dvorak keyboard is still popular amongst the ergonomic crowd and I've never heard a sales pitch that mentioned speed as the reason, it was always about not moving your fingers to reach the most common keys.
Anyone know of studies that compare QWERTY to Dvorak in respect of hand health? The most unhealthy action in typing is the thumb on the space action which is the same in both layouts (most people hammer on the space bar too hard and there thumb devleops clicks and tendon problems after a while, it's generally not painful but it's the early form of arthritis)
I agree with you in ways. This kind of activity shouldn't be encouraged but I don't think it should be discouraged either.
I equate this to cryptography in a way, most of us aren't anywhere near knowledgable to evaluate a cipher but we still want a cipher to by public before we will trust it. You can find all the security holes you want but they generally aren't going to be plugged until they are exploited. That's just the way business is. If some kid called you up and said he had found a hole in your code (if he could get ahold of you in the first place) are you going to hear him out if he can't prove it? Unfortunately, none of us want's to have them exploited. As it is, Office has had macro viruses for years and MS still hasn't corrected the problems or made it that much more secure. Same can be said about IRIX, is comes out of the box with holes you can drive a bus through, have they changed that? No. Have they had numerous CERT warnings and security breaches? Yes. In some cases, breaching the security isn't good enough to get it fixed.
I also think that there is a little bit more to this than pond scum trying to vandalize the world. That vast majority of virus writers, game crackers, and system crackers aren't malicious. They generally have low selfesteem and use it as a crutch; they brag about the size of the virus collections, the number of viruses they have written, then number of games they have cracked, the age of their games, the number of systems they have broken in to. It's generally not intended to hurt people so much as embarass them or show their superiority. Don't get me wrong, it's antisocial behavior but it's the kind of thing you do becuase the other guys think you're pond scum not usually the kind of thing you do to make money or profit in some other way. I'm not trying to defend them but it's not usually flat malicious behavior. I think it is more like the modern male equivalent of anorexia or bulimia.
It's also worth pointing out that we've had an active virus subculture for over 10 years and a cracking subculture for a lot longer and holes get found and exploited every day. It almost feels like we're going backwards, you install something like ssh to secure up your system and then you find a buffer overflow that not only let's people in but it let's them in as root! Back in the war dialer days, breaking in to a system was an involved process, now there is an entire phenomenon with the script kiddies. With all the cracking and all the viruses and all the breakins software hasn't gotten that much better. I wonder where it would be at if these good samaritin crackers would just discover weaknesses and tell CERT.
Writing viruses isn't illegal in the US, distributing them isn't illegal either. Activating them and infecting other users, with out them knowing is.
It's a tricky thing, if you out law distribution, then you have to arrest the guys at NA and Symantec because that's how they write the code. Further, many of the most sophisticated vira out there have been written by virus researchers (v2p6) trying to prove concepts, test their code, etc.. (probably a few did it trying to make a buck or two) Then there is that whole freedom of speech issue.
What this guy did was write a virus, and transmit it to a victim who unknowingly activated it. That is against the law.
It sounds like he was a little burned out, it happens to the best of us. A change of scenery is the best fix for him.
I'm also not so sure what all the depression is over with mozilla. I keep hearing that it is a failure and I don't think that is the case. When Netscape released the source code I know more than a few of us had these delusions about integrating a browser in to our various projects or changing a few lines of code to make mozilla better but they didn't give us a good workable code base and it wasn't modular in that way. Mozilla has come a long way since then. I still think that it is kind of difficult to work with mozilla right now, the nspr libs didn't install correctly on my machine and the configure script didn't work right... Just little things like that can be discouraging.
Now that mozilla is taking a more component oriented approach and we've got more wide usage of CORBA I think things are pretty exciting, as soon as mozilla can view and create HTML (xml) without crashing and can install easily I think interest will start to increase.
I've dreamed about having an underground home, complete with 24inch steal reinforced concrete walls and 70,000+ square feet of living space for most of my life.
Never really scared of nuclear war or anything like that, I just want a nice, secure, underground home. You can crank the music up and nobody will care, it's nice and evironmentally sound since you don't need air conditioning or heating (but a little heater might make it more comfortable... It has plenty of space for whatever you need. If you put in some that really cool "sun light" fiber optic style lighting so that you get real sun light in there, and put some wood and carpeting in there it's would be real homey.
Another sick fantasy I had there for a while and honestly thought might happen was that I wanted to buy a used Soviet nuclear sub, plush out the interior, and sail around the world and live in it.
I love skiing and mountain biking as much, if not more than, the next guy, but there is something really comfortable about living underground. You remember that underground home where the guy lived in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? Anyone see Until the End of the World? They had a really cool cave style computer lab in that movie..
You sound like you've never worked on anything other than a one man project. With large, dynamic, multithreaded applications it is very easy to lose track of when a piece of memory needs to be returned. It happens in just about every application but it's usually small enough that you don't notice it. I've got a masters in software engineering and I can tell you that the best programming shops in the world (CMM level 4 type places) end up with code that leaks, being careful is not good enough because nobody is good enough to be that careful on large projects. Good modern garbage collection (difficult to do with C or C++) offers a lot of advantages. Generational Copy Propgation collection is fast (much faster than reference counting), it compacts memory so the OS can reclaim pages that aren't in use (tell me how to do this with out garbage collection, you can free all your mallocs but you can't control which page the memory lands on. If all you have is two bytes on two different pages and you free everything else, you're still consuming a lot of memory...) it speeds up memory allocation which can have a dramatic impact on performance in some problems spaces, and it can enhance cache performance when accessing memory in some circumstances. Not to mention it fixes memory leaks.. The advantages far out weigh the disadvantages (a small performance hit, but you'll have a much worse one if you count refs) and it has nothing to do with design. If design is what you really care about, GC does you a huge favor because it allows you to actually focus on the design and solving the problem at hand. The anti-GC crowd are really old school thinkers who didn't understand the problems in the first place, GC is the future, even realtime systems are using it now.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be a wicked time for IBM to show some committment to the community by having some GNOME and KDE support in ViaVoice. It could be sweet.
I thought it was funny. Those crazy NPR folks, I love 'em but they're a little extra nerdy at times. I can be a hardcore ultra geek, and I usually am, but the NPR folks always make me feel like I'm somehow in the hep crowd of something. Just thought I'd mention that.
EGCS had done a lot and it is a great compiler, it has been my main compiler for quite a while and it has been my only compiler since kernel 2.2 came out. I haven't had any problems with it, some of the newer more experimental CVS versions are a little rocky but the release versions are usually pretty stable.
Now what I'd like it better documentation on the compiler, particularly the internals. I've always thought that it was fairly difficult to enhance and contribute to the compilers because none of the internals seem to be documented anywhere. No IR documentation what-so-ever to my knowledge, you just have to look at the source code.
I understand the desire to mellow out after a really tough week but I'd rather go without the drugs. Don't think pot affects you much cause it's natural? Hang with a person who has been a daily user for 4-5 years and tell me it doesn't do long term damage to your brain, aside from being perpetually lazy...
I guess each person has his own taste and moral standard and drug use may be "right" for some people but I'm convinced that it takes a toll after enough use, if nothing else you condition your mind and body to need the drugs to relax or need them to work long hours. Just like caffine usage, after a while you can't get out of bed unless there is a ready pot of coffee.
In boulder, if you sell smack, they will send you to prison for life but if you sell pot or mushrooms you just have to be quite and give the cops a price break... and nobody will ever give you a hard time. On the hill there are some dealers who even put signs up (you know how it works if you've been there, back on pleasant street where the deals go down you can often see a vintage bus with a "kind bud" sign in the back window... )
Also, Boulder was a radical place in the 1960's, it was totally a hippy town. I've been approached at work (the largest employer in Boulder... I won't say any more being as how we're talking about drugs) by 40 year old babyboomers who wanted me to hook them up before.. I'm not really even a user but since I'm younger they expected me to be able to get them some good stuff without having to risk a bad deal. In a lot of towns, pot is something you just sort of grow out of once you get out of college but in Boulder a lot of older people are still users.
From my own perspective, and while I know a lot about the drug culture in Boulder I'm not really a user, pot users are recreational drug users. You work a long hard day writing code and you want to come home and relax so you smoke a bowl and chill out. Coke, meth, ice, etc. users generally aren't rec. users. There are definitley some people who like to snort some coke from time to time just for fun but the industrial programmer types aren't them. I think it is much more habitual usage. If you're a programmer I can't think of any reason why you'd want to sniff coke except to stay up and stay alert for coding, after work I would much rather mellow out with some pot, but that' just me.
My only concerns are that the documentation probably doesn't exist for a lot of products and would have to be created in a timely manner (that being a concept MS hasn't always understood.) Source code should be an acceptable substitute.
I also think some sort of review process is needed, releasing specs doesn't do a lot of good if MS releases false specs. Then by the time developers can accuse them and notify the regulators or judge MS has had a product in the market for a considerable amount of time. Say MS chooses not to produce such a spec for a product and then goes on to release the product. You or I accuse them of not releasing the spec, lawyers and judges slowly mobilize and eventually tell them they have to do it. Does the product get pulled off the shevles until the spec is ready or are they allowed to sell it for a year and a half while they produce specs? Do they just pay a fine? When IBM was making OS/2 2.0 the problem wasn't so much that they couldn't get API specs but that MS changed them on a monthly basis so that IBM was always left scrambling behind. THey could still use that tactic.
A provision should be made that the hardware interfaces and MS's software documentation need to be made freely available on the internet, just making it "available" isn't good enough because I don't think you'll see too many linux kernel hackers shelling out $10,000 for the specs on some piece of hardware. This is good for hardware companies even though a few don't want to admit it.
I am also a bit concerned that the hardware stipulation, while the best and most beneficial for GNU/Linux, could possibly hurt other companies which might make it unacceptable. For example winmodems and winprinters are by definition "Windows Compatible and certified" but the hardware has a secret interface which belongs to the hardware vendor. Would these vendors be forced to change their product names or to release the specs to their product? Or would they just become confusion for the consumers? Winprinters that aren't "Windows Certified."
Compared to some of the other ideas I have heard, these sound the most fair to MS. MS is still in full control of what the put into their products, how they price their products, who they collaborate with, they aren't forced to do anything other than provide information and they aren't structurally changed.
I also don't think that these ideas are bad because of the way they benefit free software. In the OS world, MS has pretty much driven off their major commercial competitors. There isn't really a good way to introduce parity in that market without benefiting free software.
Breaking MS up into separate divisions might not help or change anything. Breaking them up in to several separate versions of the same company ("baby bills") may not change anything (I can't think of a compelling reason for one office provider to break compatibility with another office provider or to make their product much different...) it would just confuse the customers by creating different versions of the same products. Forcing them to Opensource their code is a very harsh punishment, depending upon how it is licensed. Forcing them to public domain their code is very harsh, that would almost take away their ability to compete.
Publishing full APIs and specs could also benefit MS. Devleopers will be less likely to leave their platform if MS gives them complete specs. It would increase the rift in documentation between MS and free software, which is going to become a bigger blackeye for GNU/Linux as it is.. It could also enable developers to treat many of MS's application components as reusable components for their own software which could make for very competitive products from 3rd party vendors that are all tied to windows.
If you look back at some other companies, like IBM, they were slapped pretty hard and they never even got convicted! For 35 years IBM was limited in how they could discuss products, when they could announce or discuss future products, how they could charge for service, all sorts of things. Their hands were tied in ways that allowed MS to get to where they are (can you imagine being FUDed by MS and being legally bound from responding? That was IBM in the early 90s. MS is announcing vaporware versions of windows that were 3 years away and IBM couldn't announce a product until 90 days before it shipped and they paid a fine if they missed the ship date.) There is more than enough precedence to take action against MS.
Being against anti-trust law is an entirely different matter. Your stance on the law shouldn't be an issue at this point.
I know some linux nuts who burn a kernel like it's a daily ritual.
Sol, the Sun, is our's. Not their's. They can't have a "Solar System"
It's just like the Moon. Other planets have moons but "The Moon" is our moon.
This is pretty exciting though, I heard on E-Town that they are building a really wide telescope that uses lot's of little telescope and some computer magic to make them act like a super sized telescope and they are going to launch it into space like Voyager. By the time it get's to Mars they are expecting it to show visual light pictures of planets around other stars. In addition to that, they are going to have photospectroposcyasdf(sp?) equipment on board that can sniff what's in the atmosphere on those planets, that way they can tell if there are the right chemicals to produce life, or if we're lucky they might find smog and pollution.. I think those planets might get a bit close to that star but it's exciting, none the less.
PowerPC and Alpha have trouble because of the full package cost. bang for buck, the PowerPC is about the best processor around for desktop computers but the cost of building an actual PowerPC computer are much higher than for building a pentium machine. There are plenty of cheap chipsets, motherboard, and motherboard components for pentiums. IBM and Motorola make a few PowerPC motherboard products and they cost 10x(!) more that the pentium version because of all the custom work.
What really needs to happen is we need to comoditize the rest of the hardware on a motherboard. Intel has a huge advanatage at this becuase the support hardware for an intel chip is quite a bit different than for most other chips. If you want to plug a PowerPC or Alpha into an intel style board you have to build some custom chips to add that extra logic, custom chips == more cost. I think that as Merced comes out and more and more people consider leaving the ia-32 x86 behind it will become more competitive, I just hope the PowerPC and alpha last that long, neither of them is in the hands of a company that doesn't also benefit from intel.
They could have hit us a lot harder if they had been smarter about it. Linux does have weaknesses but they aren't attacking them. That mindcraft BS was so clearly fixed, it would have been much more realistic if NT won by just a little bit in most categories and had a big lead in only a few, they made it look like NT bests linux by a lot at everything and everybody knows better than that.
The best way to lie is to tell subtle ones, nobody will believe you if you say you slept with Demi Moore... but you could easily get punched in the mouth by saying you slept with your coworker's wife becuase the guy thinks it's a little more plausible.
Free and open develpment has everything to do with software engineering.
Like that Shoemaker-Levy commet, it screwed up Jupiter's crap. The largest recorded explosive release of energy man has ever witnessed (other than the Crab (or was it the horse?) nebula which burned as bright as the sun during day light for a couple weeks a little over 1000 years ago, can you imagine seeing two suns for a couple weeks? That was a spiritual experience back in those days...)
I would think that the odds of a comet hitting the planet would be pretty good compared to asteroids. It would/will be crazy too, people are packing up and heading for the hills because of y2k, imagine what would happen when they get on the news and say a comet is heading for us and it looks like it will get her in about 6 months...
Planet killer asteroids only have to be about a cubic mile in size and with the very best telescopes they can be extremely difficult to see. Some of them orbit the sun in really odd planes and we have to practically stare at the sun to see them, it's very difficult to do.
SGI should sell cray, buy back mips and start doing what they used to do best, make butt kicking graphical workstations. Anymore they are on the road to becoming another Xeon "workstation" knockoff maker.
They describe the problem with Free software being when thousands of products are built under it and they are all evolving then the market will be chaotic for the consumer and then colapse. The market already functions in those conditions and consumers do fine, it sounds like they are supporting the idea of a big monopoly and one company with control of each particular industry. Heaven forbid that MS has competition and consumers have to choose which products they buy... I wonder how all those car buyers work it out, I mean, there must be 150 different makes and models to choose from but they all some how end up owning a car.
I'd also like to know who their sources are that said Linux can't compete with MS if they win the anti-trust case. All of the big free software king-pins don't seem to even care what happens with MS. It seems really trivial to me, we have more workers, more tallent and motivation. We can out code MS any day of the week. That leaves the market with a situation where all we need to do is provide what MS provides to have every economic edge because our product is free. If that was our goal, we would be there in no time. Instead we've raised the benchmark so we are providing more than MS (stability, choice, better looking, more function, easier to use (it's comming along...)) How can we not compete with MS? They can out market us and they've got a lot of pull with important people and companies but if CRC believes in Adam Smith as much as they act like they do then it's a NOP, GNU/Linux and Free Software will win as long as there are people willing to write it. For a company, excuse me, a foundation, that is supposed to study philanthropy and non-profit organaizations they seem to discount it an awful lot, especially considering the people who are doing it aren't just doing it for the cause but because they love to do it.
That might be the only fad, the number of people willing to write it, but I've seen too much to believe that.
The issue has been brought up a number of times that RMS should start his own dist. if he want's to rename it. Is that a right we give to the dist. providers? Do we want to? I don't think the community would be so cavalier about this idea if Redhat, SuSE, Debian or Caldera decided to start calling their dist something else. If "Redhat Linux" became "Redhat OS" people would be blowing gaskets. Caldera has every right to call theirs OpenUNIX instead of OpenLinux, they don't even need to mention "Linux" anywhere. How would that go over? To suggest that RMS start a dist to call it "GNU/Linux" isn't the solution, that may just be the symptom of a future problem.
The other option I have heard a few times is the "Boycott GNU" option. I support this simply because I'd like to see another compiler written for the sake of competition... In reality these efforts are very far from being useful. Subing in the "Experimental GNU compiler system" for the "GNU C Compiler" isn't quite boycotting GNU. If these people are serious, I support their efforts just so that there will be more competition but I haven't heard anything that makes me believe that they understand how large an undertaking it is. FWIW, Stallman is a brilliant hacker and has had a lot of very very sharp people working with him and the GNU project has taken a long time to get to where it is.
What I think this really represents is a change in the community. Free Software isn't a very popular thing and it never has been. There has been a small core of devoted free software people and an increasing user base. GNU/Linux or Linux has long ago reached a critical mass where the number of free software people are out numbered by the users. I think it happened around the time Netscape was ported, it was such a killer app that so many people longed for that once it was ported a lot of people could use Linux or GNU/Linux without needing something else. As soon as the needs are taken care of the community loses a bond that it once had because they aren't all waiting for that magic app to be written. This is exemplified through the KDE vs. GNOME debates, some people just don't have the ideological concern about whether or not QT is free, it works and they have it and that is all they care about. (I think that is also why the debate is so frustrating, people are debating on entirely different levels about entirely different matters.)
Linux has lost its virinity. It's useful to people and businesses now, regardless of what they think about free software, open source software engineering, or community. The majority of the people on linux don't care about free software. Now RMS may seem a little arrogant and he may even be arrogant about wanting to change the name to GNU/Linux but it might be the better thing to do for free software. Free software is bigger than Linux (GNU/Linux) Linux needs free software but free software does not need linux (but it's arguably the best kernel going right now)
How much of our soul are we as a community willing to sell? You can play games on linux, it has 3D acceleration, you can buy and use integrated office suite applications, it has sophisticated GUIs, it's in the media with good hype, big businesses and software companies are paying attention to it and porting software to it. Should it become the next windows or should it be different this time? Some people already see Redhat as the next MS, take out the free software and they might as well be. Our community needs to focus more on the freedom to keep linux from becoming what we all hate. If it's not about freedom then what is the difference between Linux and BSD? (most users aren't technical enough to truely appriciate the real differences other than the license) Or Linux and Apple Darwin? Or Linux and the Solaris with the Sun Community License?
This is just another example of him being far more into the politics of things instead of the issues at hand. He'd rather be percieved to be a technological advocate than to be one. Machivelli wrote about this kind of behavior.
If he's the candidate then it's just going to be another election where everybody loses.
I can see this screensaver with pictures of Al and nice little anecdotes ("Did you know that Al invented the internet? Well he did when he was in college in ...At the age of 21..") And then about 3 months before the election, a date switch flips and the anecdotes change ("Did you know that Al molested his daughters? Well he did and continues to do so.")
If your terms are speed and dollars, with a modern keyboard I'm convinced that you won't find a very noticable difference. There might be some but not much and probably not enough to pay for retraining (although I don't know too many people who paid to learn to type anyways..) but what about long-term health concerns. The Dvorak keyboard is still popular amongst the ergonomic crowd and I've never heard a sales pitch that mentioned speed as the reason, it was always about not moving your fingers to reach the most common keys.
Anyone know of studies that compare QWERTY to Dvorak in respect of hand health? The most unhealthy action in typing is the thumb on the space action which is the same in both layouts (most people hammer on the space bar too hard and there thumb devleops clicks and tendon problems after a while, it's generally not painful but it's the early form of arthritis)
I equate this to cryptography in a way, most of us aren't anywhere near knowledgable to evaluate a cipher but we still want a cipher to by public before we will trust it. You can find all the security holes you want but they generally aren't going to be plugged until they are exploited. That's just the way business is. If some kid called you up and said he had found a hole in your code (if he could get ahold of you in the first place) are you going to hear him out if he can't prove it? Unfortunately, none of us want's to have them exploited. As it is, Office has had macro viruses for years and MS still hasn't corrected the problems or made it that much more secure. Same can be said about IRIX, is comes out of the box with holes you can drive a bus through, have they changed that? No. Have they had numerous CERT warnings and security breaches? Yes. In some cases, breaching the security isn't good enough to get it fixed.
I also think that there is a little bit more to this than pond scum trying to vandalize the world. That vast majority of virus writers, game crackers, and system crackers aren't malicious. They generally have low selfesteem and use it as a crutch; they brag about the size of the virus collections, the number of viruses they have written, then number of games they have cracked, the age of their games, the number of systems they have broken in to. It's generally not intended to hurt people so much as embarass them or show their superiority. Don't get me wrong, it's antisocial behavior but it's the kind of thing you do becuase the other guys think you're pond scum not usually the kind of thing you do to make money or profit in some other way. I'm not trying to defend them but it's not usually flat malicious behavior. I think it is more like the modern male equivalent of anorexia or bulimia.
It's also worth pointing out that we've had an active virus subculture for over 10 years and a cracking subculture for a lot longer and holes get found and exploited every day. It almost feels like we're going backwards, you install something like ssh to secure up your system and then you find a buffer overflow that not only let's people in but it let's them in as root! Back in the war dialer days, breaking in to a system was an involved process, now there is an entire phenomenon with the script kiddies. With all the cracking and all the viruses and all the breakins software hasn't gotten that much better. I wonder where it would be at if these good samaritin crackers would just discover weaknesses and tell CERT.
It's a tricky thing, if you out law distribution, then you have to arrest the guys at NA and Symantec because that's how they write the code. Further, many of the most sophisticated vira out there have been written by virus researchers (v2p6) trying to prove concepts, test their code, etc.. (probably a few did it trying to make a buck or two) Then there is that whole freedom of speech issue.
What this guy did was write a virus, and transmit it to a victim who unknowingly activated it. That is against the law.
I'm also not so sure what all the depression is over with mozilla. I keep hearing that it is a failure and I don't think that is the case. When Netscape released the source code I know more than a few of us had these delusions about integrating a browser in to our various projects or changing a few lines of code to make mozilla better but they didn't give us a good workable code base and it wasn't modular in that way. Mozilla has come a long way since then. I still think that it is kind of difficult to work with mozilla right now, the nspr libs didn't install correctly on my machine and the configure script didn't work right... Just little things like that can be discouraging.
Now that mozilla is taking a more component oriented approach and we've got more wide usage of CORBA I think things are pretty exciting, as soon as mozilla can view and create HTML (xml) without crashing and can install easily I think interest will start to increase.
Never really scared of nuclear war or anything like that, I just want a nice, secure, underground home. You can crank the music up and nobody will care, it's nice and evironmentally sound since you don't need air conditioning or heating (but a little heater might make it more comfortable... It has plenty of space for whatever you need. If you put in some that really cool "sun light" fiber optic style lighting so that you get real sun light in there, and put some wood and carpeting in there it's would be real homey.
Another sick fantasy I had there for a while and honestly thought might happen was that I wanted to buy a used Soviet nuclear sub, plush out the interior, and sail around the world and live in it.
I love skiing and mountain biking as much, if not more than, the next guy, but there is something really comfortable about living underground. You remember that underground home where the guy lived in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? Anyone see Until the End of the World? They had a really cool cave style computer lab in that movie..
You sound like you've never worked on anything other than a one man project. With large, dynamic, multithreaded applications it is very easy to lose track of when a piece of memory needs to be returned. It happens in just about every application but it's usually small enough that you don't notice it. I've got a masters in software engineering and I can tell you that the best programming shops in the world (CMM level 4 type places) end up with code that leaks, being careful is not good enough because nobody is good enough to be that careful on large projects. Good modern garbage collection (difficult to do with C or C++) offers a lot of advantages. Generational Copy Propgation collection is fast (much faster than reference counting), it compacts memory so the OS can reclaim pages that aren't in use (tell me how to do this with out garbage collection, you can free all your mallocs but you can't control which page the memory lands on. If all you have is two bytes on two different pages and you free everything else, you're still consuming a lot of memory...) it speeds up memory allocation which can have a dramatic impact on performance in some problems spaces, and it can enhance cache performance when accessing memory in some circumstances. Not to mention it fixes memory leaks.. The advantages far out weigh the disadvantages (a small performance hit, but you'll have a much worse one if you count refs) and it has nothing to do with design. If design is what you really care about, GC does you a huge favor because it allows you to actually focus on the design and solving the problem at hand. The anti-GC crowd are really old school thinkers who didn't understand the problems in the first place, GC is the future, even realtime systems are using it now.