Unfortunately, you won't even oblige my simple request
Actually, I read that a long time ago. I believe his ideas are wrong. They have been shown to only work in practice if you don't need to make any money (RMS is basically living off charity), yet he keeps hanging on to his ideals and preaching them to everyone willing to listen. Nothing wrong with that per se, it just shows that he's a fanatic about his ideals, and unwilling to compromise. Just like I said. Even if you agree with his ideals, surely you must see that he is fanatical about them, and not willing to compromise in any way?
Also, only take RMS's viewpoints from his own writings.
You mean like his incessant rants about GNU/linux? His fanaticism and uncompromising nature have been well-documented, even by himself. He may mean well, but at the same time he appears to be living in a reality of his own, a reality that is far removed from the world the rest of us live in.
How is that interesting? What you described could have been ANY OTHER person sitting behind that booth having a talk with someone.
I might as well tell the story that I heard about RMS: a collegue used to work at a place where RMS would drop by once a week or so and give a lecture. He would sit cross-legged on a table and talk, while picking dirt out of his beard. He would literally pick something out of his beard, hold it up in front of him to examine it closely, and then flick it away. All the while just talking away, totally unaware that what he was doing is generally considered to be socially unacceptable, in the same league as picking your nose (everyone does it, but not in front of an audience). I think this perfectly illustrates the kind of detachment from reality that the man has, and THAT is what is interesting about him.
can you imagine
spending hours of your time every day trying to convince people that the sky is blue?
The problem with this analogy is that the sky is not always blue. When I look out my window, I see a grey sky. About half the earth has a black sky at any given time. In essence, RMS is preaching a "universal truth" that isn't. The GPL has its benefits, but it has some major drawbacks, as many companies who blindly followed RMS's gospel have recently found out. RMS and his most fanatic followers refuse to acknowledge this fact though, and simply keep on pretending that the sky is always blue.
Stallman may be one of the most
interesting people alive right now
He's an uncompromising fanatic, and that makes him interesting in the same way that religious zealots are interesting. What is more interesting is the cult-following that he has managed to achieve. He's managed to convince a group of otherwise bright people to focus solely on the gospel of the GPL.
Weird, I started out writing this to show that Stallman isn't interesting at all, but the more I think about it, the more I realize he is. I may not like the way he or his minions behave, but it's definitely interesting...
Having laptop-screens lit up all over the place,
keyboard clicks coming from all directions. Who in their right mind would want to go see a movie in an environment like that?
The last two companies I worked for used Perforce, and it solves this quite nicely. It will tell you if a file you want to check in has been changed by someone else in the mean time, and will help you merge in that person's changes before you make your checkin. Perforce is extremely powerful and easy. The only reason *not* to use Perforce is if you're hung up on using an open source product for your source-repository needs. If you just want to get the job done, you use Perforce. For home use, they even have a limited (2-user) version. For open-source projects, they offer free licenses as well.
Moderators: you can moderate this as troll all you want (just like you did my comments when Loki and Mandrake reported problems), but it should be obvious to anyone by now that there is NO MONEY to be made with free software.
At this point, nobody cares about the Hurd anymore. It's going to be linux all the way. I'm sure RMS will throw another one of his hissy fits when he realizes this, but he'll just have to live with the facts: the Hurd came too late, and people will say linux rather than GNU/linux.
This morning (in the Loki thread) I asked if anybody still believed that one could build a viable business around selling linux software. My comment was moderated down as a troll. Only a few hours later, *another* linux company reports being in financial problems. The trend should be obvious, but the hypocrisy of the moderators will once again mark this down as a troll, no doubt...
The guy should know better (smtp auth, pop-before-smtp). The guy seems as fanatic and rooted firmly outside of reality as RMS. I wonder if all bearded men over fifty that are into free software will eventually develop this mental illness...
How can a rant like that be marked as "insighful" by anyone with more than half a brain? If you claim something did something wrong, at least say WHAT they did wrong.
Re:BeOS had the classic catch 22
on
BeOS For Linux
·
· Score: 1
Instead of "insightful", that should be marked "user does not know what the hell he's talking about". The ABI doesn't change with every OS release. In fact, it only changes when your compiler changes it. BeOS has been backwards binary compatible since R4 (1998, I believe).
For yesterday's press release, the RIAA commissioned a survey by a research firm to
prove that music-downloading is to blame, but all they tell us about it is that "23 percent of
surveyed music consumers say they are not buying more music because they are
downloading or copying their music for free." No more details provided, no link to the
survey's raw numbers. So what does this mean? I guess 77 percent are buying more music
because they're downloading it for free?
No, that's not what it means. Any highschool student could have told you that.
Just like your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, one could could argue that your freedom to copy data ends when it's someone else's data. If this is done well, it should not hinder legitimate use, but I bet most people here are more interested in whether or not they will still be able to rip those rented DVDs.
If you think about it for a moment though, you'll realize that something like this is bound to happen some time. Instead of protesting and hoping it won't, you need to accept that it will, and try to shape and influence it so that it doesn't become a nuissance for legitimate uses, make sure it doesn't become a Windows-only thing, etcetera.
Slashdot seems bent on turning this into a free speech issue, however the linked court transcript says that this guy had M-80s (plural), Molotov cocktails (plural), and remote control detonating
devices (plural). Combined with the threats he made on his website, I can definitely see why the FBI would intervene, full force.
So it's a slightly smaller than the Saintsong Espresso PC. Big deal. The Saintsong Espresso has been available
for over a year. I really don't see what IBM is trying
to prove here.
The fact that the author himself claims to have written an "interesting article" is hilarious enough, but the fact that he even admits to not actually having used a linux PS2 system makes me wonder what this is doing on slashdot at all...
It would be terrible for such a huge thing to crash to the Earth. It could wrap around the entire Earth.
No it wouldn't.
Besides, this "space elevator" would be a giant, provactive, easy target for terrorists.
A terrorist would have to cut the cable in space in order for it to fall back to earth. Attacking the anchor-point will at most have the effect of setting the elevator adrift, away from the earth. This could be compensated for immediately by releasing ballast from the space-end of the cable, thereby keeping the elevator in place until the cable can be reattached. Worst case is when the cable is cut at very high altitude, which will cause the section below it to fall back to earth. The cable is relatively light though, and will do little damage.
The section about how to run a free software business is, while extremely long (mostly because the author somehow feels a need to preach to the choir about the virtues of free software), simply a repetition of the same old "make money on support" mantra.
The article pretty much says:
- release buggy software, that way you can charge for bugfixes
- release hard-to-use software, that way you can charge for training and support
- use free software to lure customers in and then sell them other things
(you'll notice that these three tactics are pretty much exactly what Microsoft does too)
In other words (and this is not a troll, it's all right there in the article for everyone to see), if you just like to write good software and would like to make a living doing so, then free software is not for you.
Point out the shortcomings of an open source product, and suddenly you're pretentious.
Be real guys, if the
Intel compiler beats gcc, then instead of saying "gcc
will live because it is open source", and "the article
is a bit pretentious", you need to get off your butt
and FIX GCC!
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you talking about? BeOS doesn't have any clustering abilities.
Oh well, it's not like we haven't seen this before
Actually, I read that a long time ago. I believe his ideas are wrong. They have been shown to only work in practice if you don't need to make any money (RMS is basically living off charity), yet he keeps hanging on to his ideals and preaching them to everyone willing to listen. Nothing wrong with that per se, it just shows that he's a fanatic about his ideals, and unwilling to compromise. Just like I said. Even if you agree with his ideals, surely you must see that he is fanatical about them, and not willing to compromise in any way?
You mean like his incessant rants about GNU/linux? His fanaticism and uncompromising nature have been well-documented, even by himself. He may mean well, but at the same time he appears to be living in a reality of his own, a reality that is far removed from the world the rest of us live in.
I might as well tell the story that I heard about RMS: a collegue used to work at a place where RMS would drop by once a week or so and give a lecture. He would sit cross-legged on a table and talk, while picking dirt out of his beard. He would literally pick something out of his beard, hold it up in front of him to examine it closely, and then flick it away. All the while just talking away, totally unaware that what he was doing is generally considered to be socially unacceptable, in the same league as picking your nose (everyone does it, but not in front of an audience). I think this perfectly illustrates the kind of detachment from reality that the man has, and THAT is what is interesting about him.
The problem with this analogy is that the sky is not always blue. When I look out my window, I see a grey sky. About half the earth has a black sky at any given time. In essence, RMS is preaching a "universal truth" that isn't. The GPL has its benefits, but it has some major drawbacks, as many companies who blindly followed RMS's gospel have recently found out. RMS and his most fanatic followers refuse to acknowledge this fact though, and simply keep on pretending that the sky is always blue.
He's an uncompromising fanatic, and that makes him interesting in the same way that religious zealots are interesting. What is more interesting is the cult-following that he has managed to achieve. He's managed to convince a group of otherwise bright people to focus solely on the gospel of the GPL.
Weird, I started out writing this to show that Stallman isn't interesting at all, but the more I think about it, the more I realize he is. I may not like the way he or his minions behave, but it's definitely interesting...
Having laptop-screens lit up all over the place, keyboard clicks coming from all directions. Who in their right mind would want to go see a movie in an environment like that?
I've been saying this for years. Why is it that when I say it it gets marked as "troll", but when Shawn Gordon says it, everyone agrees?
The last two companies I worked for used Perforce, and it solves this quite nicely. It will tell you if a file you want to check in has been changed by someone else in the mean time, and will help you merge in that person's changes before you make your checkin. Perforce is extremely powerful and easy. The only reason *not* to use Perforce is if you're hung up on using an open source product for your source-repository needs. If you just want to get the job done, you use Perforce. For home use, they even have a limited (2-user) version. For open-source projects, they offer free licenses as well.
Moderators: you can moderate this as troll all you want (just like you did my comments when Loki and Mandrake reported problems), but it should be obvious to anyone by now that there is NO MONEY to be made with free software.
At this point, nobody cares about the Hurd anymore. It's going to be linux all the way. I'm sure RMS will throw another one of his hissy fits when he realizes this, but he'll just have to live with the facts: the Hurd came too late, and people will say linux rather than GNU/linux.
This morning (in the Loki thread) I asked if anybody still believed that one could build a viable business around selling linux software. My comment was moderated down as a troll. Only a few hours later, *another* linux company reports being in financial problems. The trend should be obvious, but the hypocrisy of the moderators will once again mark this down as a troll, no doubt...
Anyone who still thinks you can create a viable business selling linux software, raise your hand...
The guy should know better (smtp auth, pop-before-smtp).
The guy seems as fanatic and rooted firmly outside of reality as RMS. I wonder if all bearded men over fifty that are into free software will eventually develop this mental illness...
How can a rant like that be marked as "insighful" by anyone with more than half a brain? If you claim something did something wrong, at least say WHAT they did wrong.
Instead of "insightful", that should be marked "user does not know what the hell he's talking about". The ABI doesn't change with every OS release. In fact, it only changes when your compiler changes it. BeOS has been backwards binary compatible since R4 (1998, I believe).
No, that's not what it means. Any highschool student could have told you that.
Just like your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, one could could argue that your freedom to copy data ends when it's someone else's data. If this is done well, it should not hinder legitimate use, but I bet most people here are more interested in whether or not they will still be able to rip those rented DVDs.
If you think about it for a moment though, you'll realize that something like this is bound to happen some time. Instead of protesting and hoping it won't, you need to accept that it will, and try to shape and influence it so that it doesn't become a nuissance for legitimate uses, make sure it doesn't become a Windows-only thing, etcetera.
Slashdot seems bent on turning this into a free speech issue, however the linked court transcript says that this guy had M-80s (plural), Molotov cocktails (plural), and remote control detonating devices (plural). Combined with the threats he made on his website, I can definitely see why the FBI would intervene, full force.
So it's a slightly smaller than the Saintsong Espresso PC. Big deal. The Saintsong Espresso has been available for over a year. I really don't see what IBM is trying to prove here.
The fact that the author himself claims to have written an "interesting article" is hilarious enough, but the fact that he even admits to not actually having used a linux PS2 system makes me wonder what this is doing on slashdot at all...
How unfortunate. Totally unneccessary though.
It would be terrible for such a huge thing to crash to the Earth. It could wrap around the entire Earth.
No it wouldn't.
Besides, this "space elevator" would be a giant, provactive, easy target for terrorists.
A terrorist would have to cut the cable in space in order for it to fall back to earth. Attacking the anchor-point will at most have the effect of setting the elevator adrift, away from the earth. This could be compensated for immediately by releasing ballast from the space-end of the cable, thereby keeping the elevator in place until the cable can be reattached. Worst case is when the cable is cut at very high altitude, which will cause the section below it to fall back to earth. The cable is relatively light though, and will do little damage.
The section about how to run a free software business is, while extremely long (mostly because the author somehow feels a need to preach to the choir about the virtues of free software), simply a repetition of the same old "make money on support" mantra.
The article pretty much says:
- release buggy software, that way you can charge for bugfixes
- release hard-to-use software, that way you can charge for training and support
- use free software to lure customers in and then sell them other things
(you'll notice that these three tactics are pretty much exactly what Microsoft does too)
In other words (and this is not a troll, it's all right there in the article for everyone to see), if you just like to write good software and would like to make a living doing so, then free software is not for you.
Point out the shortcomings of an open source product, and suddenly you're pretentious.
Be real guys, if the Intel compiler beats gcc, then instead of saying "gcc will live because it is open source", and "the article is a bit pretentious", you need to get off your butt and FIX GCC!