So I take it you reject the notion that you're "American" (I'm assuming you're American from your posts and journal -- apologies if this is incorrect). You also, I assume, reject the idea that you have any moral obligations towards any other human beings.
I said "written in and by a community", so it is written by individuals in a community, and you can then look at their overall work and say "the project-x community wrote that".
You don't list the names of every developer who wrote some code for KDE, you say the KDE team created it. That team works as a community.
You seem dangerously divorced from any concepts of plurality.
Now why is it that everybody seems to quote Orwell to support their own argument. He wrote a lot of interesting essays on the use of language, and I'm not sure he'd agree with you here.
You see, the idea that freedom = an individual's freedom to do what he/she wants, is a relatively recent idea, and is certainly not the only accepted definition. If you look in contemporary American dictionaries, they will almost always define freedom as "the right to do something without external control", which supports your post. But even the "founding fathers" recognised that freedom always comes with duty (which isn't surprising as they studies a lot of Locke's work), and that if you divorce freedom from duty, it is meaningless. The duty in your case is the duty to protect one's own freedom from others.
But this is where that "nebulous" idea of community comes in. You see, Free Software is written in and by a community, and is then used by that community as well as others, so I do not see why "community" should be described as a hazy term. The community has a duty to protect its freedom, as well as the freedom of other communities, if it wishes to affirm the right to freedom of others (unless you don't believe in equality...). This is what the GPL does. It restricts you by giving you freedom with duty.
Yes, it is restrictive, and so in that regard is not funamentally different from other restrictive licenses. But it is funamentally different from most other licenses, including those like the X11 and BSD licenses, in that it recognises the duty to the community which must come with the freedom the community has given.
"That bit" is there to stop the license being useless, as its aim is to keep software being written in the interests of the community, rather than a few parties.
If you want a license whose aim is to give maximum freedom to the user, but not the community, use the X11 license - there's no point in making a duplicate.
Whether the GPL is then "Free" depends on whether you think individual freedom is more or less or equally important than/as the freedom of society.
For the umpteenth time, there is a difference between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech". Free Software gives you freedom in terms of use, but it does not guarantee free prices. The GPL even says that developers may sell their code for as much as they like, so long as they offer the source code with the provisions of the GPL for no more than that price again.
The Free Software Foundation need money, and they aren't a company, so this seems like a nice way of giving it to them, which will give us all good returns in terms of personal well-being (if you really belive in Free Software) and because it will help the FSF help spread Free Software.
And I very much doubt much of this will go into Stallman's pockets!
I think one can go a lot further than your problem with this list. You see, Forbes call it 85 inventions, whilst Slashdot calls the list 85 ideas. Fine, inventions are ideas, but since when were they the only ones?
Saying this list represents the 85 biggest ideas of the 20th century is an astonishingly stupid thing to say. There have been many hugely influential and important ideas that weren't inventions, including many in the sciences. It's funny how geeks often seem to think the universe revolves around them...
Whether or not we decide to boycott them depends on:
a) the boycott's effectiveness b) your own scruples
Some will boycott reagrdless of its effectiveness, because they deem it immoral to do otherwise. I try as hard as possible to boycott all companies that use sweatshop/slave labour, and those that do a lot to damage our civil rights. But sometimes I find it would have too negative an impact on my lifestyle, e.g. not seeing any films or listening to any music, so I decide not to because the boycott would be ineffective.
A boycott of music and film is a pointless exercise, because you'll never get enough people doing it to make them notice. Hell, Esso (ExxonMobil outside the UK) don't even care when StopEsso slash their salkes by 40% a few days a year, and are constantly spreading the word to boycott Esso. But if people want to boycoot personally, good for them.
More effective forms of protest are to join/support/donate money to organisations that work for digital rights, and to try as hard as you can to spread the word and educate others.
"Why should the average person be excited about new kernel releases? That sounds like Marketing Department talk to me."
If you're using an operating system, and the core component has a major new version released, you'd be interested to hear what it has over previous versions before you think about upgrading. To non-tech people that means a clear and simple explanation of what the changes are (not some market-droid nonsense). At the moment, tech people like us get the opportunity to learn our way into finding these things out. Not everybody can do this.
You make an interesting point. Maybe Tinyminds just chose the wrong person to ask, or maybe they should have tried to clarify his answers:) Either way, I think it's important that big changes like kernel 2.6 are explained to the whole community.
Perhaps alongside the normal changelogs with major revisions, a layman-friendly changelog could be written, just describing the changes in easier terms (not laymans, you can always simply link to a useful tutorial (ahem, *grin*) which will explain the complete basics).
Just imagine you're a manager, and your IT staff have converted your servers over to GNU/Linux. You read somewhere that kernel 2.6 is out, and you wonder "what does that mean?", and yet you can't find out, and perhaps even your IT staff can't find out (as kernel internals arent' exactly a prerequisite for every sysadmin) - will that impress you? I doubt it.
That interview was interesting, but weird. I've just finished writing a tutorial introducing the Linux kernel, and I had to scratch my head over some of the things mentioned in the Tinyminds article. I know they didn't exactly aim the article at complete newbies, but it'd be nice if hackers could make a little more effort to make what they say intelligible for the average human.
A simple example might be where Robert Love mentions the need for a standard disk layer. What does that mean, to somebody who doesn't understand the way that the kernel in many areas creates a standard set of instructions (e.g. for disks, like "write", "access x data") and that he thinks this should be extended to disks, to take some of the bloated code that repeats all this stuff out of the SCSI codebase?
I think hackers in general really need to work on getting their ideas across to the more average person, otherwise most people have no reason to get excited by new releases unless they enjoy growing numbers!
Don't you think it is slightly worrying that people will be able to filter sites so they only reflect their own views? OK, many "epinions" might only be about the latest consumer products, but it was suggested that Slashdot should do a similar thing with the friend/foe system several times, which would lead to you simply blocking out of your life everything that might challenge and change your opinions.
You might as well just read the same extremist newspaper your whole life!
No shit, I think you might find that the words "a second level domain" gave the game away. I mean, it'd be fine to be a newbie, but don't slate the editors for giving a terrible summary.
...
Well, dah. We get a second level domain of.geek.nz. Hello? That _is_ the goal, what's there to no know?
Don't be ridiculous. Evidently a lot of people don't know what a second level domain is, nor why these people would want one, nor why it should be so interesting that it should be put on Slashdot. The point of a summary is to say: "This is the news, this is why its interesting, here's where to go to ead more". As it is, the summary for this story, as with many others, just speaks to a particular group (be it a majority/minority) who understand the subject enough to know why this would be cool.
Elitism has its place, and it's not on the front page of Slashdot.
I'd agree with your point that a lot of very different office products might cause confusion, but I don't think it's necessarily the only result of having many choices.
For one thing, I think a lot of the confusion is caused by the fact that lots of the packages try to do the same thing, and try to follow the (good) market leader, MS Office, and so confuse people who expect them to behave in the way that MS Office does. If packages could just focus on what makes them distinctive, on their way of doing things, then initially the choices might be confusing, but given the chance the average consumer will settle down with the choice that best fits them.
I also think that different file formats contribute to a lot of frustration and confusion. Were Gobe and OpenOffice and StarOffice and KOffice and AbiWord and all of the Free Software (or potential FS) suites to create a standard, open format and then use it as their default format, they'd be a lot less confusing, and one could switch between them more easily (as I clumsily do at the moment with OO and KO by exporting as (yuck) MS Word documents).
What Gobe could contribute is a nice, clean office suite that focuses on its own design choices. That could be a really good thing, and could force OO and SO to start looking at how dreadfully slow their interfaces are.
Why do some technologist delight in subordinating themselves to the logic of the computer? It's like Asimov's Susan Calvin, with her austere detachment from other humans. Shouldn't we be looking at more ways of humanising technology, rather than trying to get technology to reaplce what few human things we have left in life? What's wrong with just talking to people in bars, meeting people through friends, at the workplace, hobby groups, etc? Why can't we just sell things by placing ads - why are we so obsessed with making life easier when all we're doing is taking more of the basic pleasures of life away, leaving us with a vacuum which seems to just be filled by work?
Are you insane? Open Source not political? Have you ever read a license, or considered the implications of Free Software? Does it not strike you as political declaring that anybody may copy, modify and redistribute information free from restriction?
Free Software is by its very nature political. Everything is political. Your choosing to use your particular operating system has a political dimension, as does your choice of workplace, the food you eat, the clothes you wear. The sooner people realise this, and stop thinking politics is all about corrupt white men in government, or single issues, the better.
The more political hackers can become, the better IMO. If every hacker refused to get political we might as well just invite a few corporations to put great big padlocks on our doors and wipe our hard drives of anything that isn't certified by the Big Bill.
What I found fascinating is the way that they describe the universe as not existing until an observer perceives it. That correlates very closely with the philosophies of the idealists, starting with George Berkely, an English bishop in the 18th century, who suggested that nothing exists outside of our minds, and that, to twist the slightly dull old example, a forest won't exist until we see it, and then it merely exists in our mind, with the idea being implanted there by God.
It's almost as though this theory being developed could in some way prove modern idealists correct!
When waiting for Gentoo to compile (zzzzzz) my mate and I were messing around with pipes, listening to the linux kernel source code, and other such exciting things;-)
Anyway, we piped a ping through to the speakers and noticed a big difference between local pings and Internet pings, as well as Internet pings to UK sites and US sites. Probably the best use though was just to see if the machine was connected, and also to figure out which patch cable was the one belonging to the particular computer (start it pinging, then unplug until you hear no more pings!).
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE-Galeon
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Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
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· Score: 2
I'd assume because Galeon is developed more slowly than Mozilla... you have to wait for them to update things, after a new version of Mozilla is out. I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but they wouldn't shoot themselves in the foot.
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE
on
Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
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· Score: 3, Informative
Not having any mod points atm, I just thought I'd say I thought that page was really good:-)
You answered Mosfet's points very well. So far as I can see, all of the points made against RH on this one have been driven either by ego or misinformation. I use KDE, I dislike GNOME, yet I use Mozilla, and wouldn't consider using Konqueror until it works as well as Mozilla. To an IE user, Mozilla is *far* nicer. Though Mozilla does use GTK+, you're right in saying that it isn't really a GNOME app. The same goes for KOffice/OpenOffice. You could almost say I use the "toolkit" that RH8 ships with by choice, despite KDE giving me othe rdefaults. Man, I'm so awful, I'm just hitting on KDE;-)
Re:Good article, alot of Linux-bashing though
on
Overview of the BSDs
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· Score: 2
I agree that all this GNU/Linux and BSD bashing is slightly insane. Some GNU/Linux users seem to feel the need to tell everyone that their OS is every bit as secure and stable as the BSDs, and likewise BSD users seem to feel the need to tell everyone that their OS is every bit as powerful and feature laden as GNU/Linux. Windows users try to impress both camps:)
In the middle of these wars over people's insecurity about their OS, they mix in silly arguments over licensing, design philosophies and any other issues they might want to raise, usually in a very inaccurate manner. For example:
Linux, by itself, is not a complete operating system -- it's the "kernel" of the operating system....
The author is either backing the FSF by saying we should call it all GNU/Linux, or trying to imply that because we talk about "linux" when we mean a full GNU/Linux distribution, we're really comparing the Linux kernel to a whole BSD system.
The article is riddled with other such nonsense. I'm surprised it got published, its really more of a poor opinion piece. In the end it does tell you a fair bit about BSD, but far less than it could, and all of it is tainted by inaccurate boastings and attacks.
Another Unreal game! I've mucked aroud with the demo, and it's not really markedly different from UT2 (except it runs natively on my machine). Same weapons, same taunts, same levels, and its all really boring.
I mean, CTF... the classic CTF maps were back in Quake1/2 CTF and Team Fortress Classic (2fort being the best). The idea of them is to divide the level up into areas which you can defend in different ways, giving the game some tactical depth. The level with the demo is just one big open space full of spikes, with two little rooms at each end Boo. Dull. And the lightning gun is horrid... I suppose the idea is that the old sniper gun was untracreable, and therefore too good on open maps, but why not just give it tracer bullets? The lightening gun just feels, well, rubbish.
On the plus side, it's nice to see they've used Loki's installer program (and update program) which work like a treat. Hopefully in the next releases they'll also know they'll be able to ship the UNIX versions in time, and so will write that it runs on various UNIX based OSs on the box. Oh and maybe they'll support more drivers than Nvidia:(
Slashdot Mirror
So I take it you reject the notion that you're "American" (I'm assuming you're American from your posts and journal -- apologies if this is incorrect). You also, I assume, reject the idea that you have any moral obligations towards any other human beings.
Nice chap.
I said "written in and by a community", so it is written by individuals in a community, and you can then look at their overall work and say "the project-x community wrote that".
You don't list the names of every developer who wrote some code for KDE, you say the KDE team created it. That team works as a community.
You seem dangerously divorced from any concepts of plurality.
Now why is it that everybody seems to quote Orwell to support their own argument. He wrote a lot of interesting essays on the use of language, and I'm not sure he'd agree with you here.
You see, the idea that freedom = an individual's freedom to do what he/she wants, is a relatively recent idea, and is certainly not the only accepted definition. If you look in contemporary American dictionaries, they will almost always define freedom as "the right to do something without external control", which supports your post. But even the "founding fathers" recognised that freedom always comes with duty (which isn't surprising as they studies a lot of Locke's work), and that if you divorce freedom from duty, it is meaningless. The duty in your case is the duty to protect one's own freedom from others.
But this is where that "nebulous" idea of community comes in. You see, Free Software is written in and by a community, and is then used by that community as well as others, so I do not see why "community" should be described as a hazy term. The community has a duty to protect its freedom, as well as the freedom of other communities, if it wishes to affirm the right to freedom of others (unless you don't believe in equality...). This is what the GPL does. It restricts you by giving you freedom with duty.
Yes, it is restrictive, and so in that regard is not funamentally different from other restrictive licenses. But it is funamentally different from most other licenses, including those like the X11 and BSD licenses, in that it recognises the duty to the community which must come with the freedom the community has given.
"That bit" is there to stop the license being useless, as its aim is to keep software being written in the interests of the community, rather than a few parties.
If you want a license whose aim is to give maximum freedom to the user, but not the community, use the X11 license - there's no point in making a duplicate.
Whether the GPL is then "Free" depends on whether you think individual freedom is more or less or equally important than/as the freedom of society.
For the umpteenth time, there is a difference between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech". Free Software gives you freedom in terms of use, but it does not guarantee free prices. The GPL even says that developers may sell their code for as much as they like, so long as they offer the source code with the provisions of the GPL for no more than that price again.
The Free Software Foundation need money, and they aren't a company, so this seems like a nice way of giving it to them, which will give us all good returns in terms of personal well-being (if you really belive in Free Software) and because it will help the FSF help spread Free Software.
And I very much doubt much of this will go into Stallman's pockets!
Saying this list represents the 85 biggest ideas of the 20th century is an astonishingly stupid thing to say. There have been many hugely influential and important ideas that weren't inventions, including many in the sciences. It's funny how geeks often seem to think the universe revolves around them...
Whether or not we decide to boycott them depends on:
a) the boycott's effectiveness
b) your own scruples
Some will boycott reagrdless of its effectiveness, because they deem it immoral to do otherwise. I try as hard as possible to boycott all companies that use sweatshop/slave labour, and those that do a lot to damage our civil rights. But sometimes I find it would have too negative an impact on my lifestyle, e.g. not seeing any films or listening to any music, so I decide not to because the boycott would be ineffective.
A boycott of music and film is a pointless exercise, because you'll never get enough people doing it to make them notice. Hell, Esso (ExxonMobil outside the UK) don't even care when StopEsso slash their salkes by 40% a few days a year, and are constantly spreading the word to boycott Esso. But if people want to boycoot personally, good for them.
More effective forms of protest are to join/support/donate money to organisations that work for digital rights, and to try as hard as you can to spread the word and educate others.
"Why should the average person be excited about new kernel releases? That sounds like Marketing Department talk to me."
If you're using an operating system, and the core component has a major new version released, you'd be interested to hear what it has over previous versions before you think about upgrading. To non-tech people that means a clear and simple explanation of what the changes are (not some market-droid nonsense). At the moment, tech people like us get the opportunity to learn our way into finding these things out. Not everybody can do this.
You make an interesting point. Maybe Tinyminds just chose the wrong person to ask, or maybe they should have tried to clarify his answers :) Either way, I think it's important that big changes like kernel 2.6 are explained to the whole community.
Perhaps alongside the normal changelogs with major revisions, a layman-friendly changelog could be written, just describing the changes in easier terms (not laymans, you can always simply link to a useful tutorial (ahem, *grin*) which will explain the complete basics).
Just imagine you're a manager, and your IT staff have converted your servers over to GNU/Linux. You read somewhere that kernel 2.6 is out, and you wonder "what does that mean?", and yet you can't find out, and perhaps even your IT staff can't find out (as kernel internals arent' exactly a prerequisite for every sysadmin) - will that impress you? I doubt it.
A simple example might be where Robert Love mentions the need for a standard disk layer. What does that mean, to somebody who doesn't understand the way that the kernel in many areas creates a standard set of instructions (e.g. for disks, like "write", "access x data") and that he thinks this should be extended to disks, to take some of the bloated code that repeats all this stuff out of the SCSI codebase?
I think hackers in general really need to work on getting their ideas across to the more average person, otherwise most people have no reason to get excited by new releases unless they enjoy growing numbers!
Don't you think it is slightly worrying that people will be able to filter sites so they only reflect their own views? OK, many "epinions" might only be about the latest consumer products, but it was suggested that Slashdot should do a similar thing with the friend/foe system several times, which would lead to you simply blocking out of your life everything that might challenge and change your opinions.
You might as well just read the same extremist newspaper your whole life!
Well, dah. We get a second level domain of .geek.nz. Hello? That _is_ the goal, what's there to no know?
Don't be ridiculous. Evidently a lot of people don't know what a second level domain is, nor why these people would want one, nor why it should be so interesting that it should be put on Slashdot. The point of a summary is to say: "This is the news, this is why its interesting, here's where to go to ead more". As it is, the summary for this story, as with many others, just speaks to a particular group (be it a majority/minority) who understand the subject enough to know why this would be cool.
Elitism has its place, and it's not on the front page of Slashdot.
I'd agree with your point that a lot of very different office products might cause confusion, but I don't think it's necessarily the only result of having many choices.
For one thing, I think a lot of the confusion is caused by the fact that lots of the packages try to do the same thing, and try to follow the (good) market leader, MS Office, and so confuse people who expect them to behave in the way that MS Office does. If packages could just focus on what makes them distinctive, on their way of doing things, then initially the choices might be confusing, but given the chance the average consumer will settle down with the choice that best fits them.
I also think that different file formats contribute to a lot of frustration and confusion. Were Gobe and OpenOffice and StarOffice and KOffice and AbiWord and all of the Free Software (or potential FS) suites to create a standard, open format and then use it as their default format, they'd be a lot less confusing, and one could switch between them more easily (as I clumsily do at the moment with OO and KO by exporting as (yuck) MS Word documents).
What Gobe could contribute is a nice, clean office suite that focuses on its own design choices. That could be a really good thing, and could force OO and SO to start looking at how dreadfully slow their interfaces are.
Thank you for writing a longer reply than I could have been bothered to type - you understood my implicit meaning perfectly :-)
Are you insane? Open Source not political? Have you ever read a license, or considered the implications of Free Software? Does it not strike you as political declaring that anybody may copy, modify and redistribute information free from restriction?
Free Software is by its very nature political. Everything is political. Your choosing to use your particular operating system has a political dimension, as does your choice of workplace, the food you eat, the clothes you wear. The sooner people realise this, and stop thinking politics is all about corrupt white men in government, or single issues, the better.
The more political hackers can become, the better IMO. If every hacker refused to get political we might as well just invite a few corporations to put great big padlocks on our doors and wipe our hard drives of anything that isn't certified by the Big Bill.
What I found fascinating is the way that they describe the universe as not existing until an observer perceives it. That correlates very closely with the philosophies of the idealists, starting with George Berkely, an English bishop in the 18th century, who suggested that nothing exists outside of our minds, and that, to twist the slightly dull old example, a forest won't exist until we see it, and then it merely exists in our mind, with the idea being implanted there by God.
It's almost as though this theory being developed could in some way prove modern idealists correct!
When waiting for Gentoo to compile (zzzzzz) my mate and I were messing around with pipes, listening to the linux kernel source code, and other such exciting things ;-)
:-)
Anyway, we piped a ping through to the speakers and noticed a big difference between local pings and Internet pings, as well as Internet pings to UK sites and US sites. Probably the best use though was just to see if the machine was connected, and also to figure out which patch cable was the one belonging to the particular computer (start it pinging, then unplug until you hear no more pings!).
God bless UNIX
Hm, maybe not then, my mistake :-)
I'd assume because Galeon is developed more slowly than Mozilla... you have to wait for them to update things, after a new version of Mozilla is out. I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but they wouldn't shoot themselves in the foot.
Not having any mod points atm, I just thought I'd say I thought that page was really good :-)
;-)
You answered Mosfet's points very well. So far as I can see, all of the points made against RH on this one have been driven either by ego or misinformation. I use KDE, I dislike GNOME, yet I use Mozilla, and wouldn't consider using Konqueror until it works as well as Mozilla. To an IE user, Mozilla is *far* nicer. Though Mozilla does use GTK+, you're right in saying that it isn't really a GNOME app. The same goes for KOffice/OpenOffice. You could almost say I use the "toolkit" that RH8 ships with by choice, despite KDE giving me othe rdefaults. Man, I'm so awful, I'm just hitting on KDE
In the middle of these wars over people's insecurity about their OS, they mix in silly arguments over licensing, design philosophies and any other issues they might want to raise, usually in a very inaccurate manner. For example:
Linux, by itself, is not a complete operating system -- it's the "kernel" of the operating system....
The author is either backing the FSF by saying we should call it all GNU/Linux, or trying to imply that because we talk about "linux" when we mean a full GNU/Linux distribution, we're really comparing the Linux kernel to a whole BSD system.
The article is riddled with other such nonsense. I'm surprised it got published, its really more of a poor opinion piece. In the end it does tell you a fair bit about BSD, but far less than it could, and all of it is tainted by inaccurate boastings and attacks.
Sorry, that was a typo, I meant UT ;-)
:-)
And at the time of posting that, I didn't realise the problem was not Epic's (or arethye just the publisher? I don't know, I'll shut up
You can if you're Intel-ligent.
ah-hmm.
That doesn't even make sense in the context!
Another Unreal game! I've mucked aroud with the demo, and it's not really markedly different from UT2 (except it runs natively on my machine). Same weapons, same taunts, same levels, and its all really boring.
:(
I mean, CTF... the classic CTF maps were back in Quake1/2 CTF and Team Fortress Classic (2fort being the best). The idea of them is to divide the level up into areas which you can defend in different ways, giving the game some tactical depth. The level with the demo is just one big open space full of spikes, with two little rooms at each end Boo. Dull. And the lightning gun is horrid... I suppose the idea is that the old sniper gun was untracreable, and therefore too good on open maps, but why not just give it tracer bullets? The lightening gun just feels, well, rubbish.
On the plus side, it's nice to see they've used Loki's installer program (and update program) which work like a treat. Hopefully in the next releases they'll also know they'll be able to ship the UNIX versions in time, and so will write that it runs on various UNIX based OSs on the box. Oh and maybe they'll support more drivers than Nvidia