Qmail is a little tricky to set up, but it's also small, has some awesome optional features (virtualhosts and the.qmail aliasing system are wierd, but once you get them down you'll appreciate the flexibility they offer) and once you're done it's worth it. It's nice to have a service that you can say, "This is done. I no longer have to worry about it."
Of course, since I use DJBDNS and qmail-pop3, I have 3 services I can mostly ignore. And it only took me 8 hours curled up with lifewithqmail.org to do it.
Actually, it's not a bad ass, as asses go, but my hips will NEVER fit into size 34. Not without massive muscle atrophy, and though this is the industry for it, it hasn't happened yet.
Well...yeah. And some legal software (e.g. Gator, Kazaa, etc) spy on you in ways you might not like. But in the end it's all a trade off -- how much do you trust your software manufacturer?
Some of them I do trust. If I find out Adobe is spying on me to be sure I bought my boxed copy of Photoshop 7, I'm not that worried, because I did. I see this in the same light as I see cameras in retail stores...sure, it's a little annoying that they might be laughing at my fat ass trying to squeeze into size 34 pants, but I can deal with that because I respect their right to stop shoplifters. When the guy who came to paint my house asked me to leave my garage open, I did so, because I was paying him scads of money and I trusted him not to walk out with my TV as well.
Really, with proprietary software it's all a matter of trust. It always has been -- it's why my uncle wouldn't let my cousin use his Renegade pirated floppies in his c64, he was afraid of some stupid code going haywire and messing up his $500 machine.
You worried about this spyware stuff? Go whole hog OSS, it's the only way to be sure. I happen to prefer the user interface and trustworthy behavior of some of my proprietary software and don't mind paying a little extra for it, money or privacy. Still, the day I catch ImageReady sending lists of my porn directories back home to corporate is the day i switch to (shudder, ew) The Gimp.
If you think for a second that hardship is not romantic, then you've never heard the blues, man. Or rock. Or most hip hop. In fact, I'm pretty sure you just described half of the songs I know.
Seriously, you say "man the streets is tough, people out there have it rough, you don't want it." You know what? Maybe I do. Maybe I don't get much satisfaction out of a mortgage or a ninetafive. Maybe I like failure. After all, you never know what you have 'til it's gone.
When I was in college, I hitchhiked across Canada with no food, no money and no ID. My van caught fire around Vancouver and I had no other way to get home. Did it suck balls? Yes. And I would never trade a second of that experience for anything.
When I talk about "dropping out," it's romantic to me because it'd be ME doing it. It'd be me giving up this crap for life's default setting of squalor and anonymity. I know this. Still wanting it does not make me naive.
If I weren't married, didn't have a house, car payment, bunch of loans etc, I'd like to take a few years off and be nobody in particular. That's exciting to me -- the whole beatnik lifestyle, urban nomad poets roaming the landscape in search of "truth within the modern, flashy lies." Got to get me some of that, fulfill that wanderlust I never got rid of because I had to go to college.
And yes, I probably would spend a bit of time in shelters, soup kitchens etc, just to see how they seem to those who have to go there out of necesity. And yes, I would be kind of creeped out if people kept asking me who I was.
In an earlier post this week, I mentioned that when you give somebody charity, you can't expect to control it once it leaves your hand (I was speaking against the GPL, but it fits really well here). I think if you're expecting to track people who are using free services, you're probably doing so because you eventually want to restrict them (otherwise, you wouldn't care). You can judge effectiveness through other means, like volunteer surveys.
But TRACKING people -- and especially hoping to track possibly confused or paranoid people -- sounds like a really unfair thing to do in this case. Either help them, or don't...but trying to impose control over your help is not charity. Not in the christian sense of the word or in my lame tree hugging liberal humanist sense of the word.
Why not? The homeless don't vote, they don't even have ADDRESSES. So it's politically okay to fuck with them -- and if it makes the address bearing taxpayers happy, they will be fucked with.
On the other hand, there are enough of us address bearers who won't stand for this when it is us getting tagged that no matter what spin gets put on it, that it will never get passed.
Paranoia is a healthy thing, but only if you channel it in healthy ways. Speculation is dangerous...which is why I want to Bill O'reilly in his fat skull.
Well, in real life most of the time "winning" means coming out better than your colleagues in a set of criteria. In slashdot, the purpose of a post is to inform, offer an interesting or insightful opinion or to enrage.
I feel that I did all three, so I feel like I win!
I've often thought that posting on slashdot would be a good exercise for a class on either effective argument or effective discourse. For the final exam, students would post on articles with attempts to inform on the details of a post, attack and defend the positions of other posters, as well as to troll and flame. Grades would be based on moderation totals, as well as the number of subsequent posts from other users (hopefully ones not in the class). Slashdot is, after all, one of the most effective open forums on the web. As sad as that is.
Bully for you. But the original, like the Pirsig book he sourced many of his ideas from, is a very terse work. Terse, meaning it says a very lot with a very few words. And unless you knew what he was referring to already, and how he meant it, it was completely beyond you.
Verbosity is neccessary when the knowledge base between two communicating parties is different. I think Plato said that. He probably said it better than I could, but I'm afraid my copy of Phaedrus isn't at hand.
Re:What is up with slashdot?
on
G5s Start Shipping
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My wife games exclusively on the Mac (because she had been gunshy about using my PC ever since she found my usenet porn dump folder). She plays The Sims, Sim City 4, Warcraft 3 and Everquest. You might have heard of these games, they're pretty good sellers on the PC too, and they're lots of fun.
No, she doesn't have the choice of games I have on my PC, and I'm sure she really regrets being unable to play Postal 2 or Soldier of Fortune considering how much she loves needless gore. Yeah, they came out an average of 6 months later than the PC version. But she doesn't care. I dunno why, but apparently since she's still hung up on The Sims: Hot Date, she's not been too worried about waiting for Neverwinter Nights.
It also means that they don't necessarily tell the tour guides everything. I mean, they don't tell them about the secret underground labratory for creating a race of giant mutant cyborg zombie clones!
Re:What is up with slashdot?
on
G5s Start Shipping
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, it's very easy. A lot of the slashdot readers put a lot of time, money and knowledge into inferior, yet popular platforms. These are people who stayed up late nights trying to get a kernel to compile or getting a system to run stable after hacking some nuance of the bios which resulted in a 3% speed increase to memory operations.
And now Apple comes around a makes a machine that's fast, nice looking, and doesn't require all of this extra knowledge and work to use.
Of course they're annoyed. Of course they're threatened. If Apple's stuff is any good, then they've been wasting their time.
So they spread FUD about broken applications, inconsequential complaints about how a $600 bargain PC is cheaper than a $3000 high end work station, or slander about how Apples are effeminate. It's all bullshit meant to make them feel better about a perceived waste. People do it all the time...just listen to the arguments people make about the benefits of sinking $10,000 into a $15,000 honda, rather than buy a $25,000 BMW.
It's childish in a way. Isn't there more to computing than JUST running an OS as fast as possible? If you do your computer stuff in Linux and like it, fine. I use Windows 2000, Gentoo and OSX 10.2 and none of them is better than any of the others for EVERYTHING. Granted, I spend more time tweaking the Gentoo box than either of the other two, but once I'm done I can just ignore it, and let it chug away serving web pages, databases, etc to its hearts content. Admining the 2k box is generally to keep it from falling apart in DLL hell...and admining the Apple machine is usually accepting that "you can't do that" on an apple;).
Excellent Pirsig mental diarrhea. For those of you who don't think reading is strictly for masochists, here's an attempt at simplifying this post:
True Quality is not about simply delivering a nice product. It is a process which does not stop throughout the products' design and manufacture. As soon as you begin to cut corners, you begin to whittle away at this.
"We don't need the nice box," you say. That's cool, and probably true. You don't really need rounded edges or a shiny back, either. And you don't need the Chicago font, or a glowbing blue backlight, or a hold button. Fact is, 99% of the unit is in the short run inconsequential to the production of a digital music player.
But in the long run, it's these inconsequential elements that make the difference between a truly great machine and a half assed one. Really fine details smooth over the parts that may not work so great. There is a lot more leeway given, hence the Apple fanatic's uncanny ability to look over some of the stupid shit Apple does. After all, quality is a combination of all the factors of a product...here's something that looks well made, sounds well made, feels well made and comes with well made accessories in a well made box. At what point does the box start mattering? Well, it's the first thing you see at the check-out when you're about to shell out a bunch of cash for the thing, or it's the first thing you see when it comes in the mail. It's very reassuring.
Besides, the box is at most 5% of the cost of the final product. If you don't include it, you either reduce the price of the product by 5% or increase your margin by a similar amount. If additional sales as a result of the cool box are more than that 5%, and don't come at the expense of people willing to buy the thing if it were ONLY 5% cheaper, it's worthwhile to keep it. And I guarantee you that's not the case with the iPod.
Listen. I am a developer. I do not care if people steal ANYTHING I give away and make money off of it. Why? Because it is mine to give. I don't think you should give something away and expect to still own it. I think this is a concept which is as alien to human nature as most EULAs. As a result, I am against the GPL, and wouldn't mind a whit if a judge says it is invalid.
There are many people who would agree with me. Many of them post code to newsgroups and some of them work on GPL projects, just because they are there. But there are those of us that think that FREEDOM doesn't start with restricting people from using tools at their disposal without first clearing it with the people who made them. And there are those of us who think that a gift is a gift and a product is a product, end of story. This whole "Use our product until you make money on it" idea is doomed to fail because, like i said, this concept is alien to us.
Free, or not free. That's what I'd like to see. But then again, I like simple. This is probably why I hate C++ so much.
Do you not understand that the GPL is a grant of rights? How, in any possible system that allowed sublicencing, could the GPL be invalid?
I am going to give you a CD. It has one track on it and the rest is empty, ready for more sessions. But if you add another track to it, you have to give it back to me, and make it available for anybody else I give this CD too. You may not sell the CD to anybody or profit in any way other than the cost of the medium.
See all those restrictions? See, that's not a gift. You don't own that CD. You can't even use that CD in some of the ways you might want to. You are not FREE. I have granted you the rights to listen to it, but told you what you can and can't do with it.
How is this different from copyright? Because you can give it to more people? Because I say you can change it and you don't have to clear it with me? I am still imposing restrictions on your use. And it may be a very happy hippy thing to prevent people from benefitting from other people's public works, but the fact is that you won't benefit from them anyway.
If you can get something for free, or you can pay for something, which do you do? Do you pay $1 to download Kazaa Lite, or get it free from the website? Do you buy Linux on CD, or tie up sunett's ftp? Sure, some people might, but in no case is anybody getting rich off SELLING free software. The GPL's major selling point as a license -- "protecting developers rights to make money off of their hard work" -- is a total farce. And it's unnecessarily complicating things. I would like very much to use more OSS at work, and contribute to these projoects, but there are too many legal snafus.
And FYI: we bought our compiler, thanks, and no it was not expensive. even if it were, it would be worth it as it is the thing that allows us to create our software in any way we like. you do agree that paying for tools is worthwhile, correct? And we don't need to give it to our customers, some of whom don't even know how to CLICK A MOUSE. There's no need for a GPL'd compile or it's tools designed to force end users to compile everything, or pay for a binary.
SCO is saying people do NOT have the right to license their work if they are going to allow copies. IANAL, so I don't know. But I would much prefer a world where things are either FREE, or they are RESTRICTED. And where nobody RESTRICTS ME from using their tools if I intend to make a living off of using them. That's a little too much like COMMUNISM for me, a beautiful concept that in practice falls apart due to politics and classism.
Oh wait. I just described most of the projects in sourceforge.
You'd want to donate it becuase it's a community and you want to be a member of it. That's what OSS is, right? Community supported software?
You have to understand that the GPL is still just an honor system. SCO is about to test it, and I hope it fails. I think it is better for the computing world if we don't have misled people like yourself who think they can give something away but keep it, too.
As for ownership: what's ownership? If you fix bugs in Mozilla, who owns your fix? Who owns the code you fixed? Who owns the whole thing? The GPL say the community owns it. I say that nobody owns it, it's just out there, like air. SCO says THEY own it.
Which is it, man? Communism, Altruism or Capitalism? You can't have all three...this "little red hen" shit is played out.
But of course, none of us care if you donate your code or not. With autopr0n.com's shitty interface, you couldn't give it away. And tons of people are doing the same thing, only better, and without asking for a reacharound.
Why not? I like public domain. It's got solid legal footing. It's easy to understand. It's completely _FREE_. And it's often quite good. Ever use any of Dan Bernstein's tools? They beat the shit out of Bind, Sendmail, etc. And his career hasn't gone down the tubes.
All these damn licenses acheive nothing. People released code into the public domain LONG before they were penned. And if the GPL is as worthless as SCO seem to think it is (which should, by the way, be a key that it isn't worthless because SCO are lying dicks), then there's a big hole just waiting to be filled in the public domain. It can only help software to be free of these literary chains.
Then you don't want to release your code at all, do you? Fucking Indian giver. If you're going to donate your time, then donate it. Don't make demands of other people. I don't go to the soup kitchen and say, "Now I only want to serve you if you're REALLY homeless. No cheapskates." I don't send checks to the ACLU with a note attached asking them not to help people unless I support them. A donation is a donation. The GPL...well, GPL'd code isn't a donation. It's more like government cheese.
BTW: Your website is still a piece of shit. You might want to fix that.
Acutally, I'm kind of hoping that the end result of this is exactly what you're saying: you can either copyright something, or you can release it into the public domain. That you can't release something into the public domain with restrictions, even well meaning ones like community licenses.
Yes this invalidates the GPL. Good. I hate that viral piece of shit. The lack of "copyleft" has not hurt things licensed under Apache or BSD. In fact, all the GPL has done, really, is restrict the commercial viability of open source.
Think about it, man. Software companies need to make money, but software is very complicated. If you can grab the framework for your product for free without being restricted in how you release said product, you win. And free software wins, too, because it's DEVELOPERS and not LICENSES that make OSS great. We actually had a standing order here NOT to use OSS because of licensing questions, until I got the rule whittled down to exclude BSD, Apache and a few other licenses. The managers here thought that the money spent on exploring the legality of products based on top of GPL'd code was not worth the time they saved developers.
And it's not like non-GPL OSS is faltering. Postgresql is easily on par with (i'd say better than) the GPL'd MySQL. The BSD OS is easily on par with (and many say better than) Linux itself. Apache makes some of the best software on the PLANET. Lack of a GPL is not preventing people from using software and it's not preventing them from extending it. Fear of this was the reason the GPL was emitted from beneath RMS' tinfoil sombrero...making the GPL illegitimate would put a stop to all this stupid OSS license squabbling, and let us get back to what's important: making software.
Re:Gemstones as investments.
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
It's a crock of shit, is what it is. I don't mind spending a shitload of money on a girl (I mean, hell, that's why i made the money, right?) but on a diamond?
See, in a perfect world, we'd all be giving our loved ones engagement STEREOs. Or you know, engagement laptops. "Will you marry me, " open the PowerBook Case and there's a diamond ring desktop picture. Something useful for $6400.
And actually, that's a good way to prove you made the right choice. If you give your girl a new hi fi set for a wedding gift and she's COOL with it, you spent your money well. If she bitches about a ring, blah blah diamond, you put her in her place about the whole conflict diamond thing. And if she still bitches, well, you get a nice new stereo to impress the NEXT girl with.
Okay asshole. Here's the situation. You write an operating system. It has to fucking run somewhere. It is easiest to write software for a sigle platform. However, this is bad for hardware manufacturers, and bad for the public in many ways, because there is only one way to do things. It creates monopolies, or at the very least limits choice.
To give people more choice, you have to make your platform open ended. On one end is the physical hardware of the machine. One the other end is code to be executed. Each end has an API -- your OS translates the desired software "action" into a specific series of hardware "actions". And the API on the hardware side translates these into instructions on the hardware itself. This side of the API is where you install drivers.
But who writes the drivers? Well, as the system manufacturer, you can do it yourself, you can have the hardware manufacturer do it, or you can rely on a community of users to write them for you. If you do it, then hardware manufacturers have to deal with YOUR programmers and YOUR resources. They have to rely on you. Most aren't willing to do this...they would rather have their customers calling them, to maintain the relationship. If you have the user community do it, you have the problem of chicken and egg...the hardware won't work until a driver is written, but the driver won't be written until enough developers have the hardware. Hardware manufacturers don't want that, either, and they sure don't want to give free hardware to the most potentially lucrative users.
So the only viable solution is to have hardware manufacturers write their own damn drivers. That's how the hardware manufacturers WANT IT. Still, some of them don't do a good job of it. Maybe they don't completely support an API, because they have limited time to market and would rather get a mostly working product out then a completely finished one. Maybe they don't like part of the API, or figure it will never be used. Maybe the were confused by what a function does.
Is any of this your fault as the system manufacturer? FUCK NO. And you tell your customers this. "Call BotchCo. Their hardware drivers do not work the way we told them they should work." There is nothing you can do about this except fail gracefully. Think about it, man: when the video driver stops responding in a GUI OS, what the hell can you do without relying in some way on a video driver? Send audio queues? Use an elaborate system of morse code bleeps on the keyboard?
No, these would confuse people without properly explaining there was a problem. So you bring the system down in such a way that the user *KNOWS* it is down. And with your last dying breath, you try to let them know what happened. You give them the error you received and tell them what you were trying to do.
Unlike *nix, windows is not designed to be a TTY system and most windows users wouldn't know what to do with a console if they saw one. They shouldn't have to, because in an ideal world the video driver is flawless and stable and never changes. So you force them to restart the system when there's a video problem, or some other system problem that's unrecoverable. You do the same thing in Linux...when the X server crashes (taking your book report with it), you restart X. With Windows, the whole fucking system is a window server. So you restart the whole system.
Personally, I prefer the way Apple handles kernel panics. But then again, Apple doesn't worry about the hardware much, do they? I've bought three compactflash card readers since I got my mac; each time it's been because the previous one was no longer supported, and no driver would ever be made.
I think what he means is, since Linux is not owned by anybody, there is no "first party" software for it. Everything's third party. So technically, every Linux crash is caused by third party software.
Or does it become "first party" when you compile your kernel? And anything you got in binary form is "third party?"
Linux is so wierd, man. It's all so..."some assembly required."
Acutally, that's false. I am quite picky about my hardware, and no windows does not crash. I'm also picky about versions and software installed on it. Nothing with skins, nothing that tries to play "fast and loose" with the OS and nothing that's "free as in beer" unless it's also "free as in everything else."
The end result is massive, UN*X esque uptimes. I've not rebooted my PC at home since the last big thunderstorm in April. I've rebooted my work PC once -- to install Sybase -- in about 8 months. No memory bloat, no graphical glitches, no GPFs.
I'm sorry if your systems don't see the same, but realize that on good hardware Windows CAN be very stable. Which means if Windows isn't stable on YOUR hardware, it isn't any GOOD. A lot of really expensive, nicely produced, whiz bang motherboards with tons of whistles and bells are just unstable because the manufacturers used stock off the shelf drivers for unique implementations. I once had a PC with a brilliant Abit motherboard that always crashed. I put an intel board in for a month while I sent the other back to Abit, and it was stable. When I put the new Abit board in, it was once again unstable. I stayed with the Intel...I didn't miss the 3% performance difference in memory ops or whatever.
Oh, and why the hell would you ever fund development of a driver? Unless you're kicking in at least a hundred bucks, it's probably peanuts to the developer, and if you're spending that much you might as well just buy better hardware. I have no sympathy for people installing an OS on a glorified hot plate and then complaining that it isn't exactly perfect. Come on, folks. We know not to build houses out of popsicle sticks.
Slashdot Mirror
Qmail is a little tricky to set up, but it's also small, has some awesome optional features (virtualhosts and the .qmail aliasing system are wierd, but once you get them down you'll appreciate the flexibility they offer) and once you're done it's worth it. It's nice to have a service that you can say, "This is done. I no longer have to worry about it."
Of course, since I use DJBDNS and qmail-pop3, I have 3 services I can mostly ignore. And it only took me 8 hours curled up with lifewithqmail.org to do it.
Actually, it's not a bad ass, as asses go, but my hips will NEVER fit into size 34. Not without massive muscle atrophy, and though this is the industry for it, it hasn't happened yet.
Well...yeah. And some legal software (e.g. Gator, Kazaa, etc) spy on you in ways you might not like. But in the end it's all a trade off -- how much do you trust your software manufacturer?
Some of them I do trust. If I find out Adobe is spying on me to be sure I bought my boxed copy of Photoshop 7, I'm not that worried, because I did. I see this in the same light as I see cameras in retail stores...sure, it's a little annoying that they might be laughing at my fat ass trying to squeeze into size 34 pants, but I can deal with that because I respect their right to stop shoplifters. When the guy who came to paint my house asked me to leave my garage open, I did so, because I was paying him scads of money and I trusted him not to walk out with my TV as well.
Really, with proprietary software it's all a matter of trust. It always has been -- it's why my uncle wouldn't let my cousin use his Renegade pirated floppies in his c64, he was afraid of some stupid code going haywire and messing up his $500 machine.
You worried about this spyware stuff? Go whole hog OSS, it's the only way to be sure. I happen to prefer the user interface and trustworthy behavior of some of my proprietary software and don't mind paying a little extra for it, money or privacy. Still, the day I catch ImageReady sending lists of my porn directories back home to corporate is the day i switch to (shudder, ew) The Gimp.
"What do you mean you can't just GIVE stuff away if you want to make money? So THAT'S what I've been doing this wrong all these years!"
Is this the start of kernel patch micropayments???
Really awesome. You've managed to make a non-post. "Shut the fuck up." Take your own advice, moron.
If you think for a second that hardship is not romantic, then you've never heard the blues, man. Or rock. Or most hip hop. In fact, I'm pretty sure you just described half of the songs I know.
Seriously, you say "man the streets is tough, people out there have it rough, you don't want it." You know what? Maybe I do. Maybe I don't get much satisfaction out of a mortgage or a ninetafive. Maybe I like failure. After all, you never know what you have 'til it's gone.
When I was in college, I hitchhiked across Canada with no food, no money and no ID. My van caught fire around Vancouver and I had no other way to get home. Did it suck balls? Yes. And I would never trade a second of that experience for anything.
When I talk about "dropping out," it's romantic to me because it'd be ME doing it. It'd be me giving up this crap for life's default setting of squalor and anonymity. I know this. Still wanting it does not make me naive.
If I weren't married, didn't have a house, car payment, bunch of loans etc, I'd like to take a few years off and be nobody in particular. That's exciting to me -- the whole beatnik lifestyle, urban nomad poets roaming the landscape in search of "truth within the modern, flashy lies." Got to get me some of that, fulfill that wanderlust I never got rid of because I had to go to college.
And yes, I probably would spend a bit of time in shelters, soup kitchens etc, just to see how they seem to those who have to go there out of necesity. And yes, I would be kind of creeped out if people kept asking me who I was.
In an earlier post this week, I mentioned that when you give somebody charity, you can't expect to control it once it leaves your hand (I was speaking against the GPL, but it fits really well here). I think if you're expecting to track people who are using free services, you're probably doing so because you eventually want to restrict them (otherwise, you wouldn't care). You can judge effectiveness through other means, like volunteer surveys.
But TRACKING people -- and especially hoping to track possibly confused or paranoid people -- sounds like a really unfair thing to do in this case. Either help them, or don't...but trying to impose control over your help is not charity. Not in the christian sense of the word or in my lame tree hugging liberal humanist sense of the word.
Why not? The homeless don't vote, they don't even have ADDRESSES. So it's politically okay to fuck with them -- and if it makes the address bearing taxpayers happy, they will be fucked with.
On the other hand, there are enough of us address bearers who won't stand for this when it is us getting tagged that no matter what spin gets put on it, that it will never get passed.
Paranoia is a healthy thing, but only if you channel it in healthy ways. Speculation is dangerous...which is why I want to Bill O'reilly in his fat skull.
Well, in real life most of the time "winning" means coming out better than your colleagues in a set of criteria. In slashdot, the purpose of a post is to inform, offer an interesting or insightful opinion or to enrage.
I feel that I did all three, so I feel like I win!
I've often thought that posting on slashdot would be a good exercise for a class on either effective argument or effective discourse. For the final exam, students would post on articles with attempts to inform on the details of a post, attack and defend the positions of other posters, as well as to troll and flame. Grades would be based on moderation totals, as well as the number of subsequent posts from other users (hopefully ones not in the class). Slashdot is, after all, one of the most effective open forums on the web. As sad as that is.
Bully for you. But the original, like the Pirsig book he sourced many of his ideas from, is a very terse work. Terse, meaning it says a very lot with a very few words. And unless you knew what he was referring to already, and how he meant it, it was completely beyond you.
Verbosity is neccessary when the knowledge base between two communicating parties is different. I think Plato said that. He probably said it better than I could, but I'm afraid my copy of Phaedrus isn't at hand.
My wife games exclusively on the Mac (because she had been gunshy about using my PC ever since she found my usenet porn dump folder). She plays The Sims, Sim City 4, Warcraft 3 and Everquest. You might have heard of these games, they're pretty good sellers on the PC too, and they're lots of fun.
No, she doesn't have the choice of games I have on my PC, and I'm sure she really regrets being unable to play Postal 2 or Soldier of Fortune considering how much she loves needless gore. Yeah, they came out an average of 6 months later than the PC version. But she doesn't care. I dunno why, but apparently since she's still hung up on The Sims: Hot Date, she's not been too worried about waiting for Neverwinter Nights.
Which, I might add, came out August 8th.
It also means that they don't necessarily tell the tour guides everything. I mean, they don't tell them about the secret underground labratory for creating a race of giant mutant cyborg zombie clones!
Well, it's very easy. A lot of the slashdot readers put a lot of time, money and knowledge into inferior, yet popular platforms. These are people who stayed up late nights trying to get a kernel to compile or getting a system to run stable after hacking some nuance of the bios which resulted in a 3% speed increase to memory operations.
;).
And now Apple comes around a makes a machine that's fast, nice looking, and doesn't require all of this extra knowledge and work to use.
Of course they're annoyed. Of course they're threatened. If Apple's stuff is any good, then they've been wasting their time.
So they spread FUD about broken applications, inconsequential complaints about how a $600 bargain PC is cheaper than a $3000 high end work station, or slander about how Apples are effeminate. It's all bullshit meant to make them feel better about a perceived waste. People do it all the time...just listen to the arguments people make about the benefits of sinking $10,000 into a $15,000 honda, rather than buy a $25,000 BMW.
It's childish in a way. Isn't there more to computing than JUST running an OS as fast as possible? If you do your computer stuff in Linux and like it, fine. I use Windows 2000, Gentoo and OSX 10.2 and none of them is better than any of the others for EVERYTHING. Granted, I spend more time tweaking the Gentoo box than either of the other two, but once I'm done I can just ignore it, and let it chug away serving web pages, databases, etc to its hearts content. Admining the 2k box is generally to keep it from falling apart in DLL hell...and admining the Apple machine is usually accepting that "you can't do that" on an apple
Excellent Pirsig mental diarrhea. For those of you who don't think reading is strictly for masochists, here's an attempt at simplifying this post:
True Quality is not about simply delivering a nice product. It is a process which does not stop throughout the products' design and manufacture. As soon as you begin to cut corners, you begin to whittle away at this.
"We don't need the nice box," you say. That's cool, and probably true. You don't really need rounded edges or a shiny back, either. And you don't need the Chicago font, or a glowbing blue backlight, or a hold button. Fact is, 99% of the unit is in the short run inconsequential to the production of a digital music player.
But in the long run, it's these inconsequential elements that make the difference between a truly great machine and a half assed one. Really fine details smooth over the parts that may not work so great. There is a lot more leeway given, hence the Apple fanatic's uncanny ability to look over some of the stupid shit Apple does. After all, quality is a combination of all the factors of a product...here's something that looks well made, sounds well made, feels well made and comes with well made accessories in a well made box. At what point does the box start mattering? Well, it's the first thing you see at the check-out when you're about to shell out a bunch of cash for the thing, or it's the first thing you see when it comes in the mail. It's very reassuring.
Besides, the box is at most 5% of the cost of the final product. If you don't include it, you either reduce the price of the product by 5% or increase your margin by a similar amount. If additional sales as a result of the cool box are more than that 5%, and don't come at the expense of people willing to buy the thing if it were ONLY 5% cheaper, it's worthwhile to keep it. And I guarantee you that's not the case with the iPod.
Still, this HandSpring buyout should be a wake up to anybody who wants to make a lot of money while making quality hardware:
1) License the rights to a consumer device that's WAY too expensive for what you get.
2) Sell a nicer product for less money. Make it compatible but upgradable. Do everything that the licensed company SHOULD have done.
3) Sell your company back to the consumer device manufacturer.
Listen. I am a developer. I do not care if people steal ANYTHING I give away and make money off of it. Why? Because it is mine to give. I don't think you should give something away and expect to still own it. I think this is a concept which is as alien to human nature as most EULAs. As a result, I am against the GPL, and wouldn't mind a whit if a judge says it is invalid.
There are many people who would agree with me. Many of them post code to newsgroups and some of them work on GPL projects, just because they are there. But there are those of us that think that FREEDOM doesn't start with restricting people from using tools at their disposal without first clearing it with the people who made them. And there are those of us who think that a gift is a gift and a product is a product, end of story. This whole "Use our product until you make money on it" idea is doomed to fail because, like i said, this concept is alien to us.
Free, or not free. That's what I'd like to see. But then again, I like simple. This is probably why I hate C++ so much.
Do you not understand that the GPL is a grant of rights? How, in any possible system that allowed sublicencing, could the GPL be invalid?
I am going to give you a CD. It has one track on it and the rest is empty, ready for more sessions. But if you add another track to it, you have to give it back to me, and make it available for anybody else I give this CD too. You may not sell the CD to anybody or profit in any way other than the cost of the medium.
See all those restrictions? See, that's not a gift. You don't own that CD. You can't even use that CD in some of the ways you might want to. You are not FREE. I have granted you the rights to listen to it, but told you what you can and can't do with it.
How is this different from copyright? Because you can give it to more people? Because I say you can change it and you don't have to clear it with me? I am still imposing restrictions on your use. And it may be a very happy hippy thing to prevent people from benefitting from other people's public works, but the fact is that you won't benefit from them anyway.
If you can get something for free, or you can pay for something, which do you do? Do you pay $1 to download Kazaa Lite, or get it free from the website? Do you buy Linux on CD, or tie up sunett's ftp? Sure, some people might, but in no case is anybody getting rich off SELLING free software. The GPL's major selling point as a license -- "protecting developers rights to make money off of their hard work" -- is a total farce. And it's unnecessarily complicating things. I would like very much to use more OSS at work, and contribute to these projoects, but there are too many legal snafus.
And FYI: we bought our compiler, thanks, and no it was not expensive. even if it were, it would be worth it as it is the thing that allows us to create our software in any way we like. you do agree that paying for tools is worthwhile, correct? And we don't need to give it to our customers, some of whom don't even know how to CLICK A MOUSE. There's no need for a GPL'd compile or it's tools designed to force end users to compile everything, or pay for a binary.
SCO is saying people do NOT have the right to license their work if they are going to allow copies. IANAL, so I don't know. But I would much prefer a world where things are either FREE, or they are RESTRICTED. And where nobody RESTRICTS ME from using their tools if I intend to make a living off of using them. That's a little too much like COMMUNISM for me, a beautiful concept that in practice falls apart due to politics and classism.
Oh wait. I just described most of the projects in sourceforge.
You'd want to donate it becuase it's a community and you want to be a member of it. That's what OSS is, right? Community supported software?
You have to understand that the GPL is still just an honor system. SCO is about to test it, and I hope it fails. I think it is better for the computing world if we don't have misled people like yourself who think they can give something away but keep it, too.
As for ownership: what's ownership? If you fix bugs in Mozilla, who owns your fix? Who owns the code you fixed? Who owns the whole thing? The GPL say the community owns it. I say that nobody owns it, it's just out there, like air. SCO says THEY own it.
Which is it, man? Communism, Altruism or Capitalism? You can't have all three...this "little red hen" shit is played out.
But of course, none of us care if you donate your code or not. With autopr0n.com's shitty interface, you couldn't give it away. And tons of people are doing the same thing, only better, and without asking for a reacharound.
Why not? I like public domain. It's got solid legal footing. It's easy to understand. It's completely _FREE_. And it's often quite good. Ever use any of Dan Bernstein's tools? They beat the shit out of Bind, Sendmail, etc. And his career hasn't gone down the tubes.
All these damn licenses acheive nothing. People released code into the public domain LONG before they were penned. And if the GPL is as worthless as SCO seem to think it is (which should, by the way, be a key that it isn't worthless because SCO are lying dicks), then there's a big hole just waiting to be filled in the public domain. It can only help software to be free of these literary chains.
Then you don't want to release your code at all, do you? Fucking Indian giver. If you're going to donate your time, then donate it. Don't make demands of other people. I don't go to the soup kitchen and say, "Now I only want to serve you if you're REALLY homeless. No cheapskates." I don't send checks to the ACLU with a note attached asking them not to help people unless I support them. A donation is a donation. The GPL...well, GPL'd code isn't a donation. It's more like government cheese.
BTW: Your website is still a piece of shit. You might want to fix that.
Acutally, I'm kind of hoping that the end result of this is exactly what you're saying: you can either copyright something, or you can release it into the public domain. That you can't release something into the public domain with restrictions, even well meaning ones like community licenses.
Yes this invalidates the GPL. Good. I hate that viral piece of shit. The lack of "copyleft" has not hurt things licensed under Apache or BSD. In fact, all the GPL has done, really, is restrict the commercial viability of open source.
Think about it, man. Software companies need to make money, but software is very complicated. If you can grab the framework for your product for free without being restricted in how you release said product, you win. And free software wins, too, because it's DEVELOPERS and not LICENSES that make OSS great. We actually had a standing order here NOT to use OSS because of licensing questions, until I got the rule whittled down to exclude BSD, Apache and a few other licenses. The managers here thought that the money spent on exploring the legality of products based on top of GPL'd code was not worth the time they saved developers.
And it's not like non-GPL OSS is faltering. Postgresql is easily on par with (i'd say better than) the GPL'd MySQL. The BSD OS is easily on par with (and many say better than) Linux itself. Apache makes some of the best software on the PLANET. Lack of a GPL is not preventing people from using software and it's not preventing them from extending it. Fear of this was the reason the GPL was emitted from beneath RMS' tinfoil sombrero...making the GPL illegitimate would put a stop to all this stupid OSS license squabbling, and let us get back to what's important: making software.
It's a crock of shit, is what it is. I don't mind spending a shitload of money on a girl (I mean, hell, that's why i made the money, right?) but on a diamond?
See, in a perfect world, we'd all be giving our loved ones engagement STEREOs. Or you know, engagement laptops. "Will you marry me, " open the PowerBook Case and there's a diamond ring desktop picture. Something useful for $6400.
And actually, that's a good way to prove you made the right choice. If you give your girl a new hi fi set for a wedding gift and she's COOL with it, you spent your money well. If she bitches about a ring, blah blah diamond, you put her in her place about the whole conflict diamond thing. And if she still bitches, well, you get a nice new stereo to impress the NEXT girl with.
Okay asshole. Here's the situation. You write an operating system. It has to fucking run somewhere. It is easiest to write software for a sigle platform. However, this is bad for hardware manufacturers, and bad for the public in many ways, because there is only one way to do things. It creates monopolies, or at the very least limits choice.
To give people more choice, you have to make your platform open ended. On one end is the physical hardware of the machine. One the other end is code to be executed. Each end has an API -- your OS translates the desired software "action" into a specific series of hardware "actions". And the API on the hardware side translates these into instructions on the hardware itself. This side of the API is where you install drivers.
But who writes the drivers? Well, as the system manufacturer, you can do it yourself, you can have the hardware manufacturer do it, or you can rely on a community of users to write them for you. If you do it, then hardware manufacturers have to deal with YOUR programmers and YOUR resources. They have to rely on you. Most aren't willing to do this...they would rather have their customers calling them, to maintain the relationship. If you have the user community do it, you have the problem of chicken and egg...the hardware won't work until a driver is written, but the driver won't be written until enough developers have the hardware. Hardware manufacturers don't want that, either, and they sure don't want to give free hardware to the most potentially lucrative users.
So the only viable solution is to have hardware manufacturers write their own damn drivers. That's how the hardware manufacturers WANT IT. Still, some of them don't do a good job of it. Maybe they don't completely support an API, because they have limited time to market and would rather get a mostly working product out then a completely finished one. Maybe they don't like part of the API, or figure it will never be used. Maybe the were confused by what a function does.
Is any of this your fault as the system manufacturer? FUCK NO. And you tell your customers this. "Call BotchCo. Their hardware drivers do not work the way we told them they should work." There is nothing you can do about this except fail gracefully. Think about it, man: when the video driver stops responding in a GUI OS, what the hell can you do without relying in some way on a video driver? Send audio queues? Use an elaborate system of morse code bleeps on the keyboard?
No, these would confuse people without properly explaining there was a problem. So you bring the system down in such a way that the user *KNOWS* it is down. And with your last dying breath, you try to let them know what happened. You give them the error you received and tell them what you were trying to do.
Unlike *nix, windows is not designed to be a TTY system and most windows users wouldn't know what to do with a console if they saw one. They shouldn't have to, because in an ideal world the video driver is flawless and stable and never changes. So you force them to restart the system when there's a video problem, or some other system problem that's unrecoverable. You do the same thing in Linux...when the X server crashes (taking your book report with it), you restart X. With Windows, the whole fucking system is a window server. So you restart the whole system.
Personally, I prefer the way Apple handles kernel panics. But then again, Apple doesn't worry about the hardware much, do they? I've bought three compactflash card readers since I got my mac; each time it's been because the previous one was no longer supported, and no driver would ever be made.
I think what he means is, since Linux is not owned by anybody, there is no "first party" software for it. Everything's third party. So technically, every Linux crash is caused by third party software.
Or does it become "first party" when you compile your kernel? And anything you got in binary form is "third party?"
Linux is so wierd, man. It's all so..."some assembly required."
Acutally, that's false. I am quite picky about my hardware, and no windows does not crash. I'm also picky about versions and software installed on it. Nothing with skins, nothing that tries to play "fast and loose" with the OS and nothing that's "free as in beer" unless it's also "free as in everything else."
The end result is massive, UN*X esque uptimes. I've not rebooted my PC at home since the last big thunderstorm in April. I've rebooted my work PC once -- to install Sybase -- in about 8 months. No memory bloat, no graphical glitches, no GPFs.
I'm sorry if your systems don't see the same, but realize that on good hardware Windows CAN be very stable. Which means if Windows isn't stable on YOUR hardware, it isn't any GOOD. A lot of really expensive, nicely produced, whiz bang motherboards with tons of whistles and bells are just unstable because the manufacturers used stock off the shelf drivers for unique implementations. I once had a PC with a brilliant Abit motherboard that always crashed. I put an intel board in for a month while I sent the other back to Abit, and it was stable. When I put the new Abit board in, it was once again unstable. I stayed with the Intel...I didn't miss the 3% performance difference in memory ops or whatever.
Oh, and why the hell would you ever fund development of a driver? Unless you're kicking in at least a hundred bucks, it's probably peanuts to the developer, and if you're spending that much you might as well just buy better hardware. I have no sympathy for people installing an OS on a glorified hot plate and then complaining that it isn't exactly perfect. Come on, folks. We know not to build houses out of popsicle sticks.