You could do that. Or... you could lay a TV cable from where your PC is to where your TV is, which would cost you a few bucks at most.
That would work until it's time to actually use the thing, then I would preferably like to be in the same room as the input devices on the PC!
I'll have to lug the thing around until I can find out where blind guys buy their long range wireless keyboards that work through walls, and have the spare $ to get one.
Either that or I could get something cheap enough to leave in place with the TV (PS2 with X! Who cares if it's 640x480), or ditch my girlfriend and keep her PC in the lounge full time (that would be the sign of a truly hopeless geek).
Is this proposal just to put some sort of nonstandard GUI desktop shell over the top of a framebuffer?
Why not just write this shell over the top of SVGAlib (or a new framebuffer), and run XFree86 in a window on the local GUI to run X programs? XFree86 for win* systems runs in a window on the local GUI.
That way another app supports all of your networked programs, or stuff displayed on screen owned by another user (I do this all the time because it's a pain running two Xservers for two people and switching views), and you have your fast desktop shell (or windowing system or whatever) only handling supported programs.
One person that refuses is a suspect and marked for extra attention, the only way to get around something like this is if everyone refuses.
Talk to your union!
Not in a union? Then things get tricky; anyone that starts to organise people in the workplace to improve conditions is usually seen as a troublemaker. Going through various levels of bosses can work if everyone up the chain to the boss that has the power to make the decision is reasonable and approachable - otherwise you'll get ignored or marked as a troublemaker.
USB networking sucks, and hasn't been implemented.
There's an article here which describes how to network an iPac and a PC runing linux 2.4.2 via USB.
I've got now idea whether the performance would be adequate in a lot of cases, but I can think of a lot of situations where having high speed in only one direction would not be a big problem. I've used X over a modem a few times - it's usable for a few things, and a couple of orders of magnitude more bandwidth would make an enormous difference.
I also like the idea of putting a "laplink" USB cable between a PC and a PS2, and instantly have read/write storage mounted via NFS to provide everything newer than your boot CD or DVD.
Of course - the USB "laplink" cable only gives you 1:1 connectivity.
Firewire has the same major disadvantages of SCSI - price and scarcity, while USB ports are fairly common.
That said, you could probably get a PC firewire card for less than the price of the laptop ethernet card you would need for the PS2.
Has anyone been able to get the PS2 under linux to talk to a another linux box via USB? Is the USB hardware on the playstation supported in sony's linux port?
A couple of megabits a second is nothing to sneeze at, a lot of things could run full speed under X at 2Mb/s.
The firewire port would give far better speeds, but every recent PC has USB.
Currently I have a box with TV out which gets lugged into the living room occasionally to play movie files in various formats & xgalaga on the TV. Having a PS2 as an X-term would be a far more convenient (and cheaper) idea than a box with a GeForce with TV-out. Things that chew serious amounts of CPU (eg. DivX) could be run on the real box in another room and piped to the local display on the PS2. After a certain point the bandwidth of firewire would be desireable.
Re:Now that they've won the desktop "war"
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Microsoft's Future
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· Score: 1
At least in the field of mouse design, Microsoft has done some major advances....Intellimouse Explorer with its breakthrough optical sensor?
The mice are a bad example - the only new thing there is a wheel combined with the optical sensor. I've got no idea how long ago the sun sparc stations came with mice with an optical sensor - but it was more than five years ago. You had to use them on shiny little mats, but they worked on exactly the same principle.
MS are doing real research, what you are describing with the mice is development - taking well known priciples and making a product.
Re:Asbestos underpants time -
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GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 1
The plural of "Emacs" is "Emacsen".
I gnu I'd get something wrong in talking about both breeds of Emacs. You've got to love RMS's creative use of english if nothing else - it's his choice.
It's late, I'd better go home to play with my LiGNuX box (maybe he came up with a different name when people said "lick nux" instead of "lee-gnu-eccs").
Now that they've won the desktop "war"
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Microsoft's Future
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Microsoft actually spend money on research these days (instead of the assimilation technique that gave them almost everthing more advanced than "MSworks"), and have enormous resources, so they are likely to be a big name for a while if they take a long term view.
Some of IBM's basic research (eg. superconductivity and nanotechnology) may produce enormous returns, and have already made the world a better place , but won't be pulling in the money for that immediately. Their earlier research helped make them the big company that they've been for decades. Xerox gave us the PC and workstation desktop environment as research, and not a product in development.
If MS dedicates some effort towards published research (remember, product development is only called "research" if it makes the tax man happy, and real reseach can be done outside a university) that will add to the global knowledge base and may mean that the "next big thing" is owned by them. After all, flouride was added to toothpaste after a company that had a waste disposal problem with it funded a lot of research to find out what it could be used for, and some of it paid off spectacularly. You never know what can be done until you try.
In the 1980s, if you were in the computer room, you were a probably a programmer.
At my school there were three programmers, who were very jealous of their hard won knowledge (usually expensively aquired, so they weren't going to tell anyone anything), a few gamers with pirate software, and a bunch of newbies (myself included) that typed in programs from magazines because we couldn't afford real documentation (or know where to find it), or get into the cupboard where the documentation was locked away from the students. I never got to write real progams that did more than made noises or some graphics. I got ambitious then disappointed (tried to write a very simple 3D CAD program, but found BASIC too slow & assembly too difficult without docs, then tried to do lower case text for a simple word processor & same problem) someone suggesting simpler things that sounded cool (or some docs) would have kept me going - that should be the role for the teacher.
The teacher, however, was not paid to do this, so he didn't.
My reaction was to give up and spend my lunchtimes playing D&D, talk about ways to make explosives and reading every SF novel and non-fiction book in the (relatively small) library instead.
With usenet (in most schools I suspect it's banned) or IRC, if the F.Manual is in a locked cupboard, there's bound to be someone out there who can point you who can point you to one that you can read.
With open source you don't need an expensive manual to work out what you've got to call to put lines on the screen via a propriatry API, you can use a well documented one - but here I'm preaching to the converted.
If linux or something similar had existed when I was at school I would have used my time in that room more effectively - either learning more or playing something like DOOM - either way it would have been less of a waste of time. A few linux boxes in a school would probably keep the inquisitive geeks gainfully employed. There's only so much that a newbie can do on a MS box with dos and batch files, but newbies can bash a lot together on a *nix box.
I was one of the generation that was supposed to be propelled forward by the "computing revolution".
I was too, only fifteen years ago, and it still hasn't been fixed.
It's a policy thing, when the people who put together the syllubus (my spelling is bad) are computer literate, then the teachers will have set guidelines on how to use them in the classroom.
My experience:
Grade 8 - not allowed near the things.
Grade 9-12 - a "computer club" where anyone could go in and play with the apples with all documentation forbidden in case we broke something. One actually had a floppy disk but the leading geek has us fooled into thinking that only he had permission to use it. I spend weeks working out the memory address for each pixel in the graphics screen, and once I'd done that the teacher took my pirate tape with integer basic (which had an assembler) away, so I gave up on doing anything other than lo-res pong.
This was optional, and almost completely uncontrolled (the only control was the teacher checking for pirate software every couple of months). In retrospect my time would have been better spent chasing girls or in the metal shop (or both, but that's another story) since I didn't actually learn much - other than documentation can be forbidden, and I came out of it with the idea that computer science would be a boring and extremely constrained career choice.
Grade 12 - about six hours using a fairly expensive Sperry PC to write programs in BASIC.
Six hours total teaching time for one student in the top science/maths stream over five years, with the machines paid for and gathering dust. However, they did let me give up on sport and take a tech course on electronics and the Z80 CPU - but that course was at the local tech college.
The secretarial studies girls didn't even get to see them. If they pursued that career those women would have used computers more now than anyone else that graduated in that year - typing counts for more use than staring at a screen and thinking:).
Back then, it was enough for the parents group to provide funding for the computers, the future of their children was assured. It appears that a lot of that attitude still remains, and large amounts of money is spent without actually utilising the resource effectively.
How many desktops can you buy for a laptop?
on
Technology and Society
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In a lot of places the education budgets are shrinking.
The old reading books from the 1960's that were put in storage when it was decided that they were too violent are back out again, because there isn't enough money for new reading books (and the kids love them, plus the violence was pretty tame for any time other than the 90's).
If every kid has a laptop, something else has got to go. If there is a desktop for every kid, a bit less has to go. The only advantage of the laptop is that the kids can use them on the bus. If the kid can book out a desktop system that they can use at home, then they have a computer at home. You can buy a lot more than two PC's for the price of a laptop, and you still wouldn't need a full PCs per student. Laptops typically have a short and nasty life in comparison to a desktop system. Also, most schools already have a lot of desktop systems. Just because it's an old box doesn't mean that it can't run matlab and teach the best and brightest students - it just won't run quake II or above.
Asbestos underpants time -
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GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 1
Green pizza asked about the history of Emacs (notice no gnu in front - I'm using it as a plural) and was modded down as flamebait, and wanted to know why.
There has been a serious flame war raging for almost a decade about gnu emacs and (gnu) Xemacs (formerly lucid emacs).
To summarise, undisputed (I hope) facts only to avoid flames.
- RMS stopped developing emacs and appointed someone to develop it.
- The company "Lucid" wanted to use emacs 19 in conjuction with their product, but it wasn't finished, so they paid the developer to work on emacs full time.
- RMS decided that it was time to take control back from the emacs developer and wanted to approve every line of code, but his schedule wouldn't allow him to do that in a timely manner.
- The emacs developer and lucid (who put a few more people onto emacs, under control of the developer) pushed ahead.
- RMS appointed a new developer for emacs, and the code forked.
- A philosophical argument between people at lucid (who wanted an emacs 19 with a certain feature set - like using X, and wanted it ASAP) and RMS ensued. Various and numerous comments were made.
- Offers of a merge were made by both sides, but major features that would have to be scrapped (like being able to use X in that release) and management style have kept the majority of the code apart. Some features have been merged on both, which everyone agrees is a good thing.
- Both projects are GPLed, you can get the source of both and modify them as you wish. Aparently the copyright of both is held by the FSF, although one party believes there is some issue with "legal papers". The other party, not having written the GPL, assumed that it meant what it said, and that copyright still remains with the FSF.
There is some info about the history of (gnu) Xemacs and gnu emacs from both sides here, with an interesting quote from RMS, paticularly since ALL of XEmacs was written under the GPL and is available under the GPL.
No flames please, if you disagree then read the source material, become enlightened, and carry on a sensible conversation with one of the two parties that care about the issue.
Re:Architect or Engineer? - Time to be pedantic
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Coder or Architect?
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· Score: 1
It depends upon your qualifications.
If you've spent years studying and can design buildings, and a professional body has decided that you are good enough to do that for a living, then you can call yourself an architect.
The same goes for engineers, you've got to have the knowledge to put together an "engine" (or machine in the old form of the word) of some description, and be certified by your peers.
Put "Software" in front of the name however and everything changes - you're a software person working on a specific aspect of software. Leave the "software" off and you have a sitation akin to a Phd in divinity calling themselves "doctor" all of the time and letting people assume that they are a medical doctor.
I'm still a bit miffed at Microsoft selling the MSCE, which lets all kinds of people of various skill levels (eg. why can't you just put the name in for the dns server instead of this big number?) go around calling themselves Engineers.
I'm waiting for the next step, M$ certified judges. Selling a title like that would upset a few people.
If you start a fork of a web browser project.... For nothing more than ego points, by giving the false impression you set out the goal and started from scratch
Ego? Anyone who forks code solely to pretend that all of the previous work was theirs will have a very short lived project!
What I thought was obvious, is that if a developer wishes to go in a different direction then they can take the code and fork it. They are then responsible for updating the forked code - effectively they "own" that branch, since they control what happens to the code in the branch. An example of a code fork is XEmacs & GNU Emacs. Both can run under X windows, so the X just denotes that it is different, and that a group of developers wished to
fork the code.
Those are big shoulders you're standing on--praise them
"Emacs" is still in the name to say where it came from and RMS is credited in the docs.
But burying them and claiming the world starts at your feet is
wrong.
What does that have to do with a bunch of people renaming someone elses work and insisting the EVERYONE use the name they've picked for someone elses work?
the elimination of Project GNU from revised history
No, my point is the addition of the GNU name to LiGNux (or gnu/linux in the more recent form of the revised name) to get a bit of press is revisionism. Not accepting the new name will not do anything detrimental to the FSF - they didn't have it before so they have lost NOTHING.
being un-ownable is a big part of the purpose of the GNU System!
Then RMS (and others) should stop trying to pretend that they own linux just to get a bit of press!
Of course projects have owners, individually or collectively - someone has to do the work. Under the GPL if you want overriding control of someone elses work for some reason you can always fork off a new project - or if a project is dropped anyone else can pick it up and run with it.
It is my belief that the people who are in control of a project "A" should have the right to call it what thay like, and it is just a little bit rude for people involved in a project "B" to choose a new name for the first project to make everyone think that they are running that too, then insist that everyone use it.
single most effective way to harm the Free Software movement you could possibly have found
Pointing out that there is an alternative view to "Linux is a gnu variant" does that? I think not.
Pointing out that it has not always been LiGNux (it's growing on me) or gnu/linux doesn't do that either.
A silly little argument about publicity or the "Free vs free vs open source" definition is not going to do anything horrible to the FSF.
The "use the new name or we shall flame you" attitude annoys me - and I don't think it can be justified by anything I've read so far.
Unless the embedded QT gets released under the GPL
It has - probably before you or anyone outside of TrollTech heard of it.
Also, most of the Gnome/KDE software is bloated beyond belief when seen from the standpoint of an embedded SW engineer
True, so there is an opportunity for furthur development - a move back to small unix style apps. Pipes instead of OLE and COM (sorry, I meant to say bonobo).
X11 is simply too much of an memory hog, and to feature rich to run on any of the current generation of palm-sized devices.
There is work in progress on bringing the size of X back down to what it once was.
If They can start injecting "legitimate" trader's IPs into the blacklists, the value of the lists would be considerably reduced!
That would be impersonation, which is against the law virtually everywhere. They could get around it if caught, because the rights of the corporation often exceed that of the individual in the USA (which is in direct opposition to the intentions of the founders). Everywhere else the laws vary, but usually favour large organised industry groups.
Perhaps Microsoft should be prosecuted for running a degree mill?
You give them money, study for a few months and you can call youself an Engineer.
In Australia, a telecommunications company found itself in legal trouble when they called the untrained guys that put cable TV boxes in peoples homes engineers.
Anyway, why pay money to become a MSCE when you will get paid money to become a Microsoft Certified Supreme Court Judge!
This whole gnu/linux revisionism thing isn't all that old.
Some of you may recall the suggestion to call it "LiGNuX" proir to that.
"Transcript of Chat With Linus Torvalds", Linus Torvalds, 5/5/99, ABCNEWS.com
Oh, Gods, not the lignux thing again..
No, Linux should not be spelled Lignux. There's a lot of GNU code out there, but it should stand on its own instead of trying to get a free ride on the Linux name recognition.
I _am_ very indebted to the gcc developers, who have made sure that there's a good high-quality compiler out there that everybody can use, but that doesn't really mean that they get to choose their own name for the system.
Your midwife doesn't select the name of your babies..
I wrote my earier comment as a reply to an arrogant comment that laid down the line that linux is a gnu variant, and had it written as if there is no other possible view. Otherwise I would have kept quiet on the issue.
I disagree with the statement by RMS (justifying gnu's implied ownership of linux) that was linked to by the previous comment, and would like to have the right to disagree without people attempting to "correct" me everytime I use the name that linux had before RMS decided that gnu needed some more press.
I argue that a "complete system" is far more than an OS. If you want to call it "gnu system/linux" go ahead, just don't try to make me do it. Groups like Debian and RedHat decide what goes into a linux system and not gnu. That is how I justify my view on not calling it gnu/linux.
Recently, a suspected GPL violation occured with respect to linux (the kernel), which was reported on a FSF page, alone with a comment along the lines that they don't own linux so it's up to an individual author to chase it down. My view is that if they are not responsible for it they shouldn't pretend to own it. The kernel is linux, the system is Yellow Dog Linux (or whatever), the gnu tools are the gnu tools. Gnu decide what goes into the gnu tools, other people decide where to go from there.
I respect that others can have other views on the issue, but expect that others should be able to accept that the view taken before RMS heard of linux is still valid.
BTW, thanks for the comments on Hurd, your short description is better than what I've seen on the gnu pages.
It's time for me to get back to work on this "NT based GNU system" (where the gnu tools are most definitely NOT part of the OS, but are essential to my work).
It uses chains (think pipes, only sometimes in parallel) to process audio. The gui is still in early stages of development, but you can do far more than in any gui I've seen with the command line tools (which is probably why it's hard to represent it all in a gui). it lives here.
The gui, of course goes give you the amplitude of sound on each track, lets you cut and paste, and apply whatever filters are defined to selections.
Rasterman told me himself that X was limiting him. Hes working on the enlightenment project, hes having problems with alpha channeling and you are telling me all this bogus nonsense?
Of course not, I'm just saying that the window manager is the interface to the user, not X. X doesn't have everything - but it does have the openGL stuff another poster was asking about.
So then I guess it should be called "GNU/Linux/Xfree86/KDE/Qt"? Or perhaps just "Linux" for short...
Plus the "Open Group", "Regents Of the University Of California" etc.:)
Somewhere there must be a really authoratative (excuse spelling) definition of what an operating system is. I've always seen it as the software that directly adresses the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have to lug the thing around until I can find out where blind guys buy their long range wireless keyboards that work through walls, and have the spare $ to get one.
Either that or I could get something cheap enough to leave in place with the TV (PS2 with X! Who cares if it's 640x480), or ditch my girlfriend and keep her PC in the lounge full time (that would be the sign of a truly hopeless geek).
Why not just write this shell over the top of SVGAlib (or a new framebuffer), and run XFree86 in a window on the local GUI to run X programs? XFree86 for win* systems runs in a window on the local GUI.
That way another app supports all of your networked programs, or stuff displayed on screen owned by another user (I do this all the time because it's a pain running two Xservers for two people and switching views), and you have your fast desktop shell (or windowing system or whatever) only handling supported programs.
Talk to your union!
Not in a union? Then things get tricky; anyone that starts to organise people in the workplace to improve conditions is usually seen as a troublemaker. Going through various levels of bosses can work if everyone up the chain to the boss that has the power to make the decision is reasonable and approachable - otherwise you'll get ignored or marked as a troublemaker.
I've got now idea whether the performance would be adequate in a lot of cases, but I can think of a lot of situations where having high speed in only one direction would not be a big problem. I've used X over a modem a few times - it's usable for a few things, and a couple of orders of magnitude more bandwidth would make an enormous difference.
I also like the idea of putting a "laplink" USB cable between a PC and a PS2, and instantly have read/write storage mounted via NFS to provide everything newer than your boot CD or DVD.
Of course - the USB "laplink" cable only gives you 1:1 connectivity.
Firewire has the same major disadvantages of SCSI - price and scarcity, while USB ports are fairly common. That said, you could probably get a PC firewire card for less than the price of the laptop ethernet card you would need for the PS2.
Has anyone been able to get the PS2 under linux to talk to a another linux box via USB? Is the USB hardware on the playstation supported in sony's linux port?
A couple of megabits a second is nothing to sneeze at, a lot of things could run full speed under X at 2Mb/s.
The firewire port would give far better speeds, but every recent PC has USB.
Currently I have a box with TV out which gets lugged into the living room occasionally to play movie files in various formats & xgalaga on the TV. Having a PS2 as an X-term would be a far more convenient (and cheaper) idea than a box with a GeForce with TV-out. Things that chew serious amounts of CPU (eg. DivX) could be run on the real box in another room and piped to the local display on the PS2. After a certain point the bandwidth of firewire would be desireable.
MS are doing real research, what you are describing with the mice is development - taking well known priciples and making a product.
It's late, I'd better go home to play with my LiGNuX box (maybe he came up with a different name when people said "lick nux" instead of "lee-gnu-eccs").
Some of IBM's basic research (eg. superconductivity and nanotechnology) may produce enormous returns, and have already made the world a better place , but won't be pulling in the money for that immediately. Their earlier research helped make them the big company that they've been for decades. Xerox gave us the PC and workstation desktop environment as research, and not a product in development.
If MS dedicates some effort towards published research (remember, product development is only called "research" if it makes the tax man happy, and real reseach can be done outside a university) that will add to the global knowledge base and may mean that the "next big thing" is owned by them. After all, flouride was added to toothpaste after a company that had a waste disposal problem with it funded a lot of research to find out what it could be used for, and some of it paid off spectacularly. You never know what can be done until you try.
The teacher, however, was not paid to do this, so he didn't.
My reaction was to give up and spend my lunchtimes playing D&D, talk about ways to make explosives and reading every SF novel and non-fiction book in the (relatively small) library instead.
With usenet (in most schools I suspect it's banned) or IRC, if the F.Manual is in a locked cupboard, there's bound to be someone out there who can point you who can point you to one that you can read.
With open source you don't need an expensive manual to work out what you've got to call to put lines on the screen via a propriatry API, you can use a well documented one - but here I'm preaching to the converted.
If linux or something similar had existed when I was at school I would have used my time in that room more effectively - either learning more or playing something like DOOM - either way it would have been less of a waste of time. A few linux boxes in a school would probably keep the inquisitive geeks gainfully employed. There's only so much that a newbie can do on a MS box with dos and batch files, but newbies can bash a lot together on a *nix box.
It's a policy thing, when the people who put together the syllubus (my spelling is bad) are computer literate, then the teachers will have set guidelines on how to use them in the classroom.
My experience:
Six hours total teaching time for one student in the top science/maths stream over five years, with the machines paid for and gathering dust. However, they did let me give up on sport and take a tech course on electronics and the Z80 CPU - but that course was at the local tech college.The secretarial studies girls didn't even get to see them. If they pursued that career those women would have used computers more now than anyone else that graduated in that year - typing counts for more use than staring at a screen and thinking :).
Back then, it was enough for the parents group to provide funding for the computers, the future of their children was assured. It appears that a lot of that attitude still remains, and large amounts of money is spent without actually utilising the resource effectively.
The old reading books from the 1960's that were put in storage when it was decided that they were too violent are back out again, because there isn't enough money for new reading books (and the kids love them, plus the violence was pretty tame for any time other than the 90's).
If every kid has a laptop, something else has got to go. If there is a desktop for every kid, a bit less has to go. The only advantage of the laptop is that the kids can use them on the bus. If the kid can book out a desktop system that they can use at home, then they have a computer at home. You can buy a lot more than two PC's for the price of a laptop, and you still wouldn't need a full PCs per student. Laptops typically have a short and nasty life in comparison to a desktop system. Also, most schools already have a lot of desktop systems. Just because it's an old box doesn't mean that it can't run matlab and teach the best and brightest students - it just won't run quake II or above.
There has been a serious flame war raging for almost a decade about gnu emacs and (gnu) Xemacs (formerly lucid emacs).
To summarise, undisputed (I hope) facts only to avoid flames.
- RMS stopped developing emacs and appointed someone to develop it.
- The company "Lucid" wanted to use emacs 19 in conjuction with their product, but it wasn't finished, so they paid the developer to work on emacs full time.
- RMS decided that it was time to take control back from the emacs developer and wanted to approve every line of code, but his schedule wouldn't allow him to do that in a timely manner.
- The emacs developer and lucid (who put a few more people onto emacs, under control of the developer) pushed ahead.
- RMS appointed a new developer for emacs, and the code forked.
- A philosophical argument between people at lucid (who wanted an emacs 19 with a certain feature set - like using X, and wanted it ASAP) and RMS ensued. Various and numerous comments were made.
- Offers of a merge were made by both sides, but major features that would have to be scrapped (like being able to use X in that release) and management style have kept the majority of the code apart. Some features have been merged on both, which everyone agrees is a good thing.
- Both projects are GPLed, you can get the source of both and modify them as you wish. Aparently the copyright of both is held by the FSF, although one party believes there is some issue with "legal papers". The other party, not having written the GPL, assumed that it meant what it said, and that copyright still remains with the FSF.
There is some info about the history of (gnu) Xemacs and gnu emacs from both sides here, with an interesting quote from RMS, paticularly since ALL of XEmacs was written under the GPL and is available under the GPL.
No flames please, if you disagree then read the source material, become enlightened, and carry on a sensible conversation with one of the two parties that care about the issue.
If you've spent years studying and can design buildings, and a professional body has decided that you are good enough to do that for a living, then you can call yourself an architect.
The same goes for engineers, you've got to have the knowledge to put together an "engine" (or machine in the old form of the word) of some description, and be certified by your peers.
Put "Software" in front of the name however and everything changes - you're a software person working on a specific aspect of software. Leave the "software" off and you have a sitation akin to a Phd in divinity calling themselves "doctor" all of the time and letting people assume that they are a medical doctor.
I'm still a bit miffed at Microsoft selling the MSCE, which lets all kinds of people of various skill levels (eg. why can't you just put the name in for the dns server instead of this big number?) go around calling themselves Engineers.
I'm waiting for the next step, M$ certified judges. Selling a title like that would upset a few people.
What I thought was obvious, is that if a developer wishes to go in a different direction then they can take the code and fork it. They are then responsible for updating the forked code - effectively they "own" that branch, since they control what happens to the code in the branch. An example of a code fork is XEmacs & GNU Emacs. Both can run under X windows, so the X just denotes that it is different, and that a group of developers wished to fork the code.
"Emacs" is still in the name to say where it came from and RMS is credited in the docs. What does that have to do with a bunch of people renaming someone elses work and insisting the EVERYONE use the name they've picked for someone elses work?There's some very emotive cars in this movie, and an image here.
Of course projects have owners, individually or collectively - someone has to do the work. Under the GPL if you want overriding control of someone elses work for some reason you can always fork off a new project - or if a project is dropped anyone else can pick it up and run with it.
It is my belief that the people who are in control of a project "A" should have the right to call it what thay like, and it is just a little bit rude for people involved in a project "B" to choose a new name for the first project to make everyone think that they are running that too, then insist that everyone use it.
Pointing out that there is an alternative view to "Linux is a gnu variant" does that? I think not.Pointing out that it has not always been LiGNux (it's growing on me) or gnu/linux doesn't do that either.
A silly little argument about publicity or the "Free vs free vs open source" definition is not going to do anything horrible to the FSF.
The "use the new name or we shall flame you" attitude annoys me - and I don't think it can be justified by anything I've read so far.
You give them money, study for a few months and you can call youself an Engineer.
In Australia, a telecommunications company found itself in legal trouble when they called the untrained guys that put cable TV boxes in peoples homes engineers.
Anyway, why pay money to become a MSCE when you will get paid money to become a Microsoft Certified Supreme Court Judge!
Some of you may recall the suggestion to call it "LiGNuX" proir to that.
"Transcript of Chat With Linus Torvalds", Linus Torvalds, 5/5/99, ABCNEWS.com
To read the whole thing in context go here.The only difference I see with the "gnu/linux" renaming is that the name isn't as silly or difficult to type.
I disagree with the statement by RMS (justifying gnu's implied ownership of linux) that was linked to by the previous comment, and would like to have the right to disagree without people attempting to "correct" me everytime I use the name that linux had before RMS decided that gnu needed some more press.
I argue that a "complete system" is far more than an OS. If you want to call it "gnu system/linux" go ahead, just don't try to make me do it. Groups like Debian and RedHat decide what goes into a linux system and not gnu. That is how I justify my view on not calling it gnu/linux.
Recently, a suspected GPL violation occured with respect to linux (the kernel), which was reported on a FSF page, alone with a comment along the lines that they don't own linux so it's up to an individual author to chase it down. My view is that if they are not responsible for it they shouldn't pretend to own it. The kernel is linux, the system is Yellow Dog Linux (or whatever), the gnu tools are the gnu tools. Gnu decide what goes into the gnu tools, other people decide where to go from there.
I respect that others can have other views on the issue, but expect that others should be able to accept that the view taken before RMS heard of linux is still valid.
BTW, thanks for the comments on Hurd, your short description is better than what I've seen on the gnu pages.
It's time for me to get back to work on this "NT based GNU system" (where the gnu tools are most definitely NOT part of the OS, but are essential to my work).
The gui, of course goes give you the amplitude of sound on each track, lets you cut and paste, and apply whatever filters are defined to selections.
Somewhere there must be a really authoratative (excuse spelling) definition of what an operating system is. I've always seen it as the software that directly adresses the hardware.