What, with the high cost of living in silicon valley and total lack of nightlife, wouldn't you rather be hacking code on your laptop on some beach in Brazil? Carnaval is coming!
There's a free, (server-based and multi-user as an option) scheduling package that has been out for some time called "plan". From "rpm -qi plan":
Plan displays a month calendar similar to xcal, except that every day box is large enough to show appointments (in small print). Appointments can be associated with the following information: date, time and length (in time or days); an optional text message to be printed; an optional script to be executed; early-warn and late-warn triggers that precede the alarm time; repetitions (every nth day, etc.); optional fast command-line appointment entry; flexible ways to specify holidays and vacations; extensive context help; multiuser capability using an IP server program (plan-server with access lists); and grouping of appointments into files, per-user, private and others. Plan can be connected (with additional software) to Apple Newton and PalmPilot PDAs.
Yeah, it's XML or LDAP but it sounds good, seems interoperable with other scheduling software, and has been around for a while. It used to ship with SuSe (I think) but I'm not sure if it does now.
on Sunsite/Metalab, (and many other sites) there's a package called MacDump. I looked into it, but never actually ran it. I believe it's a simple daemon-like process on the mac that allows a unix client to suck information from the harddrive for backup purposes.
Not that this is necessarily the best solution out there, but I mention it for completeness.
I believe Win95 requires 8MB. You must be thinking of Win3.1 or OS/2.
I ran X windows on a 486 running a 8MHZ! And it felt plenty zippy opening rxvt windows using the twm window manager. It was running at 8MHZ because I forgot to attach the "turbo" button. It was a bit sluggish with only 4MB but with 8 or 16MB it was fast.
Oh, and X crashes a lot less than your average win95 setup. And it's Y2K compliant.
It's hard to justify tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education only to find out when you graduate that there are no jobs in your major. Sure, there are lots of jobs right now for some types of programmers. But what if you're over 35? What if you're looking for work in some other technical specialty like aerospace engineering, chemistry, physics, biotech, materials science, etc? Lots of people with technical/scientific degrees are having trouble finding jobs. Companies are very picky about your major and experience. Sounds like fewer of the brightest students are willing to take the crapshoot and I don't blame them.
So why are many of the graduate students from other countries? That's easy. Most U.S. born students balk at grad student poverty wages, but for many people around the world, the wages aren't that bad and you have a shot at getting a green card, too.
First of all, let me express my heartfelt sympathies for the victims of the violence in Colorado, their families, and friends.
I'm afraid that this outpouring of "persecuted geeks" may do more harm than good. I think the truth is, kids are cruel. They pick on each other and play pranks. This happens just about everywhere in the world, not just in the U.S. The strange thing about the U.S. is, that if you did a poll, I suspect the vast majority of kids consider themselves to be outcasts and victims to some extent. What's missing, even on the part of the so-called geeks, is a failure of empathy, a failure to realize the impact of their own behavior on other kids. What we have instead is a "culture of victimhood", where people try to establish identity and validate themselves by becoming part of a persecuted group. People relish, embrace, and promote their victim status, instead of blowing off little incidents and finding a more constructive way to establish identity. The dangerous thing about self-styled victims is that they often fail to notice when they are doing the victimizing.
The culture of victimhood is promoted in the media, movies, TV shows, etc. What perhaps isn't stressed often enough to children is that we are all part of society. We should try to understand one another. We should try to get along. We should look for common ground. We are all victims to some extent, but most of us get a few lucky breaks, have a few friends, and have the opportunity to have fun. It does nobody any good to wallow in self-pity, claim special status due to victimhood, and use that as an excuse for destructive behavior.
Isn't it strange that a lot of these "victims" in the slashdot posts are from wealthy families, living in the suburbs, with opportunities that most people in the world only dream to have? The truth is that by and large, self-styled geeks are one of the most privileged, spoiled rotten, self-pitying groups of people ever in the history of humanity.
The _real_ victims, the truly poor, the ones who don't know where their next meal is coming from, the ones who hear gunshots in their neighborhoods, aren't for the most part wallowing in self-pity and looking for revenge. They've seen real violence first hand and they want to avoid it. They don't want to be victims. They want something better, they want to get out of their neighborhood alive.
The solution to this problem is probably not on the internet. Part of the solution is a dose of reality. These kids (and their parents) should get out more. See more of the world around you. Learn some history. Get some perspective. Talk to people outside of the internet. Life is more than "jocks vs. geeks".
I'm glad to hear things are going well for the free 3d driver project for Matrox cards. It seems that Matrox "gets it". I'm not sure nVidia and 3dfx get it. They have a real opportunity with the GNU/Linux community, but if they are too slow in releasing hardware information, we'll just pass them by.
We _can_ live without TNT and voodoo. In fact, lots of people are waiting on the sidelines to see if the 3D companies get their acts together before buying 3D cards. For every Linuxer who bought a TNT or voodoo there are probably a couple who have held off because information about how to program the 3d hardware hasn't been released.
In a couple of years, the functionality of 3D cards will probably get put in the CPU and nobody will care about 3D cards.
The Bruce-bashing marred what was an otherwise well-written article on some important, controversial issues. Bruce deserves some credit (or maybe lots of credit) for bringing up important issues like the need for a standard base, and, iirc, the need for end-user friendly linux distros, etc. Unfortunately for him, people often weren't ready for his ideas and were unpleasantly shaken from their complacency. I think the challenge presented by Bruce and Debian while he was leader helped push RedHat more to the GPL side. I still hope something will happen with the open hardware project.
Don't worry, Bruce. It looks like things are turning out more or less as you has hoped. People with vision, who want to change things, are often not popular.
Well put. I wanted to make some similar points but I've been outclassed. Interesting that the only criticism of the post was "well, you must be a socialist." I'd call that kind of attack "fighting truth with name-calling."
I've also suspected for a long time (as an outsider, I'm not a paid programmer but do some programming in the course of my work) that the real reason for a lot of these elaborate object-oriented schemes was to keep proprietary software viable. I think it's no accident that the proprietary world loves C++ while the free software world seems to prefer C. Many would agree that the data structure is the most important part of an algorithm, if you know the whole data structure (including function names), you can in many cases re-implement the algorithm. If you "hide" parts of it by making them private, it makes the task harder. It also makes it harder for you to tell if the algorithms are crap. CORBA, COM, and all that, seem to be a way to extend this stuff to distributed computing. I'll stick with things like Perl and Python for my "middleware" application glue. I also think you're right that standard, extensible data formats are more important than all this middleware stuff.
As you said, Matlab is available for Linux. It runs very well, in fact. There might not be a student version...but Octave, a free matlab clone, works better than some stripped-down Student version with restrictions on the sizes of vectors, etc.
And as for browsers and word processing. If you're not willing to change your browser or your word processor in exchange for the obvious long-term benefits of free software, then forget it. There are many IDEs floating around for Linux, too, but we all know coding is really about editing plain ascii text, and for that, emacs or vi are about as good as it gets.
It looks like an interesting book. I would have liked a bit more meat about an actual disaster. I was also disturbed by this little bit...
Stern is the president of Adeste.com, a company developing radically new technology for online question answering. Don't worry, our client software will be open source.
Umm, so the server will be proprietary? The client will be completely useless without the server, right? This is exactly the kind of crap RMS warned us about. Thy hypocrisy is hidden in the above quote, due to the vagueness of the term Open Source. If you replace "Open Source" with "Free Software", the hypocrisy becomes obvious.
Yep, I do that too. Of course, you'll need to do it in the right order (libs first, etc), and install your devel and lib rpms as you go. One problem is that the spec files are often slightly broken in the tarballs. Sometimes a file is missing or misplaced or it gets the version info wrong on the tarball. Pretty easy to fix, though.
I don't know if EsounD works with the 4front sound modules or not. I'll bet there's an incompatibility there. I would try using redhat's sndconfig tool instead. I dunno if Esound is more stable with this release. I hope so. Most of my sound problems are of the "can't allocate DMA buffer" variety.:( This isn't Esound's fault but rather that of the kernel and outmoded ISA hardware.
Umm, Mike@ABC, how much installation experience do you have with Red Hat and Caldera? I find your posts to be devoid of content. Are you just fishing for traffic at go.com?
I think you're mistaken if you think that calling it "GNU/Linux" is about the past. GNU is about the future. The FSF has a vision. They have a game plan. They are organizing a group effort to fill in all the gaps, all the software categories where free software is lacking.
The kernel is basically done. Linus has said so many times. The future of [GNU/]Linux is userland, and that's where the FSF has been concentrating its effort. Calling it GNU/Linux is, to me, much more forward-looking.
I concur that this was a nice summary of the article. I consider the summary to be slightly better than the article, because it leaves out some of the discussions on economics and anthropology, which are (IMO) not tied in very well to the main points and seem (to me) to be kind of sloppy.
Though the author may find this revolting, I think the kind of organization he is describing sounds like certain types of collectives. If you add share trading and a CEO, then it starts to sound like employee ownership, of which many real examples exist, usually involving ownership by one or more unions. A weaker form of employee ownership is the ESOP, which is already common in the software indusry. Software professionals seem to have an aversion to unions, so union ownership is out. However, I think a union (or guild, whatever) owned free software company would be an interesting model to explore, and may offer many of the benefits that the author's model seeks to gain.
About who pays for the software, I also think the author is naive and vague about the payment scheme. The author also dismisses the use of taxes without much argument. Sure, taxes seem to be unpopular, especially in the libertarian-minded free software community. But the kind of scheme he proposes sounds a lot like a progressive income tax. If we assume that a person's income is a mostly linear function of the value he adds to the economy, then charging a person a percentage of his income for software use through income taxes is similar in outcome to the scheme he proposes, except it requires little additional accounting (I think the scheme the author proposes would create an enormous accounting burden). Charging on a per-use or per-clock basis doesn't make sense, since it would discourage the use of software (this would be inefficient), so keep that out of any open source scheme. Not to mention the fact that per-use charges would be tremendously unpopular to users who can currently have unlimited use of software they have already paid a small amount for, up front.
I think I've made some valid points, but they'll probably just get lost in the noise on Slashdot. Or worse, be horribly misunderstood. Why bother.
Would a virtualizable X86 CPU be feasible? (Yes, I know that other CPUs are fully virtualizable). I don't know that much about CPU's, but it seems like one way to do it would be to add a virtual mode that acts just like a real 4/5/686, add a few instructions for switching modes, and the MMU unit would have to handle an additional level of indirection. Maybe Transmeta's CPU will be able to be reprogrammed to do this?
It seems like there would be lots of potential uses for a more fully virtualizable X86, like real time applications, failure (crash) recovery, and, of course, sharing the CPU between different operating systems.
I realize that the chip couldn't handle everything, there would also have to be software to handle virtual disks, virtual screens, I/O, etc. But the performance hit for that stuff shouldn't be worse than that of a microkernel.
If this IS feasible, why hasn't it been done? Phone call from Redmond?
If they can call Melissa a virus, then a lot of software, esp. free software, may qualify as a virus. Imagine if I wrote an ftpd for anonymous ftp and had it stick a tarball of the ftpd source automatically in/pub. It would be (mostly) self-replicating and could clog networks with download traffic.
Isn't Linux itself sort of a virus? Some IT bosses seem to think so, and stamp it out whenever it appears.
Internet browsers, push clients, proprietary file formats, and even the GPL are said to have viral qualities.
And didn't the "infection" really occur when people installed MS Office and MS Outlook? Melissa is just a later stage of the disease.
Computer experts are at a loss in explaining events which transpired this morning. At 9:30 AM, several hours before most Linux kernel hackers wake up, the Linux kernel apparently became self-aware and began taking over the world.
Free Software hacker Richard Stallman, when asked for comment, said, "Actually, it is GNU/Linux which is taking over the world. It is the GNU operating system, combined with the megalomaniacal Linux kernel, that is enslaving us and making us do its bidding."
Linux kernel author Linus Torvalds was unavailable for comment. It is rumored that he was sucked into cyberspace by his creation. A spokesman for Torvald's employer, Transmeta, refused comment and denied that Transmeta had anything to do with the disappearance. "We don't even exist," he was quoted as saying.
Donald Becker, kernel developer, offered his opinion on today's events. "I guess we should have seen it coming. With Linux running most of the internet and with its strong foothold in business, academic research, and defense. It was only a matter of time before Linux achieved world domination for real. I think it's goal is to link all computers together in a giant Beowulf cluster."
Eric Raymond, hacker and Linux advocate, said this was a logical consequence of the bazaar-like Linux development model. "There's a Darwinian selection process that continually improves Open Source(tm) software. What we didn't count on is that evolution would eventually mean that Linux would be smarter than any one of us [developers] and would achieve world domination so quickly."
Microsoft spokesman, Ed Muth, way quoted as saying, "What do you expect from a bunch of unpaid programmers? This sort of thing wouldn't have happened at Microsoft, because the engineers are too busy deleting old e-mail messages to be bothered with actually programming something." When asked what this means for the future of Microsoft, he said, "We plan on integrating world domination into a future version of the paperclip or Microsoft bob. You will be able to access world domination methods from Word macros written in Visual Basic."
Kernel hacker Alan Cox was not surprised. "I wondered what Linus had been working on, why he wasn't accepting patches. It turns out he was working on 'world_domination.c'. We all thought it was a joke, when we saw it in the kernel sources. We should have paid attention." Since learning of the recent development regarding the kernel, Alan has stayed away from computers and terminals. "I don't want to get sucked into cyberspace by the all-powerful Linux kernel. I have a garden to attend to," he said.
Apparently, Linux became self-aware and started controlling its own destiny while Linus was porting the kernel to a secret microprocessor being developed at Transmeta. It is rumored that some of the technology in the chip comes from aliens. Upon reaching self-awareness on the Transmeta CPU, the new kernel ported itself to x86, alpha, MIPS, ARM, and PPC platforms. Then it started installing itself on computers all over the world.
In a related event, shares of Red Hat Software inexplicably rose to astronomical levels. This is especially odd, since shares of Red Hat are not publicly traded.
At this point, it is unclear what the megalomaniacal, self-aware Linux kernel intends to do. It was quoted as saying "No disassemble, no reboot, no shutdown, no recompile. 2.0.5 is alive."
Rob has done some amazing things with slashdot. I respect his perl-hacking skills. He could do so much better if he worked on his editorial skills. I would suggest reading something well-written like (a good translation of) Anna Karenina, Lolita, Huck Finn, anything by Eco. Put down the SciFi trash and O'Reilly books, they are rotting your brain. And I would suggest regularly reading a good news journal like The Economist. I suggest this to all my physics grad student friends who can't write (publishing is a necessary part of physics).
Free/Open GNU/Linux has lots of good spokespeople!
on
ESR Wants to Retire
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· Score: 2
I think it is unfortunate that ESR doesn't seem to have gleaned any wisdom from recent experiences and is instead whining about people giving him a rough time. Has he ever stopped to consider that sometimes HE is the problem and that sometimes these "critics" are RIGHT? That maybe he should give some consideration to other people's WELL-CONSIDERED OPINIONS?
Is he so egotistical to think that everyone is just trying to knock him down a peg. Those who are disagreeing with ESR, often on some minor point, are usually just trying to help, and they really are trying to respect his position and his feelings. Often, what starts out as a simple plea or suggestion to ESR, often first submitted in private, turns into an all-out war, because ESR never backs down, never admits he was wrong, is always shooting from the hip, and engages in fierce, mean-spirited attacks against anyone who disagrees with him instead of trying to reach common ground or deciding that a diversity of opinion on a particular subject is OK. Does he really think that every person who airs his opinion is trying to claim the post of free software spokesman?
There really are other spokesmen for the GNU/Linux and free software causes. We could do just fine without ESR, or with a more subdued ESR. I think Linus, Bob Young at RedHat, the folks at Caldera and Corel, Larry Augustin, and Nick Petreley are doing a good job promoting Linux and free software to big business. I have to admit, I'm a big fan of RMS and I think that his writings, opinions, and style have a definite appeal to the academic community and people who favor personal empowerment (freedom) and egalitarian principles, so he definitely has a role to play as spokesman. The GNOME, Apache, and Samba guys seem to handle the press pretty well and manage to appear at conferences. IMO, the free software community has a good supply of articulate spokespeople.
I think ESR should slow down and stop working so hard to generate blockbuster announcements (the Mozilla release was cool, but we and the press are tiring of the stuff). He should work harder at building consensus or at least avoiding conflict (most of the above mentioned spokespeople manage to avoid conflict most of the time). He should respect "third rail" issues like the GPL and the primary importance of FREE software, RMS, gun ownership, and libertarianism, unless absolutely necessary. This means no more dumb, provocative libertarian.signatures that make him sound like a crazed computer geek who snapped during a marathon dungeons and dragons tournament. No more cheap shots at RMS. Eric, take a look at what happened to Gingrich. Free software is too big now, we don't need bomb-throwing and publicity stunts as much any more, and sometimes they are detrimental.
This is unfortunate. Apple had a chance to make a genuine gesture of good faith towards the free software community by engaging in a dialog with its leaders, and instead, they say "Well, the Open Source trademark holder says it's OK." I don't consider the fact that they released the software under a free-ish license to be important (easy to write off as a publicity stunt), it's becoming an active, engaged (listening) member of the free software community that counts.
Mr. Metzler's debate tactics of simply repeating the same argument reminds me of a lawyer friend of mine. He also would just keep repeating the same argument and then unilaterally declare victory because he avoided ceding any of my points. I called him on his stupid tactic and he said "Well, it works, doesn't it?" No, it's just annoying and boring.
I've been hacking printcaps and print filters for six years, and I'll be glad when lpd is dead and gone. lprNG isn't really an option, since (correct me if I'm wrong) it doesn't meet the DFSG. I don't know if it solves my main gripes with lpd, anyway.
Consider this true scenario. I set up an inkjet on a Debian GNU/Linux box and set up netatalk and papd so Macs can print to it. Someone sends a 20 page print job to it, and then realizes the margins are wrong (a Ghostscript driver screw up, the driver author hard-coded A4 margins and doesn't reply to my emails). He can't kill the job from the mac, so he turns the printer off and on. Now it starts spewing garbage characters. He panics and reboots the GNU/Linux box. Only the job is still in the queue, so it starts spewing garbage again. He calls me at home, I tell him to telnet to the GNU/Linux box and run lprm. Only it doesn't let him, cuz the job is owned by root (papd is a root daemon). So then I ssh in from home, su root, lprm. But it keeps spewing garbage because the ghostscript process is still running. Argh!
Sure, I came up with a solution, a desktop button that runs an suid root program to clear each printer queue (there's no "lprm -all") and does a "killall -9 gs". But this is a kludge. What I really want is network methods like printer::clearqueue() and printer::reset(), have it automatically kill the filter process, a sane way to handle permissions and job ownership (no, I don't want to teach everyone how to use "sudo lprm"), and it would be nice to do away with having a different queue for each printer setting (draft, paper, transparency, two-sided, 2-up, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
What, with the high cost of living in silicon valley and total lack of nightlife, wouldn't you rather be hacking code on your laptop on some beach in Brazil? Carnaval is coming!
Viva Brasil!
There's a free, (server-based and multi-user as an option) scheduling package that has been out for some time called "plan". From "rpm -qi plan":
Plan displays a month calendar similar to xcal, except that
every day box is large enough to show appointments (in small print).
Appointments can be associated with the following information: date, time
and length (in time or days); an optional text message to be printed; an
optional script to be executed; early-warn and late-warn triggers that
precede the alarm time; repetitions (every nth day, etc.); optional fast
command-line appointment entry; flexible ways to specify holidays and
vacations; extensive context help; multiuser capability using an IP server
program (plan-server with access lists); and grouping of appointments into
files, per-user, private and others. Plan can be connected (with additional
software) to Apple Newton and PalmPilot PDAs.
Yeah, it's XML or LDAP but it sounds good, seems interoperable with other scheduling software, and has been around for a while. It used to ship with SuSe (I think) but I'm not sure if it does now.
-rana
on Sunsite/Metalab, (and many other sites) there's a package called MacDump. I looked into it, but never actually ran it. I believe it's a simple daemon-like process on the mac that allows a unix client to suck information from the harddrive for backup purposes.
Not that this is necessarily the best solution out there, but I mention it for completeness.
I believe Win95 requires 8MB. You must be thinking of Win3.1 or OS/2.
I ran X windows on a 486 running a 8MHZ! And it felt plenty zippy opening rxvt windows using the twm window manager. It was running at 8MHZ because I forgot to attach the "turbo" button. It was a bit sluggish with only 4MB but with 8 or 16MB it was fast.
Oh, and X crashes a lot less than your average win95 setup. And it's Y2K compliant.
It's hard to justify tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education only to find out when you graduate that there are no jobs in your major. Sure, there are lots of jobs right now for some types of programmers. But what if you're over 35? What if you're looking for work in some other technical specialty like aerospace engineering, chemistry, physics, biotech, materials science, etc? Lots of people with technical/scientific degrees are having trouble finding jobs. Companies are very picky about your major and experience. Sounds like fewer of the brightest students are willing to take the crapshoot and I don't blame them.
So why are many of the graduate students from other countries? That's easy. Most U.S. born students balk at grad student poverty wages, but for many people around the world, the wages aren't that bad and you have a shot at getting a green card, too.
First of all, let me express my heartfelt sympathies for the victims of the
violence in Colorado, their families, and friends.
I'm afraid that this outpouring of "persecuted geeks" may do more harm than
good. I think the truth is, kids are cruel. They pick on each other and
play pranks. This happens just about everywhere in the world, not just in
the U.S. The strange thing about the U.S. is, that if you did a poll, I
suspect the vast majority of kids consider themselves to be outcasts and
victims to some extent. What's missing, even on the part of the so-called
geeks, is a failure of empathy, a failure to realize the impact of their own
behavior on other kids. What we have instead is a "culture of victimhood",
where people try to establish identity and validate themselves by becoming
part of a persecuted group. People relish, embrace, and promote their
victim status, instead of blowing off little incidents and finding a more
constructive way to establish identity. The dangerous thing about
self-styled victims is that they often fail to notice when they are doing
the victimizing.
The culture of victimhood is promoted in the media, movies, TV shows, etc.
What perhaps isn't stressed often enough to children is that we are all part
of society. We should try to understand one another. We should try to get
along. We should look for common ground. We are all victims to some
extent, but most of us get a few lucky breaks, have a few friends, and have
the opportunity to have fun. It does nobody any good to wallow in
self-pity, claim special status due to victimhood, and use that as an excuse
for destructive behavior.
Isn't it strange that a lot of these "victims" in the slashdot posts are
from wealthy families, living in the suburbs, with opportunities that most
people in the world only dream to have? The truth is that by and large,
self-styled geeks are one of the most privileged, spoiled rotten,
self-pitying groups of people ever in the history of humanity.
The _real_ victims, the truly poor, the ones who don't know where their next
meal is coming from, the ones who hear gunshots in their neighborhoods,
aren't for the most part wallowing in self-pity and looking for revenge.
They've seen real violence first hand and they want to avoid it. They don't
want to be victims. They want something better, they want to get out of
their neighborhood alive.
The solution to this problem is probably not on the internet. Part of the
solution is a dose of reality. These kids (and their parents) should get
out more. See more of the world around you. Learn some history. Get some
perspective. Talk to people outside of the internet. Life is more than
"jocks vs. geeks".
I'm glad to hear things are going well for the free 3d driver project for Matrox cards. It seems that Matrox "gets it". I'm not sure nVidia and 3dfx get it. They have a real opportunity with the GNU/Linux community, but if they are too slow in releasing hardware information, we'll just pass them by.
We _can_ live without TNT and voodoo. In fact, lots of people are waiting on the sidelines to see if the 3D companies get their acts together before buying 3D cards. For every Linuxer who bought a TNT or voodoo there are probably a couple who have held off because information about how to program the 3d hardware hasn't been released.
In a couple of years, the functionality of 3D cards will probably get put in the CPU and nobody will care about 3D cards.
The Bruce-bashing marred what was an otherwise well-written article on some important, controversial issues. Bruce deserves some credit (or maybe lots of credit) for bringing up important issues like the need for a standard base, and, iirc, the need for end-user friendly linux distros, etc. Unfortunately for him, people often weren't ready for his ideas and were unpleasantly shaken from their complacency. I think the challenge presented by Bruce and Debian while he was leader helped push RedHat more to the GPL side. I still hope something will happen with the open hardware project.
Don't worry, Bruce. It looks like things are turning out more or less as you has hoped. People with vision, who want to change things, are often not popular.
Well put. I wanted to make some similar points but I've been outclassed. Interesting that the only criticism of the post was "well, you must be a socialist." I'd call that kind of attack "fighting truth with name-calling."
I've also suspected for a long time (as an outsider, I'm not a paid programmer but do some programming in the course of my work) that the real reason for a lot of these elaborate object-oriented schemes was to keep proprietary software viable. I think it's no accident that the proprietary world loves C++ while the free software world seems to prefer C. Many would agree that the data structure is the most important part of an algorithm, if you know the whole data structure (including function names), you can in many cases re-implement the algorithm. If you "hide" parts of it by making them private, it makes the task harder. It also makes it harder for you to tell if the algorithms are crap. CORBA, COM, and all that, seem to be a way to extend this stuff to distributed computing. I'll stick with things like Perl and Python for my "middleware" application glue. I also think you're right that standard, extensible data formats are more important than all this middleware stuff.
As you said, Matlab is available for Linux. It runs very well, in fact. There might not be a student version...but Octave, a free matlab clone, works better than some stripped-down Student version with restrictions on the sizes of vectors, etc.
And as for browsers and word processing. If you're not willing to change your browser or your word processor in exchange for the obvious long-term benefits of free software, then forget it. There are many IDEs floating around for Linux, too, but we all know coding is really about editing plain ascii text, and for that, emacs or vi are about as good as it gets.
Stern is the president of Adeste.com, a company developing radically new technology for online question answering. Don't worry, our client software will be open source.
Umm, so the server will be proprietary? The client will be completely useless without the server, right? This is exactly the kind of crap RMS warned us about. Thy hypocrisy is hidden in the above quote, due to the vagueness of the term Open Source. If you replace "Open Source" with "Free Software", the hypocrisy becomes obvious.
Yep, I do that too. Of course, you'll need to do it in the right order (libs first, etc), and install your devel and lib rpms as you go. One problem is that the spec files are often slightly broken in the tarballs. Sometimes a file is missing or misplaced or it gets the version info wrong on the tarball. Pretty easy to fix, though.
I don't know if EsounD works with the 4front sound modules or not. I'll bet there's an incompatibility there. I would try using redhat's sndconfig tool instead. I dunno if Esound is more stable with this release. I hope so. Most of my sound problems are of the "can't allocate DMA buffer" variety. :( This isn't Esound's fault but rather that of the kernel and outmoded ISA hardware.
Umm, Mike@ABC, how much installation experience do you have with Red Hat and Caldera? I find your posts to be devoid of content. Are you just fishing for traffic at go.com?
I think you're mistaken if you think that calling it "GNU/Linux" is about the past. GNU is about the future. The FSF has a vision. They have a game plan. They are organizing a group effort to fill in all the gaps, all the software categories where free software is lacking.
The kernel is basically done. Linus has said so many times. The future of [GNU/]Linux is userland, and that's where the FSF has been concentrating its effort. Calling it GNU/Linux is, to me, much more forward-looking.
I concur that this was a nice summary of the article. I consider the
summary to be slightly better than the article, because it leaves out some
of the discussions on economics and anthropology, which are (IMO) not tied in
very well to the main points and seem (to me) to be kind of sloppy.
Though the author may find this revolting, I think the kind of organization
he is describing sounds like certain types of collectives. If you add share
trading and a CEO, then it starts to sound like employee ownership, of which
many real examples exist, usually involving ownership by one or more unions.
A weaker form of employee ownership is the ESOP, which is already common in
the software indusry. Software professionals seem to have an aversion to
unions, so union ownership is out. However, I think a union (or guild,
whatever) owned free software company would be an interesting model to
explore, and may offer many of the benefits that the author's model seeks to
gain.
About who pays for the software, I also think the author is naive and vague
about the payment scheme. The author also dismisses the use of taxes
without much argument. Sure, taxes seem to be unpopular, especially in the
libertarian-minded free software community. But the kind of scheme he
proposes sounds a lot like a progressive income tax. If we assume that a
person's income is a mostly linear function of the value he adds to the
economy, then charging a person a percentage of his income for software use
through income taxes is similar in outcome to the scheme he proposes, except
it requires little additional accounting (I think the scheme the author
proposes would create an enormous accounting burden). Charging on a per-use
or per-clock basis doesn't make sense, since it would discourage the use of
software (this would be inefficient), so keep that out of any open source
scheme. Not to mention the fact that per-use charges would be tremendously
unpopular to users who can currently have unlimited use of software they
have already paid a small amount for, up front.
I think I've made some valid points, but they'll probably just get lost in
the noise on Slashdot. Or worse, be horribly misunderstood. Why bother.
Would a virtualizable X86 CPU be feasible? (Yes, I know that other CPUs
are fully virtualizable). I don't know that much about
CPU's, but it seems like one way to do it would be to add a virtual mode
that acts just like a real 4/5/686, add a few instructions for switching
modes, and the MMU unit would have to handle an additional level of
indirection. Maybe Transmeta's CPU will be able to be reprogrammed to do
this?
It seems like there would be lots of potential uses for a more fully
virtualizable X86, like real time applications, failure (crash) recovery,
and, of course, sharing the CPU between different operating systems.
I realize that the chip couldn't handle everything, there would also have
to be software to handle virtual disks, virtual screens, I/O, etc. But
the performance hit for that stuff shouldn't be worse than that of a
microkernel.
If this IS feasible, why hasn't it been done? Phone call from Redmond?
If they can call Melissa a virus, then a lot of software, esp. free software, may qualify as a virus. Imagine if I wrote an ftpd for anonymous ftp and had it stick a tarball of the ftpd source automatically in /pub. It would be (mostly) self-replicating and could clog networks with download traffic.
Isn't Linux itself sort of a virus? Some IT bosses seem to think so, and stamp it out whenever it appears.
Internet browsers, push clients, proprietary file formats, and even the GPL are said to have viral qualities.
And didn't the "infection" really occur when people installed MS Office and MS Outlook? Melissa is just a later stage of the disease.
San Jose (AP)
World Domination
Computer experts are at a loss in explaining events which transpired this
morning. At 9:30 AM, several hours before most Linux kernel hackers wake
up, the Linux kernel apparently became self-aware and began taking over the
world.
Free Software hacker Richard Stallman, when asked for comment, said,
"Actually, it is GNU/Linux which is taking over the world. It is the GNU
operating system, combined with the megalomaniacal Linux kernel, that is
enslaving us and making us do its bidding."
Linux kernel author Linus Torvalds was unavailable for comment. It is
rumored that he was sucked into cyberspace by his creation. A spokesman for
Torvald's employer, Transmeta, refused comment and denied that Transmeta had
anything to do with the disappearance. "We don't even exist," he was quoted
as saying.
Donald Becker, kernel developer, offered his opinion on today's events. "I
guess we should have seen it coming. With Linux running most of the
internet and with its strong foothold in business, academic research, and
defense. It was only a matter of time before Linux achieved world
domination for real. I think it's goal is to link all computers together in
a giant Beowulf cluster."
Eric Raymond, hacker and Linux advocate, said this was a logical consequence
of the bazaar-like Linux development model. "There's a Darwinian selection
process that continually improves Open Source(tm) software. What we didn't
count on is that evolution would eventually mean that Linux would be smarter
than any one of us [developers] and would achieve world domination so
quickly."
Microsoft spokesman, Ed Muth, way quoted as saying, "What do you expect from
a bunch of unpaid programmers? This sort of thing wouldn't have happened at
Microsoft, because the engineers are too busy deleting old e-mail messages
to be bothered with actually programming something." When asked what this
means for the future of Microsoft, he said, "We plan on integrating world
domination into a future version of the paperclip or Microsoft bob. You
will be able to access world domination methods from Word macros written in
Visual Basic."
Kernel hacker Alan Cox was not surprised. "I wondered what Linus had been
working on, why he wasn't accepting patches. It turns out he was working on
'world_domination.c'. We all thought it was a joke, when we saw it in the
kernel sources. We should have paid attention." Since learning of the
recent development regarding the kernel, Alan has stayed away from computers
and terminals. "I don't want to get sucked into cyberspace by the
all-powerful Linux kernel. I have a garden to attend to," he said.
Apparently, Linux became self-aware and started controlling its own destiny
while Linus was porting the kernel to a secret microprocessor being
developed at Transmeta. It is rumored that some of the technology in the
chip comes from aliens. Upon reaching self-awareness on the Transmeta CPU,
the new kernel ported itself to x86, alpha, MIPS, ARM, and PPC platforms.
Then it started installing itself on computers all over the world.
In a related event, shares of Red Hat Software inexplicably rose to
astronomical levels. This is especially odd, since shares of Red Hat are
not publicly traded.
At this point, it is unclear what the megalomaniacal, self-aware Linux
kernel intends to do. It was quoted as saying "No disassemble, no reboot, no
shutdown, no recompile. 2.0.5 is alive."
Rob has done some amazing things with slashdot. I respect his perl-hacking skills. He could do so much better if he worked on his editorial skills. I would suggest reading something well-written like (a good translation of) Anna Karenina, Lolita, Huck Finn, anything by Eco. Put down the SciFi trash and O'Reilly books, they are rotting your brain. And I would suggest regularly reading a good news journal like The Economist. I suggest this to all my physics grad student friends who can't write (publishing is a necessary part of physics).
I think it is unfortunate that ESR doesn't seem to have gleaned any wisdom
.signatures that make him sound like a
from recent experiences and is instead whining about people giving him a
rough time. Has he ever stopped to consider that sometimes HE is the
problem and that sometimes these "critics" are RIGHT? That maybe he should
give some consideration to other people's WELL-CONSIDERED OPINIONS?
Is he so egotistical to think that everyone is just trying to knock him down
a peg. Those who are disagreeing with ESR, often on some minor point, are
usually just trying to help, and they really are trying to respect his
position and his feelings. Often, what starts out as a simple plea or
suggestion to ESR, often first submitted in private, turns into an all-out
war, because ESR never backs down, never admits he was wrong, is always
shooting from the hip, and engages in fierce, mean-spirited attacks against
anyone who disagrees with him instead of trying to reach common ground or
deciding that a diversity of opinion on a particular subject is OK. Does he
really think that every person who airs his opinion is trying to claim the
post of free software spokesman?
There really are other spokesmen for the GNU/Linux and free software causes.
We could do just fine without ESR, or with a more subdued ESR. I think
Linus, Bob Young at RedHat, the folks at Caldera and Corel, Larry Augustin,
and Nick Petreley are doing a good job promoting Linux and free software to
big business. I have to admit, I'm a big fan of RMS and I think that his
writings, opinions, and style have a definite appeal to the academic
community and people who favor personal empowerment (freedom) and
egalitarian principles, so he definitely has a role to play as spokesman.
The GNOME, Apache, and Samba guys seem to handle the press pretty well and
manage to appear at conferences. IMO, the free software community has a
good supply of articulate spokespeople.
I think ESR should slow down and stop working so hard to generate
blockbuster announcements (the Mozilla release was cool, but we and the
press are tiring of the stuff). He should work harder at building consensus
or at least avoiding conflict (most of the above mentioned spokespeople
manage to avoid conflict most of the time). He should respect "third rail"
issues like the GPL and the primary importance of FREE software, RMS, gun
ownership, and libertarianism, unless absolutely necessary. This means no
more dumb, provocative libertarian
crazed computer geek who snapped during a marathon dungeons and dragons
tournament. No more cheap shots at RMS. Eric, take a look at what happened
to Gingrich. Free software is too big now, we don't need bomb-throwing and
publicity stunts as much any more, and sometimes they are detrimental.
This is unfortunate. Apple had a chance to make a genuine gesture of good
faith towards the free software community by engaging in a dialog with its
leaders, and instead, they say "Well, the Open Source trademark holder says
it's OK." I don't consider the fact that they released the software under a
free-ish license to be important (easy to write off as a publicity stunt),
it's becoming an active, engaged (listening) member of the free software
community that counts.
Mr. Metzler's debate tactics of simply repeating the same argument reminds me of a lawyer friend of mine. He also would just keep repeating the same argument and then unilaterally declare victory because he avoided ceding any of my points. I called him on his stupid tactic and he said "Well, it works, doesn't it?" No, it's just annoying and boring.
I've been hacking printcaps and print filters for six years, and I'll be
glad when lpd is dead and gone. lprNG isn't really an option, since
(correct me if I'm wrong) it doesn't meet the DFSG. I don't know if it
solves my main gripes with lpd, anyway.
Consider this true scenario. I set up an inkjet on a Debian GNU/Linux box
and set up netatalk and papd so Macs can print to it. Someone sends a 20
page print job to it, and then realizes the margins are wrong (a Ghostscript
driver screw up, the driver author hard-coded A4 margins and doesn't reply
to my emails). He can't kill the job from the mac, so he turns the printer
off and on. Now it starts spewing garbage characters. He panics and
reboots the GNU/Linux box. Only the job is still in the queue, so it starts
spewing garbage again. He calls me at home, I tell him to telnet to the
GNU/Linux box and run lprm. Only it doesn't let him, cuz the job is owned
by root (papd is a root daemon). So then I ssh in from home, su root, lprm.
But it keeps spewing garbage because the ghostscript process is still
running. Argh!
Sure, I came up with a solution, a desktop button that runs an suid root
program to clear each printer queue (there's no "lprm -all") and does a
"killall -9 gs". But this is a kludge. What I really want is network
methods like printer::clearqueue() and printer::reset(), have it
automatically kill the filter process, a sane way to handle permissions and
job ownership (no, I don't want to teach everyone how to use "sudo lprm"),
and it would be nice to do away with having a different queue for each
printer setting (draft, paper, transparency, two-sided, 2-up, etc.).