What about Coolio? I heard that he was upset with Al about "Amish Paradise."
Which is especially funny since "Gangsta Paradise" is based on samples and the basic rhythm and melody of "Pastime Paradise" by Stevie Wonder (on Songs in the Key of Life). The tell-tale opening melody is just a sample from Stevie Wonder's tune.
Well, because you see -- to hire someone they have to agree to it. Last I checked there's no provision for hiring people by force.;-)
Also, as opposed to the job climate for traditional development positions, believe it or not, core developers of large, well recognized OSS projects don't exactly have a hard time finding employment. When you could work for quite a few companies -- why would one chose to work for their "competitor"?
Also, in addition to what was said in a later post, MS's development is centered in the US; most KDE developers aren't in the US and aren't going to leave their home countries to work for a company that they don't like anyway.
I for one would not work for MS. When the company that I work for was in talks with MS about being acquired many of us in the LinuxLab made it clear that we'd be on the way out if the acquisition went through -- fortunately it didn't.
If you get out of the isolated liberal sanctionary of the university where the majority of parent-subsidized students and teachers agree with this anti-capitalist nonsense, and go work for a business, perspective will change
Yep. They certainly did for me, but I suppose not in the way that you're assuming. When I was in college I was a pretty run-of-the-mill democrat and was far less concerned with power ammassed by profit driven institutions. And then I got involved in them. But I did a couple of things -- I worked in the "corporate world" in the US and then I moved to working for a large company in Western Europe, specifically in Germany where a Social Democrat / Green alliance is in power.
As for businesses being bigger than governments, so what?
Well, let's start with ideals. I work for a large corporation. How does a large corporation make it's decisions? Well, naturally it makes them to maximize profits. That's what corporations do -- they make money. If they don't make decisions to help them make more money their board of trustees will put people in there that will make those decisions. This is all pretty simple really -- and in a way I don't think we can fault corporations themselves for running to their logical extremes. And of course where there's profit vs. say, overall quality of human life profit wins hands down. Again, this is a no-brainer. That's just how corporations work.
Now, what about the government? Well, at least the government is supposed to be there for the service of the people. I mean, that's what it's there for, right? At least in modern democracies I think this is pretty clear. Now I'm not saying that it always does act in the interests of the majority of the people, but at least if it was doing its job well it would.
So there we're stuck with two large, power wielding institutions. Basically I've got to put my hope into the government since a corporation isn't even conceptually there to help me out beyond my function as a consumer. The government fundamentally should.
So, in the end I think -- and have personally seen -- that things work better when you have a government that's powerful enough to keep business in check. There has to be something there that says at times, "Ok, guys we know that would get you more profit, but that's going to screw people, so you can't do it." I mean, that's basically why we have governments -- to put checks on the amounts of power that individuals or institutions can wield over individuals. Like I don't want you to take my laptop and tell me you'll whomp me if I resist and to have no recourse. But right now we're basically watching just that happen in the corporate sphere, and that's what's got to change for democratic capitalism itself to survive. I mean, if a goverment of the people can't trump Microsoft and GM when they decide to screw people over we might as well go ahead and give up on this whole democracy thing and come up with a new name for what we're transitioning into now -- which is control by corporate power.
I've got no love for huge government beurocracies, but unfortunately we live in times where there's so much concentrated power in the private sector that you need something pretty huge to offset that.
The article also says that other than distCC, the computers need not have anything in common; this is not strictly true. Different major versions of GCC can cause problems if you are trying to compile with optimization flags that are only on the newer version.
Heh. No. GCC pretty regularly breaks binary compatibility for the C++ ABI. Breaks were at GCC 2.95 -> 2.96 (though 2.96 was just a RH/Mandrake thing), 2.x -> 3.0, 3.1 -> 3.2 and 3.3 -> 3.4.
You can't mix C++ compiled with any of the compilers that are on opposite sides of those splits.
Another thing is that some very large packages have trouble with distributed building of any sort (either multiple threads on the same machine, or over a network like with distCC). As far as I know, at least parts of [...] KDE and the kernel.
Wrong again. Both KDE and the Linux kernel build fine with distributed compilation systems. In fact, KDE has been used with distcc and TeamBuilder for years (TB has been used at the last several KDE meetings) and now there's even IceCream (developed by KDE folks) in KDE's CVS which is sort of based on distcc, but has a central scheduler and does better automatic configuration. It also gets around the first issue above because it's able to build a basic runtime environment based on your system tools (compiler, glibc, etc.) and ship it over to the host machines to build in a chroot environment.
The kernel also works just fine in a distributed build environment; I build it regularly with such.
They probably didn't put the one up with the source RPMs since that's available from the FTP site anyway. When they're distributing boxes it's easier to fulfill the GPL requirements by just adding in the CD rather than being stuck providing an offer to send the sources by mail.
I know it's not very Slashdot-like to you know, read articles, much less books, but there's an interesting mention of this in Brave New World where a small colony of "alphas" is created. Everything very quickly goes to crap and it falls apart and there's a desire to bring back the system of an engineered population.
The point of the whole thing is that society runs the most smoothly when people's function in society best fits their abilities.
Of course the overarching theme of the book is that this leads to a very well run hell, but that's beyond the scope of this mini-rant.:-)
That's naive at best. Autotools solve a complex problem. They're not exactly elegant at all times (I'm not exactly an m4 cheerleader.), but they're robust enough to handle even very complex build environments and to present basically the same interface to anyone that's regularly building packages from source.
I've yet to see a system that can compete with them in this regard and I have seen things that tried. The results have either been (a) even uglier and/or (b) not general purpose.
Take for example the fact that this tarball requires nasm -- it doesn't tell you that until the build fails and then there's no opportunity to tell you what it is and where you can get it. This would be a relatively simple configure check.
Or what about header and library installation locations? Cross platform library versioning?
Bah, I'll stop there... This is pretty obviously just a troll...
This is the same code that they've had on their download page (I forget which one, but when I went to download it I noticed that I had already had the file for a few weeks.).
The sources are in terrible shape at the moment. The developers really need to stuff them into a real autotools setup, pay attention to compiler warnings (there are hundreds), and well, on my system it doesn't even build.
If MPC is ever going to become a successful OSS project it's going to have to code and build tools in shape. Nobody wants to package or develop for something that is a PITA to even build.
[snip] the hiring in the Indian firm is about maximum age requirement
How exactly is a maximum age troubling but a minimum one not? I don't see the fundamental difference between:
"We like hiring people over 30 for job Foo because people over 30 tend to be more mature."
"We like hiring 20-somethings for position Bar because 20 year olds have more energy."
In fact I'd say it's pretty common practice in corporations to hire younger people for the entry level positions because there's a hope that they'll work their way up in the company.
Who knows -- I'm not even really trying to defend this, but preferring people in their 20s for office jobs is hardly in league with putting 12 year olds to work in a sweat shop.
Wow, this should get a gold metal for such a high number of mostly unrelated information given in a single article summary.
The age discrimination IBM was hit with was related to pensioners having their benefits plan changed; it had nothing to do with hiring.
The stuff on the Indian side of things, well, isn't really all that strange. The same thing happens informally in the US and in fact even the government has minimum ages for many elected representatives.
But of course this will just turn into another "Oh, woe is me, I can't believe that skilled people in other countries are getting jobs too." (Nevermind that it's still much harder for an Indian with strong tech skills to find a job than an American.)
I have to strongly disagree with this (as an American that's been living and working in Germany for the last two years).
I can see how one could draw this conclusion after a few weeks in said places, but the gap between American and German work environments may be subtle, but it's very significant.
Germans work fewer hours per week and fewer weeks per year. People are encouraged to have a life outside of work and I think this makes for happier employees. (This is also tied with the fact that there's less BS trying to tell you that you jobs should always be fun and fulfilling -- if it's not, well, you've still got a real life.)
There's a much stronger emphasis on quality and efficiency, but also more business conservatism. German businesses don't react as quickly to fast emerging trends.
Salaries are slightly lower at the bottom and a lot lower at the top compared to the US.
German companies tend to be somewhat more bureaucratic.
Jobs are harder to find but harder to lose. Job security is much more significant here where after a 6 month evaluation period I have to be given several months notice before I could lose my job and the company has to give a reason that they're willing to stand by in court for firing me.
Germans tend to stay at jobs for longer -- especially in the tech sector. People in the US switch jobs rather often on average; in Germany it's common to keep them until retirement.
It wouldn't really matter since the command line has been around much longer than the lifetime of patents. Remember -- patents do expire -- I think the lifetime is 20 years in most countries.
You obviously haven't been to the middle east. If anything it's more the opposite -- the only contact some parts of the middle east have with western culture is through the pervasiveness of American crap.
I mean, if all that you saw of the west was Duncan Donuts, Levi's, Ford, Microsoft, Chevron and CNN -- found in American style malls around American style highways full of American cars -- you'd probably not be terribly fond of it. Some of the more insulated countries (I spent a little while in Saudi Arabia recently) are commercially very American, but there's very limited contact between normal people and westerners.
There's much more American junk in the Middle East than you find in Western Europe.
The real question is: what is the volume of reason that would be needed to propperly catylize a self sustaining reaction in such a pool? And how large is this pool really? What's the SI unit for reason?
Just to be pedantic -- you mean "libre vs. gratis" -- the translation of "libre" into English is "free"; if you want to differentiate by using another language you need to use both of the distinct terms from that language (or in this case family of languages).
Actually it's really, really smart from a marketing perspective. This stuff is great for Lindows. They're able to generate loads of PR by messing with their product name in a country that they don't have any sales in.
Of course there's a much easier way of doing that by figuring out that 1024 = 2^10, so you could just do:
2^32 / 2^10 / 2^10 / 2^10 = 2^(32 - 30) = 2^2 = 4
You can't address more than 4 GB of virtual memory with a 32 bit address. So regardless of how much memory you can afford that means that you can't have more than 4 GB of physical memory plus swap. Even then you typically allocate at least 1 GB of address space to the kernel leaving you with 3 GB of addressable space for applications. Now add up your swap and physical memory and you realize that we're getting pretty close to that limit on newer desktops.
Actually a couple of the GStreamer guys were originally scheduled to speak at the recent KDE conference in the Czech Republic (which ended up not working out) -- the title of their talk was to be KStreamer.:-)
Yes, I know we all think Microsoft is the Evil Empire (tm), but even evil empires/villians generally know when it's time to shut the hell up and at least pretend to play by the rules for a while.
Hasn't MS learned by now that further antagonization very well may cause them to end up in bigger trouble?
No, because it hasn't landed them in bigger trouble. They continue to ignore the legal system and it continues to be very profitable for them. And they'll keep thwarting the legal system as for them it's been a working strategy.
Microsoft has learned that they can win most of their court cases and get slap-on-the-hand settlements for the rest and then see to it that the slap doesn't even actually happen.
...which you obviously failed. If the median IQ was 100 that would mean that half of the population is below 100 (or right at it). However given that it's the mean then 99% could have an IQ of 102 and have just have 1% below 100. Not that statistical analysis of IQs really has any significance...
Or which big technology companies were you referrring to exactly? Sure, it was a troll, but hey -- who isn't supporting Linux that doesn't make a competing OS? I mean, heck Sun, HP and IBM do make competing OSes and they've all jumped on the Linux bandwaggon.
The point is that it's still illegal to steal the car even if you don't lock it. Note that I don't actually agree with the law, but your anology is poor. The govenment is making it illegal to steal the car; you should know that you're supposed to lock it.
Re:They have to make SOME money!
on
QT 3.2 Released
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Their existing customers either continue to pay up, or they have to open their own apps, which is probably not feasable for the licensee.
No, wrong. Most of the license sales are for internal cross-platform tools. At work we can use all of the GPL'ed libraries in the world so long as the binaries aren't ever released externally. If Qt for Windows was GPL'ed it would be perfectly legal for companies to use GPL'ed Qt for Windows in their in-house applications -- Trolltech's bread and butter.
Their existing customers either continue to pay up, or they have to open their own apps, which is probably not feasable for the licensee.
Since presumably you would be the copyright holder, you can give someone permission to link to anything you want. You can do this explicitly by adding an exception in your GPL notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, because you see -- to hire someone they have to agree to it. Last I checked there's no provision for hiring people by force. ;-)
Also, as opposed to the job climate for traditional development positions, believe it or not, core developers of large, well recognized OSS projects don't exactly have a hard time finding employment. When you could work for quite a few companies -- why would one chose to work for their "competitor"?
Also, in addition to what was said in a later post, MS's development is centered in the US; most KDE developers aren't in the US and aren't going to leave their home countries to work for a company that they don't like anyway.
I for one would not work for MS. When the company that I work for was in talks with MS about being acquired many of us in the LinuxLab made it clear that we'd be on the way out if the acquisition went through -- fortunately it didn't.
Yep. They certainly did for me, but I suppose not in the way that you're assuming. When I was in college I was a pretty run-of-the-mill democrat and was far less concerned with power ammassed by profit driven institutions. And then I got involved in them. But I did a couple of things -- I worked in the "corporate world" in the US and then I moved to working for a large company in Western Europe, specifically in Germany where a Social Democrat / Green alliance is in power.
Well, let's start with ideals. I work for a large corporation. How does a large corporation make it's decisions? Well, naturally it makes them to maximize profits. That's what corporations do -- they make money. If they don't make decisions to help them make more money their board of trustees will put people in there that will make those decisions. This is all pretty simple really -- and in a way I don't think we can fault corporations themselves for running to their logical extremes. And of course where there's profit vs. say, overall quality of human life profit wins hands down. Again, this is a no-brainer. That's just how corporations work.
Now, what about the government? Well, at least the government is supposed to be there for the service of the people. I mean, that's what it's there for, right? At least in modern democracies I think this is pretty clear. Now I'm not saying that it always does act in the interests of the majority of the people, but at least if it was doing its job well it would.
So there we're stuck with two large, power wielding institutions. Basically I've got to put my hope into the government since a corporation isn't even conceptually there to help me out beyond my function as a consumer. The government fundamentally should.
So, in the end I think -- and have personally seen -- that things work better when you have a government that's powerful enough to keep business in check. There has to be something there that says at times, "Ok, guys we know that would get you more profit, but that's going to screw people, so you can't do it." I mean, that's basically why we have governments -- to put checks on the amounts of power that individuals or institutions can wield over individuals. Like I don't want you to take my laptop and tell me you'll whomp me if I resist and to have no recourse. But right now we're basically watching just that happen in the corporate sphere, and that's what's got to change for democratic capitalism itself to survive. I mean, if a goverment of the people can't trump Microsoft and GM when they decide to screw people over we might as well go ahead and give up on this whole democracy thing and come up with a new name for what we're transitioning into now -- which is control by corporate power.
I've got no love for huge government beurocracies, but unfortunately we live in times where there's so much concentrated power in the private sector that you need something pretty huge to offset that.
Heh. No. GCC pretty regularly breaks binary compatibility for the C++ ABI. Breaks were at GCC 2.95 -> 2.96 (though 2.96 was just a RH/Mandrake thing), 2.x -> 3.0, 3.1 -> 3.2 and 3.3 -> 3.4.
You can't mix C++ compiled with any of the compilers that are on opposite sides of those splits.
Wrong again. Both KDE and the Linux kernel build fine with distributed compilation systems. In fact, KDE has been used with distcc and TeamBuilder for years (TB has been used at the last several KDE meetings) and now there's even IceCream (developed by KDE folks) in KDE's CVS which is sort of based on distcc, but has a central scheduler and does better automatic configuration. It also gets around the first issue above because it's able to build a basic runtime environment based on your system tools (compiler, glibc, etc.) and ship it over to the host machines to build in a chroot environment.
The kernel also works just fine in a distributed build environment; I build it regularly with such.
They probably didn't put the one up with the source RPMs since that's available from the FTP site anyway. When they're distributing boxes it's easier to fulfill the GPL requirements by just adding in the CD rather than being stuck providing an offer to send the sources by mail.
I know it's not very Slashdot-like to you know, read articles, much less books, but there's an interesting mention of this in Brave New World where a small colony of "alphas" is created. Everything very quickly goes to crap and it falls apart and there's a desire to bring back the system of an engineered population.
:-)
The point of the whole thing is that society runs the most smoothly when people's function in society best fits their abilities.
Of course the overarching theme of the book is that this leads to a very well run hell, but that's beyond the scope of this mini-rant.
That's naive at best. Autotools solve a complex problem. They're not exactly elegant at all times (I'm not exactly an m4 cheerleader.), but they're robust enough to handle even very complex build environments and to present basically the same interface to anyone that's regularly building packages from source.
I've yet to see a system that can compete with them in this regard and I have seen things that tried. The results have either been (a) even uglier and/or (b) not general purpose.
Take for example the fact that this tarball requires nasm -- it doesn't tell you that until the build fails and then there's no opportunity to tell you what it is and where you can get it. This would be a relatively simple configure check.
Or what about header and library installation locations? Cross platform library versioning?
Bah, I'll stop there... This is pretty obviously just a troll...
This is the same code that they've had on their download page (I forget which one, but when I went to download it I noticed that I had already had the file for a few weeks.).
The sources are in terrible shape at the moment. The developers really need to stuff them into a real autotools setup, pay attention to compiler warnings (there are hundreds), and well, on my system it doesn't even build.
If MPC is ever going to become a successful OSS project it's going to have to code and build tools in shape. Nobody wants to package or develop for something that is a PITA to even build.
- "We like hiring people over 30 for job Foo because people over 30 tend to be more mature."
- "We like hiring 20-somethings for position Bar because 20 year olds have more energy."
In fact I'd say it's pretty common practice in corporations to hire younger people for the entry level positions because there's a hope that they'll work their way up in the company. Who knows -- I'm not even really trying to defend this, but preferring people in their 20s for office jobs is hardly in league with putting 12 year olds to work in a sweat shop.Wow, this should get a gold metal for such a high number of mostly unrelated information given in a single article summary.
The age discrimination IBM was hit with was related to pensioners having their benefits plan changed; it had nothing to do with hiring.
The stuff on the Indian side of things, well, isn't really all that strange. The same thing happens informally in the US and in fact even the government has minimum ages for many elected representatives.
But of course this will just turn into another "Oh, woe is me, I can't believe that skilled people in other countries are getting jobs too." (Nevermind that it's still much harder for an Indian with strong tech skills to find a job than an American.)
I have to strongly disagree with this (as an American that's been living and working in Germany for the last two years).
I can see how one could draw this conclusion after a few weeks in said places, but the gap between American and German work environments may be subtle, but it's very significant.
It wouldn't really matter since the command line has been around much longer than the lifetime of patents. Remember -- patents do expire -- I think the lifetime is 20 years in most countries.
You obviously haven't been to the middle east. If anything it's more the opposite -- the only contact some parts of the middle east have with western culture is through the pervasiveness of American crap.
I mean, if all that you saw of the west was Duncan Donuts, Levi's, Ford, Microsoft, Chevron and CNN -- found in American style malls around American style highways full of American cars -- you'd probably not be terribly fond of it. Some of the more insulated countries (I spent a little while in Saudi Arabia recently) are commercially very American, but there's very limited contact between normal people and westerners.
There's much more American junk in the Middle East than you find in Western Europe.
The real question is: what is the volume of reason that would be needed to propperly catylize a self sustaining reaction in such a pool? And how large is this pool really? What's the SI unit for reason?
> [...] (free vs. libre)
Just to be pedantic -- you mean "libre vs. gratis" -- the translation of "libre" into English is "free"; if you want to differentiate by using another language you need to use both of the distinct terms from that language (or in this case family of languages).
Actually it's really, really smart from a marketing perspective. This stuff is great for Lindows. They're able to generate loads of PR by messing with their product name in a country that they don't have any sales in.
Basically no losses and lots of PR.
2^32 bit = 4294967296 bytes of address space
Converting to gigabytes...
4294967296 / 1024 = 4194304 (kb)
419304 / 1024 = 4096 (mb)
4096 / 1024 = 4 (gb)
Of course there's a much easier way of doing that by figuring out that 1024 = 2^10, so you could just do:
2^32 / 2^10 / 2^10 / 2^10 = 2^(32 - 30) = 2^2 = 4
You can't address more than 4 GB of virtual memory with a 32 bit address. So regardless of how much memory you can afford that means that you can't have more than 4 GB of physical memory plus swap. Even then you typically allocate at least 1 GB of address space to the kernel leaving you with 3 GB of addressable space for applications. Now add up your swap and physical memory and you realize that we're getting pretty close to that limit on newer desktops.
Konqueror in the upcoming KDE 3.2 has spell checking and highlighting in text forms.
Actually a couple of the GStreamer guys were originally scheduled to speak at the recent KDE conference in the Czech Republic (which ended up not working out) -- the title of their talk was to be KStreamer. :-)
It's also cool to note that they're using Linux and KDE in some of the rendering. See here for more details and screenies.
No, because it hasn't landed them in bigger trouble. They continue to ignore the legal system and it continues to be very profitable for them. And they'll keep thwarting the legal system as for them it's been a working strategy.
Microsoft has learned that they can win most of their court cases and get slap-on-the-hand settlements for the rest and then see to it that the slap doesn't even actually happen.
...which you obviously failed. If the median IQ was 100 that would mean that half of the population is below 100 (or right at it). However given that it's the mean then 99% could have an IQ of 102 and have just have 1% below 100. Not that statistical analysis of IQs really has any significance...
Right, big tech companies obviously avoid Linux -- say big tech companies like:
Or which big technology companies were you referrring to exactly? Sure, it was a troll, but hey -- who isn't supporting Linux that doesn't make a competing OS? I mean, heck Sun, HP and IBM do make competing OSes and they've all jumped on the Linux bandwaggon.
The point is that it's still illegal to steal the car even if you don't lock it. Note that I don't actually agree with the law, but your anology is poor. The govenment is making it illegal to steal the car; you should know that you're supposed to lock it.
No, wrong. Most of the license sales are for internal cross-platform tools. At work we can use all of the GPL'ed libraries in the world so long as the binaries aren't ever released externally. If Qt for Windows was GPL'ed it would be perfectly legal for companies to use GPL'ed Qt for Windows in their in-house applications -- Trolltech's bread and butter.
Since presumably you would be the copyright holder, you can give someone permission to link to anything you want. You can do this explicitly by adding an exception in your GPL notice.