Silly me, I thought that was the entire point of having a prize. To promote that for which the prize is awarded
Well, no it's not in this case. The Nobel Foundation isn't some organization devoted to promoting science. They're merely the executors of Alfred Nobels will. They are legally bound to follow that will, or they'll be breaking the law.
And they've done a damn good job at it. After 100 years, the Nobel prizes are the most prestigious awards in the world. The Nobel fortune has been invested wisely, and is larger than ever.
The Fields medal is just as prestigious as a Nobel prize. It just isn't as well known to the general public.
I'd agree with that. But that difference in publicity is exactly one of the things which puts the Nobel prizes in their own category.
And it has everything to do with the Committee never even trying to create a prize for mathematics.
Of course they never even tried to create a prize for mathematics. It's not their job. The Committees select the prize-winners, that's all.
The ones which concievable could do that would be the Nobel Foundation (the executors of the will). But for that precise reason (being executors of the will) they're legally bound to follow it. And the will says nothing about a mathematics prize.
(No, I know it doesn't say anything about an Economics prize either. But the "Nobel prize in economics" isn't a Nobel Prize. It's named "The prize in economics in the memory of Alfred Nobel". It's not awarded by the Nobel foundation. The prize money does not come from the Nobel estate.)
While I understand that reasoning, from TFA: "founder Alfred Nobel once said he wanted to encourage "dreamers" who lacked funding."
That might be what TFA says. But it's not at all what Nobel's final will and testament says:
"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. "
(Yes, they dropped the 'preceding year' bit almost from the start. It just wasn't practically feasable.)
At the heart of the issue, there are two (partially) conflicting goals at work.
There is no conflict. The Nobel Committe has to follow Nobels will, and that does not say anything about promoting Science. Only awarding those who have made great discoveries. End of discussion.
And in case you missed it, the Nobel ceremonies are televised in something like 70 nations. Perhaps you've never seen it, but it does have celebrities; The Swedish royal family and Prime Minister, previous prize-winners. Essentially the world's academic elite.
No, it's not as glitzy as Will Smith and George Lucas. It's something far more sober and classy. And that's how it's supposed to be. The prize is for the winners, not vice-versa.
Although, chemistry prize is often given these days to work related to biology and I can't remember many fundametal discoveries were made lately.
That has less to do with the prize and more to do with what's going on in chemistry nowadays. It's simply that more things are going on in biochemistry than in the more 'conventional' fields of chemistry.
Biochemistry is to chemistry now a bit like quantum physics was to physics in the 30's. A vast new field to be explored, with lots of new ground to break.
No, fundamental discoveries in 'traditional' chemistry don't come around much anymore. That's because our understanding of fundamental chemistry is sound.
Few chemists believe there is anything in chemistry which cannot be explained by quantum mechanics (which isn't really a seperate dicipline when you get into basic chemistry). While QM isn't the final 'theory of everything' the physicists dream about, it probably is the final theory as far as chemistry is concerned. (In the same way Newtonian mechanics was the 'final theory' of the mechanics of everyday objects)
Since when weren't prizes, any and all of them, used for prestige and marketing?
What do you mean "It is nowhere near the idea Mr Nobel had"? Did he have a section in his will that said "Those who recive my prize may not be proud of it?".
Or are you implying that the Nobel committee is corrupt? There certainly is very little evidence of that. The prizes which have been rewarded have largely been regarded as deserved. That is the whole reason the prize means anything and has any marketing value.
The Nobel Committee isn't living up to goals Alfred Nobel had for the prize. [..] IIRC, the average time between doing something Nobel worthy and being nominated for it is ~20 years.
And how does that indicate that the Nobel committee isn't doing their job? It often takes 20 years to evaluate the importance of a discovery. Could you point out some prize-winners you don't feel are worthy? There is seldom any controversy over the winners. Which means that the Committee is indeed doing a good job.
Also, it's not true that it always takes a long time. Naturally it depends on the discovery and the field. Carlo Rubbia was awarded the prize less than 2 years after his discovery, because it was an anticipated experimental verification of a theory.
The idea that these prizes would compete with the Nobels is rather ridiculous. In the century since the Nobel prizes were instituted lots of other science prizes have been created. None of them compete with the Nobels which have achived a class of their own. Much due to the good work of the Committee.
It's the most efficient way to transport heat in terms of joules per kg coolant.
Think about a pot of water. It takes much less time to bring a pot of water to the boil than to boil off the same amount of water. And while the water is boiling, it stays at the boiling point (with constant pressure) since all energy is going towards vaporizing the liquid.
Seems to me the best choice would be to just choose some liquid like, say, methanol (boiling point 65 C/150 F) and let it boil on the processor and have a condensation loop and reservoir.
GNU Classpath and JamVM are smaller and faster than Suns JRE but they may not run Azureus yet.
No, JamVM (although extremly small ~200kB) isn't anywhere near as fast as the Sun JRE. JamVM is an interpreter, not a JIT VM. But it's fast as far as VMs go.
If you want a Classpath-based VM which is fast you should look at Jikes RVM or Kaffe, or perhaps consider compiling to native with GCJ.
Azureus uses native GUI widgets by way of the Eclipse SWT so if JamVM supports the required communication methods between VM and System alright, then it won't be too hard to run.
JamVM handles native calls without problems. I've run Eclipse and other SWT apps on it myself.
However, Azureus doesn't run on Classpath yet. It's very close to it.. But there's still one or two small issues with the Classpath libraries. If someone wants to help out with this, email the classpath list (classpath@gnu.org) or drop in on #classpath on FreeNode. You'll be 'liberating' Azureus and helping free java at the same time.
quote "That said, no one should expect a "point-oh-point-oh" release to deliver the full potential of a product, particularly when it comes to a software system with the complexity of GCC."
I bet no one would dare say that about certain product from Redmond.
I don't know about that.. But first off GCC (and other free software projects) tend to be much more upfront about the fact that radical changes also means new bugs. Slashdot types (read: engineers) tend to value that kind of technical honesty over marketspeak.
Secondly.. when did Microsoft last develop something radically new? Most of their products are over a decade old, and a lot of those which aren't are based on technology they bought up from competitors.
Thirdly, unlike Microsoft, the GCC guys aren't doing everything in their power to get me to upgrade.
Yes. PJ says she corrected a statement. The Register said she retracted the same statement. The poster here said there was no evidence of any 'retraction'.
I don't really care whether it qualifies as a 'retraction' or not, but it's an undisputed fact that PJ did change some of her previous statements after The Register published their article, which means that stating there's 'no evidence' is false.
That's all I mean. Personally I don't care much, because I don't really consider either Groklaw or The Register to hold very high journalistic standards. Although Groklaw is far better than The Register in that respect. (Groklaw seems to at least try to use primary sources as much as possible. The Register almost never. Both are blatantly biased in their commentary. Groklaw somewhat less so, but at least it's clear that it *is* personal commentary, and not reporting.)
But how is that different from most ordinary phone calls in general? Or most conversations in general?
Why should cell phones be restricted to 'important' things?
I'll concede that no, you can't say anything on a cell phone when in a public space. But I can't for the life of me see why you can't talk about any of the things people talk about in public. As long as you adhere to the rules of etiquette that apply to public conversations. (E.g. don't be loud, don't talk about initimate things) And really, on a modern cell phone there's no reason why you should be speaking louder than the ordinary conversation level anyway.
People who get irritated over cell phones seldom have a problem with cell phones. They have a problem with loud and obnoxious people. And who doesn't?
apple takes a project, puts a ton of work into it to improve features, usability, etc. and then tells the project developers what exactly they changed, and this still isnt good enough?
It's just fine. They are within their rights doing that. Nobody is saying otherwise.
But would it be better if they could provide some form of changelog? Yes. It'd be a friendly thing to do. Not a required thing, nobody's saying that. Just a nice thing.
the next step that you fail to take is that it was a lot of work to create those changes as well. explaining it to someone else would basically double the workload on the safari team.
I didn't say that they had to sit down and explain everything. They have a version control system. It has a log of their changes. They're not sharing that. Again, they don't have to. But it's not a difficult thing to do. At least not with any such system I've used.
Using version control doesn't necessarily mean "check in each feature/bug fix as one change".
I didn't really say that must mean that either. But regardless of what version control system they are using, they do have a version history saying what changed and why. And whatever version control system their using, it's likely trivial to export that.
stop whining
Who's whining? I've just stated what I believe the KHTML guys were saying. I don't deny that Apple is within their rights not sharing any form of version history.
All I'm saying is that they'd be a better "open source citizen" if they did, and that it's not something which is very costly or hard to do.
Even if the diff-logging process was made automatic someone has to script that and then make sure it doesn't break. Even if their VCS has easy-to-use changelist descriptions like Perforce someone still has to go extract them all for you.
And obviously you have little experience of version control systems. I have yet to see one (including perforce) which can't export diffs and changelogs to some simple format. Why would they need to write a script for that?
And you're completely missing the point: If Apple did cooperate more with KHTML, then that would be beneficial for Apple, too. It's not just a question of giving.
What's happening now is a release is getting diffed against the previous one and the results shared - very simple and easy.
Simple for Apple, and not very useful for the KHTML guys.
I'm amazed at the whining that's going on here. How about Apple gives you NOTHING, and you get something real to complain about, eh?
I see you've spent some time involved in the Apple workflow. Has it occurred to you that the Safari team's development methodology might not easily lend itself to individual diffs and CVS logs?
In other words: Has it occured to me that Apple's Safari team might not use any form of Version Control System?
To be honest: No, it hadn't.
But now that you mention it.. Yeah, maybe they're just hacking on a lump of code on a shared network directory.
Now that diff can't tell you why they've changed, but for Pete's sake, you're a developer. You've got the code. You've got the standard. You've got the changes in the code. You've got the old code. You can see how behaviour changes in each. You've (hopefully) got an reasonable general understanding of the codebase.
You obviously didn't read the blog entry.
The problem here is that Apple drops a huge diff on them for every release. It's not individual diffs for each change, but one massive one. We're talking about a diff several megabytes in size consisting of hundreds of changes. With all kinds of changes mixed in with eachother and mixed in with all kinds of Safari-specific stuff.
Yes it is possible to sit and pick that apart. But it's a lot of work. It may very well take more work to seperate out a change than to re-implement it from scratch.
On top of that it's unnecessary work, because there's no reason Apple wouldn't be able to hand over all individual patches seperately, which would make things immensely simpler for the KHTML guys.
Apparently the KTHML guys have tried and tried to get Apple to do this. And they haven't helped.
I do some free software development, and to be honest, I don't care much.
Having 10,000 or 10 'ordinary' users makes very little difference to my projects, if those users are not contributing code or at least bug reports. On the contrary, they might beg for support or make nagging requests for features.
Now I do try to give support to an extent (just being a nice person), but hey, I can't teach the whole world the basics of computers, can I?
There's nothing wrong with someone asking for a feature either, but if you get 200 emails asking for a feature, you're just annoying me and wasting time I could've spent implementing it.
So there are upsides and downsides to popularity.
Apart from that; I expect people to use whatever is the best tool for the job. It might be free software, but it might not be either. I'm not on any personal crusade to save the world or crush Microsoft.
The FSF describes, generally, how assignment of copyright to the FSF works for GNU projects, but I am having a devil of a time finding a copy of the assignment questionnaire that they mention.
Yes, that's because the FSF purposefully doesn't have them available online. The reason is that the FSF has several different assignment forms depending on what kind project you are contributing to (e.g. original work or an implemenatation of something else), on what kind of contribution you're making (new original code or old code) and depending on whether your employer (if any) possibly has claims to your work.
Too many people were filing the wrong forms, and it was wasting time.
Does anyone know what this thing looks like? Surely it involves more than emailing the maintainer and saying "I assign the copyright of my contribution to the FSF?"
Yes, they want a paper form, signed and mailed. Typically it'll require you to confirm that all your contributions are your own original work and that your employer does not have claims to your work. (This being the form for original contributions where the employer has no claim. If you have an employer who might have a claim they want a different form where the employer waives all claims.)
The reason why FOSS users aren't too fond of OpenOffice's use of Java is because the Java features are currently Sun-only; the free Java compilers and VMs haven't implemented all of the Java libraries and features at this time. Many of those Java libraries are also underdocumented; even though the core language is well documented, the Java libraries aren't.
While your first statement on the status of free java is true, the second one isn't quite. The public libraries are pretty well documented.
The #1 problem OOo has with Free Java is that the Sun hackers don't use the public libraries. They make use of Sun-specific internal libraries which are not publicly documented at all, and are not supposed to be used by applications. These libraries aren't part of Java.
To give a practical example, there are classes like com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Provider , (code using which I've seen code floating around). This class is not available on the Apple or IBM java runtimes. (Both of which are Sun-approved as 'Java')
So it's not as much that they're using Java as the fact that they're not using Java as it's intended but rather Java coded to only work with the Sun JRE specifically.
Anyway.. So far Red Hat has been working on compiling the parts of OOo that do work (or can be made to work) with GCJ for shipping with their distro. I suspect Debian and so on will do something similar. So in that sense, it's already forked.
What if an INDIVIDUAL wants to sell some DRM software? They should be able to do it. You don't need consumer rights, you need human rights.
Well, DRM software by itself isn't very valuable. But what we are talking about here is the rights of one individual (the creator of a work) versus the fair-use rights of the general public. Copyright is not a fundamental right of man. It's a provision created by society to promote creativity. Freedom to distribute information is essential to the practice of Free Speech.
Therefore copyright has its limits. Fair-use is one of them. Allowing works to be 'protected' by DRM means in practice that you allow the author to extend his rights at the cost of the fair-use rights of everybody else. And what does society get in return? Increased creativity? (that was the original goal, remember?). Probably not. Increased profits? Yes.
Governments are necessary to guarantee and protect rights. They are not self-regulating.
Blatant lying in advertising and selling hazardous products should be allowed because I believe people are the best judges of what is true, not the government.
That's overly idealistic. People's judgement is only as good as the information they get to form that judgement from. Which you seem to recognize. Unfortunately your drug analogy is one of very few cases where it holds, because the victims of drugs are the people who believe misinformation. Most of the time things aren't like that.
When someone's misguided actions/beliefs start having reprecussions on the rights of others, then it's everybody's business. That's what we've got governments for. If people want to f-k up their own life, it's fine by me too. But the point of government is there to protect us from letting them f-k up our lives.
That can't be done without prohibiting certain behavour. Which means someone is always going to get screwed over. And in a democracy, the forbidden behaviour will be that which the majority feels encroaches on their rights. So yes, minorities won't get the 'freedom' to do what they want. On the other hand, having the majority freedoms guaranteed is still far better than having total freedom, and no guarantees. That is anarchy and the antithesis of society.
Society is a social contract built on trust. Civilization as we know it is built on this. For instance, signing a contract means something. From the viewpoint you're expounding, it shouldn't; People shouldn't have to trust contracts, they should be able to whatever they want. If someone doesn't hold their end of the bargain "So what? They should've known they were untrustworthy!".
Ultimately, that is anarchy and leads to nothing but the total domination of the strong over the weak. I suggest you look at how things work in some third-world nations for practical examples. Maybe you think you'd do fine in such a dog-eats-dog society. But personally, I'd like to live in a place with more compassion than that.
If you really believe in free speech you should admit that Corporations and individuals both should have the right to distribute (and sell) any kind of information they want. Anti-DRM leglisation is socialist and wrong.
Bullshit. Why should corporations be entitled to 'free speech'? They are artificial social constructs, not human beings. Corporations don't have the same rights of speech as people anywhere, anyway. So I guess we're all 'socialists' then.
By the same coin, you can put anything under 'free speech', from blatant lying in advertising to selling hazardous products.
A artifical entities artifical 'right' to free speech should not trump the consumer rights of real people.
If citizens get too used to the government protecting them, they will have weak bullshit detectors and will become dependent on the nanny state to tell them how to be "free".
That's bull too. You're comparing apples to oranges. You're defending the 'rights' of corporations using the argument that it'll infringe on the freedoms of people. As if the 'rights' of corporations and the 'rights' of the people were the same thing.
So tell me then who the DMCA serves? Citizens' rights or Corporations? Who's rights were served by the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention act? Those of Corporations or those of the Citizens?
Then the US passed laws like the PATRIOT act. The PATRIOT act limits the civil rights of real people in a large number of ways. Are you saying that happened because the US has strong consumer-rights laws? Because in 'socialist' Europe they've got much stronger consumer-rights laws than in the US, and most countries there don't have anything nearly as draconian as the PATRIOT.
Obviously mime type and file extension are unrelated. Think dynamically served content. Depends purely on mime type. Just 'cause the SVG spec on W3 recommends saving the physical files with a certain extension doesn't mean that browsers need to start using a combination of file extension and mime type to decode.
Since when don't browsers support multiple extensions for the same MIME type? I certainly can't remember having a problem with ".jpeg" vs ".jpg" lately.
It doesn't seem to me a browser should be expected to examine the file extension to determine whether to do a gzip filter prior to parsing the file.
But you're not expected to examine the file extension. The different file extension is a recommendation, not a requirement. But supporting gzipped content is required for an SVG reader to be spec-compliant. It's not like it's a hard determination to make. (E.g. "Are the first 4-bytes of the file 0x1f 0x8b 0x08 0x08 or not?")
Slashdot Mirror
Silly me, I thought that was the entire point of having a prize. To promote that for which the prize is awarded
Well, no it's not in this case. The Nobel Foundation isn't some organization devoted to promoting science. They're merely the executors of Alfred Nobels will. They are legally bound to follow that will, or they'll be breaking the law.
And they've done a damn good job at it. After 100 years, the Nobel prizes are the most prestigious awards in the world. The Nobel fortune has been invested wisely, and is larger than ever.
The Fields medal is just as prestigious as a Nobel prize. It just isn't as well known to the general public.
I'd agree with that. But that difference in publicity is exactly one of the things which puts the Nobel prizes in their own category.
And it has everything to do with the Committee never even trying to create a prize for mathematics.
Of course they never even tried to create a prize for mathematics. It's not their job. The Committees select the prize-winners, that's all.
The ones which concievable could do that would be the Nobel Foundation (the executors of the will). But for that precise reason (being executors of the will) they're legally bound to follow it. And the will says nothing about a mathematics prize.
(No, I know it doesn't say anything about an Economics prize either. But the "Nobel prize in economics" isn't a Nobel Prize. It's named "The prize in economics in the memory of Alfred Nobel". It's not awarded by the Nobel foundation. The prize money does not come from the Nobel estate.)
While I understand that reasoning, from TFA: "founder Alfred Nobel once said he wanted to encourage "dreamers" who lacked funding."
That might be what TFA says. But it's not at all what Nobel's final will and testament says:
"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. "
(Yes, they dropped the 'preceding year' bit almost from the start. It just wasn't practically feasable.)
At the heart of the issue, there are two (partially) conflicting goals at work.
There is no conflict. The Nobel Committe has to follow Nobels will, and that does not say anything about promoting Science. Only awarding those who have made great discoveries. End of discussion.
And in case you missed it, the Nobel ceremonies are televised in something like 70 nations. Perhaps you've never seen it, but it does have celebrities; The Swedish royal family and Prime Minister, previous prize-winners. Essentially the world's academic elite.
No, it's not as glitzy as Will Smith and George Lucas. It's something far more sober and classy. And that's how it's supposed to be. The prize is for the winners, not vice-versa.
Although, chemistry prize is often given these days to work related to biology and I can't remember many fundametal discoveries were made lately.
That has less to do with the prize and more to do with what's going on in chemistry nowadays. It's simply that more things are going on in biochemistry than in the more 'conventional' fields of chemistry.
Biochemistry is to chemistry now a bit like quantum physics was to physics in the 30's. A vast new field to be explored, with lots of new ground to break.
No, fundamental discoveries in 'traditional' chemistry don't come around much anymore. That's because our understanding of fundamental chemistry is sound.
Few chemists believe there is anything in chemistry which cannot be explained by quantum mechanics (which isn't really a seperate dicipline when you get into basic chemistry). While QM isn't the final 'theory of everything' the physicists dream about, it probably is the final theory as far as chemistry is concerned.
(In the same way Newtonian mechanics was the 'final theory' of the mechanics of everyday objects)
Since when weren't prizes, any and all of them, used for prestige and marketing?
What do you mean "It is nowhere near the idea Mr Nobel had"? Did he have a section in his will that said "Those who recive my prize may not be proud of it?".
Or are you implying that the Nobel committee is corrupt? There certainly is very little evidence of that. The prizes which have been rewarded have largely been regarded as deserved. That is the whole reason the prize means anything and has any marketing value.
The Nobel Committee isn't living up to goals Alfred Nobel had for the prize. [..] IIRC, the average time between doing something Nobel worthy and being nominated for it is ~20 years.
And how does that indicate that the Nobel committee isn't doing their job? It often takes 20 years to evaluate the importance of a discovery. Could you point out some prize-winners you don't feel are worthy? There is seldom any controversy over the winners. Which means that the Committee is indeed doing a good job.
Also, it's not true that it always takes a long time. Naturally it depends on the discovery and the field. Carlo Rubbia was awarded the prize less than 2 years after his discovery, because it was an anticipated experimental verification of a theory.
The idea that these prizes would compete with the Nobels is rather ridiculous. In the century since the Nobel prizes were instituted lots of other science prizes have been created. None of them compete with the Nobels which have achived a class of their own. Much due to the good work of the Committee.
How about vaporising a liquid?
It's the most efficient way to transport heat in terms of joules per kg coolant.
Think about a pot of water. It takes much less time to bring a pot of water to the boil than to boil off the same amount of water. And while the water is boiling, it stays at the boiling point (with constant pressure) since all energy is going towards vaporizing the liquid.
Seems to me the best choice would be to just choose some liquid like, say, methanol (boiling point 65 C/150 F) and let it boil on the processor and have a condensation loop and reservoir.
GNU Classpath and JamVM are smaller and faster than Suns JRE but they may not run Azureus yet.
No, JamVM (although extremly small ~200kB) isn't anywhere near as fast as the Sun JRE. JamVM is an interpreter, not a JIT VM. But it's fast as far as VMs go.
If you want a Classpath-based VM which is fast you should look at Jikes RVM or Kaffe, or perhaps consider compiling to native with GCJ.
Azureus uses native GUI widgets by way of the Eclipse SWT so if JamVM supports the required communication methods between VM and System alright, then it won't be too hard to run.
JamVM handles native calls without problems. I've run Eclipse and other SWT apps on it myself.
However, Azureus doesn't run on Classpath yet. It's very close to it.. But there's still one or two small issues with the Classpath libraries. If someone wants to help out with this, email the classpath list (classpath@gnu.org) or drop in on #classpath on FreeNode. You'll be 'liberating' Azureus and helping free java at the same time.
Does this mean I have to wait until it's 18?
Not much of a wait. Release announcement, March 22 1987.
Seems GCC reached 'maturity' over a month ago.
quote "That said, no one should expect a "point-oh-point-oh" release to deliver the full potential of a product, particularly when it comes to a software system with the complexity of GCC."
I bet no one would dare say that about certain product from Redmond.
I don't know about that.. But first off GCC (and other free software projects) tend to be much more upfront about the fact that radical changes also means new bugs. Slashdot types (read: engineers) tend to value that kind of technical honesty over marketspeak.
Secondly.. when did Microsoft last develop something radically new? Most of their products are over a decade old, and a lot of those which aren't are based on technology they bought up from competitors.
Thirdly, unlike Microsoft, the GCC guys aren't doing everything in their power to get me to upgrade.
Yes. PJ says she corrected a statement. The Register said she retracted the same statement. The poster here said there was no evidence of any 'retraction'.
I don't really care whether it qualifies as a 'retraction' or not, but it's an undisputed fact that PJ did change some of her previous statements after The Register published their article, which means that stating there's 'no evidence' is false.
That's all I mean. Personally I don't care much, because I don't really consider either Groklaw or The Register to hold very high journalistic standards. Although Groklaw is far better than The Register in that respect.
(Groklaw seems to at least try to use primary sources as much as possible. The Register almost never. Both are blatantly biased in their commentary. Groklaw somewhat less so, but at least it's clear that it *is* personal commentary, and not reporting.)
Oh, as if. There are lots of compilers and platforms that don't have correct IEEE floating-point at all.
E.g. Try running the following on GCC on linux/x86:You'll get a 1 ULP rounding error:
Result1 = 0
Result2 = -5.55112e-15
The Register article's claims about PJ retracting statements are not backed up by any evidence.
Strange, since PJ concedes that she changed a statement after the article.
But how is that different from most ordinary phone calls in general? Or most conversations in general?
Why should cell phones be restricted to 'important' things?
I'll concede that no, you can't say anything on a cell phone when in a public space. But I can't for the life of me see why you can't talk about any of the things people talk about in public. As long as you adhere to the rules of etiquette that apply to public conversations. (E.g. don't be loud, don't talk about initimate things) And really, on a modern cell phone there's no reason why you should be speaking louder than the ordinary conversation level anyway.
People who get irritated over cell phones seldom have a problem with cell phones. They have a problem with loud and obnoxious people. And who doesn't?
apple takes a project, puts a ton of work into it to improve features, usability, etc. and then tells the project developers what exactly they changed, and this still isnt good enough?
It's just fine. They are within their rights doing that. Nobody is saying otherwise.
But would it be better if they could provide some form of changelog? Yes. It'd be a friendly thing to do. Not a required thing, nobody's saying that. Just a nice thing.
the next step that you fail to take is that it was a lot of work to create those changes as well. explaining it to someone else would basically double the workload on the safari team.
I didn't say that they had to sit down and explain everything. They have a version control system. It has a log of their changes. They're not sharing that. Again, they don't have to. But it's not a difficult thing to do. At least not with any such system I've used.
Using version control doesn't necessarily mean "check in each feature/bug fix as one change".
I didn't really say that must mean that either. But regardless of what version control system they are using, they do have a version history saying what changed and why. And whatever version control system their using, it's likely trivial to export that.
stop whining
Who's whining? I've just stated what I believe the KHTML guys were saying. I don't deny that Apple is within their rights not sharing any form of version history.
All I'm saying is that they'd be a better "open source citizen" if they did, and that it's not something which is very costly or hard to do.
What's so wrong about that?
Even if the diff-logging process was made automatic someone has to script that and then make sure it doesn't break. Even if their VCS has easy-to-use changelist descriptions like Perforce someone still has to go extract them all for you.
And obviously you have little experience of version control systems. I have yet to see one (including perforce) which can't export diffs and changelogs to some simple format. Why would they need to write a script for that?
And you're completely missing the point: If Apple did cooperate more with KHTML, then that would be beneficial for Apple, too. It's not just a question of giving.
What's happening now is a release is getting diffed against the previous one and the results shared - very simple and easy.
Simple for Apple, and not very useful for the KHTML guys.
I'm amazed at the whining that's going on here. How about Apple gives you NOTHING, and you get something real to complain about, eh?
That's just trolling.
I see you've spent some time involved in the Apple workflow. Has it occurred to you that the Safari team's development methodology might not easily lend itself to individual diffs and CVS logs?
In other words: Has it occured to me that Apple's Safari team might not use any form of Version Control System?
To be honest: No, it hadn't.
But now that you mention it.. Yeah, maybe they're just hacking on a lump of code on a shared network directory.
Now that diff can't tell you why they've changed, but for Pete's sake, you're a developer. You've got the code. You've got the standard. You've got the changes in the code. You've got the old code. You can see how behaviour changes in each. You've (hopefully) got an reasonable general understanding of the codebase.
You obviously didn't read the blog entry.
The problem here is that Apple drops a huge diff on them for every release. It's not individual diffs for each change, but one massive one. We're talking about a diff several megabytes in size consisting of hundreds of changes. With all kinds of changes mixed in with eachother and mixed in with all kinds of Safari-specific stuff.
Yes it is possible to sit and pick that apart. But it's a lot of work. It may very well take more work to seperate out a change than to re-implement it from scratch.
On top of that it's unnecessary work, because there's no reason Apple wouldn't be able to hand over all individual patches seperately, which would make things immensely simpler for the KHTML guys.
Apparently the KTHML guys have tried and tried to get Apple to do this. And they haven't helped.
I do some free software development, and to be honest, I don't care much.
Having 10,000 or 10 'ordinary' users makes very little difference to my projects, if those users are not contributing code or at least bug reports. On the contrary, they might beg for support or make nagging requests for features.
Now I do try to give support to an extent (just being a nice person), but hey, I can't teach the whole world the basics of computers, can I?
There's nothing wrong with someone asking for a feature either, but if you get 200 emails asking for a feature, you're just annoying me and wasting time I could've spent implementing it.
So there are upsides and downsides to popularity.
Apart from that; I expect people to use whatever is the best tool for the job. It might be free software, but it might not be either. I'm not on any personal crusade to save the world or crush Microsoft.
But hey, that's just me.
The FSF describes, generally, how assignment of copyright to the FSF works for GNU projects, but I am having a devil of a time finding a copy of the assignment questionnaire that they mention.
Yes, that's because the FSF purposefully doesn't have them available online. The reason is that the FSF has several different assignment forms depending on what kind project you are contributing to (e.g. original work or an implemenatation of something else), on what kind of contribution you're making (new original code or old code) and depending on whether your employer (if any) possibly has claims to your work.
Too many people were filing the wrong forms, and it was wasting time.
Does anyone know what this thing looks like? Surely it involves more than emailing the maintainer and saying "I assign the copyright of my contribution to the FSF?"
Yes, they want a paper form, signed and mailed. Typically it'll require you to confirm that all your contributions are your own original work and that your employer does not have claims to your work.
(This being the form for original contributions where the employer has no claim. If you have an employer who might have a claim they want a different form where the employer waives all claims.)
The reason why FOSS users aren't too fond of OpenOffice's use of Java is because the Java features are currently Sun-only; the free Java compilers and VMs haven't implemented all of the Java libraries and features at this time. Many of those Java libraries are also underdocumented; even though the core language is well documented, the Java libraries aren't.
While your first statement on the status of free java is true, the second one isn't quite. The public libraries are pretty well documented.
The #1 problem OOo has with Free Java is that the Sun hackers don't use the public libraries. They make use of Sun-specific internal libraries which are not publicly documented at all, and are not supposed to be used by applications. These libraries aren't part of Java.
To give a practical example, there are classes like com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Provider , (code using which I've seen code floating around). This class is not available on the Apple or IBM java runtimes. (Both of which are Sun-approved as 'Java')
So it's not as much that they're using Java as the fact that they're not using Java as it's intended but rather Java coded to only work with the Sun JRE specifically.
Anyway.. So far Red Hat has been working on compiling the parts of OOo that do work (or can be made to work) with GCJ for shipping with their distro. I suspect Debian and so on will do something similar. So in that sense, it's already forked.
What if an INDIVIDUAL wants to sell some DRM software? They should be able to do it. You don't need consumer rights, you need human rights.
Well, DRM software by itself isn't very valuable. But what we are talking about here is the rights of one individual (the creator of a work) versus the fair-use rights of the general public. Copyright is not a fundamental right of man. It's a provision created by society to promote creativity. Freedom to distribute information is essential to the practice of Free Speech.
Therefore copyright has its limits. Fair-use is one of them. Allowing works to be 'protected' by DRM means in practice that you allow the author to extend his rights at the cost of the fair-use rights of everybody else. And what does society get in return? Increased creativity? (that was the original goal, remember?). Probably not. Increased profits? Yes.
Governments are necessary to guarantee and protect rights. They are not self-regulating.
Blatant lying in advertising and selling hazardous products should be allowed because I believe people are the best judges of what is true, not the government.
That's overly idealistic. People's judgement is only as good as the information they get to form that judgement from. Which you seem to recognize. Unfortunately your drug analogy is one of very few cases where it holds, because the victims of drugs are the people who believe misinformation. Most of the time things aren't like that.
When someone's misguided actions/beliefs start having reprecussions on the rights of others, then it's everybody's business. That's what we've got governments for. If people want to f-k up their own life, it's fine by me too. But the point of government is there to protect us from letting them f-k up our lives.
That can't be done without prohibiting certain behavour. Which means someone is always going to get screwed over. And in a democracy, the forbidden behaviour will be that which the majority feels encroaches on their rights. So yes, minorities won't get the 'freedom' to do what they want. On the other hand, having the majority freedoms guaranteed is still far better than having total freedom, and no guarantees. That is anarchy and the antithesis of society.
Society is a social contract built on trust. Civilization as we know it is built on this. For instance, signing a contract means something. From the viewpoint you're expounding, it shouldn't; People shouldn't have to trust contracts, they should be able to whatever they want. If someone doesn't hold their end of the bargain "So what? They should've known they were untrustworthy!".
Ultimately, that is anarchy and leads to nothing but the total domination of the strong over the weak. I suggest you look at how things work in some third-world nations for practical examples. Maybe you think you'd do fine in such a dog-eats-dog society. But personally, I'd like to live in a place with more compassion than that.
If you really believe in free speech you should admit that Corporations and individuals both should have the right to distribute (and sell) any kind of information they want. Anti-DRM leglisation is socialist and wrong.
Bullshit. Why should corporations be entitled to 'free speech'? They are artificial social constructs, not human beings. Corporations don't have the same rights of speech as people anywhere, anyway. So I guess we're all 'socialists' then.
By the same coin, you can put anything under 'free speech', from blatant lying in advertising to selling hazardous products.
A artifical entities artifical 'right' to free speech should not trump the consumer rights of real people.
If citizens get too used to the government protecting them, they will have weak bullshit detectors and will become dependent on the nanny state to tell them how to be "free".
That's bull too. You're comparing apples to oranges. You're defending the 'rights' of corporations using the argument that it'll infringe on the freedoms of people. As if the 'rights' of corporations and the 'rights' of the people were the same thing.
So tell me then who the DMCA serves? Citizens' rights or Corporations? Who's rights were served by the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention act? Those of Corporations or those of the Citizens?
Then the US passed laws like the PATRIOT act. The PATRIOT act limits the civil rights of real people in a large number of ways. Are you saying that happened because the US has strong consumer-rights laws? Because in 'socialist' Europe they've got much stronger consumer-rights laws than in the US, and most countries there don't have anything nearly as draconian as the PATRIOT.
Obviously mime type and file extension are unrelated. Think dynamically served content. Depends purely on mime type.
Just 'cause the SVG spec on W3 recommends saving the physical files with a certain extension doesn't mean that browsers need to start using a combination of file extension and mime type to decode.
Since when don't browsers support multiple extensions for the same MIME type? I certainly can't remember having a problem with ".jpeg" vs ".jpg" lately.
It doesn't seem to me a browser should be expected to examine the file extension to determine whether to do a gzip filter prior to parsing the file.
But you're not expected to examine the file extension. The different file extension is a recommendation, not a requirement. But supporting gzipped content is required for an SVG reader to be spec-compliant. It's not like it's a hard determination to make. (E.g. "Are the first 4-bytes of the file 0x1f 0x8b 0x08 0x08 or not?")