I'd like to make a complaint: why are all the recent Slashdot Interviews about online gaming exclusively? I believe there are many Slashdot readers who are not partciularly interested in such things. The Slashdot FAQ specifically says:
Note that we like variety in our interview guests. If we interviewed the CEO of a network security appliance company last week, for example, it is probably going to be a while before we're interested in interviewing another security company CEO.
Now how much of a variety was the latest series of interviews related to online games? I'm pretty sure there are many open source developers, bloggers of various kinds and other prominent figures, who would love to be interviewed, but Slashdot only gives games. I'm not much of a gamer, and due to the fact I'm running Linux and have an old Nvidia (a.k.a "Hang-vidia") card, I cannot really play too many high-end games. And yet, I am reading Slashdot.
You're right in a way - they are accusing the innocent of "stealing". As I demonstrate in my essay "The Case for File Swapping", file swapping is not a crime - it's not wrong and it should be legal. Once a work of art has been released for public consumption, one must not try to restrict its non-commercial distribution.
My essay, "The Case for File Swapping" explains why file swapping is ethical and moral and why it should be legal. It touches on many points of the subject and is very comprehensive. The page links to other discussions and resources on the topic.
For your information, some very large scale systems were and are developed in Perl (follow the link for some evidence to support this claim). I have no idea what was your experience exactly, but using perl was not the reason-for-failure here because it has been done before and is doable.
This is the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy. Namely, the poster believed that since this survey occured after the "Get the Facts" campaign, then the "Get the Facts" campaign is responsible for the survey results. This may or may not be true.
Personally, I found the "Get the Facts" campaign as anything but factual.
The Term "Intellectual Property" is misleading. See what I wrote in a Newsforge article about it. To sum up, IP consists of copyrights, trademarks and patents, which are different legal tools for different purposes and should not be grouped together. Furthermore, Intellectual Property is not property. It is a contract between the originator and the public, and violating it, does not damage the well-being of his tangible property as crimes such as theft or sabotage do.
Was OpenIngress (now even more so) chosen for being made free software, because it did not generate enough profit? Or alternatively, do you hope to rip benefits out of open-sourcing it (please enumerate), but otherwise could continue developing the product as proprietary?
Good luck, and I hope that open-sourcing Ingress will benefit both Computer Associates and the open-source community.
> This is obviously because Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are girly-men.
Yeah and what are the offerings of the open-source world? Let's see:
Linus Torvalds - Looks like a dweeb, ergo is a dweeb. How girly is that? (plus
his wife can kick ass better than him)
Richard M. Stallman - a hippy. How girly is that?
Eric S. Raymond - a nice looking man with a mustache. Baby faced, so he looks
a bit girly to me.
Larry Wall - a cross between Linus and RMS (i.e: a hippy dweeb) that is even
more girly.
So who do we have left? Alan Cox? OK, he's manly. (huge man, huge facial hair,
etc.) And all the others are so neglible people don't even know how they look
like.
Note: this comment may have been a bit cruel, so sorry. Don't take it too
seriously, especially if you're one of the guys I laughed about. I hold you
all with the greatest respect. Seriously.
Sincerily yours, Shlomi Fish (who is a quite girly male himself).
Here's the text of the article to relieve the stress from the site. Slashdot operators: please link to it from the feature.
Introducing the RMS-Lint
Introduction
A new tool aims to revolutionize the way people communicate with
the famous free software evangelist Richard M. Stallman, (also
known by his initials - "RMS"). Its project leader Shlomi Fish has
more to say of it:
"RMS-Lint is called RMS-Lint because like most lints it warns
on many things that are obviously not errors, because there's a chance
that they are. RMS-Lint is an interactive speller that runs over the
document word by word with a sophisticated look-ahead and look-behind
and warns the user over any word or combination of words that may
irritate Stallman, or otherwise will be frowned upon by him."
RMS-Lint's Rules
In accordance to the Free Software Foundation's
list of
words to avoid and other documents available on the
FSF Site, the following rules are
recognized by RMS-Lint:
Warns on every use of the term "Linux" not preceded by
"GNU/". This is due to the fact that Stallman advocates using
"GNU/Linux" instead of just "Linux" to refer to the entire operating
system. It especially warns on "the Linux kernel" (because the
kernel part is redundant as Linux is just the kernel).
Legitimate use of the term "Linux" to refer to just the kernel
are also warned about, but can be overridden.
Warns on every use of the term "open source" and even the word
"open". Replacements are "free software", "free", "revealed",
"viewable", and the bootload of synonyms from the
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary". Also warns on the
terms "closed-source" or "closed".
Warns on every use of the term "free" for fear it may be used
to imply costlessness. As for legitimate uses of the term ("free
as in free speech"), it should be noted that being a lint,
RMS-Lint attempts to cover every possible error, not just
the ones that actually are such. Replacements are "liberal",
"libre", "costless", "gratis", and you also have an option to
ignore it.
Warns on every use of the term "pirate" or "piracy". It is our
belief that when talking to Dr. Stallman, people won't usually
wish to talk about the sea-faring robbers, but instead on
illegitimate copying of one form of media or another. Thus,
RMS-Lint warns on every such use and suggests the
alternatives of "illegal copier/copying", or "bucanneer".
Warns on every use of "Intellectual Proprety" or "IP" (a common
short form of it). The developers of RMS-Lint realize that IP
can also mean the "Internet Protocol" (as in "IP address", "my
IP is '192.168.1.1'"), but we believe that when corresponding to
RMS, such use will be relatively uncommon, and does not justify
risking mentioning "intellectual property" to him.
And much, much more...
Opinions on RMS-Lint
Eric S. Raymond, a long time
friend of Stallman, and the chief leader of the open source movement,
expressed a great deal of content from the availability of this tool.
"I've been waiting for such a thing all my life. Communicating with
Richard has become more and more difficult, and RMS-Lint can easily
make it much better."
Raymond's long time collaborator Bruce
Perens also expressed
happiness that RMS-Lint has become available. "Modern-day open source
enthusiasts find it more and more difficult to communicate with Richard
Stallman due to his terminological whims. RMS-Lint is just the tool
that can help them validate their E-mails for RMS' correctness."
Meanwhile, Richard Stallman himself expressed dismay from this
project: "RMS-Lint is an unsatisfying symptomatic cure for
a big problem.
Pardon me for the shameless plug, but as you see it has some relevance to the comment. I am the author of Freecell Solver, which is a library and a stand-alone command line program that solves games of Freecell and similar solitaire variants. Now, since its first public version, I posted announcements for its subsequent releases on Freshmeat, each time announcing new features.
As a side-effect of this publicity, the
Google search for "freecell solver" yields almost exclusively hits that has something to do with it. However, the query itself is generic enough that a user would just want to find a solver for Freecell, not necessarily my own.
I call this phenomenon the "Freshmeat Effect", albeit it is by no means restricted to Freshmeat. Is there anything Googlers plan to do to restrict such clogging of searches by constant publicity of a package with a mis-chosen title?
(Refer here for a slightly earlier record of this effect, and a call for developers to use original names to avoid it.)
Well, actually Mandrake's version is 7.1. And there's an active beta of 7.2.
<br>
BTW, from my experience, the Mandrake 7.1 installer is very buggy. For instance, I could not define an EXT2 partition followed by a ReiserFS one, or a swap partition after a ReiserFS one. The other time I tried, I was not able to define a ReiserFS partition over 15 MB or so in size.<br>
<br>
I eventually had to split my 45 GB hard-disk into two ReiserFS partitions (one for / and the other for/home). Did anybody had any experience with the resize_reiserfs utility?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to make a complaint: why are all the recent Slashdot Interviews about online gaming exclusively? I believe there are many Slashdot readers who are not partciularly interested in such things. The Slashdot FAQ specifically says:
Now how much of a variety was the latest series of interviews related to online games? I'm pretty sure there are many open source developers, bloggers of various kinds and other prominent figures, who would love to be interviewed, but Slashdot only gives games. I'm not much of a gamer, and due to the fact I'm running Linux and have an old Nvidia (a.k.a "Hang-vidia") card, I cannot really play too many high-end games. And yet, I am reading Slashdot.
You're right in a way - they are accusing the innocent of "stealing". As I demonstrate in my essay "The Case for File Swapping", file swapping is not a crime - it's not wrong and it should be legal. Once a work of art has been released for public consumption, one must not try to restrict its non-commercial distribution.
My essay, "The Case for File Swapping" explains why file swapping is ethical and moral and why it should be legal. It touches on many points of the subject and is very comprehensive. The page links to other discussions and resources on the topic.
For your information, some very large scale systems were and are developed in Perl (follow the link for some evidence to support this claim). I have no idea what was your experience exactly, but using perl was not the reason-for-failure here because it has been done before and is doable.
This is the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy. Namely, the poster believed that since this survey occured after the "Get the Facts" campaign, then the "Get the Facts" campaign is responsible for the survey results. This may or may not be true.
Personally, I found the "Get the Facts" campaign as anything but factual.
The Term "Intellectual Property" is misleading. See what I wrote in a Newsforge article about it. To sum up, IP consists of copyrights, trademarks and patents, which are different legal tools for different purposes and should not be grouped together. Furthermore, Intellectual Property is not property. It is a contract between the originator and the public, and violating it, does not damage the well-being of his tangible property as crimes such as theft or sabotage do.
Was OpenIngress (now even more so) chosen for being made free software, because it did not generate enough profit? Or alternatively, do you hope to rip benefits out of open-sourcing it (please enumerate), but otherwise could continue developing the product as proprietary?
Good luck, and I hope that open-sourcing Ingress will benefit both Computer Associates and the open-source community.
Yeah and what are the offerings of the open-source world? Let's see:
So who do we have left? Alan Cox? OK, he's manly. (huge man, huge facial hair, etc.) And all the others are so neglible people don't even know how they look like.
Note: this comment may have been a bit cruel, so sorry. Don't take it too seriously, especially if you're one of the guys I laughed about. I hold you all with the greatest respect. Seriously.
Sincerily yours, Shlomi Fish (who is a quite girly male himself).
Here's the text of the article to relieve the stress from the site. Slashdot operators: please link to it from the feature.
Introducing the RMS-Lint
Introduction
A new tool aims to revolutionize the way people communicate with the famous free software evangelist Richard M. Stallman, (also known by his initials - "RMS"). Its project leader Shlomi Fish has more to say of it:
"RMS-Lint is called RMS-Lint because like most lints it warns on many things that are obviously not errors, because there's a chance that they are. RMS-Lint is an interactive speller that runs over the document word by word with a sophisticated look-ahead and look-behind and warns the user over any word or combination of words that may irritate Stallman, or otherwise will be frowned upon by him."
RMS-Lint's Rules
In accordance to the Free Software Foundation's list of words to avoid and other documents available on the FSF Site, the following rules are recognized by RMS-Lint:
Warns on every use of the term "Linux" not preceded by "GNU/". This is due to the fact that Stallman advocates using "GNU/Linux" instead of just "Linux" to refer to the entire operating system. It especially warns on "the Linux kernel" (because the kernel part is redundant as Linux is just the kernel).
Legitimate use of the term "Linux" to refer to just the kernel are also warned about, but can be overridden.
Warns on every use of the term "open source" and even the word "open". Replacements are "free software", "free", "revealed", "viewable", and the bootload of synonyms from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary". Also warns on the terms "closed-source" or "closed".
Warns on every use of the term "free" for fear it may be used to imply costlessness. As for legitimate uses of the term ("free as in free speech"), it should be noted that being a lint, RMS-Lint attempts to cover every possible error, not just the ones that actually are such. Replacements are "liberal", "libre", "costless", "gratis", and you also have an option to ignore it.
Warns on every use of the term "pirate" or "piracy". It is our belief that when talking to Dr. Stallman, people won't usually wish to talk about the sea-faring robbers, but instead on illegitimate copying of one form of media or another. Thus, RMS-Lint warns on every such use and suggests the alternatives of "illegal copier/copying", or "bucanneer".
Warns on every use of "Intellectual Proprety" or "IP" (a common short form of it). The developers of RMS-Lint realize that IP can also mean the "Internet Protocol" (as in "IP address", "my IP is '192.168.1.1'"), but we believe that when corresponding to RMS, such use will be relatively uncommon, and does not justify risking mentioning "intellectual property" to him.
Opinions on RMS-Lint
Eric S. Raymond, a long time friend of Stallman, and the chief leader of the open source movement, expressed a great deal of content from the availability of this tool. "I've been waiting for such a thing all my life. Communicating with Richard has become more and more difficult, and RMS-Lint can easily make it much better."
Raymond's long time collaborator Bruce Perens also expressed happiness that RMS-Lint has become available. "Modern-day open source enthusiasts find it more and more difficult to communicate with Richard Stallman due to his terminological whims. RMS-Lint is just the tool that can help them validate their E-mails for RMS' correctness."
Meanwhile, Richard Stallman himself expressed dismay from this project: "RMS-Lint is an unsatisfying symptomatic cure for a big problem.
Pardon me for the shameless plug, but as you see it has some relevance to the comment. I am the author of Freecell Solver, which is a library and a stand-alone command line program that solves games of Freecell and similar solitaire variants. Now, since its first public version, I posted announcements for its subsequent releases on Freshmeat, each time announcing new features.
As a side-effect of this publicity, the Google search for "freecell solver" yields almost exclusively hits that has something to do with it. However, the query itself is generic enough that a user would just want to find a solver for Freecell, not necessarily my own.
I call this phenomenon the "Freshmeat Effect", albeit it is by no means restricted to Freshmeat. Is there anything Googlers plan to do to restrict such clogging of searches by constant publicity of a package with a mis-chosen title?
(Refer here for a slightly earlier record of this effect, and a call for developers to use original names to avoid it.)
Well, actually Mandrake's version is 7.1. And there's an active beta of 7.2.
/home). Did anybody had any experience with the resize_reiserfs utility?
<br>
BTW, from my experience, the Mandrake 7.1 installer is very buggy. For instance, I could not define an EXT2 partition followed by a ReiserFS one, or a swap partition after a ReiserFS one. The other time I tried, I was not able to define a ReiserFS partition over 15 MB or so in size.<br>
<br>
I eventually had to split my 45 GB hard-disk into two ReiserFS partitions (one for / and the other for