> A 'truly free' program cannot be under any license.
That's freedom to claim you wrote the code and freedom to sue me if it's buggy, not freedom to put the code in your closed source baby crushing machine or shove it in the Linux kernel with a few lines stating who originally wrote it.
If GNU can have their restricted concept of freedom, I'll have my less restricted concept of freedom:)
Even your "'truely free'" code needs to state that it's public domain; otherwise by default you get no rights.
> But then if I download a binary closed sourced > program based on your code it is not longer free, > as I can't then amend the program I've just downloaded
They were free to close their work, I'm free to open my work, you're free to use my open works over their closed ones. I'm not seeing the problem here.
If having access to source is such a big deal for you, use only open source software, but why should you think you know better than the originator what they should do with their code?
> Or is your idea of freedom that the code is free > for the packager but not the consumer?
My code is free, their code may not be, and whether they make it so or not is up to them. So they included some of my work; big deal, it's not as if it closes the original work, it just means they didn't have to spend the next 3 weeks redoing what has already been written.
If they were going to release the code anyway, it doesn't matter; if they weren't, 999 times out of 1000 they'll either find a work they can take, or spend 3 weeks rolling their own. I'd rather those 999 projects not waste several man-year's effort than 1 project release their code grudgingly (or waste time pushing my work into a plugin so they don't have to release much anyway).
I'm afraid Mr Stallman gives "freedom" a different meaning to me.
When I want my code to be free as in freedom, I put it under a BSD, MIT or Beerware license; why should I decide someone else is less deserving of using my code than anyone else? That's not very free.
Sure, people can place restrictions on their changes, but those changes are their work and I'd rather not take away their freedom in controling it, and I definately don't want to take away their freedom of control over code that happens to use something I've written.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with the GPL, just that pushing it as a "free" license rather pushes the concept of freedom to breaking point IMO.
> Does anyone else remember from college how the poles just flip every million years or so
No, that was far too advanced for my college:)
I'm not so bothered by it flipping; I'm bothered by the suggestions that in the process of flipping the field weakens and practically disappears.
It's one thing to think "N is S, and S is now N", it's quite another to think "my compass is useless, and I'm probably going to get cancer from the next solar mass ejection because there's no magnetic field to offset all those high energy particles".
So? What's wrong with supporting one platform well rather than many platforms poorly?
It's not as if the world is short on Gnutella clients; use one of them; do you want me to whinge because x *ix Gnutella client isn't available as a Win32 native app?
> Can't someone port it to KDE/Gnome?
Sure; you. You seem to want it so badly, go right ahead. Have fun replacing all those Win32 API calls with Unix equivilents, and testing it on 20 different platforms, while keeping it in sync with the original version.
> Anyone using Sourceforge should have to make their stuff./configure and make under Nix.
Why? Last I looked SF was for open source projects, not open source *ix projects.
I guess you're going to go and whinge for a Linux version of Descaler next.
> Framerates above the refresh rate of the monitor are pointless.
While you're right that there's little point in rendering faster than the monitor refresh beyond benchmarks (which is really what we're talking about), being able to go above the refresh rate on average scenes is important because complex scenes will be, um, more complex and drop the framerate.
You may be able to push an average of 90FPS in Quake 3, but that's not so wonderful if you drop down to 20FPS every time you leave a corridor and drop to 10FPS every time someone throws a smoke grenade or fires a rocket.
"What if" is the basis for preparing for anything. If you can't answer it and you concider the situation likely enough, you put it on the pile of reasons not to do something.
"What if the sun goes *ffftt* in ten years?"; everyone freezes to death. Oh well, not a good enough reason to leave the solar system just yet.
What if someone flies a large aircraft at speed into a nuclear power station?; It makes a sizable dent and it takes a few weeks or months to clean up and repair.
> Is there really much visual difference between > 700 fps and 135 fps?
700FPS means when things are really hectic you drop to 300FPS instead of 30FPS (this is basically the argument for 150FPS over 70FPS; the average is fine, but the most detailed parts will start pushing it into being jerky)
700FPS means you can up the detail ~7 times and get ~100FPS. Unreal 2 is already pushing about 4 times as many polygons as the orignal engine; you may well get 700FPS now, but you certainly won't in the top end games in 2 years time.
Remember, Quake 3 is fairly old now; already games like MoH have parts that will make most above-average machines struggle (like that mission with all the trees); newer engines, larger cheaper monitors etc are only going to push that further.
I know they're designed to sustain it; so was the WTC, except since then planes have got bigger, and they weren't counting on a full load of aviation fuel or a full speed impact.
I dare say they probably will stand up pretty well, but I'm still not going to laugh off the possibility:)
> It always ticks me off that the Greenpeace people > oppose anything that creates greenhouse gasses > while at the same time protesting nuclear power > which is the only real way to get free of > greenhouse gas emmisions
More Nuclear power stations = more chance of one of them somewhere exploding, leaking, or having nuclear material stolen.
They could be concidered a terrorist target too; you have to wonder how well a power station would stand up to someone flying a plane or two into it.
I usually have an IRC client or two sitting in the background while I work and do other things; not only does it give me something to do when I need to walk away from the problem for a few minutes, but it also gives me somewhere I can ask questions and shoot ideas at.
So while it's pretty bad if all the user is doing is IRCing/reading SlashDot/checking Hotmail, most people can multitask and have these things go on in the background for use in idle periods (let's recompile and check slashdot while it chungs along; that query's taking a while, wonder if anyone's on IRC; hm, I don't get it, might as well check my email while I work it out)
I had problems with my 40GB Quantum AS (bad sectors, spinning down and refusing to speak to anything); I noticed it was getting rather hot (bare in mind this is in a well ventilated case at the bottom of the 3.5" mounting bays with plenty of space above it) and wondered if this had anything to do with it.
So I mounted a card cooler I had spare, put it on top of a small speaker just outside the case (I leave the side open) and had it blow over the system.
The result? CPU temp dropped a good 6c (43c fully loaded for a 1GHz Athlon clocked to 1.2GHz, compared with ~50 before) and now both my drives (Quantum Fireball 20GB and Quantum Fireball AS 40GB) are cool to the touch. There's been absolutely no sign of any problems with the drive since either.
Notice it includes ?rated=5 - that means all/. readers who use that URL will give it a rating of 5 out of 6.
Way to mess up their stats:)
It also links directly to the article, which will instantly reload you to the frameset. A better URL is http://www.starstuff.org/default.asp?cover=/articl es/1087.asp, which won't make you vote for anything and which won't cause the entire thing to refresh into a frameset the instant it loads.
Everyone who even pretends to be able to knock up websites, hack PHP and CGI scripts etc should be familar with REST; it's one of the core concepts behind the web.
Don't forget the BSD's have things like this too. Tsk, anyone would think the BSD's and the Linux's aren't on speaking terms or something:)
/usr/src/release/picobsd/
PICOBSD(8) FreeBSD System Manager's Manual PICOBSD(8)
NAME
picobsd - floppy disk based FreeBSD system
DESCRIPTION
picobsd is a script which can be used to produce a minimal implementation of FreeBSD (historically called PicoBSD) which typically fits on one floppy disk, or can be downloaded as a single image file from some media such as CDROM, flash memory, or through etherboot.
The boot media (typically a floppy disk) contains a boot loader and a compressed kernel which includes a memory file system. Depending on the media, it might also contain a number of additional files, which can be updated at run time, and are used to override/update those in the memory file system.
I find Opera's fine for all the sites I visit, in fact for the types of site I visit it tends to do a better job than IE beacause of the improved CSS support.
For sites that do screw up, there's always that handy little "Switch between author mode and user mode" button in the corner of every document that will fall back to a perfectly usable unstyled page.
And when I come across the odd site that overloads on DHTML or whatever, I just load IE, or go away. Spending 3 seconds to load IE, copy the URL and paste it into IE isn't exactly the hardest of workarounds.
> Relational DB for filesystems? If this is based > on SQL Server, that is exactly what it will be. > Will that help or hurt?
Doubtful. Even Oracle keep adding extensions to push it away from a rigid relational model, and with an increasing number of Object and XML databases competing they'll probably end up absorbing some of their features.
> It seems to me that the traditional concept of > a filesystem is that of a hierarchical database > manager more similar to LDAP than SQL-92.
Hierachies are difficult to impliment in the relational model, yup; maybe we'll find the query language will be more like XQuery than SQL, or an odd mix of it.
> Will this have serious performance tradeoffs?
Just look at Apache; it's slow as hell serving files compared with the likes of thttpd, but it's much more flexible; which one do most people choose (and who even notices the slowness)? These kind of tradeoffs are made everywhere, and don't forget Microsoft are targetting the market several years in the future when the hardware's going to be something like 2-4 times faster.
> They want to get their Digital Rights > Management Software to infest every aspect of > their OS as possible.
Right. You keep throwing your FUD about while the rest of us looks at things seriously.
> Do you honestly believe that the benifit of a > faster search is enough incentive to rewrite > such a major part of the OS?
Short Answer: Yes.
Long Answer: Filesystems haven't changed much in the past few decades, but one of the things they have tended to gain is arbitrary metadata. Adding indexing to that metadata is a natural progression of that.
Now your filenames are just a part of the metadata you'll want to play with different views of the system, which suddenly becomes much much cheaper. Believe it or not, lots of users have trouble understanding the current basic filesystem concepts and using them to organise their data; well, now you can do it automatically for them.
Of course, you want your other stuff to make use of these new ways of looking at the system, especially when you're MS and are running out of new features to put in (come on, what are they going to add to Word XP now? A paperclip with speech recognition? Yet another GUI redesign?), so you want to do something that provides a visible difference (and maybe even an advantage) for those expensive upgrade programmes.
So, yes, I think they do have a very good reason for such a major change, like they had good reason to introduce '95 and start dropping DOS, or NT and start dropping Win16, or.NET and start dropping the crufty Win16-contaminated Win32 API and x86 ties.
The biggest issue I have with it is that it's going to be a bitch to use in other OS's. Hopefully they'll do detailed specs and stick to them fairly closely (ah haha), which will at least make it easier.
Still has an overdose of aliens-with-generic-ridged-foreheads-and-stereotyp es, and space battles consisting mostly of firing primary coloured blobs around at 30mph. Acceleration doesn't seem to effect anyone either, despite their lack of artificial gravity.
It does at least have a believable flight model and less inconsitant universe.
Anyway, isn't B5 dead? I don't see anyone pumping $200m into it:)
Star Wars is more a fantasy or fairy tale than science fiction (nothing wrong with that, just look at LoTR). Lucas seemed to be pushing the fairy tale part rather hard in episode 1 though:/
> Anyway, that isn't what Star Wars is, and you can't tell me you were really expecting that in the trailer/up coming movie, can you?
Nope, I was more suggesting that the Star Wars universe is a bit lame and wishing we could spend the millions on something new and less on the children's fantasy end of the spectrum.
Not that Star Wars doesn't have a ligitimate place in all of this too, but suspending disbelief and switching to watch-and-drool mode constantly gets tiring.
Slashdot Mirror
> A 'truly free' program cannot be under any license.
:)
That's freedom to claim you wrote the code and freedom to sue me if it's buggy, not freedom to put the code in your closed source baby crushing machine or shove it in the Linux kernel with a few lines stating who originally wrote it.
If GNU can have their restricted concept of freedom, I'll have my less restricted concept of freedom
Even your "'truely free'" code needs to state that it's public domain; otherwise by default you get no rights.
> But then if I download a binary closed sourced
> program based on your code it is not longer free,
> as I can't then amend the program I've just downloaded
They were free to close their work, I'm free to open my work, you're free to use my open works over their closed ones. I'm not seeing the problem here.
If having access to source is such a big deal for you, use only open source software, but why should you think you know better than the originator what they should do with their code?
> Or is your idea of freedom that the code is free
> for the packager but not the consumer?
My code is free, their code may not be, and whether they make it so or not is up to them. So they included some of my work; big deal, it's not as if it closes the original work, it just means they didn't have to spend the next 3 weeks redoing what has already been written.
If they were going to release the code anyway, it doesn't matter; if they weren't, 999 times out of 1000 they'll either find a work they can take, or spend 3 weeks rolling their own. I'd rather those 999 projects not waste several man-year's effort than 1 project release their code grudgingly (or waste time pushing my work into a plugin so they don't have to release much anyway).
I'm afraid Mr Stallman gives "freedom" a different meaning to me.
When I want my code to be free as in freedom, I put it under a BSD, MIT or Beerware license; why should I decide someone else is less deserving of using my code than anyone else? That's not very free.
Sure, people can place restrictions on their changes, but those changes are their work and I'd rather not take away their freedom in controling it, and I definately don't want to take away their freedom of control over code that happens to use something I've written.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with the GPL, just that pushing it as a "free" license rather pushes the concept of freedom to breaking point IMO.
> Does anyone else remember from college how the poles just flip every million years or so
:)
No, that was far too advanced for my college
I'm not so bothered by it flipping; I'm bothered by the suggestions that in the process of flipping the field weakens and practically disappears.
It's one thing to think "N is S, and S is now N", it's quite another to think "my compass is useless, and I'm probably going to get cancer from the next solar mass ejection because there's no magnetic field to offset all those high energy particles".
> No fucking Linux version.
./configure and make under Nix.
So? What's wrong with supporting one platform well rather than many platforms poorly?
It's not as if the world is short on Gnutella clients; use one of them; do you want me to whinge because x *ix Gnutella client isn't available as a Win32 native app?
> Can't someone port it to KDE/Gnome?
Sure; you. You seem to want it so badly, go right ahead. Have fun replacing all those Win32 API calls with Unix equivilents, and testing it on 20 different platforms, while keeping it in sync with the original version.
> Anyone using Sourceforge should have to make their stuff
Why? Last I looked SF was for open source projects, not open source *ix projects.
I guess you're going to go and whinge for a Linux version of Descaler next.
(Score: -1, Dumbass)
> Framerates above the refresh rate of the monitor are pointless.
While you're right that there's little point in rendering faster than the monitor refresh beyond benchmarks (which is really what we're talking about), being able to go above the refresh rate on average scenes is important because complex scenes will be, um, more complex and drop the framerate.
You may be able to push an average of 90FPS in Quake 3, but that's not so wonderful if you drop down to 20FPS every time you leave a corridor and drop to 10FPS every time someone throws a smoke grenade or fires a rocket.
"What if" is the basis for preparing for anything. If you can't answer it and you concider the situation likely enough, you put it on the pile of reasons not to do something.
"What if the sun goes *ffftt* in ten years?"; everyone freezes to death. Oh well, not a good enough reason to leave the solar system just yet.
What if someone flies a large aircraft at speed into a nuclear power station?; It makes a sizable dent and it takes a few weeks or months to clean up and repair.
> 700 fps and 135 fps?
Remember, Quake 3 is fairly old now; already games like MoH have parts that will make most above-average machines struggle (like that mission with all the trees); newer engines, larger cheaper monitors etc are only going to push that further.
That's a small single seater being crashed into a single block, not a 747 or so being flown into some point of a real building.
What if someone were to fly a large aircraft at full pelt into the roof?
I know they're designed to sustain it; so was the WTC, except since then planes have got bigger, and they weren't counting on a full load of aviation fuel or a full speed impact.
:)
I dare say they probably will stand up pretty well, but I'm still not going to laugh off the possibility
> It always ticks me off that the Greenpeace people
> oppose anything that creates greenhouse gasses
> while at the same time protesting nuclear power
> which is the only real way to get free of
> greenhouse gas emmisions
More Nuclear power stations = more chance of one of them somewhere exploding, leaking, or having nuclear material stolen.
They could be concidered a terrorist target too; you have to wonder how well a power station would stand up to someone flying a plane or two into it.
I usually have an IRC client or two sitting in the background while I work and do other things; not only does it give me something to do when I need to walk away from the problem for a few minutes, but it also gives me somewhere I can ask questions and shoot ideas at.
So while it's pretty bad if all the user is doing is IRCing/reading SlashDot/checking Hotmail, most people can multitask and have these things go on in the background for use in idle periods (let's recompile and check slashdot while it chungs along; that query's taking a while, wonder if anyone's on IRC; hm, I don't get it, might as well check my email while I work it out)
Bad idea: Letting your drive melt.
I had problems with my 40GB Quantum AS (bad sectors, spinning down and refusing to speak to anything); I noticed it was getting rather hot (bare in mind this is in a well ventilated case at the bottom of the 3.5" mounting bays with plenty of space above it) and wondered if this had anything to do with it.
So I mounted a card cooler I had spare, put it on top of a small speaker just outside the case (I leave the side open) and had it blow over the system.
The result? CPU temp dropped a good 6c (43c fully loaded for a 1GHz Athlon clocked to 1.2GHz, compared with ~50 before) and now both my drives (Quantum Fireball 20GB and Quantum Fireball AS 40GB) are cool to the touch. There's been absolutely no sign of any problems with the drive since either.
Notice it includes ?rated=5 - that means all /. readers who use that URL will give it a rating of 5 out of 6.
:)
l es/1087.asp, which won't make you vote for anything and which won't cause the entire thing to refresh into a frameset the instant it loads.
Way to mess up their stats
It also links directly to the article, which will instantly reload you to the frameset. A better URL is http://www.starstuff.org/default.asp?cover=/artic
Everyone who even pretends to be able to knock up websites, hack PHP and CGI scripts etc should be familar with REST; it's one of the core concepts behind the web.
The REST Wiki is a good place to start.
Don't forget the BSD's have things like this too. Tsk, anyone would think the BSD's and the Linux's aren't on speaking terms or something :)
/usr/src/release/picobsd/
PICOBSD(8) FreeBSD System Manager's Manual PICOBSD(8)
NAME
picobsd - floppy disk based FreeBSD system
DESCRIPTION
picobsd is a script which can be used to produce a minimal implementation
of FreeBSD (historically called PicoBSD) which typically fits on one
floppy disk, or can be downloaded as a single image file from some media
such as CDROM, flash memory, or through etherboot.
The boot media (typically a floppy disk) contains a boot loader and a
compressed kernel which includes a memory file system. Depending on the
media, it might also contain a number of additional files, which can be
updated at run time, and are used to override/update those in the memory
file system.
> I don't get any kind of warning in IE6.
You'll get a little icon in the status bar you can click on if it blocks something based on your settings; look at View -> Privacy Report otherwise.
Yahoo is a good example to try it out on, since it seems to specify just about everything.
"in P3P you can only set a different policy for (sub-)folders (differrent URI's)"
Uhm, no, you can specify policies for URI's, methods (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE etc) and cookies (including name, value, domain and even content).
For example:
<POLICY-REF about="/P3P/UserPolicy.xml"><COOKIE-INCLUDE name="loggedin" value="*" domain="*" path="*"/>
</POLICY-REF>
If you really can't describe your case:
And, of course, talk to the peeps on the P3P ml and see if you can get it fixed in version 2.
I find Opera's fine for all the sites I visit, in fact for the types of site I visit it tends to do a better job than IE beacause of the improved CSS support.
For sites that do screw up, there's always that handy little "Switch between author mode and user mode" button in the corner of every document that will fall back to a perfectly usable unstyled page.
And when I come across the odd site that overloads on DHTML or whatever, I just load IE, or go away. Spending 3 seconds to load IE, copy the URL and paste it into IE isn't exactly the hardest of workarounds.
> I've said it before and I'll say it again- using
> those two malcontented weirdos to "sell" anything
> is professional suicide.
Yup, never mind breaking up Microsoft or forcing them to open their API's, just make them to take on RMS as their chief marketing bod.
Of course, we'll have to run him through a copy of sed -e s/GNU/Microsoft/ first to make sure he has the desired effect.
> Relational DB for filesystems? If this is based
> on SQL Server, that is exactly what it will be.
> Will that help or hurt?
Doubtful. Even Oracle keep adding extensions to push it away from a rigid relational model, and with an increasing number of Object and XML databases competing they'll probably end up absorbing some of their features.
> It seems to me that the traditional concept of
> a filesystem is that of a hierarchical database
> manager more similar to LDAP than SQL-92.
Hierachies are difficult to impliment in the relational model, yup; maybe we'll find the query language will be more like XQuery than SQL, or an odd mix of it.
> Will this have serious performance tradeoffs?
Just look at Apache; it's slow as hell serving files compared with the likes of thttpd, but it's much more flexible; which one do most people choose (and who even notices the slowness)? These kind of tradeoffs are made everywhere, and don't forget Microsoft are targetting the market several years in the future when the hardware's going to be something like 2-4 times faster.
> They want to get their Digital Rights
.NET and start dropping the crufty Win16-contaminated Win32 API and x86 ties.
> Management Software to infest every aspect of
> their OS as possible.
Right. You keep throwing your FUD about while the rest of us looks at things seriously.
> Do you honestly believe that the benifit of a
> faster search is enough incentive to rewrite
> such a major part of the OS?
Short Answer: Yes.
Long Answer: Filesystems haven't changed much in the past few decades, but one of the things they have tended to gain is arbitrary metadata. Adding indexing to that metadata is a natural progression of that.
Now your filenames are just a part of the metadata you'll want to play with different views of the system, which suddenly becomes much much cheaper. Believe it or not, lots of users have trouble understanding the current basic filesystem concepts and using them to organise their data; well, now you can do it automatically for them.
Of course, you want your other stuff to make use of these new ways of looking at the system, especially when you're MS and are running out of new features to put in (come on, what are they going to add to Word XP now? A paperclip with speech recognition? Yet another GUI redesign?), so you want to do something that provides a visible difference (and maybe even an advantage) for those expensive upgrade programmes.
So, yes, I think they do have a very good reason for such a major change, like they had good reason to introduce '95 and start dropping DOS, or NT and start dropping Win16, or
The biggest issue I have with it is that it's going to be a bitch to use in other OS's. Hopefully they'll do detailed specs and stick to them fairly closely (ah haha), which will at least make it easier.
> Thus, a production server in Minneapolis, Minnesota would be usmnminpsnnn
Wouldn't:
nnn.ps.min.mn.us[.domain.tld.]
Be more true to the way DNS is supposed to work and easier to manage?
> So watch Babylon 5!
p es, and space battles consisting mostly of firing primary coloured blobs around at 30mph. Acceleration doesn't seem to effect anyone either, despite their lack of artificial gravity.
:)
Still has an overdose of aliens-with-generic-ridged-foreheads-and-stereoty
It does at least have a believable flight model and less inconsitant universe.
Anyway, isn't B5 dead? I don't see anyone pumping $200m into it
> Try the science non-fiction section, thanks. ;)
:/
Star Wars is more a fantasy or fairy tale than science fiction (nothing wrong with that, just look at LoTR). Lucas seemed to be pushing the fairy tale part rather hard in episode 1 though
> Anyway, that isn't what Star Wars is, and you can't tell me you were really expecting that in the trailer/up coming movie, can you?
Nope, I was more suggesting that the Star Wars universe is a bit lame and wishing we could spend the millions on something new and less on the children's fantasy end of the spectrum.
Not that Star Wars doesn't have a ligitimate place in all of this too, but suspending disbelief and switching to watch-and-drool mode constantly gets tiring.