RMS has fought this issue many times, and pleaded people not to do this. It will become a mess if people start adding lines that match their own agendas. "People who kill cannot use this" "People who are gay.." "People who voted bush.." and so on.
In terms of software licenses, which doesn't fully cover the question, but..:
RMS is very clear on this, and for those who don't agree with him (which seems to be the latest fad) many others have to.
You should not keep let politics like this get in the way. There was a particular project that released there code under a license that was basically GPL'ed but with a line saying that it was not to be used by terrorists and not to be used to help kill people. RMS really disliked the license, and argued that such lines are impossible to define.
I submitted a very small patch to the kernel, and Dave Jones accepted it, and it eventually got added to the kernel.
Anyway, a few months later I got a job at a large company, doing research. One of the things I mentioned in the interview was this kernel patch - but I did tell them it was small.
A few months after working there, there was a linux conference, and so me and my boss went to it. Dave Jones is one of the speakers and actually starts talking about my patch! So I turn to my boss and tell him excitedly that that was my work. Then DJ says "of course, the fix was trivial..".. sigh.. oh well.
I told DJ afterwards, and he found it amusing anyway.
It reminds me of work where somewhere installed the latest windows service pack because it fixed a bug that was causing havok in a program they were writing.
Course the network people found out and made him uninstall it, and so the programmer had to spend ages working around the problem in the code..
I really really hate this kind of politics.
Offtopic, but while I'm at it, this kind of stupidity causes no end of problems. Like to save a little bit of money in the short term they sold off all their computers to some firm... in america (our research group was in the uk) and then had then rent the machines back again to us. This meant we were bound by the dumbest laws you can imagine, and ended up having to destroy machines and then buying new ones under a different budget to avoid paying several thousand pounds a year for maintance of the machines... Oh and did I mention the stupid laws which meant that yes we did have to actually destroy the machine totally.
Agreed! Otherwise you might write a game that looks really good and you think is working... until you sober up the next morning..not that I've ever done that.
Okay I sort of thought that - but it doesn't make much sense. Aren't you basically integrating the engine into your game, then distributing to everyone? I mean, if an inside tester played the game, then they are using the engine. Would they count as a user or developer?
I just thought... one way to perhaps show that you can't reach zero is that to cool something you either need:
*) Something colder, to cool it - but you can't get colder than 0.
*) A bigger space to put the nonzero heat it - but trivally if you expand something with non-zero temperature into an finite space, then the result is still going to be above zero.
*) If it radiates/conducts/etc heat away, then it must be into an area that has a non-zero heat, so that will (instinctively) also radiate an equal or greater amount of heat back again. Hmm, thinking about it this means you can't have a one-way heat shield, or something that absorbes without emitting. (Unless a material stops radiating/conducting below a certain temperature.)
There's probably some other cases I missed - I don't know anything about this field.:) Is there any other way to cool something other than these cases?
You know those showers that let you adjust the temperature with a knob, but have a button that you have to press if you want the water hotter than a certain temperature, just so you don't make it too hot by mistake..
Perhaps we need the same thing for the slider that sets what level of configuration you want.
So instead of being able to chose, say:
Basic Intermediate Advanced God-like
You have another configuration which says:
Don't allow advanced settings. Do allow advanced settings.
So in total, if you wanted to do something complex, you'd first turn on the allow advanced settings, this allows you to turn up the configuration options up to "God-like" and this then shows the advanced setting.
Of course, if you had a kiosk type machine, you could disallow the setting of "Allow advanced settings", which you have to re-allow first...:)
KDE is working on this - it's works pretty well too. Of course it only works if you only run kde apps. So say you wanted to change the background, but the admin had disabled that feature, there is nothing kde can do (within reason) if you manage to run a program that runs as the back most program and displays a picture.
To properly lockdown a machine fully would take a bit of thinking (although not too much).
>Bingo. In order to make it through highschool you >need to be streetsmart. Playing chess during lunch >isn't streetsmart, it's like walking down a dark >alley alone.
It's funny you use that example.
When I was at highschool I was the typical bullied geek. I spent a lot of time at the library with a couple of friends and ones of the best teachers I've ever met.
Anyway, the teacher wanted me to set up a chess class - and I was so afraid. She was trying to teach my initiative, and not to be afraid.
I went round and asked people to come along to a chess club, and as you can probably guess, was laughed at. (This was also a poor neighbourhood).
However quite a lot of people did actually turn up, and the chess club turned out to be quite a success.
That teacher taught me to have initiative and not to be afraid of what people think.
That coupled with a wonderful headmaster got me into doing gcse's early, doing several programming courses in college, and various jobs. Before I started uni I was earning £1k a week after taxes.
Sir,
You make a sort of strawman argument again. Did you single handedly produce 300 double side pages of docs? (I'm really asking - it is possible) Does the average project require this sort of thing? (Average is a dodgy word I admit..)
I'm not trying to say that a lone student will produce in the few hours a week, a project that is comparable to a crack team of full time programmers with 40 years experiance.
I'm saying that a/good/ student will be able to produce code comparable to that of an average programmer - although it may take them longer.
What do I base this on? Well for one thing a startling number of projects fail, and huge amount of code that I see isn't particular nice. It hardly seems that a full time programmer is perfect - or even close to it. Also have you looked at the code of, for example, many of the GNU tools - it's horribly put together. Not a good example, but I don't get to see many closed source programs to compare with. Also as I mentioned before how netscape had to start over again...
And then I read articles on/. about how people complain that other fellow coders check in code that breaks the system - and this is supposed to be the standard I'm aiming for?
It seems that what people call experiance is the whole teamwork learning, politcs, dealing with bad specs, drawing UML diagrams, and so on. Not stuff that directly or hugely affects my coding abilities.
I suppose I should point out that I am to some extent playing devil's advocate. But I am annoyed when I'm not taken seriously just because of my age - although that has changed a lot now that I'm older (21 now).
Do you get refunded for the cost of the phone call?
Also, I'm taking a risk to report bugs - if I'm wrong, or they refuse to acknowledge it as a bug (for example you suspect a race a condition) then they charge you. My question is, what do you get in return for taking such a risk, in order to do their bug hunting for them?
Say you have a load of CS students, and some of them code OS programs for a hobby. Now intuitively the ones who code for a hobby are more likely to be better coders than the average CS student.
When the hobbiest-student-coder has to do his 6 month computing project (I assume that most uni's have similiar projects - or at least some coding projects) then you have to produce plans and documentation etc for it. They are also far more likely to make their said software open source.
When in the work place, then you have all the coders together producing code - resulting in a lower average quality of code.
I'm obviously making some assumptions here, but you get my point..
Btw, as for kernel, it's not quite so clear cut. I do not dispute that there isn't enough documentation, but sometimes people take up issues in the wrong places. For one example, when AA wrote his memory manager, and non-coders complained and booed because it wasn't documentated. One big reason for this was that the algorithm used was a standard well documentated algorithm, and anyone that understood the algorithm well, would be able to easily understand the code.
Anyway, I have a quantum computing lecture to attend.. bye!
I looked at the link which described a "slipperly" slope, but fail to see how this points out a fallacy in the logic?
Basically all it does is define it, and clarify that: "..are not (as in the case of deductive logic) 100% absolutely certain." Well duh.
It gives some examples of where it didn't work out, or strawman examples of it taken to the extreme. This is not the same as showing the logic has a fallacy.
>So much open source software tends to be writter by students with little experience and it shows.
You mean it's been written with the latest design and coding ideas, to a high quality, tested, documentated and above all written by someone who cares about the program, without the bother of office politcs?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, if they ban 'methods for passing a polygraph test' - does that include being innocent?
No, but you can get TI-86 emulators that require an illegal bootrom.
RMS has fought this issue many times, and pleaded people not to do this.
It will become a mess if people start adding lines that match their own agendas. "People who kill cannot use this" "People who are gay.." "People who voted bush.." and so on.
In terms of software licenses, which doesn't fully cover the question, but..:
RMS is very clear on this, and for those who don't agree with him (which seems to be the latest fad) many others have to.
You should not keep let politics like this get in the way. There was a particular project that released there code under a license that was basically GPL'ed but with a line saying that it was not to be used by terrorists and not to be used to help kill people. RMS really disliked the license, and argued that such lines are impossible to define.
Speaking of kernel hacks...
I submitted a very small patch to the kernel, and Dave Jones accepted it, and it eventually got added to the kernel.
Anyway, a few months later I got a job at a large company, doing research. One of the things I mentioned in the interview was this kernel patch - but I did tell them it was small.
A few months after working there, there was a linux conference, and so me and my boss went to it. Dave Jones is one of the speakers and actually starts talking about my patch! So I turn to my boss and tell him excitedly that that was my work. Then DJ says "of course, the fix was trivial..".. sigh.. oh well.
I told DJ afterwards, and he found it amusing anyway.
Oh, and while I'm complaining - what do you mean "does it work?". Are you seriously asking whether you can export the display of an X program?
This is a trivial project, if you ignore licenses.
If you take them into account, then you have yet another legal question to a group computer people.
It reminds me of work where somewhere installed the latest windows service pack because it fixed a bug that was causing havok in a program they were writing.
Course the network people found out and made him uninstall it, and so the programmer had to spend ages working around the problem in the code..
I really really hate this kind of politics.
Offtopic, but while I'm at it, this kind of stupidity causes no end of problems. Like to save a little bit of money in the short term they sold off all their computers to some firm... in america (our research group was in the uk) and then had then rent the machines back again to us.
This meant we were bound by the dumbest laws you can imagine, and ended up having to destroy machines and then buying new ones under a different budget to avoid paying several thousand pounds a year for maintance of the machines...
Oh and did I mention the stupid laws which meant that yes we did have to actually destroy the machine totally.
Agreed! Otherwise you might write a game that looks really good and you think is working... until you sober up the next morning..not that I've ever done that.
Okay I sort of thought that - but it doesn't make much sense. Aren't you basically integrating the engine into your game, then distributing to everyone?
I mean, if an inside tester played the game, then they are using the engine. Would they count as a user or developer?
Hate to be dumb, but what's a "seat" ?
> I think that one day you'll be posting to /. saying 'damn students, what do they know' ;-)
:)
I have no doubts that I will. On the other hand, hopefully I won't be an average coder by that time.
I just thought... one way to perhaps show that you can't reach zero is that to cool something you either need:
:) Is there any other way to cool something other than these cases?
*) Something colder, to cool it - but you can't get colder than 0.
*) A bigger space to put the nonzero heat it - but trivally if you expand something with non-zero temperature into an finite space, then the result is still going to be above zero.
*) If it radiates/conducts/etc heat away, then it must be into an area that has a non-zero heat, so that will (instinctively) also radiate an equal or greater amount of heat back again. Hmm, thinking about it this means you can't have a one-way heat shield, or something that absorbes without emitting. (Unless a material stops radiating/conducting below a certain temperature.)
There's probably some other cases I missed - I don't know anything about this field.
You know those showers that let you adjust the temperature with a knob, but have a button that you have to press if you want the water hotter than a certain temperature, just so you don't make it too hot by mistake..
:)
Perhaps we need the same thing for the slider that sets what level of configuration you want.
So instead of being able to chose, say:
Basic
Intermediate
Advanced
God-like
You have another configuration which says:
Don't allow advanced settings.
Do allow advanced settings.
So in total, if you wanted to do something complex, you'd first turn on the allow advanced settings, this allows you to turn up the configuration options up to "God-like" and this then shows the advanced setting.
Of course, if you had a kiosk type machine, you could disallow the setting of "Allow advanced settings", which you have to re-allow first...
KDE is working on this - it's works pretty well too. Of course it only works if you only run kde apps. So say you wanted to change the background, but the admin had disabled that feature, there is nothing kde can do (within reason) if you manage to run a program that runs as the back most program and displays a picture.
To properly lockdown a machine fully would take a bit of thinking (although not too much).
See Kde Kiosk.
>Bingo. In order to make it through highschool you >need to be streetsmart. Playing chess during lunch >isn't streetsmart, it's like walking down a dark >alley alone.
It's funny you use that example.
When I was at highschool I was the typical bullied geek. I spent a lot of time at the library with a couple of friends and ones of the best teachers I've ever met.
Anyway, the teacher wanted me to set up a chess class - and I was so afraid. She was trying to teach my initiative, and not to be afraid.
I went round and asked people to come along to a chess club, and as you can probably guess, was laughed at. (This was also a poor neighbourhood).
However quite a lot of people did actually turn up, and the chess club turned out to be quite a success.
That teacher taught me to have initiative and not to be afraid of what people think.
That coupled with a wonderful headmaster got me into doing gcse's early, doing several programming courses in college, and various jobs. Before I started uni I was earning £1k a week after taxes.
> True, they didn't take some of the ridiculous college math courses that we nerds did. ....they were popular..
(sorry for snipping your post so horribly..)
So basically they traded learning for being popular?
Not a path that all of us would take.
Sir,
/good/ student will be able to produce code comparable to that of an average programmer - although it may take them longer.
/. about how people complain that other fellow coders check in code that breaks the system - and this is supposed to be the standard I'm aiming for?
;)
You make a sort of strawman argument again. Did you single handedly produce 300 double side pages of docs? (I'm really asking - it is possible) Does the average project require this sort of thing? (Average is a dodgy word I admit..)
I'm not trying to say that a lone student will produce in the few hours a week, a project that is comparable to a crack team of full time programmers with 40 years experiance.
I'm saying that a
What do I base this on? Well for one thing a startling number of projects fail, and huge amount of code that I see isn't particular nice. It hardly seems that a full time programmer is perfect - or even close to it.
Also have you looked at the code of, for example, many of the GNU tools - it's horribly put together. Not a good example, but I don't get to see many closed source programs to compare with.
Also as I mentioned before how netscape had to start over again...
And then I read articles on
It seems that what people call experiance is the whole teamwork learning, politcs, dealing with bad specs, drawing UML diagrams, and so on. Not stuff that directly or hugely affects my coding abilities.
I suppose I should point out that I am to some extent playing devil's advocate. But I am annoyed when I'm not taken seriously just because of my age - although that has changed a lot now that I'm older (21 now).
Anyway, I waffle too much
Do you get refunded for the cost of the phone call?
Also, I'm taking a risk to report bugs - if I'm wrong, or they refuse to acknowledge it as a bug (for example you suspect a race a condition) then they charge you.
My question is, what do you get in return for taking such a risk, in order to do their bug hunting for them?
Where did large projects come into this? I thought we were just talking about projects in general.
And anyway, is this supposed to be as opposed to full time developers who write large code bases like netscape that had to be scrapped and redone?
Hmm..
Say you have a load of CS students, and some of them code OS programs for a hobby. Now intuitively the ones who code for a hobby are more likely to be better coders than the average CS student.
When the hobbiest-student-coder has to do his 6 month computing project (I assume that most uni's have similiar projects - or at least some coding projects) then you have to produce plans and documentation etc for it. They are also far more likely to make their said software open source.
When in the work place, then you have all the coders together producing code - resulting in a lower average quality of code.
I'm obviously making some assumptions here, but you get my point..
Btw, as for kernel, it's not quite so clear cut. I do not dispute that there isn't enough documentation, but sometimes people take up issues in the wrong places.
For one example, when AA wrote his memory manager, and non-coders complained and booed because it wasn't documentated. One big reason for this was that the algorithm used was a standard well documentated algorithm, and anyone that understood the algorithm well, would be able to easily understand the code.
Anyway, I have a quantum computing lecture to attend.. bye!
I looked at the link which described a "slipperly" slope, but fail to see how this points out a fallacy in the logic?
Basically all it does is define it, and clarify that: "..are not (as in the case of deductive logic) 100% absolutely certain." Well duh.
It gives some examples of where it didn't work out, or strawman examples of it taken to the extreme. This is not the same as showing the logic has a fallacy.
Was this out of pride, or problems with the bsd tcp/ip stack?
>So much open source software tends to be writter by students with little experience and it shows.
You mean it's been written with the latest design and coding ideas, to a high quality, tested, documentated and above all written by someone who cares about the program, without the bother of office politcs?
I agree!
Maybe people don't report bugs because they don't want to pay MS to report bugs?
Have you seen how expensive those phone calls are..