Bite the bullet! Free as in free beer also!
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RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
Anyone with even half an eye open can see that one of the major strengths of Free Software is that in addition to being libre it is also effectively free of cost.
It's not just the fact that the dollars stay in your wallet that is important, but also the lack of all the payment paraphenalia, and the fact that software is much freer when you can pass it on without worrying that the recipient should pay for it just as you have done. Removing the cost of an item makes it free in far more than just the obvious way.
Now that the world can see that gratis software works just fine, why not bite the bullet and proclaim both types of freedom as worthy goals for software?
You are not at liberty to redefine Free Software
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RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
Despite what you might wish "Free Software" to mean, unfortunately you are a couple of decades too late. It means what the FSF defined it to mean, so any argument you may make based on an alternative meaning is simply irrelevant.
Try using the kernel without the GNU stuff
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RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
... and see how far you get.
Issues are being misrepresented. RMS is right to give them redress.
No, it's not relevant at all to issues of anonymity and privacy, because a common carrier does not deal with content whereas anonymity and privacy are entirely to do with content.
You're copnfusing all that legal nonsense with fundamental properties of Internet carriage. The two are not the same, and it is only the desire of traditional institutions to bring the Internet under their tightly controlled umbrella that attempts to make them the same when they aren't.
If as reported Demon acknowledged the libellious nature of third-party material held on their servers then they have only themselves to blame.
They should never have examined the material in the first place, and they should have returned the letter from Godfrey back to him with an explanation that issues of content are not entertained by Demon in their role as an Internet carrier. Then Godfrey's complaint would forever have remained no more than an allegation.
You can't both claim to be a common carrier and at the same time express an official opinion on the nature of the content. That's what the word "common" is all about, an expression of universality. Demon prejudiced their case by being responsive to an issue that should have been outside their jurisdiction. A true common carrier has to be oblivious to all issues except transit parameters. In the absence of any legal common carrier status, they should at least have acted like one.
AFAIK, Raster has always welcomed people's contributions to Enlightenment, both in terms of ideas and even more so in the form of patches. I seem to recall some quite explicit note to that effect either on the E website/mailing list or in the sources. That doesn't seem to be the mark of someone that won't accept input from others.
Are you suggesting that this was not really so in practice, that he didn't want to accept certain types of functionality and so he left? Details please. E could be themed to look and behave very very much like W95, so there's no inherent reason why RH couldn't have put E to good use in their plans as far as I can tell.
Maybe the source of the problem is that perhaps RH wanted Raster *not* to work on the bits of E that he knows currently require a lot of attention, but on other bits instead --- maybe W95 lookalike or workalike functionality, since he mentions something like that. I can see how that would not have gone down too well. It's typical of managerial types to want to direct the course of development in ways that don't take technical necessity into account.
I guess we'll never really know the full story though.
Window managers are such a subjective thing that it would be very poor strategy for RedHat to supply future distributions with just a single window manager configured on installation.
Obviously there has to be a default, but all the other major window managers should be just one simple menu selection away.
The very least that should be provided are E, WM, fvwm*, icewm, twm and olvwm, and another half dozen or so would be most welcome.
People have hugely varying tastes and functional requirements, and the ability to choose window managers is one huge advantage that we have over Windows --- RedHat should make the most of that possibility.
> But to a lot of people the fact that all buttons > behave the same way is a feature they like.
I've found places where E doesn't do what I expect, but I thought that it was so configurable that all its buttons *could* be made to behave in exactly the way one would want, if they didn't already.
You forgot the Enter key, so what you really meant was
7 E 3 + 5 E 2 * 3 E 4 / + /
which is 14 keystrokes, whereas the algebraic form requires 20 including the = on the end.
However, I don't feel that the number of keystrokes is the main difference. I use HPs and RPN because it's more logical to delimit terms with a single Enter than to require a pair of matching brackets. For engineering problems, it's no contest.
If you're a clued-up techie and you are giving your CIO advice and *he doesn't believe you*, then clearly he's incompetent. Fire him, or get him fired!
There's nothing worse than a manager that doesn't know about something and yet refuses to delegate the decision making in that area to the people that he has around him for this very purpose.
Nothing prevents it in reality, although in theory there will be bylaws in some places that prevent people communicatingfreely electronically with their neighbours because the local PTT has the monopoly on residential wiring.
The main problem is inertia and lack of technical knowhow. However, this can certainly be overcome if there is a techie group in each neighbourhood that takes it on as a project for the local community.
If they're going to charge US$10 per album download then they're definitely not with it at all. They're out by a factor of 10 or more.
The only thing that they're "with" is with the habit of extorting megabucks through the traditional music channels, and believing that it's a law of nature that they must continue to earn at this rate whatever the replication technology and whatever the distribution system. They've learned nothing from the MP3 lesson.
Yes, it is The Battle for Management, as you put it, although I've been calling it The Rise of the Techies.
It's a peculiar war, fought with cries of "Learn or Delegate! [Tech]" and "I am in Control! [PHB]". It's not at all like the management wars that accompanied previous technical revolutions (eg. the PC) because unlike those, the Internet is not a product of industry and it doesn't go in the direction the PHBs want, not even in mega-corps. Instead, it seems to head in the direction in which the techies say it will, which is infuriating of course to PHBs, yet they're loath to ignore managerial advice from technical ranks because their bonuses depend on it. It's great fun.
Er, that was the meaning of my smiley immediately after Walsh Function... "no, it's not pizza, it's tomato and cheese on a flour and water base." In other words, maybe the "new invention" is one of the types of SS the world has known for many years but described in a way that makes it sound different.
I'll be most interested to see whether this thing makes it to market. We shouldn't prejudge it on the basis of just an article or two: really new inventions are rare, but they *do* appear occasionally.
It's different. SS/CDMA encodes information in the phase of fixed-rate transitions of a fixed-frequency phase-locked carrier. As far as I can make out, the article is describing a type of Time Hopping SS in which information-coded pseudo noise modulates the time-domain position of a pulse, so none of the RF bits of SS/CDMA are present at all.
What you describe is only one type of SS, called Frequency Hopping SS. There are various others as well, mainly Direct Sequence SS (also known as pseudo-noise, phase hopping, direct spread or direct code SS), Chirp SS which sweeps the carrier over a wide band (also known as pulse-FM, mainly used by the military), Time Hopping SS in which the time position of a pulse is controlled by a pseudo-noise code sequence, and various hybrid schemes such as DS/FH and DS/TH.
The description in the article sounds like it's about TH, or a hybrid using TH together with something else (probably DS) to widen the bandwidth and provide greater immunity to multipath problems.
Or, who knows, maybe it has nothing to do with TH. Maybe it's the world's first implementation of communication by Walsh Functions.:-)
When radio waves go THROUGH something easily then they're not being attenuated much inside it, which by definition means that they're not dumping their energy into it, so it's safe.
Your brain gets fried only when it STOPS the waves, as it does at the high frequencies that cellular phones use (eg. 900MHz and 1.8GHz). Microwave ovens provide another example: at 2.4GHz, the radio waves penetrate a thick slab of meat no further than a couple of inches max, which is why the outside cooks and the inside doesn't.
So, if you're concerned about fried brains then you should worry more about existing radio technology than about the relatively low frequency stuff that the article was describing, because the power density of the ultra-wideband signal is very low and therefore there is little power transmitted in the frequency slots where tissues absorb power.
I think you may have missed the point here. If reruns of I Love Zorblak are indeed flying around in our corner of the galaxy then SETI programs have a chance of detecting them, whereas without such searches then we would not know that we are in the vicinity of such broadcasts at all. Your reasoning seems to be 180 degrees off target.
Just because you get a lot of flack back from mindless zealots (every community has them) doesn't mean that nobody's listening.
Solid engineering criticism that is clear and well presented will usually be accepted by any half-decent engineer that happens to read it. That doesn't necessarily mean that he or she will voice their support, but then that shouldn't matter to people that want input rather than political visibility.
Also, if you state reasonable specific requirements rather than making broad-brush criticism then you'll stand a much better chance of affecting the course of development. Even better, join a development team (not necessarily officially) even if you're not a developer: evaluators are needed just as much as programmers, and any reasonable designer will be more than happy to accept additional "customer requirements".
Finally, it's pointless to say that "the community needs to accept criticism better". As we get more and more non-professionals in our midst, the situation will get worse in this regard, not better, so what you're asking for becomes ever more like changing the world. As a direct goal, that's impossible in practice. Just aim to change your own microcosm instead, and if everyone does so then the world will in time slowly change for the better.
I couldn't help smiling at your complex form of expression (I'm sometimes guilty of the same thing), but you know, I think you may have a very valid point here.
Yes, Free/Open software *does* remove control from the suppliers of capital. That's a very interesting observation.
The trouble with initiatives like COSS is that they fail to recognize that there are forces at work other than those described on the GNU website alone. Richard Stallman has been so consistent in his statements across many, many years that we believe him unreservedly when he uses the phrase "free as in free speech, not as in free beer". However, what almost nobody talks about is that practice in the community has not followed FSF theory in this area in any but the most infinitesimal of ways.
Let's not delude ourselves. Yes, the community is underpinned by software that is free as in free speech, but effectively all of this is also gratis. Furthermore, the mere mention of money always raises a sour taste in the mouths and writings of many, and I do *not* mean just those that confuse the two types of freedom. We see this on Slashdot time and again.
Why this is so I don't know. Perhaps gratis software is perceived as conveying more freedom. Perhaps it is that paying for software limits the number of users and hence is an a priori barrier on the freedom to join the user community --- surely a severe restriction of one's freedom. Perhaps people are just cheapskates, or maybe poverty among computer users is more widespread than is acknowledged. Or maybe it is much more complicated than that, because many seem willing to pay for distribution and/or support costs but still shy away from paying for the software itself. It's not necessarily a simple, black and white economic situation.
Whatever the reason, whatever the explicit claims, there is no doubt that the implicit effect is there, like a slow but massive undercurrent that is impossible to resist. Free software is promoting gratis software, at least in the hearts of the members of the community, and that meme has been extraordinarily successful.
ESR doesn't mention the valid criticisms
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ESR Wants to Retire
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· Score: 3
It's easy to feel sympathy for ESR for the grief he gets from hormone-hyped adolescents, as he describes it.
But in generalising about the source of criticism in this way, he fails to recognize and accept that there might be valid criticism out there as well.
For example, none of the reasons ESR cites as generating criticism bother me at all, yet one that he doesn't cite I find very important: his continual negativity regarding RMS, FSF, GNU and everything in that general neck of the woods.
If ESR did just as he writes in his essay and was an entirely positive embassador then I would support him totally. But I find it hard to support people whose visible strategy is to knock other well-regarded folk in the movement at every opportunity.
We don't need an either-or scene here. The success of free software and open source rests on everyone building upon everyone else's valuable efforts, ie. cooperation and not confrontation. Ambassadors need to be positive.
I just had an absolutely appalling thought. What if the (hidden) O/S on the Oracle8i Appliance is actually an NT kernel...:-((((
Nah, Oracle would be the joke of the planet. It's probably BSD, since they wouldn't have to release the source for it. That would be far more cost-effective than creating an O/S from scratch.
Could you break down the failures on Intel hardware for us a little? It would be good to know which components go down more often than others to get an idea of where to spend extra money if one is tied to a PC solution. Motherboards, power supplies, disk controllers, Ethernet, etc, which go down most often in your experience? (Disks die most frequently I reckon, but they're the same across all computer manufacturers.)
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone with even half an eye open can see that one of the major strengths of Free Software is that in addition to being libre it is also effectively free of cost.
It's not just the fact that the dollars stay in your wallet that is important, but also the lack of all the payment paraphenalia, and the fact that software is much freer when you can pass it on without worrying that the recipient should pay for it just as you have done. Removing the cost of an item makes it free in far more than just the obvious way.
Now that the world can see that gratis software works just fine, why not bite the bullet and proclaim both types of freedom as worthy goals for software?
Despite what you might wish "Free Software" to mean, unfortunately you are a couple of decades too late. It means what the FSF defined it to mean, so any argument you may make based on an alternative meaning is simply irrelevant.
... and see how far you get.
Issues are being misrepresented. RMS is right to give them redress.
No, it's not relevant at all to issues of anonymity and privacy, because a common carrier does not deal with content whereas anonymity and privacy are entirely to do with content.
You're copnfusing all that legal nonsense with fundamental properties of Internet carriage. The two are not the same, and it is only the desire of traditional institutions to bring the Internet under their tightly controlled umbrella that attempts to make them the same when they aren't.
If as reported Demon acknowledged the libellious nature of third-party material held on their servers then they have only themselves to blame.
They should never have examined the material in the first place, and they should have returned the letter from Godfrey back to him with an explanation that issues of content are not entertained by Demon in their role as an Internet carrier. Then Godfrey's complaint would forever have remained no more than an allegation.
You can't both claim to be a common carrier and at the same time express an official opinion on the nature of the content. That's what the word "common" is all about, an expression of universality. Demon prejudiced their case by being responsive to an issue that should have been outside their jurisdiction. A true common carrier has to be oblivious to all issues except transit parameters. In the absence of any legal common carrier status, they should at least have acted like one.
In the classic market model, when competition is recognized then prices drop.
Has MS lowered the price of IIS recently?
AFAIK, Raster has always welcomed people's contributions to Enlightenment, both in terms of ideas and even more so in the form of patches. I seem to recall some quite explicit note to that effect either on the E website/mailing list or in the sources. That doesn't seem to be the mark of someone that won't accept input from others.
Are you suggesting that this was not really so in practice, that he didn't want to accept certain types of functionality and so he left? Details please. E could be themed to look and behave very very much like W95, so there's no inherent reason why RH couldn't have put E to good use in their plans as far as I can tell.
Maybe the source of the problem is that perhaps RH wanted Raster *not* to work on the bits of E that he knows currently require a lot of attention, but on other bits instead --- maybe W95 lookalike or workalike functionality, since he mentions something like that. I can see how that would not have gone down too well. It's typical of managerial types to want to direct the course of development in ways that don't take technical necessity into account.
I guess we'll never really know the full story though.
Window managers are such a subjective thing that it would be very poor strategy for RedHat to supply future distributions with just a single window manager configured on installation.
Obviously there has to be a default, but all the other major window managers should be just one simple menu selection away.
The very least that should be provided are E, WM, fvwm*, icewm, twm and olvwm, and another half dozen or so would be most welcome.
People have hugely varying tastes and functional requirements, and the ability to choose window managers is one huge advantage that we have over Windows --- RedHat should make the most of that possibility.
Alan writes:
> But to a lot of people the fact that all buttons > behave the same way is a feature they like.
I've found places where E doesn't do what I expect, but I thought that it was so configurable that all its buttons *could* be made to behave in exactly the way one would want, if they didn't already.
Is this not so? (Examples please.)
You forgot the Enter key, so what you really meant was
7 E 3 + 5 E 2 * 3 E 4 / + /
which is 14 keystrokes, whereas the algebraic form requires 20 including the = on the end.
However, I don't feel that the number of keystrokes is the main difference. I use HPs and RPN because it's more logical to delimit terms with a single Enter than to require a pair of matching brackets. For engineering problems, it's no contest.
If you're a clued-up techie and you are giving your CIO advice and *he doesn't believe you*, then clearly he's incompetent. Fire him, or get him fired!
There's nothing worse than a manager that doesn't know about something and yet refuses to delegate the decision making in that area to the people that he has around him for this very purpose.
Nothing prevents it in reality, although in theory there will be bylaws in some places that prevent people communicatingfreely electronically with their neighbours because the local PTT has the monopoly on residential wiring.
The main problem is inertia and lack of technical knowhow. However, this can certainly be overcome if there is a techie group in each neighbourhood that takes it on as a project for the local community.
If they're going to charge US$10 per album download then they're definitely not with it at all. They're out by a factor of 10 or more.
The only thing that they're "with" is with the habit of extorting megabucks through the traditional music channels, and believing that it's a law of nature that they must continue to earn at this rate whatever the replication technology and whatever the distribution system.
They've learned nothing from the MP3 lesson.
Yes, it is The Battle for Management, as you put it, although I've been calling it The Rise of the Techies.
It's a peculiar war, fought with cries of "Learn or Delegate! [Tech]" and "I am in Control! [PHB]". It's not at all like the management wars that accompanied previous technical revolutions (eg. the PC) because unlike those, the Internet is not a product of industry and it doesn't go in the direction the PHBs want, not even in mega-corps. Instead, it seems to head in the direction in which the techies say it will, which is infuriating of course to PHBs, yet they're loath to ignore managerial advice from technical ranks because their bonuses depend on it. It's great fun.
Er, that was the meaning of my smiley immediately after Walsh Function ... "no, it's not pizza, it's tomato and cheese on a flour and water base." In other words, maybe the "new invention" is one of the types of SS the world has known for many years but described in a way that makes it sound different.
I'll be most interested to see whether this thing makes it to market. We shouldn't prejudge it on the basis of just an article or two: really new inventions are rare, but they *do* appear occasionally.
It's different. SS/CDMA encodes information in the phase of fixed-rate transitions of a fixed-frequency phase-locked carrier. As far as I can make out, the article is describing a type of Time Hopping SS in which information-coded pseudo noise modulates the time-domain position of a pulse, so none of the RF bits of SS/CDMA are present at all.
What you describe is only one type of SS, called Frequency Hopping SS. There are various others as well, mainly Direct Sequence SS (also known as pseudo-noise, phase hopping, direct spread or direct code SS), Chirp SS which sweeps the carrier over a wide band (also known as pulse-FM, mainly used by the military), Time Hopping SS in which the time position of a pulse is controlled by a pseudo-noise code sequence, and various hybrid schemes such as DS/FH and DS/TH.
:-)
The description in the article sounds like it's about TH, or a hybrid using TH together with something else (probably DS) to widen the bandwidth and provide greater immunity to multipath problems.
Or, who knows, maybe it has nothing to do with TH. Maybe it's the world's first implementation of communication by Walsh Functions.
When radio waves go THROUGH something easily then they're not being attenuated much inside it, which by definition means that they're not dumping their energy into it, so it's safe.
Your brain gets fried only when it STOPS the waves, as it does at the high frequencies that cellular phones use (eg. 900MHz and 1.8GHz). Microwave ovens provide another example: at 2.4GHz, the radio waves penetrate a thick slab of meat no further than a couple of inches max, which is why the outside cooks and the inside doesn't.
So, if you're concerned about fried brains then you should worry more about existing radio technology than about the relatively low frequency stuff that the article was describing, because the power density of the ultra-wideband signal is very low and therefore there is little power transmitted in the frequency slots where tissues absorb power.
I think you may have missed the point here. If reruns of I Love Zorblak are indeed flying around in our corner of the galaxy then SETI programs have a chance of detecting them, whereas without such searches then we would not know that we are in the vicinity of such broadcasts at all. Your reasoning seems to be 180 degrees off target.
Just because you get a lot of flack back from mindless zealots (every community has them) doesn't mean that nobody's listening.
Solid engineering criticism that is clear and well presented will usually be accepted by any half-decent engineer that happens to read it. That doesn't necessarily mean that he or she will voice their support, but then that shouldn't matter to people that want input rather than political visibility.
Also, if you state reasonable specific requirements rather than making broad-brush criticism then you'll stand a much better chance of affecting the course of development. Even better, join a development team (not necessarily officially) even if you're not a developer: evaluators are needed just as much as programmers, and any reasonable designer will be more than happy to accept additional "customer requirements".
Finally, it's pointless to say that "the community needs to accept criticism better". As we get more and more non-professionals in our midst, the situation will get worse in this regard, not better, so what you're asking for becomes ever more like changing the world. As a direct goal, that's impossible in practice. Just aim to change your own microcosm instead, and if everyone does so then the world will in time slowly change for the better.
I couldn't help smiling at your complex form of expression (I'm sometimes guilty of the same thing), but you know, I think you may have a very valid point here.
Yes, Free/Open software *does* remove control from the suppliers of capital. That's a very interesting observation.
The trouble with initiatives like COSS is that they fail to recognize that there are forces at work other than those described on the GNU website alone. Richard Stallman has been so consistent in his statements across many, many years that we believe him unreservedly when he uses the phrase "free as in free speech, not as in free beer". However, what almost nobody talks about is that practice in the community has not followed FSF theory in this area in any but the most infinitesimal of ways.
Let's not delude ourselves. Yes, the community is underpinned by software that is free as in free speech, but effectively all of this is also gratis. Furthermore, the mere mention of money always raises a sour taste in the mouths and writings of many, and I do *not* mean just those that confuse the two types of freedom. We see this on Slashdot time and again.
Why this is so I don't know. Perhaps gratis software is perceived as conveying more freedom. Perhaps it is that paying for software limits the number of users and hence is an a priori barrier on the freedom to join the user community --- surely a severe restriction of one's freedom. Perhaps people are just cheapskates, or maybe poverty among computer users is more widespread than is acknowledged. Or maybe it is much more complicated than that, because many seem willing to pay for distribution and/or support costs but still shy away from paying for the software itself. It's not necessarily a simple, black and white economic situation.
Whatever the reason, whatever the explicit claims, there is no doubt that the implicit effect is there, like a slow but massive undercurrent that is impossible to resist. Free software is promoting gratis software, at least in the hearts of the members of the community, and that meme has been extraordinarily successful.
It's easy to feel sympathy for ESR for the grief he gets from hormone-hyped adolescents, as he describes it.
But in generalising about the source of criticism in this way, he fails to recognize and accept that there might be valid criticism out there as well.
For example, none of the reasons ESR cites as generating criticism bother me at all, yet one that he doesn't cite I find very important: his continual negativity regarding RMS, FSF, GNU and everything in that general neck of the woods.
If ESR did just as he writes in his essay and was an entirely positive embassador then I would support him totally. But I find it hard to support people whose visible strategy is to knock other well-regarded folk in the movement at every opportunity.
We don't need an either-or scene here. The success of free software and open source rests on everyone building upon everyone else's valuable efforts, ie. cooperation and not confrontation. Ambassadors need to be positive.
I just had an absolutely appalling thought. What if the (hidden) O/S on the Oracle8i Appliance is actually an NT kernel ... :-((((
Nah, Oracle would be the joke of the planet. It's probably BSD, since they wouldn't have to release the source for it. That would be far more cost-effective than creating an O/S from scratch.
That's a good post.
Could you break down the failures on Intel hardware for us a little? It would be good to know which components go down more often than others to get an idea of where to spend extra money if one is tied to a PC solution. Motherboards, power supplies, disk controllers, Ethernet, etc, which go down most often in your experience? (Disks die most frequently I reckon, but they're the same across all computer manufacturers.)