Firstly, the GPL does not automatically assign copyright to the FSF. Some people do it because the FSF has more ability to enforce the license than J. Random Developer but a copyright holder who employs the GPL still holds copyright. The original copyright holder can even license the same work to different parties with different licenses.
Secondly, the GPL has no provisions whatsover against diarrhea of the mouth. SCO can trash talk the GPL all day without violating it. The GPL is only going to bite them if they distribute binaries without source or attempt to extort fees from users. Basically someone who is approached by SCO with a bill or legal threat needs to go the kernel devs and other kernel copyright holders. Then and only then does SCO get held accountable.
I humbly suggest the v3 of the GPL have oral diarrhea provisions.
I'm running Mozilla Firebird on a PPC Linux machine. It opened just fine. It's set to block many ads and cookies and has very indifferent Flash capabilities. Try disabling Flash or get Flash Click To View and see if that helps.
All of that only goes for boxed software that is bought like product. MS, Oracle, etc all assume that the only solution to a problem is buy some product. For a techie, that's the easy way out. It is often expensive and not a very good fit for the problem either.
I'll give you a for-instance. We use a troubleticket system called IRM to handle IT inventory and helpdesk tracking. It did almost everything we needed it to do very very well. The only thing it cost us was me learning how to set it up. The one thing it didn't do is spit out of a list of machines that have a particular software package installed. I made a module for it that did it and made it available to the rest of the IRM community.
As downloaded, IRM was a better fit than anything we would have cared to pay for. A very small amount of tweaking on my part made it exactly what was needed.
The process that is using the file can still read the inodes. To put it another way, running processes use cached file descriptors. Inodes in use will stay availiable to the processes that are using them. The inodes will be deallocated once no processes are accessing them. That is how we upgrade live services; switch the old files out from underneath and restart the services so they fully release the old inodes and start using their new files.
What it looks like to the end user is that you can delete the file but it doesn't actually go away until you shutdown everything that's using it.
Godwin's law is more an observation about human nature than a law that can be invoked in an argument. Think Bugs Bunny hovering in the air while Elmer Fudd plumments to the ground. "I know what you're thinking: this violates the law of gravity. Well, I never studied law."
Basically, if someone trots out Nazis, Commies, or The Terrorists in an argument just mentally chalk them off as losers and DON'T REPLY to them. You don't invoke Godwin's Law or its Corollaries; clueless disputants invoke it themselves.
You want to sue us? We will disable your software and the data inside it until you bend over and drop your pants. And how will the government be able to defend itself from that sort of abuse?
Ok, so MS can threaten them with their extra 'leet backdoors. The goverment has all the guns. If Ballmer and Gates had AR-15s jammed in their ears, I do believe they would pull their peckers out of the goverment's ass in a hurry,
A software company threatening the goverment with IT armageddon is laughable.
"Computers do not have intuition. They cannot form an hypothesis. They have no imagination. They cannot do research or construct an argument. In other words, they have no mind, and therefore they will not "exceed the computational abilities of the human brain" at all, much less in 20 years."
True computers do none of these things. But computers were the next step up from things called "calculators". I agree with you in a way. Computers will not exceed human brains in certain capacities.
A technologically manufactured brain/mind would be a whole other kettle of fish altogether. Since our minds operate according to the laws of chemistry and physics then there is no reason in principal why we couldn't construct artificial minds. This device would recognizably be a product of technology. It would be no mere computer.
The parent does have a point though. I seriously doubt that human minds work anything like Von Neumann or Turing machines. Even a 64 processor, 512GB RAM, multiterabyte blade cluster is still an approximation of a Turing machine. You can still model it as a thing that does one simple thing at a time ludicrously fast.
Near as we can tell, human minds run thousands or even millions of "threads" simultaneously and slowly. Even though EEGs show something like a "clock" in human brains, the individual neurons run far more asynchronously than computer logic. A neuron can be in many more "states" than two and this process is not terribly precise. All of this is just a long winded way of saying most computers make a lousy model of a human brain and most software is a lousy model of a human mind.
On the other hand, we have been experimenting with asynchrous logic and neural nets for years. And as the above post mentioned, we're taking small steps with quantum computers. For the most part we are still taking baby steps making such machines do anything useful but those efforts look like better models for human minds and brains than the digital logic we use as a kind of mental lever.
true, but on the other hand, the moment they released quake and quake2, there was such a huge influx of cheating, that it pretty much killed the left over communities... plus dont forget that you dont see id releasing quake3 or doom3's source... they only released quake and quake2 because they dont see that they will be making any respectable amount of money off of it anymore...
I've noticed that Id tends to release the source to an engine a year or two after releasing a new engine to third party developers. In a way, it kills the market for their preceding product since it is cheater heaven. Since it is the current product that makes them money, anything that drives adoption of their current product is good for them. Its win-win for them. They score points with the techie crowd and they don't have to compete with their own established base.
Its insidious. They use the consequences of releasing an old free product to drive sales of new product. They retain ownership of the data files so it isn't as though they're giving free games to end users. Any free data files we come up with on our own are no threat to products a generation ahead. Very pretty. I'm not complaining though. The hacked on ports of the Quake and Doom sources are prettier and have more features than the original games. Sometimes things do get better with age!
The Atari, for some reason, was not that interesting to work on.
In a way, the Ataris were like an indirect way of hacking TV sets. Most everything interesting you could do with an Atari involved the GTIA and ANTIC chips. Even now, some people try to find ways to do crazy things like get 4096 or more color palettes out of them. The sound sucked, the sprites were iffy, and the default character set was pretty hideous. You could do damn near anything that's possible to do to a monitor with one though.
Unless you like thinking about things like vertical blanks and overscanning, the Ataris were just odd ducks.
Nothing special, nothing facinating about it and it didn't lead him into computers as a hobby... I wonder if it's the same for kids starting out these days on P4s with WinXP.
I watch the kids in school computer labs. They might as well be watching TV. There are more outlets than ever for the kids with a geeky bent but you're right about one thing though. No one will particularly fall in love with their first machine.
I had an Atari 800XL and later a 520ST. I've also got to play with Amigas, C64s, TI99/4As, Sinclairs and a plethora of consoles. Each machine had at least one feature that made it distinct from all the others. The Ataris had that wonderful video chipset. The Commodores had the fantastic SID chips.The Amigas had an even more wonderful video chipset. Going from the 800XL to the ST was a real jump. It was also the machine that went with me out of the house into adulthood.
Since the ST, it has been a progression of machines that started with a 486/DX2-66. Each machine since then hasn't really been different in kind, only degree. At some point, I'll have 64 bit machines at home and work and those will just be faster machines with the same data that has been following me around since the 486. Most software will now run on any platform that has a minimum level of power. It will be emulated, recompiled, translated, or its API calls intercepted and redirected. The hardware+firmware used to really separate software worlds. Not anymore. The only important differences between machines now are purely performance metrics. The underlying platform matters less and less everyday. Even gaming consoles are more about titles and less about technical features. Intellivision basketball is much more like real basketball. They don't advertise them like that anymore.
Computer based flamage doesn't seem very passionate to me either. Tech weenies would really argue the fine points of Atari vs. Commodore. These days the Apple vs. PC flaming feels really half-hearted and the BIG arguments are philosophical and political. Those will be settled one way or another in ten years tops. This proprietary vs. free stuff will boil down to conventional wisdom. RMS will probably be the only one left who really gets excited about it.
At that point, even geeks won't be very excited about computers. They'll still be used masterfully by geeky people but they'll just be a means to hack DNA or nanotech or something else.
Only 1 hour? Well, what I'm going to describe would be overkill then. It is possible to build a serial cable (simple stuff) that lets a PC be in an Atari SIO daisy chain. The simplest software that does this is called SIO2PC though there are others.
You could have transferred directories to the PC as fast as the Atari drive would run. You can easily make disk images for emulators as well.
I've also recovered old C64 floppies with the cable that others have mentioned. Its really creepy watching PC direct a 1541/1571. Its even creepier watching an Atari boot from a PC.
That was true to life in more ways than one. Remember when the goverment "bailed out" the airlines by taking Mr. Garrison's business and threatening him with jail?
Done in the '60s or no, manned spaceflight is Very Hard and Very Expensive. Up till now, the manned spaceflight club only had two real members the USA and USSR/Russia. Anybody else pulling this off is news. It's especially news these days since the Russians can't afford to do the things they accomplished in their heyday and the US is infatuated with shuttles and mostly just plays in low Earth orbit.
Manned spaceflight has needed aggressive new blood for some time now. If China starts accomplishing "Great Things", then it just might motivate the US a little.
I'm no fan of MS but if they did argue "Because clearly, if the alternative to 'the way we were doing things' is this god-awful mess of confirmation windows, then their solution becomes the obvious one, and thus not suitable for patent." I would agree with them.
It just so happens this ONE guy has a beef with MS so he's going to kick them around a little. The problem is that there are many many patents as stupid as Eolas in the hands of companies who compete with lawyers rather than product. This type of thing is more of a threat to FOSS and companies like Opera than MS.
Software patents are the IP equivalent of nuclear weapons. The only thing they're really good for is stopping the other guy from using his on you. When they're used, everybody loses.
This is not a sanctioned code release. It would be just about impossible to build a development community around it. Anything made with it would be warez. I suppose its possible some tight knit group of geniuses could adapt and "spread" the work but I wouldn't hold my breath. There would be inevitable bugs and no good way for the clandestine developers to get feedback.
Contrary to SCO's opinion, unclean code doesn't help Linux at all. The best thing to do is just avoid that source like the plague. It would legally contaminate anyone who even had just had it much less looked at it.
If he is correct about the license then it is a legitimate concern. If someone contributes to say Subversion, then they are locked out of contributing to unrelated projects that are managed with Bitkeeper unless the maintainers have an alternate method for accessing the development tree.
the RIAA has more than enough motive to frame people.
Granted, they have the motive. But why bother? There are gazillions of people who really are sharing out their entire Britney and Hanson collections. Why bother with the risk of getting caught framing someone when they have so many potential targets that are legally legitimate?
The RIAA has a quality control problem with who they're suing. A little bit of research and kid glove handling could have headed off the little old lady before it blew up in their faces. It would even be more cost effective. They won't need to pay for PR damage control and there'll be even more money for the attack lawyers. The pool of victims er defendants will be that much more unsavory looking to the jury.
Oh well, intelligence isn't a quality we assign to the RIAA around here. Maybe they really are stupid enough to do a frame up.
There's an old adage that says "If you take the king's shilling you become the king's man". @Stake has just loudly announced that they are little more than another Gartner. Why should anyone take any pronouncements they make seriously? Especially since we know they are adverse to offending MS. Someone last week put it best: "l0pht is getting s0pht."
Anyway, @Stake did not "bestow" the job on Geer. He was a founding member and it become politically incorrect for him to do something he had always been doing. He is correct in that we have a very large problem. When tenured academics scuttle about in fear of MS, we definitely have a problem.
I was referring the Weird Al tune "All about the Pentiums" in which he indeed threatens to "Control-Alt-Delete you!". I thought you might have been too.
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Firstly, the GPL does not automatically assign copyright to the FSF. Some people do it because the FSF has more ability to enforce the license than J. Random Developer but a copyright holder who employs the GPL still holds copyright. The original copyright holder can even license the same work to different parties with different licenses.
Secondly, the GPL has no provisions whatsover against diarrhea of the mouth. SCO can trash talk the GPL all day without violating it. The GPL is only going to bite them if they distribute binaries without source or attempt to extort fees from users. Basically someone who is approached by SCO with a bill or legal threat needs to go the kernel devs and other kernel copyright holders. Then and only then does SCO get held accountable.
I humbly suggest the v3 of the GPL have oral diarrhea provisions.
I'm running Mozilla Firebird on a PPC Linux machine. It opened just fine. It's set to block many ads and cookies and has very indifferent Flash capabilities. Try disabling Flash or get Flash Click To View and see if that helps.
All of that only goes for boxed software that is bought like product. MS, Oracle, etc all assume that the only solution to a problem is buy some product. For a techie, that's the easy way out. It is often expensive and not a very good fit for the problem either.
I'll give you a for-instance. We use a troubleticket system called IRM to handle IT inventory and helpdesk tracking. It did almost everything we needed it to do very very well. The only thing it cost us was me learning how to set it up. The one thing it didn't do is spit out of a list of machines that have a particular software package installed. I made a module for it that did it and made it available to the rest of the IRM community.
As downloaded, IRM was a better fit than anything we would have cared to pay for. A very small amount of tweaking on my part made it exactly what was needed.
Spyware, spyware, spyyyyyyyyyywaaaaare!
Wankers.
The process that is using the file can still read the inodes. To put it another way, running processes use cached file descriptors. Inodes in use will stay availiable to the processes that are using them. The inodes will be deallocated once no processes are accessing them. That is how we upgrade live services; switch the old files out from underneath and restart the services so they fully release the old inodes and start using their new files.
What it looks like to the end user is that you can delete the file but it doesn't actually go away until you shutdown everything that's using it.
Godwin's law is more an observation about human nature than a law that can be invoked in an argument. Think Bugs Bunny hovering in the air while Elmer Fudd plumments to the ground. "I know what you're thinking: this violates the law of gravity. Well, I never studied law."
Basically, if someone trots out Nazis, Commies, or The Terrorists in an argument just mentally chalk them off as losers and DON'T REPLY to them. You don't invoke Godwin's Law or its Corollaries; clueless disputants invoke it themselves.
You have two right wing politicians. One is pro-life. The other is pro-choice. Now go vote.
You want to sue us? We will disable your software and the data inside it until you bend over and drop your pants. And how will the government be able to defend itself from that sort of abuse?
Ok, so MS can threaten them with their extra 'leet backdoors. The goverment has all the guns. If Ballmer and Gates had AR-15s jammed in their ears, I do believe they would pull their peckers out of the goverment's ass in a hurry,
A software company threatening the goverment with IT armageddon is laughable.
"Computers do not have intuition. They cannot form an hypothesis. They have no imagination. They cannot do research or construct an argument. In other words, they have no mind, and therefore they will not "exceed the computational abilities of the human brain" at all, much less in 20 years."
True computers do none of these things. But computers were the next step up from things called "calculators". I agree with you in a way. Computers will not exceed human brains in certain capacities.
A technologically manufactured brain/mind would be a whole other kettle of fish altogether. Since our minds operate according to the laws of chemistry and physics then there is no reason in principal why we couldn't construct artificial minds. This device would recognizably be a product of technology. It would be no mere computer.
The parent does have a point though. I seriously doubt that human minds work anything like Von Neumann or Turing machines. Even a 64 processor, 512GB RAM, multiterabyte blade cluster is still an approximation of a Turing machine. You can still model it as a thing that does one simple thing at a time ludicrously fast.
Near as we can tell, human minds run thousands or even millions of "threads" simultaneously and slowly. Even though EEGs show something like a "clock" in human brains, the individual neurons run far more asynchronously than computer logic. A neuron can be in many more "states" than two and this process is not terribly precise. All of this is just a long winded way of saying most computers make a lousy model of a human brain and most software is a lousy model of a human mind.
On the other hand, we have been experimenting with asynchrous logic and neural nets for years. And as the above post mentioned, we're taking small steps with quantum computers. For the most part we are still taking baby steps making such machines do anything useful but those efforts look like better models for human minds and brains than the digital logic we use as a kind of mental lever.
...that he loved Louisiana politics since he could still take part in them after his death.
true, but on the other hand, the moment they released quake and quake2, there was such a huge influx of cheating, that it pretty much killed the left over communities... plus dont forget that you dont see id releasing quake3 or doom3's source... they only released quake and quake2 because they dont see that they will be making any respectable amount of money off of it anymore...
I've noticed that Id tends to release the source to an engine a year or two after releasing a new engine to third party developers. In a way, it kills the market for their preceding product since it is cheater heaven. Since it is the current product that makes them money, anything that drives adoption of their current product is good for them. Its win-win for them. They score points with the techie crowd and they don't have to compete with their own established base.
Its insidious. They use the consequences of releasing an old free product to drive sales of new product. They retain ownership of the data files so it isn't as though they're giving free games to end users. Any free data files we come up with on our own are no threat to products a generation ahead. Very pretty. I'm not complaining though. The hacked on ports of the Quake and Doom sources are prettier and have more features than the original games. Sometimes things do get better with age!
The Atari, for some reason, was not that interesting to work on.
In a way, the Ataris were like an indirect way of hacking TV sets. Most everything interesting you could do with an Atari involved the GTIA and ANTIC chips. Even now, some people try to find ways to do crazy things like get 4096 or more color palettes out of them. The sound sucked, the sprites were iffy, and the default character set was pretty hideous. You could do damn near anything that's possible to do to a monitor with one though.
Unless you like thinking about things like vertical blanks and overscanning, the Ataris were just odd ducks.
Nothing special, nothing facinating about it and it didn't lead him into computers as a hobby... I wonder if it's the same for kids starting out these days on P4s with WinXP.
I watch the kids in school computer labs. They might as well be watching TV. There are more outlets than ever for the kids with a geeky bent but you're right about one thing though. No one will particularly fall in love with their first machine.
I had an Atari 800XL and later a 520ST. I've also got to play with Amigas, C64s, TI99/4As, Sinclairs and a plethora of consoles. Each machine had at least one feature that made it distinct from all the others. The Ataris had that wonderful video chipset. The Commodores had the fantastic SID chips.The Amigas had an even more wonderful video chipset. Going from the 800XL to the ST was a real jump. It was also the machine that went with me out of the house into adulthood.
Since the ST, it has been a progression of machines that started with a 486/DX2-66. Each machine since then hasn't really been different in kind, only degree. At some point, I'll have 64 bit machines at home and work and those will just be faster machines with the same data that has been following me around since the 486. Most software will now run on any platform that has a minimum level of power. It will be emulated, recompiled, translated, or its API calls intercepted and redirected. The hardware+firmware used to really separate software worlds. Not anymore. The only important differences between machines now are purely performance metrics. The underlying platform matters less and less everyday. Even gaming consoles are more about titles and less about technical features. Intellivision basketball is much more like real basketball. They don't advertise them like that anymore.
Computer based flamage doesn't seem very passionate to me either. Tech weenies would really argue the fine points of Atari vs. Commodore. These days the Apple vs. PC flaming feels really half-hearted and the BIG arguments are philosophical and political. Those will be settled one way or another in ten years tops. This proprietary vs. free stuff will boil down to conventional wisdom. RMS will probably be the only one left who really gets excited about it.
At that point, even geeks won't be very excited about computers. They'll still be used masterfully by geeky people but they'll just be a means to hack DNA or nanotech or something else.
Only 1 hour? Well, what I'm going to describe would be overkill then. It is possible to build a serial cable (simple stuff) that lets a PC be in an Atari SIO daisy chain. The simplest software that does this is called SIO2PC though there are others.
You could have transferred directories to the PC as fast as the Atari drive would run. You can easily make disk images for emulators as well.
I've also recovered old C64 floppies with the cable that others have mentioned. Its really creepy watching PC direct a 1541/1571. Its even creepier watching an Atari boot from a PC.
When I asked "What about tying him down and leaving on top of an anthill instead?" he replied "I like that idea."
Don't forget to pour honey on his nads.....
That was true to life in more ways than one. Remember when the goverment "bailed out" the airlines by taking Mr. Garrison's business and threatening him with jail?
Done in the '60s or no, manned spaceflight is Very Hard and Very Expensive. Up till now, the manned spaceflight club only had two real members the USA and USSR/Russia. Anybody else pulling this off is news. It's especially news these days since the Russians can't afford to do the things they accomplished in their heyday and the US is infatuated with shuttles and mostly just plays in low Earth orbit.
Manned spaceflight has needed aggressive new blood for some time now. If China starts accomplishing "Great Things", then it just might motivate the US a little.
I'm no fan of MS but if they did argue "Because clearly, if the alternative to 'the way we were doing things' is this god-awful mess of confirmation windows, then their solution becomes the obvious one, and thus not suitable for patent." I would agree with them.
It just so happens this ONE guy has a beef with MS so he's going to kick them around a little. The problem is that there are many many patents as stupid as Eolas in the hands of companies who compete with lawyers rather than product. This type of thing is more of a threat to FOSS and companies like Opera than MS.
Software patents are the IP equivalent of nuclear weapons. The only thing they're really good for is stopping the other guy from using his on you. When they're used, everybody loses.
This is not a sanctioned code release. It would be just about impossible to build a development community around it. Anything made with it would be warez. I suppose its possible some tight knit group of geniuses could adapt and "spread" the work but I wouldn't hold my breath. There would be inevitable bugs and no good way for the clandestine developers to get feedback.
Contrary to SCO's opinion, unclean code doesn't help Linux at all. The best thing to do is just avoid that source like the plague. It would legally contaminate anyone who even had just had it much less looked at it.
If he is correct about the license then it is a legitimate concern. If someone contributes to say Subversion, then they are locked out of contributing to unrelated projects that are managed with Bitkeeper unless the maintainers have an alternate method for accessing the development tree.
the RIAA has more than enough motive to frame people.
Granted, they have the motive. But why bother? There are gazillions of people who really are sharing out their entire Britney and Hanson collections. Why bother with the risk of getting caught framing someone when they have so many potential targets that are legally legitimate?
The RIAA has a quality control problem with who they're suing. A little bit of research and kid glove handling could have headed off the little old lady before it blew up in their faces. It would even be more cost effective. They won't need to pay for PR damage control and there'll be even more money for the attack lawyers. The pool of victims er defendants will be that much more unsavory looking to the jury.
Oh well, intelligence isn't a quality we assign to the RIAA around here. Maybe they really are stupid enough to do a frame up.
There's an old adage that says "If you take the king's shilling you become the king's man". @Stake has just loudly announced that they are little more than another Gartner. Why should anyone take any pronouncements they make seriously? Especially since we know they are adverse to offending MS. Someone last week put it best: "l0pht is getting s0pht."
Anyway, @Stake did not "bestow" the job on Geer. He was a founding member and it become politically incorrect for him to do something he had always been doing. He is correct in that we have a very large problem. When tenured academics scuttle about in fear of MS, we definitely have a problem.
Check this out.
I was referring the Weird Al tune "All about the Pentiums" in which he indeed threatens to "Control-Alt-Delete you!". I thought you might have been too.