Anti-religious zealotry is usually reactive, in response to The Right And Good Chosen People Of God attempting to coerce non-believers into behaving more in line with their religious ideology.
Usually, maybe. But I see no coercion in my original post that spawned this, or even any indication that I am a Bible believer rather than just someone familiar with the original source of the quote. So in this case the anti-religious zealotry was not a reaction to coercion at all.
I think some slashdotters are so used to seeing religious coercion that they think any mention of religion at all is coercion, and they react accordingly.
Of course, we're talking about an anonymous coward post here, so I'm not going to get worked up over it.;)
Lots of folks jump the gun around here, I've noticed. I didn't say anywhere in my post that I was a Bible believer, actually; I just identified the original source of the quote. Seems any mention of religious texts is offensive at all, at least if it's Christian or Jewish.
Re:Unlikely!
on
Halloween VII
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Esther is in my Bible, as well as Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. There are some books the Roman Catholic Church considers to be Scripture such as Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the Maccabees books, III and IV Esdras (I think?), etc., that most Protestants do not.
Not sure where the poster above got the idea that Esther was omitted in Catholic or Protestant Bibles...
I figure I'm capable of examining each book myself on its merits and deciding if it is Scripture or not myself. People were doing so long before any councils decided what was canon and what was not.
Re:Learn to state your case clearly
on
Ebay vs. Musician
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· Score: 1
Yes he did, but I don't think he ever clearly told them in his complaint emails "I am the copyright holder and I stated so in my auction." If he did, he didn't state it at first, and he said way too many other things such that it got buried. His emails should have consisted of little more than just that sentence, because that's the real issue.
Learn to state your case clearly
on
Ebay vs. Musician
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I sympathize with the man completely, but I wish he didn't let himself get sidetracked so easily. I would have sent a letter back that clearly and simply stated:
Your policy says CD-R's can only be sold by the copyright holder and only if the seller indicates this in the description. I am the copyright holder of the music on these CD's and clearly said so in my description, but you have removed my auctions. You have made this mistake twice. Please give me some assurances that I can sell my music in accordance with your policy without having my actions removed. Thank you.
I hate not being able to get a human to talk to me. He's frustrated enough from having them remove his auctions after a cursory glance that didn't even check to see if he followed their policy, and not being able to find someone who will talk to him about it makes it worse.
I also think his "can't sell this on ebay" logo is invalid; that would violate the right of first sale, wouldn't it; the right to resell anything you have bought? Part of fair use, last I checked.
I think you're confused about the difference between free software and copylefted free software. BSD-licensed, X11-licensed, and public domain software are all examples of non-copylefted free software. This software is free because it satisfies the free software definition, but it is not copylefted, because someone can make a non-free derivative version. Copyleft is a strategy of using copyright to prevent people from making non-free derivatives of free software. The GPL is one means (perhaps the best) of copylefting your software.
Check out the philosophy section on gnu.org. There's some good reading there.
Also google for the response to the non-libertarian FAQ.:) Most of the things in that FAQ are trite cliches spouted by folks new to libertarianism, rather than real arguments.
If you are libertarian, be sure to actually check out the project before you decide everything you hear here accurately reflects it. For one thing, they are not secessionists.
They don't want to win by votes alone. They want to move in 20k activists, not just 20k voters. The idea is to sway public opinion through peaceful, rational discourse.
No, I don't agree with all their beliefs. I'm just a friend.:)
You don't know much about libertarianism, do you? They will not want protection from "gouging" utility prices, nor will they expect other people to pay for their infrastructure improvements.
It's like trying to factor products of large prime numbers; sure, you can solve the problem, but it would take longer than the oldest estimates for the age of the universe to do it. It's real, real big.
How many "years past" do you mean? Subversion is relatively new. Only about 2 years, I think. It has been built completely from scratch very rapidly.
I don't think Linus ever used CVS for the kernel. If he did, it was certainly more than two years ago, before subversion existed, so "subversion is still in development" could not have been an argument at that time.
BTW, it's "subversion," not "subversions." Unless you're talking about a different package I don't know about (which would explain a lot).
I think you need to go recheck a few things.
Oh, and FSF definitely doesn't consider Linux, the kernel, to be their flagship. And you should check on latest HURD developments. I'd say (and have said) they are likely to show up on the radar as a usable product very soon.
Here's my prediction. In 2003 the GNU/HURD OS will finally become usable. A combination of ideology, technical interest, and better understood development methodologies is finally going to bring this project to fruition. I don't anticipate a 1.0 release (possible by December but not likely), but I think we will see GNU/HURD in a state similar to Mozilla before 1.0: slow recognition that the project is viable and producing something worth using, a 0.9 level of polish that slowly, almost asymptotically approaches 1.0.
But HURD is dead! We all know this to be true, right? I won't argue. But I will point out two community projects that have variously been pronounced dead and are now leading the way for new developments no one anticipated: Mozilla, and Perl 6. I think all three of these projects share some commonalities: an initial surge of interest that cannot possibly be assimilated into a development process, followed by a general disappointment, abandonment, and outright flaming phase, a shrinking of the group of interested parties to a small dedicated core, lots of unrecognized work behind the scenes, and a gradual awareness in the community that this is Something Good.
We've all heard about the ideological pressures for GNU/HURD. Mercifully, I won't repeat them here.:) That's not to say I don't find them important. One interesting thing you might not know about is binary drivers in the kernel. Basically, someone took a compiled driver, converted it to a bunch of hex bytes in a C struct in a file, added it to the kernel, and called it source. There are some people who are unhappy about that.
Technologically, HURD has a lot to offer. The microkernel underpinnings make for a lot of new features: the whole OS is decentralized, in that authentication can go through the "offical" authentication server (/etc/password or whatever), or through a user-implemented alternative. Nothing except hardware access is really controlled by the kernel. It's like a libertarian , anarchistic OS, where you can ignore all the offical services and provide your own.:) Moreover, you can even mount your own filesystems. As a regular user. These filesystems can be real disks, network entitities, or interfaces to something as yet unheard of. The canonical example is an FTP filesystem. Personally, I've always wanted to be able to mount anything I can ssh to. In my home directory.:) I've even dug into kernel internals to see how that might work, but unless someone wants to buy me off of my current job and put up with me on a moderately steep learning curve, it isn't going to happen anytime soon. It'll be much easier with HURD, though, and I expect to see it.
HURD has a lot of similarities with Darwin, when you think about it. Both are a UNIX like OS running on a microkernel. There's a lot of untapped potential there for new OS possibilities. Microkernels still don't rule the roost, despite being universally recognized in academia as the One True Way. Darwin/Mac OS X has meant the installation of thousands of microkernel based systems across the globe. HURD will mean even more.
Speaking of Mac OS X, work has been done to make HURD work on the version of Mach that sits at the heart of Darwin instead of the GNU version of Mach. GNU/Mach worked on multiple architectures at one time, but that support has been temporarily abandoned in favor of just getting GNU/HURD up and running on Intel. If HURD worked on the Mach from Darwin, it would suddenly have PowerPC to play on, too. There's also a project to port HURD to the L4 microkernel. It's said that Mach is showing its age, and L4 is the next best thing. I wouldn't anticipate seeing L4 play any role until post 1.0, though. I'm not sure what benefits it brings, anyway. Still, interesting that you can take all those servers (read: plain programs) that comprise the HURD, compile them for a different microkernel, and get basically the same OS.
There's been a lot of advances in community development methodology, too. I think we all know how in the early days of GNU RMS kept a tight reign on everything, sometimes to the detriment of the project. Linus, ESR, egcs, and others (you guys!) have shown that this is not the way to run these projects. Frequent releases, complete openness, invited volunteer contributions from anyone, and all the factors in CatB have proved to be the way to run this kind of project. And as that development methodology has become more pervasive, HURD has slowly gained progress.
Nowadays HURD has a very special ally: the Debian project. In the same way that people would like to make the HURD servers run on different microkernels, Debian likes to make their OS (this is OS in the sense of "all the programs and utilities that make a system usable") run on different kernels. Did you know there are several Debian projects that do not involve the Linux kernel? Debian/NetBSD, Debian/Win32. Almost scary. A large part of the important work in making GNU/HURD usable is occurring in the Debian/HURD project. Take the thousands of packages that make up Debian and compile them, one by one, on GNU/HURD. Fix bugs. Send patches back to maintainers. Stress test the system. Build a beautiful apt repository so all GNU/HURD users can be running and testing the absolute latest. Think of how Debian has an almost identical running OS with thousands of packages across so many different architectures: Intel, PowerPC, Sparc, etc. They'll put all that work into making Debian/HURD usable, reliable, and consistent, as well. As a result of this volunteer and mostly decentralized effort, GNU/HURD is going to be a very usable system with thousands of running packages right from the start.
Once there is a running and usable HURD system, optimization will begin. I'm certain this will be just like Mozilla: complaints that the code is a memory hog, complaints that it is needlessly slow. But optimizations will occur. I hope Perl 6 doesn't follow the same pattern. I want it fast from the start.:) But, premature optimization is the root of all evil, and if there's any message to this little essay, it's patience.
One other thing I think the free software community has learned as a whole that will play a prominent role in making HURD usable and popular is how to port an OS across architectures. BSD lite started out as an Intel OS. I think. (Actually, it was a descendant of a VAX OS, which was a descendant of a PDP OS. But who's counting?) Now NetBSD runs on 38 architectures, and FreeBSD is being ported. Linux, the kernel, started out as an Intel only OS, and now runs all over the place. The history of porting that kernel to other architectures is a great lesson in extreme programming and refactoring. Linus didn't care if his kernel ever ran anywhere besides Intel, and in fact he started his work as a chance to learn and practice Intel assembly. He didn't worry about porting his OS at all, because that wasn't needed at the time. Other people came back and refactored the codebase to make it easier to port, then took it to their favorite chips. If it weren't for this history, I'd be upset and scared that HURD is Intel-only right now. As it is, I'm eagerly looking forward to watching people use lessons learned to port HURD and GNU Mach.
The HURD is dead. We've known that for years. We also knew Mozilla was dead, and here I am posting this from its cousin Phoenix. Perl 6 was called a disaster for months, then suddenly one day there was a working Perl 6 grammar and parrot interpreter. Yet, the motivation of some dedicated hackers is unstoppable. We will almost certainly see a usable GNU OS in 2003, and RMS will finally have the fulfillment of his long-delayed vision.
I can see how you would fervently hope so. Heaven forbid someone should hold a non-mainstream but perfectly reasonable view on the subject that different from yours. There ought to be a law to prevent such people from airing their views in public in places like slashdot sigs.
That essay about LD_LIBRARY_PATH is one of the most interesting things I've ever read. Reading it helped me understand not only the issues involved, but affected a lot of my thinking about programming in general. It's good for you!:) I never can remember where it is, but I see that it's the first hit you get when you search for LD_LIBRARY_PATH on google now.
I've used automake for several projects, and never for portability. It is a nice build system. Automake+CVS+a test suite can be a beautiful rapid development environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Anti-religious zealotry is usually reactive, in response to The Right And Good Chosen People Of God attempting to coerce non-believers into behaving more in line with their religious ideology.
Usually, maybe. But I see no coercion in my original post that spawned this, or even any indication that I am a Bible believer rather than just someone familiar with the original source of the quote. So in this case the anti-religious zealotry was not a reaction to coercion at all.
I think some slashdotters are so used to seeing religious coercion that they think any mention of religion at all is coercion, and they react accordingly.
Of course, we're talking about an anonymous coward post here, so I'm not going to get worked up over it. ;)
Thanks.
Lots of folks jump the gun around here, I've noticed. I didn't say anywhere in my post that I was a Bible believer, actually; I just identified the original source of the quote. Seems any mention of religious texts is offensive at all, at least if it's Christian or Jewish.
Hate to tell you, but it was actually Solomon, in the Bible. The book of Proverbs says something to that effect multiple times, in fact.
Lincoln has gotten credit for reusing or slightly rewording Biblical sayings before, including "A house divided cannot stand."
Maybe, but the real solution would be to realize that advertisements and sales activity have no business being covered by an EULA.
But maybe that's just one of my crazy ideas...
Esther is in my Bible, as well as Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. There are some books the Roman Catholic Church considers to be Scripture such as Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the Maccabees books, III and IV Esdras (I think?), etc., that most Protestants do not.
Not sure where the poster above got the idea that Esther was omitted in Catholic or Protestant Bibles...
I figure I'm capable of examining each book myself on its merits and deciding if it is Scripture or not myself. People were doing so long before any councils decided what was canon and what was not.
Yes he did, but I don't think he ever clearly told them in his complaint emails "I am the copyright holder and I stated so in my auction." If he did, he didn't state it at first, and he said way too many other things such that it got buried. His emails should have consisted of little more than just that sentence, because that's the real issue.
I sympathize with the man completely, but I wish he didn't let himself get sidetracked so easily. I would have sent a letter back that clearly and simply stated:
I hate not being able to get a human to talk to me. He's frustrated enough from having them remove his auctions after a cursory glance that didn't even check to see if he followed their policy, and not being able to find someone who will talk to him about it makes it worse.
I also think his "can't sell this on ebay" logo is invalid; that would violate the right of first sale, wouldn't it; the right to resell anything you have bought? Part of fair use, last I checked.
I think you're confused about the difference between free software and copylefted free software. BSD-licensed, X11-licensed, and public domain software are all examples of non-copylefted free software. This software is free because it satisfies the free software definition, but it is not copylefted, because someone can make a non-free derivative version. Copyleft is a strategy of using copyright to prevent people from making non-free derivatives of free software. The GPL is one means (perhaps the best) of copylefting your software.
Check out the philosophy section on gnu.org. There's some good reading there.
Also google for the response to the non-libertarian FAQ. :) Most of the things in that FAQ are trite cliches spouted by folks new to libertarianism, rather than real arguments.
I'm sensing a recursion thing starting, here.
If you are libertarian, be sure to actually check out the project before you decide everything you hear here accurately reflects it. For one thing, they are not secessionists.
Google for Eric Raymond's libertarian FAQ.
we really don't want to just walk away from.
libertarians, like these folks, do.
If you want change, work for it. Get involved. It's easy enough to get elected to local boards and councils; after that, work your way up.
That is exactly what they are trying to motivate 20k people to do.
They don't want to win by votes alone. They want to move in 20k activists, not just 20k voters. The idea is to sway public opinion through peaceful, rational discourse.
No, I don't agree with all their beliefs. I'm just a friend. :)
You don't know much about libertarianism, do you? They will not want protection from "gouging" utility prices, nor will they expect other people to pay for their infrastructure improvements.
It's like trying to factor products of large prime numbers; sure, you can solve the problem, but it would take longer than the oldest estimates for the age of the universe to do it. It's real, real big.
Eventually Mozilla will become emacs.
How many "years past" do you mean? Subversion is relatively new. Only about 2 years, I think. It has been built completely from scratch very rapidly.
I don't think Linus ever used CVS for the kernel. If he did, it was certainly more than two years ago, before subversion existed, so "subversion is still in development" could not have been an argument at that time.
BTW, it's "subversion," not "subversions." Unless you're talking about a different package I don't know about (which would explain a lot).
I think you need to go recheck a few things.
Oh, and FSF definitely doesn't consider Linux, the kernel, to be their flagship. And you should check on latest HURD developments. I'd say (and have said) they are likely to show up on the radar as a usable product very soon.
Boy, one might almost call that license ... viral.
Here's my prediction. In 2003 the GNU/HURD OS will finally become usable. A combination of ideology, technical interest, and better understood development methodologies is finally going to bring this project to fruition. I don't anticipate a 1.0 release (possible by December but not likely), but I think we will see GNU/HURD in a state similar to Mozilla before 1.0: slow recognition that the project is viable and producing something worth using, a 0.9 level of polish that slowly, almost asymptotically approaches 1.0.
But HURD is dead! We all know this to be true, right? I won't argue. But I will point out two community projects that have variously been pronounced dead and are now leading the way for new developments no one anticipated: Mozilla, and Perl 6. I think all three of these projects share some commonalities: an initial surge of interest that cannot possibly be assimilated into a development process, followed by a general disappointment, abandonment, and outright flaming phase, a shrinking of the group of interested parties to a small dedicated core, lots of unrecognized work behind the scenes, and a gradual awareness in the community that this is Something Good.
We've all heard about the ideological pressures for GNU/HURD. Mercifully, I won't repeat them here. :) That's not to say I don't find them important. One interesting thing you might not know about is binary drivers in the kernel. Basically, someone took a compiled driver, converted it to a bunch of hex bytes in a C struct in a file, added it to the kernel, and called it source. There are some people who are unhappy about that.
Technologically, HURD has a lot to offer. The microkernel underpinnings make for a lot of new features: the whole OS is decentralized, in that authentication can go through the "offical" authentication server (/etc/password or whatever), or through a user-implemented alternative. Nothing except hardware access is really controlled by the kernel. It's like a libertarian , anarchistic OS, where you can ignore all the offical services and provide your own. :) Moreover, you can even mount your own filesystems. As a regular user. These filesystems can be real disks, network entitities, or interfaces to something as yet unheard of. The canonical example is an FTP filesystem. Personally, I've always wanted to be able to mount anything I can ssh to. In my home directory. :) I've even dug into kernel internals to see how that might work, but unless someone wants to buy me off of my current job and put up with me on a moderately steep learning curve, it isn't going to happen anytime soon. It'll be much easier with HURD, though, and I expect to see it.
HURD has a lot of similarities with Darwin, when you think about it. Both are a UNIX like OS running on a microkernel. There's a lot of untapped potential there for new OS possibilities. Microkernels still don't rule the roost, despite being universally recognized in academia as the One True Way. Darwin/Mac OS X has meant the installation of thousands of microkernel based systems across the globe. HURD will mean even more.
Speaking of Mac OS X, work has been done to make HURD work on the version of Mach that sits at the heart of Darwin instead of the GNU version of Mach. GNU/Mach worked on multiple architectures at one time, but that support has been temporarily abandoned in favor of just getting GNU/HURD up and running on Intel. If HURD worked on the Mach from Darwin, it would suddenly have PowerPC to play on, too. There's also a project to port HURD to the L4 microkernel. It's said that Mach is showing its age, and L4 is the next best thing. I wouldn't anticipate seeing L4 play any role until post 1.0, though. I'm not sure what benefits it brings, anyway. Still, interesting that you can take all those servers (read: plain programs) that comprise the HURD, compile them for a different microkernel, and get basically the same OS.
There's been a lot of advances in community development methodology, too. I think we all know how in the early days of GNU RMS kept a tight reign on everything, sometimes to the detriment of the project. Linus, ESR, egcs, and others (you guys!) have shown that this is not the way to run these projects. Frequent releases, complete openness, invited volunteer contributions from anyone, and all the factors in CatB have proved to be the way to run this kind of project. And as that development methodology has become more pervasive, HURD has slowly gained progress.
Nowadays HURD has a very special ally: the Debian project. In the same way that people would like to make the HURD servers run on different microkernels, Debian likes to make their OS (this is OS in the sense of "all the programs and utilities that make a system usable") run on different kernels. Did you know there are several Debian projects that do not involve the Linux kernel? Debian/NetBSD, Debian/Win32. Almost scary. A large part of the important work in making GNU/HURD usable is occurring in the Debian/HURD project. Take the thousands of packages that make up Debian and compile them, one by one, on GNU/HURD. Fix bugs. Send patches back to maintainers. Stress test the system. Build a beautiful apt repository so all GNU/HURD users can be running and testing the absolute latest. Think of how Debian has an almost identical running OS with thousands of packages across so many different architectures: Intel, PowerPC, Sparc, etc. They'll put all that work into making Debian/HURD usable, reliable, and consistent, as well. As a result of this volunteer and mostly decentralized effort, GNU/HURD is going to be a very usable system with thousands of running packages right from the start.
Once there is a running and usable HURD system, optimization will begin. I'm certain this will be just like Mozilla: complaints that the code is a memory hog, complaints that it is needlessly slow. But optimizations will occur. I hope Perl 6 doesn't follow the same pattern. I want it fast from the start. :) But, premature optimization is the root of all evil, and if there's any message to this little essay, it's patience.
One other thing I think the free software community has learned as a whole that will play a prominent role in making HURD usable and popular is how to port an OS across architectures. BSD lite started out as an Intel OS. I think. (Actually, it was a descendant of a VAX OS, which was a descendant of a PDP OS. But who's counting?) Now NetBSD runs on 38 architectures, and FreeBSD is being ported. Linux, the kernel, started out as an Intel only OS, and now runs all over the place. The history of porting that kernel to other architectures is a great lesson in extreme programming and refactoring. Linus didn't care if his kernel ever ran anywhere besides Intel, and in fact he started his work as a chance to learn and practice Intel assembly. He didn't worry about porting his OS at all, because that wasn't needed at the time. Other people came back and refactored the codebase to make it easier to port, then took it to their favorite chips. If it weren't for this history, I'd be upset and scared that HURD is Intel-only right now. As it is, I'm eagerly looking forward to watching people use lessons learned to port HURD and GNU Mach.
The HURD is dead. We've known that for years. We also knew Mozilla was dead, and here I am posting this from its cousin Phoenix. Perl 6 was called a disaster for months, then suddenly one day there was a working Perl 6 grammar and parrot interpreter. Yet, the motivation of some dedicated hackers is unstoppable. We will almost certainly see a usable GNU OS in 2003, and RMS will finally have the fulfillment of his long-delayed vision.
Right now, if you google for "Quaoar," you'll find one unrelated hit, one news item, and a suggestion that maybe you meant "Quasar."
I love your thought process.
You need to learn how to spell "amendment." :)
I can see how you would fervently hope so. Heaven forbid someone should hold a non-mainstream but perfectly reasonable view on the subject that different from yours. There ought to be a law to prevent such people from airing their views in public in places like slashdot sigs.
Do not set LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Compile with -R or LD_RUN_PATH instead.
That essay about LD_LIBRARY_PATH is one of the most interesting things I've ever read. Reading it helped me understand not only the issues involved, but affected a lot of my thinking about programming in general. It's good for you! :) I never can remember where it is, but I see that it's the first hit you get when you search for LD_LIBRARY_PATH on google now.
I've used automake for several projects, and never for portability. It is a nice build system. Automake+CVS+a test suite can be a beautiful rapid development environment.
Thank you for keeping Red Hat Free.