However, if both camps understand that they are working towards the same end, and work together towards that end, there will be plenty of room for a middle ground.
I'm not advocating polarizing the open-source community. Just the opposite, in fact. I was commenting on my observations of the community, and pointing out that I didn't necessarily like what I saw.
I agree that there are both moral and pratical benefits to using Linux, and I think we need to emphasize both to potential users.
What I found most interesting...
on
The Stallman Factor
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...was this quote from Linus:
"Quite frankly, I don't _want_ people using Linux for ideological reasons. I think ideology sucks. This world would be a much better place if people had less ideology, and a whole lot more. I do this because it's FUN and because others might find it useful, not because I got religion."
Given that Linus has a rep for being a bit of an egotist, I was a bit suprised by this. There seem to be two camps of Linux users: those who use it because it's Free Software (the RMS camp), and those who use it because it does what we need to do better than Win2k.
But this isn't a problem, per se, as long as each camp recognizes the other's right to exist. There is no need for "controversial figures" in the open-source community. There is very little need for evangelism. There IS a need for people from each camp to put their effort into developing Free Software which is as good as (or better than) commercial software. Doing so will further both causes.
I'm glad I saw some intellegent criticism of this law in addition to the usual Slashdot Sheep saying that the government can't take away our rights.
This law probably isn't a great idea. I mean, look how well it hasn't worked in the movie industry. I've been seeing R-rated movies, with parental consent but not always with a parent, since I was about 14. I've been carded once (on my 17th birthday, of all days).
That said, my mom happened to be much more involved in her job as a parent than many these days. She decided I was mature enough to see certain movies before the MPAA thought I should. There were plenty of movies she felt were inappropriate for me at that age, and I respected that. I agree 120% that it SHOULD be a parent's job to make these decisions. The problem is that a lot of parents AREN'T taking responsibility to care what their kid sees.
Is every kid who has lazy parents and therefore plays Doom or Wolfenstein or GTA is going to shoot up a school? Of course not. In fact, I would contend that I was a less agressive high-schooler because I took out agression playing violent video games. It makes me much more uncomfortable that Congress is trying to blame all of the problems in schools on the video game industry than that they're doing parents' jobs.
Maybe if they got some teachers who knew how to teach and paid them a decent salary, we'd have educated kids. Oh no I must be a Democrat!
Party affiliations are getting pretty twisted around with the DMCA. Sure, there's Mr. Boucher (D-VA), but there's also Mr. Hollins (D-Disney). The House still has a Republican majority. I vaguely recall Tom DeLay (R-TX) not letting an xxAA bill out of comittee recently.
It's true that the Republicans are largely responsible for screwing up this country lately, but with this issue you need to pay attention to the person, not the party.
So Intel put the P4 on a quad-pumped bus to get the clock speed to look better. When AMD put the Athlon on a double-pumped 133 MHz bus and said it had a 266 MHz bus speed, nobody believed it. Now even Socket A motherboards admit that they run at 133 MHz now. What gives with Intel doing this? Am I missing something that's supposed to impress me?
(if I am, please tell me, because otherwise I will be buying an AMD processor for my new computer)
What are your feelings on microkernels vs. monolithic kernels? Linux attempts to be both through the use of loadable modules; is this an ideal answer to the question? How do you define what is an essential component of an operating system kernel?
Your famous series of -AC kernel patches is described by most as being much more experimental than Linus's kernels. Do you feel that Linux should be an experimental OS rather than one which is designed for production use? Or do you write these patches to take Linux closer to (or beyond it's limits) in the spirit of kernel hacking?
The Spiderman movie is doing well because the MPAA said it would (through their companies advertising it). The MPAA is directly making money from it. Isn't that illegal?
And this question will almost certainly get modded Troll or Flamebait, but I can't help but wonder how much of that money is going to line the pockets of Sen. Fritz Hollins (D-Disney)?
This one might piss off the religious right. The Big Bang could sort of be reconciled with the idea that God created the world in 7 days, since maybe the Big Bang happened on the first day. But the idea that the universe has always existed (and therefore predates creation) is a big problem, since it excludes God from the picture.
I'll be interested to hear the religious responses to this theory.
Of course this is a violation of the 5th Amendment. My question is, why aren't SonicBlue's lawyers screaming bloody murder about this to the press?? The average American is going to be much more outraged by the fact that a judge is forcing this company to testify against itself than that the company has to collect statistics. I know I certainly am.
What's even better about New Balance is that they make damn good sneakers.
But their website is 0wned by M$. When I go there in Konqueror or Opera (which identifies itself as IE 5), it says the site isn't compatible with my browser and links me to IE or Netscape for Windoze.
Why do HP's boxes get such a bad name? I bought my Athlon 750 box from them a couple of years ago, and I've never had a problem with it, even during the addition of more memory, another hard disk, the removal of the CD burner, installation of Linux, etc. And Customer Service handled things quite well when they fscked up my order (they upgraded shipping to next-day saturday delivery so it would only arrive one day later than they told me it would). Am I the only one?
(disclaimer: to my knowledge, I was the only satisfied customer of Tower Air before they folded:) )
The shell is a program that runs on top of UNIX and can be replaced with a different shell at the discretion of the computer's user. I don't have to use bash; I could use tcsh if I wanted to.
IE is a program that runs as an integral part of the Windows kernel and can not be replaced by a different browser. Or so the states are trying to argue.
If someone who is a CS prof at MIT doesn't understand what a window manager is, I fear for the future of CS research. I have friends who are English majors and could explain that KDE, Gnome, and XFree86 are all prograams that may or may not be installed on a particular Linux system.
Although I have to wonder what sort of deal did Microsoft offer him to forget the difference between Windoze and KDE?:)
Bill Gates to solve the crisis in the West Bank???
Now THAT is something I'd like to see. Which side would he take? The Israelis, who simply do not get it, or the Palestinians who have a monopoly on God?
(since nobody ever understands what I'm referring to, this thing would have been over years ago if the Israelis knew how to manipulate world opinion like the other countries in the Middle East. And Muslims have a long history of destroying everyone else's holy places when they occupy a new land, because their god is the ONLY god. The Jews and Christians don't because their god is the biggest, not the only.)
Of course Linux isn't piracy. It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to pirate RedHat when I can get it legally from their website.
This is another one of those "We'll look like we're compromising on this minor point so that people can buy into our other major point" things. Linux may not be piracy, but it is viral and anti-capitalist and bad for consumers because it's supported by hobbyists with PHDs in CS rather than a major company whose tech support knows as much as their average supportee (is that a word?).
What is the market for Linux like in Europe? Does M$ have any more reason to be worried over there than they do here?
(sorry if this is a dumb question, but I'm an American so I have no clue what goes on outside of my own country)
I don't see how they're doing anything that exposes them to a lawsuit.
Since when does that stop the xxAA? The kid who wrote DeCSS wasn't exposing himself to a lawsuit either, since Norway doesn't have a DMCA. But he got sued anyway. I realize that this is a much different case, but I feel that my point still holds. IANAL.
This would actually be a good plan for Wal-Mart. It would be better publicity for them than their current practice of censoring music/movies/video games that don't jive with their "good" Christian sensibilities. Instead of complaining about how crass pop culture is, they could do something about it by releasing their own "clean" music.
Because Microsoft has forced us to accept the fact that computers don't work and need to be rebooted/reformatted/whatever several times per day. Since people are used to the fact that computers break, companies can have bad tech support, and it won't reflect poorly on them because computers naturally can't be expected to function well.
My original post was not intending to be funny or a troll; I was completely serious.
Not necessarily. It is possible to write a program which knows only the rules of the game, and teaches itself how to play. This requires the programmer to be talented at writing machine learning code, but not necessarily talented at the game of chess.
Slashdot Mirror
Good call.
However, if both camps understand that they are working towards the same end, and work together towards that end, there will be plenty of room for a middle ground.
I'm not advocating polarizing the open-source community. Just the opposite, in fact. I was commenting on my observations of the community, and pointing out that I didn't necessarily like what I saw.
I agree that there are both moral and pratical benefits to using Linux, and I think we need to emphasize both to potential users.
...was this quote from Linus:
"Quite frankly, I don't _want_ people using Linux for ideological reasons. I think ideology sucks. This world would be a much better place if people had less ideology, and a whole lot more. I do this because it's FUN and because others might find it useful, not because I got religion."
Given that Linus has a rep for being a bit of an egotist, I was a bit suprised by this. There seem to be two camps of Linux users: those who use it because it's Free Software (the RMS camp), and those who use it because it does what we need to do better than Win2k.
But this isn't a problem, per se, as long as each camp recognizes the other's right to exist. There is no need for "controversial figures" in the open-source community. There is very little need for evangelism. There IS a need for people from each camp to put their effort into developing Free Software which is as good as (or better than) commercial software. Doing so will further both causes.
I'm glad I saw some intellegent criticism of this law in addition to the usual Slashdot Sheep saying that the government can't take away our rights.
This law probably isn't a great idea. I mean, look how well it hasn't worked in the movie industry. I've been seeing R-rated movies, with parental consent but not always with a parent, since I was about 14. I've been carded once (on my 17th birthday, of all days).
That said, my mom happened to be much more involved in her job as a parent than many these days. She decided I was mature enough to see certain movies before the MPAA thought I should. There were plenty of movies she felt were inappropriate for me at that age, and I respected that. I agree 120% that it SHOULD be a parent's job to make these decisions. The problem is that a lot of parents AREN'T taking responsibility to care what their kid sees.
Is every kid who has lazy parents and therefore plays Doom or Wolfenstein or GTA is going to shoot up a school? Of course not. In fact, I would contend that I was a less agressive high-schooler because I took out agression playing violent video games. It makes me much more uncomfortable that Congress is trying to blame all of the problems in schools on the video game industry than that they're doing parents' jobs.
Maybe if they got some teachers who knew how to teach and paid them a decent salary, we'd have educated kids. Oh no I must be a Democrat!
Party affiliations are getting pretty twisted around with the DMCA. Sure, there's Mr. Boucher (D-VA), but there's also Mr. Hollins (D-Disney). The House still has a Republican majority. I vaguely recall Tom DeLay (R-TX) not letting an xxAA bill out of comittee recently.
It's true that the Republicans are largely responsible for screwing up this country lately, but with this issue you need to pay attention to the person, not the party.
Slashdot editors are like windoze boxen. They need to be rebooted once per day, and they lose the contents of their memory each time.
So Intel put the P4 on a quad-pumped bus to get the clock speed to look better. When AMD put the Athlon on a double-pumped 133 MHz bus and said it had a 266 MHz bus speed, nobody believed it. Now even Socket A motherboards admit that they run at 133 MHz now. What gives with Intel doing this? Am I missing something that's supposed to impress me?
(if I am, please tell me, because otherwise I will be buying an AMD processor for my new computer)
Mr Cox:
What are your feelings on microkernels vs. monolithic kernels? Linux attempts to be both through the use of loadable modules; is this an ideal answer to the question? How do you define what is an essential component of an operating system kernel?
Mr. Cox -
Your famous series of -AC kernel patches is described by most as being much more experimental than Linus's kernels. Do you feel that Linux should be an experimental OS rather than one which is designed for production use? Or do you write these patches to take Linux closer to (or beyond it's limits) in the spirit of kernel hacking?
The Spiderman movie is doing well because the MPAA said it would (through their companies advertising it). The MPAA is directly making money from it. Isn't that illegal?
And this question will almost certainly get modded Troll or Flamebait, but I can't help but wonder how much of that money is going to line the pockets of Sen. Fritz Hollins (D-Disney)?
This one might piss off the religious right. The Big Bang could sort of be reconciled with the idea that God created the world in 7 days, since maybe the Big Bang happened on the first day. But the idea that the universe has always existed (and therefore predates creation) is a big problem, since it excludes God from the picture.
I'll be interested to hear the religious responses to this theory.
Of course this is a violation of the 5th Amendment. My question is, why aren't SonicBlue's lawyers screaming bloody murder about this to the press?? The average American is going to be much more outraged by the fact that a judge is forcing this company to testify against itself than that the company has to collect statistics. I know I certainly am.
What's even better about New Balance is that they make damn good sneakers.
But their website is 0wned by M$. When I go there in Konqueror or Opera (which identifies itself as IE 5), it says the site isn't compatible with my browser and links me to IE or Netscape for Windoze.
Why do HP's boxes get such a bad name? I bought my Athlon 750 box from them a couple of years ago, and I've never had a problem with it, even during the addition of more memory, another hard disk, the removal of the CD burner, installation of Linux, etc. And Customer Service handled things quite well when they fscked up my order (they upgraded shipping to next-day saturday delivery so it would only arrive one day later than they told me it would). Am I the only one?
:) )
(disclaimer: to my knowledge, I was the only satisfied customer of Tower Air before they folded
"I'm not trying to be evasive," Stuart E. Madnick, a computer science professor at MIT, said at one point. "I'm just trying to be precise."
Guess again.
KDE makes no requirements about what browser you use with it. I use Galeon in KDE all of the time, because Galeon works and Konqueror doesn't.
Not only that, KDE has that menu that allows you to PICK BETWEEN DIFFERENT BROWSERS TO VIEW WITH when you copy a URL to the clipboard.
The shell is a program that runs on top of UNIX and can be replaced with a different shell at the discretion of the computer's user. I don't have to use bash; I could use tcsh if I wanted to.
IE is a program that runs as an integral part of the Windows kernel and can not be replaced by a different browser. Or so the states are trying to argue.
If someone who is a CS prof at MIT doesn't understand what a window manager is, I fear for the future of CS research. I have friends who are English majors and could explain that KDE, Gnome, and XFree86 are all prograams that may or may not be installed on a particular Linux system.
:)
Although I have to wonder what sort of deal did Microsoft offer him to forget the difference between Windoze and KDE?
Bill Gates to solve the crisis in the West Bank???
Now THAT is something I'd like to see. Which side would he take? The Israelis, who simply do not get it, or the Palestinians who have a monopoly on God?
(since nobody ever understands what I'm referring to, this thing would have been over years ago if the Israelis knew how to manipulate world opinion like the other countries in the Middle East. And Muslims have a long history of destroying everyone else's holy places when they occupy a new land, because their god is the ONLY god. The Jews and Christians don't because their god is the biggest, not the only.)
Of course Linux isn't piracy. It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to pirate RedHat when I can get it legally from their website.
This is another one of those "We'll look like we're compromising on this minor point so that people can buy into our other major point" things. Linux may not be piracy, but it is viral and anti-capitalist and bad for consumers because it's supported by hobbyists with PHDs in CS rather than a major company whose tech support knows as much as their average supportee (is that a word?).
What is the market for Linux like in Europe? Does M$ have any more reason to be worried over there than they do here?
(sorry if this is a dumb question, but I'm an American so I have no clue what goes on outside of my own country)
I don't see how they're doing anything that exposes them to a lawsuit.
Since when does that stop the xxAA? The kid who wrote DeCSS wasn't exposing himself to a lawsuit either, since Norway doesn't have a DMCA. But he got sued anyway. I realize that this is a much different case, but I feel that my point still holds. IANAL.
(disclaimer: this is NOT a troll! I am serious.)
This would actually be a good plan for Wal-Mart. It would be better publicity for them than their current practice of censoring music/movies/video games that don't jive with their "good" Christian sensibilities. Instead of complaining about how crass pop culture is, they could do something about it by releasing their own "clean" music.
If those who can't are teaching, how do we ever train new people who can??
Because Microsoft has forced us to accept the fact that computers don't work and need to be rebooted/reformatted/whatever several times per day. Since people are used to the fact that computers break, companies can have bad tech support, and it won't reflect poorly on them because computers naturally can't be expected to function well.
My original post was not intending to be funny or a troll; I was completely serious.
Yet another thing Microsoft has forced the world to get used to...
Not necessarily. It is possible to write a program which knows only the rules of the game, and teaches itself how to play. This requires the programmer to be talented at writing machine learning code, but not necessarily talented at the game of chess.
An interesting page on the topic