And yes, those who do not go to Church are immoral. There is no morality without God.
Contemporary mainstream Christianity would say that someone who has never heard of Jesus or Church can still go to heaven (if they do, in fact, live by and with God, whether they know the word "God" or not). This is offtopic, and probably irrelevant to all programmers; I just wanted to ensure that people didn't take the above sentence to speak for Christianity as a whole.
However, I still suggest that a jury decision should be based upon the law and not Christian morals; else people will be behaving outwardly Christianly by compunction and not by choice, which is not desirable whether or not you are Christian.
So called non-techs could wind up being the ones making decisions on increasingly technical crimes.
Implying that this is a bad thing is nothing less than elitism. What makes you think a programmer is any better qualified to make a decision on DeCSS [...] than a farmhand from Kansas?
Some farmhands might have difficulty following the technical issues. E.g. they may not have enough understanding to decide whether or not the recording industry made a "reasonable effort" to make DeCSS secure. (Dunno if that decision would be neccessary for that trial, it's just an example of something hard to understand if you're not technical).
I can almost guarantee you that the farmhand has had a more moral upbringing and goes to Church more than the programmer.
If you believe in separation of church and state, then this should count for nothing. The job of the jury is to decide whether [it's overwhelmingly likely that] the law has been broken. It is *not* to decide if the defendant has broken the Christian moral code, or the juror's own moral code.
How will keeping China poor help undermine its dictatorship? If it was a racist oligarchy, like South Africa was, then the people on top might be motivated by greed to encourage reforms. But it isn't. A few people wield absolute power, and they are essentially as rich as they want to be.
Standing on moral ground until the market is large enough just looks very hypocritical.
I agree. However I think it's the Cuba embargo that's bad, not free trading with China.
Suppose your intention is to maximise the speed at which democracy/free speech/human rights reaches China. 30 years of economic stagnation, upheaval and famine did nothing to provoke these things. There is a chance that the creation of people who are sufficiently educated and well-fed might just help things. The point of this article was that, once things like the Internet are available, it's hard for any government to clamp down on information and speech. Condemning China to poverty and technological backwardness will *increase* the Chinese government's control over its population and won't help at all.
OTOH if the intention is to protect American jobs from cheap labour, then embargoes against both Cuba and China are great ideas.
[BTW I'm not claiming that other developed countries are any better]
Re:Anyone designing an I586 specific OS in 2000 ..
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I am continually amazed at how you slashdorks so casually like to badmouth projects that none of you participate in. It just boggles the mind.
Get a clue. I was *disagreeing* with those who claimed that Intel-specific = silly. By [mis]quoting the similar comments which the author of Minix made about Linux when it first came out. (Now it's a fully portable OS). You can be forgiven for not recognising the quote, but I even posted a comment explaining it - *before* you posted yours.
Oh well, Slashdot has fast become the laughing stock of the web.
I disagree, there are hundreds of insightful comments on slashdot every day. And if you laugh at some of these because you misunderstand them, then that's not a sign that the forum as a whole is clueless.
Re:I Suspect they Ripped off a BSD
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I have heard that Stallman did this to intentionally screw over the BSD developers.
Interesting theory, but the FSF claim that the (modern, 3-clause) BSD license is GPL-compatible.
Re:Can it be good if it's built for a certain Chip
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INT 21h/Function 4c for.EXE exists.
Wow, so my programs can return exit statuses. Granted, it's useful, but you can hardly claim it's a core difference in the APIs.
Re:Can it be good if it's built for a certain Chip
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NT is portable
That may or may not be true, we can't tell without looking at the source. But the point is that NT is a single-platform OS, whether or not older versions were. Since they've stuck their GUI into the kernel I'd imagine that portability has been sacrificed, anyhow. But that's just speculation, and it's irrelevant since nobody but MS can do the porting.
Can I read the source? Yes. Can I modify the source? Yes. Must be open source then.
Can Apple ban me from distributing the modified source on the slightest whim? Yes. All your efforts can be rendered useless if it happens to suit Apple to ban you from distributing the source. (It says in the license that if they claim that you infringe their IP, you have to stop distributing modified-APSL software until it's sorted out in court. That could potentially be indefinitely). [At least, this was all true the last time I checked the APSL].
Everything else is just grousing
You can't e.g. have a viable business strategy that permanently depends on the whim of a potential competitor.
Re:But I guess you'd jump at a i386 specific OS
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I quite agree. I'd recommend ImageMagick for such a person.
LaTeX is 80's technology.
Don't write LaTeX off. The default document classes are indeed academically-orientated. But if you're a power user (and who else'd use LaTeX) you'll write your own document class for to suit your needs, in which case LaTeX is still not really all that beatable.
Anyone designing an I586 specific OS in 2000 ...
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You seem to be saying that the IT industry can be a crap place to work. Are you a hacker, as a separate thing from being a professional programmer? Do your comments apply to non-professional projects and stuff?
Tell me that Joe Average-end-user uses CMYK more heavily than is supported by Gimp. Alternatively, if you're talking about for a minority of power users who really need advanced features, then LaTeX beats Word hands down.
Linux is first and foremost a server operating system. What else could it possibly be with the number of services that are enabled by default in most distros?
I think you could say "Today's Linux distros are server OSes". That's the distros, though, and not Linux itself. One day someone (maybe Corel) will create a distro which is truly desktop-oriented. Probably port 22 will be enabled, to allow secure remote administration, but nothing else much. (If you want an application server then this'd be the wrong distro).
All the stuff you say is true. However, if I want to come and visit you in a car, I don't have to be using the same car vendor as you. When proprietory APIs and communication protocols are in widespread use, I have to go to the same software vendor to even be able to talk to other people / other apps.
That's the claim he makes in the article. Well, it's hard to prove him wrong without a time machine. But the PC revolution was something waiting to happen. If it wasn't the IBM PC, it would have been the Apple Mac. If it wasn't Apple then it would have been Amiga. Etcetera.
But I assume his claim is meant to extend to the following:
If proprietory software had not been legally possible there would be no cheap hardware to run free operating systems on.
Again, this is hard to refute, but I think it's false. As I said, the PC revolution was waiting to happen, Moore's Law ensured this. If proprietory software had not been legally possible then free software would have been written. As he points out, IBM et al were trying to sell hardware at the time and considered the software to be just a supporting tool for that.
[Of course, just cos I've argued with this point it doesn't mean I don't think the rest of the article is a pile of bollocks too;) ]
Ford isn't "depriving" people of transportation by demanding that you pay money for one of their cars. If you can't afford it, that's your problem, not Ford's.
The difference with software is the "Network effect". The software that other people use affects the software that you can use. E.g. a lot of companies interchange information in Winword's.doc format. If I don't have compatible software I won't be able to communicate effectively with these companies.
So you see that Microsoft has more ability to "force" me to use their product than Ford does. Anyone who "owns" a popular communication standard has far more power than could have been envisaged when copyright law was invented. People are deprived of some ability to communicate with *third parties*.
It's not Open Source (TM) in the sense that you can't distribute modifications which violate Sun's standard. That sounds good but if Sun ever make Java++ which violates the Java standard then you can't add that functionality to the JDK.
OTOH IIRC IBM's JDK is OSS. Hmmm I had just better pad this out or the lameness filter will get the last sentence.
Nice strawman sherlock. But this student's DeCSS page was totally unrelated to his academic major
[Minor point: in Oxford most people do one subject only - so "major" is the wrong word. But yes, I'm being a peadant.] Yebbut this was on his own computer using network connectivity which is claimed to come with the room IIUC.
Slashdot Mirror
But that kind of selection is not allowed in Australia AFAIK. (Or most places that aren't the US)
Contemporary mainstream Christianity would say that someone who has never heard of Jesus or Church can still go to heaven (if they do, in fact, live by and with God, whether they know the word "God" or not). This is offtopic, and probably irrelevant to all programmers; I just wanted to ensure that people didn't take the above sentence to speak for Christianity as a whole.
However, I still suggest that a jury decision should be based upon the law and not Christian morals; else people will be behaving outwardly Christianly by compunction and not by choice, which is not desirable whether or not you are Christian.
Some farmhands might have difficulty following the technical issues. E.g. they may not have enough understanding to decide whether or not the recording industry made a "reasonable effort" to make DeCSS secure. (Dunno if that decision would be neccessary for that trial, it's just an example of something hard to understand if you're not technical).
If you believe in separation of church and state, then this should count for nothing. The job of the jury is to decide whether [it's overwhelmingly likely that] the law has been broken. It is *not* to decide if the defendant has broken the Christian moral code, or the juror's own moral code.
If you're looking to approximate pi, then the last digit would be better off as a 3.
I know there are human rights violations in Cuba but there's no way that the embargo has ever been about that.
How will keeping China poor help undermine its dictatorship? If it was a racist oligarchy, like South Africa was, then the people on top might be motivated by greed to encourage reforms. But it isn't. A few people wield absolute power, and they are essentially as rich as they want to be.
I agree. However I think it's the Cuba embargo that's bad, not free trading with China.
Suppose your intention is to maximise the speed at which democracy/free speech/human rights reaches China. 30 years of economic stagnation, upheaval and famine did nothing to provoke these things. There is a chance that the creation of people who are sufficiently educated and well-fed might just help things. The point of this article was that, once things like the Internet are available, it's hard for any government to clamp down on information and speech. Condemning China to poverty and technological backwardness will *increase* the Chinese government's control over its population and won't help at all.
OTOH if the intention is to protect American jobs from cheap labour, then embargoes against both Cuba and China are great ideas.
[BTW I'm not claiming that other developed countries are any better]
Get a clue. I was *disagreeing* with those who claimed that Intel-specific = silly. By [mis]quoting the similar comments which the author of Minix made about Linux when it first came out. (Now it's a fully portable OS). You can be forgiven for not recognising the quote, but I even posted a comment explaining it - *before* you posted yours.
I disagree, there are hundreds of insightful comments on slashdot every day. And if you laugh at some of these because you misunderstand them, then that's not a sign that the forum as a whole is clueless.
Interesting theory, but the FSF claim that the (modern, 3-clause) BSD license is GPL-compatible.
Wow, so my programs can return exit statuses. Granted, it's useful, but you can hardly claim it's a core difference in the APIs.
That may or may not be true, we can't tell without looking at the source. But the point is that NT is a single-platform OS, whether or not older versions were. Since they've stuck their GUI into the kernel I'd imagine that portability has been sacrificed, anyhow. But that's just speculation, and it's irrelevant since nobody but MS can do the porting.
Nope. OSD, DFSG.
Can Apple ban me from distributing the modified source on the slightest whim? Yes. All your efforts can be rendered useless if it happens to suit Apple to ban you from distributing the source. (It says in the license that if they claim that you infringe their IP, you have to stop distributing modified-APSL software until it's sorted out in court. That could potentially be indefinitely). [At least, this was all true the last time I checked the APSL].
You can't e.g. have a viable business strategy that permanently depends on the whim of a potential competitor.
Yeah, but I was [mis]quoting Andy Tan[n?]enbaum.
I quite agree. I'd recommend ImageMagick for such a person.
Don't write LaTeX off. The default document classes are indeed academically-orientated. But if you're a power user (and who else'd use LaTeX) you'll write your own document class for to suit your needs, in which case LaTeX is still not really all that beatable.
... would not get high marks from me.
You have the Windows source-code? (sorry, my Irish is terribly bad)
You seem to be saying that the IT industry can be a crap place to work. Are you a hacker, as a separate thing from being a professional programmer? Do your comments apply to non-professional projects and stuff?
Tell me that Joe Average-end-user uses CMYK more heavily than is supported by Gimp. Alternatively, if you're talking about for a minority of power users who really need advanced features, then LaTeX beats Word hands down.
I think you could say "Today's Linux distros are server OSes". That's the distros, though, and not Linux itself. One day someone (maybe Corel) will create a distro which is truly desktop-oriented. Probably port 22 will be enabled, to allow secure remote administration, but nothing else much. (If you want an application server then this'd be the wrong distro).
Is Darwin Open Source (TM) now? (Its licence used to be non OSD/DFSG compliant).
All the stuff you say is true. However, if I want to come and visit you in a car, I don't have to be using the same car vendor as you. When proprietory APIs and communication protocols are in widespread use, I have to go to the same software vendor to even be able to talk to other people / other apps.
That's the claim he makes in the article. Well, it's hard to prove him wrong without a time machine. But the PC revolution was something waiting to happen. If it wasn't the IBM PC, it would have been the Apple Mac. If it wasn't Apple then it would have been Amiga. Etcetera.
But I assume his claim is meant to extend to the following:
Again, this is hard to refute, but I think it's false. As I said, the PC revolution was waiting to happen, Moore's Law ensured this. If proprietory software had not been legally possible then free software would have been written. As he points out, IBM et al were trying to sell hardware at the time and considered the software to be just a supporting tool for that.
[Of course, just cos I've argued with this point it doesn't mean I don't think the rest of the article is a pile of bollocks too ;) ]
The difference with software is the "Network effect". The software that other people use affects the software that you can use. E.g. a lot of companies interchange information in Winword's .doc format. If I don't have compatible software I won't be able to communicate effectively with these companies.
So you see that Microsoft has more ability to "force" me to use their product than Ford does. Anyone who "owns" a popular communication standard has far more power than could have been envisaged when copyright law was invented. People are deprived of some ability to communicate with *third parties*.
It's not Open Source (TM) in the sense that you can't distribute modifications which violate Sun's standard. That sounds good but if Sun ever make Java++ which violates the Java standard then you can't add that functionality to the JDK.
OTOH IIRC IBM's JDK is OSS. Hmmm I had just better pad this out or the lameness filter will get the last sentence.
[Minor point: in Oxford most people do one subject only - so "major" is the wrong word. But yes, I'm being a peadant.]
Yebbut this was on his own computer using network connectivity which is claimed to come with the room IIUC.