Re:Before the inevitable Stallman bashing starts .
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RMS On 'Open' Motif
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· Score: 5
open-source is becoming increasingly polluted.
Right on brother. Not many people see this, but it is happening. I think one of the major points where it started was with the APSL. Sure, it's been renegotiated, and we're told everything is getting better, but in the end effect, open source is about popularity. In that respect, it's succeeding quite well.
People still wonder about why RMS is so sore about Open source - it's because they have dissimilar goals. Open source and ESR is all about "world domination" and popularity. Sure, they're fun, but if you have to bastardize what got you to that point for that popularity, it isn't worth it IMHO. I was a happy linux user before open source was popular, and I'll be a happy user whether or not it's popular. Well, I may not be so happy in a few years when linux gets flooded with pseudo-open source garbage that trades popularity for freedom.
You don't have to follow what he says. For that matter, you're free to not listen to anybody. You're free to take the source to the linux kernel and start your own OS project. You can do whatever you want to do. That's one of the whole thrusts of free software in general.
The fact that he has written more software than you and I combined will ever write suggests that you don't have to care about or follow what he says, but it might be a good idea to listen. RMS is the reason why you're here spouting this on slashdot, since this site was written by a person influenced by his software and running on Debian GNU/Linux.
He's not any "better" than you or I - but you shouldn't simply dismiss him just because it's currently en vogue in the slashdot community to put Stallman down.
The open source guidelines specify that there has to be no discrimination against a particular area or endeavor of work - the license on this motif that is masquerading as open source only lets you use it on certain platforms.
This is not free software, this is not open source, this is restrictionware.
Well, I realize that laws can make people feel more comfortable, but there comes a point where penalizing somebody doesn't make anymore sense. For example, if they guy who wrote melissa had to pay restitution or pay a $17,000 fine for every copy of the virus he spread, he'd probably own millions upon millions of dollars which he'd never be able to repay, no matter how long he lived.
You can punish a person harshly, you can even make it so that the person will never get away from the punishment for the rest of their lives, but fining somebody $40 million is pretty much the same thing as fining them $40 billion. At least the effect is the same, and the amount of money you'll actually collect is the same.
I say this because if you make it a crime to spread a virus and make it punishable by jail, restitiution, or fines, then anybody who spreads a virus (since they go all over the world) will be liable for damages in so many damn jurisdictions that it will be the same as fining them $40 billion, and just as pointless.
Not to compare virus spreading to murder, but just as an example of over-punishment - when Jeffry Dahmer went to jail, he got *400* years in jail. 400!!!! What's the point? Of course it was arrived at by adding the amount of time he got for each murder, just like the fine would be arrived at by adding the recompensation for each victim for a virus spreader.
An effective punishment would be a $0.25 fine and no restitution, since by the time everyone on earth got finished suing the poor bastard, he'd be in for millions.:)
In an e-commerce world where companies are dying to know every last detail about you so that they can show you the banner ad that is most likely to get you to bite, I think it's fair to expect privacy problems if you get companies that have had previous business dealings with you to cooperate and 'share notes'. It seems like asking for your privacy to be invaded to me.
I'm not even quite sure why they would require the type of authentication that the poster is talking about. Even if it's straight credit card fraud, the company that ships the product still keeps the sale dollars, it's the credit card company (or the consumer) that eats the cost of the fraud. It seems that if companies don't have a problem with people complaining about them taking any credit card that is presented to them that they would do just that - why put extra hurdles in the way of a consumer, or make it less likely that a sale will actually be made?
As for the privacy though, I don't trust any company further than I can throw them. Companies are about profit, and when the concept of 'profit' coincides with my interests then the company will make me happy. But when somebody's idea of profit suggests that it might be a good idea to dig into my past purchases and compare consumer notes with another company in the name of "verification", it's pretty clearly not going to serve the customer's best interest.
If they HAVE to do this, it might be SLIGHTLY better to ask the credit card company for info rather than somebody else you have bought from. (i.e. when you dial up the company for card confirmation, have a way of digitally asking the question "if this purchase goes through, would it send up some weird red flag on this customer's account?" or something similar). Not that this would be good either, far from it. It seems like it might be slightly better though.
Why not just demand that they open up their source? The mistake is made, so why not crowbar their asses?
Well, I like to think that the GPL has a live and let live attitude to things. A lot of people are going to disagree with me on that. The reason tha the provision is placed there is not so we can crowbar the source code out of an author who made a simple mistake, but to prevent GPL'd source from being included in those programs. I usually tend to agree with the FSF that software probably shouldn't be owned, but until things are changed, I'd rather convince people that it's better to free their source than to take it from them forcibly by using a GPL provision. Note that I'm saying this assuming that they did it on purpose. The GPL violations we've seen thus far I really think were mistakes. Not to say that they couldn't have been WAY more careful, but I don't think they did it with malicious intent.
Also, suing costs a holy shitload of money, even if you win there's a large initial capital outlay unless you know a lawyer who will do it pro bono. (If you do, then share that name, please)
But for me, it comes down to this: I'd rather that my software simply not be incorporated. As a GPL source author, I don't really want to pry the source away from an author that made a mistake, I just want them to know what the rules are and make sure that they play by them. Suing should always be the last option IMHO since for the most part humans can be reasonable and come to an agreement if they try. It shouldn't be ruled out, it's just that I don't think it should be the first thing we jump to.
The scary part is not the hole in PGP. That's been found, and if it hasn't been fixed already, it will be very shortly.
The scary part is things similar to this that HAVEN'T been found.
I get the feeling that the really succesful crackers are probably the types of people who spot things like this and never mention them, just exploiting them for their own use.
Speaking of the plot, I've heard quite a bit of commentary in different reviews and 'hollywood' type stuff that said that they purposely dumbed down the plot, because one of the largest weak points of the first movie was that nobody understood what the hell was going on. I admit it, after the first time I watched the first movie, I didn't have a CLUE what was going on.
This movie was not like that. You could actually understand what was going on, even though there was quite a bit of artifice in different parts.
I thought that the plot was not the greatest, but in terms of action, this was one of the most badass movies I've ever seen.
Much better than gladiator anyway, which was just an extremely bloody remake of Braveheart in Roman times. (If you've seen Braveheart, you roughly know the entire plot of Gladiator except that instead of fighting for freedom, the gladiator is fighting *for* the republic of rome after a fashion)
I know that there's a lot of people who download things off the net and through napster, and then go out and buy the album. Lots of people actually like the liner notes, and a lot of times the mp3 may not come with a proper ID3 tag to identify artist, album name, track number, track name, year, genre, etc. So people support the artist by buying the CD even though they've already got the whole album on mp3 through napster. (And let's be more general - this isn't really about napster per se, but the easy availability of the media in the first place - IMHO there isn't much difference between napster and any other file sharing protocol, just that napster is what's in the news recently)
But there are a lot of other people who just download mp3s and never buy the album. I'm not going to make a value judgement and say that they are theives, or that they are are excellent freedom fighters trying to liberate ideas from evil recording companies. What I want is for people to take responsibility for what they do. There are a lot of people out there who just take from napster, and never buy albums. That's fine, I'm sure they have a moral justification one way or the other, but I don't like hearing people say that Napster is fine, because it boosts record sales, because most people buy records after downloading things. Conversely, I don't like to hear people say that napster hurts record sales, because that ignores all of the people who bought the album when they wouldn't have otherwise done so due to "sampling" the album through napster.
Frankly, whatever you want to do with napster is cool with me. I don't use napster, but I don't think that people who do are going to starve the RIAA out anytime soon. What I wish though is that people would only speak for themselves and not make arguments for the napster community as a whole. Because guess what? There are people out there using napster who believe that the RIAA have the right to make the money, so they pay for the albums after the fact. There are also people who see themselves on napster as information gurillas. YOu can't have it both ways. Speak for yourself, and live with your rationalizations, whichever way they may be.
Nonononon...the solution to fermat's theorem was most definately not obvious - I didn't mean that one, I just meant some other proofs that I've seen. You're right - the way the guy tied everything together to prove fermat's last theorem was the genius in that proof, but any proof so long as to require several PhD's years to read the hundreds of pages it contains is not what I would call obvious.:)
Ah, and the old 0.999999999... thing. Most people don't realize that it is 1 until you tell them this:
What does it mean for one number to be equal to another number? Well, if x = y, then x - y = 0. In this case, what's 1 - 0.9999999999999...? The answer is 0.000000000000....(infinite number of 0's). Since 0.000000000.... = 0, they are indeed the same number.
Taking number theory in college and persuing math in my spare time, I've found out that sometimes the ones that look the easiest are actually the most nasty, bastardly, evil problems you've ever seen. Some may look easy, but you have to figure there's a reason why there's a $1 million prize on each question.
Some of the toughest ones are the "prove or disprove" type problems - for example, before fermat's last theorem was proven, (some people are sticklers for long periods of peer review and say that it hasn't been officially proven yet) it was pretty easy with the use of computers to prove that fermat's last theorem held for all integers up through some ungodly number. But proving through "some ungodly number" != proving through all numbers. Induction is the name of the game.
Math is always news for nerds, because programming is very much like the activity proving theorems - you go for simplicity, generality, and ABOVE ALL, conceptual elegance. The really cool part is that when you find a truly elegant, awesome proof, I almost always have that feeling of "damn! It was so OBVIOUS!" -- even though it wasn't, the elegance of the proof makes the concepts surrounding the program just gel perfectly.
I hope to see solutions like that for some of these problems. I'm not really all that great at number theory, but I really enjoy doing it and watching the big boys do it.
Unless they get sponsorship from some huge company. Not that they couldn't do it, just that mainframes are so hugely expensive, that I really doubt they could afford one, or that they own even a small one already. Possibly if some huge company "donated" an LPAR for a period of time it'd be possible, but otherwise I don't know how they'd actually get a hold of the platform to do it.
This would undoubtedly be a neat hack, and nice to have, but first, I'm guessing this is going to impact roughly 0.02% of slashdot, and second, they shouldn't be doing it for business reasons, since there already is UNIX on os/390.
At my job I spend a lot of time working with IBM's Open Edition, which is a UNIX that IBM implemented on top of os/390. It is very, very strange as UNIX goes. A lot of common things you associate with unix aren't there like a password file, and other common facilities. Things are put in very strange places on the filesystem, and the way the backend works, (i.e. how it interfaces with MVS) is far weirder than weird. That said, it's a very interesting system that seems pretty stable.
Unfortunately, none of the architecture dependant GNU utilities will compile on this beast, since the hardware isn't even similar to anything unix boxes are used to running on. If suse is going to port linux, they may encounter the hardest part in porting things like gas and gcc, since AFAIK they don't know how to spit out binary for this CPU as of now.
(FYI for people who aren't familiar with OS/390 - it's IBM's mainframe OS. These types of boxes generally start in the $60,000 range for one that probably isn't worth using, and range in price up to the multi-million dollar range. On the one I work on, each individual CPU costs $200K.)
That's why I say probably most slashdot readers won't care. For the vast majority of people, they never work with a mainframe because the only people who can afford to have mainframes are large organizations. (The federal reserve has some bitchin huge mainframes)
Along with emacs identity as a web browser, and email client, an editor, an ftp client, and even an irc client, emacs is a windowing system.
Try firing up emacs and hitting C-x 2 if you don't believe me.
Oh sure, maybe it doesn't following the WIMP paradigm per se, and maybe it's only just text, but conniseurs of lynx know the value of text. It's better than eye-clogging graphics of indescribable shapes and colors that prove nothing other than that the author had WAY too much time.
Emacs is the ultimate windowing system. I haven't gotten around to write a window manager in elisp yet, but I'm sure there's somebody out there that would do it.:)
Generations of Unix geeks have been thrilled with pine, elm, and mutt.
True. I'm one of them. (mutt)
Generations of Unix geeks have been thrilled with pine, elm, and mutt.
So?
My boss wants Free Agent. He loves Free Agent. He worships Free Agent. He won't read news with any *nix newsreader that isn't an exact Free Agent clone. He boots into Windows just to read news. If I clone Free Agent, I have just done a great service to the free software community: one less instance of Windows being loaded.
So?
Let's ask ourselves something here - what is linux about, anyway? What is free sofwtare about? Because a lot of people think that the sole reason linux exists is to steal market share from microsoft and to take over the world. If that happens, I'm fine with it, but that is not the goal of linux as I see it. (And this is an opinion, yes) The reason I use linux is not to see microsoft topple, or to see my manager using the same OS as me, I use linux because it works for me. I don't really care if company X is moving to linux or if GNOME is easy enough for your grandmother.
In that framework, sometimes writing applications that mimic microsoft applications doesn't make any sense. If I wanted to use a program with that type of look and feel and approach to things, I wouldn't be using linux. Maybe Miguel does like that type of environment. I don't know.
If you go to the evolution page and helixcode, you'll find out that there is even an effort going on to write a replacement for visual basic for GNOME. Why?????? And this coming RIGHT after the love bug problem. Visual basic is one of the reasons why microsoft products suck, and people want the same thing on linux? It doesn't make any sense. Well, it does if stealing marketshare from microsoft is your only purpose, but otherwise it doesn't.
n general, I agree. In this specific, I do not. I believe Rob, Robin, Hemos, et. al., are moral individuals. They have been given complete editorial control over/.'s content.
How is it that editorial control would extend to making decisions about lawsuits involving not just the site that a person runs, but the parent company that owns the site?
I don't necessarily disagree with you about Taco's credibility or "moralness", and I'm not entirely sure what his role is within andover, but I'm not sure he's the guy who calls the shots when it comes to lawsuits.
Plus, in this case, I believe it will be worth a court battle; it'll bring/.'s name into the mainstream. What better than a Free Speech battle with MS to get good press?
I think it's already in the mainstream. Or the internet mainstream anyway. I bet most people who have ever heard of free software or "open source" could name slashdot. Within its realm of operation, (quasi open source) I'd be willing to bet it has better than 80% name recognition.
Besides, on the topic of getting slashdot good press, that doesn't really interest me. I get some news here, but I feel no obligation to boost this site. They seem to be doing fine.
If/. does not stand up for Free Speech now, it will never get the chance again
I'm not going to say "This doesn't matter" or "this isn't an assault on freedom of speech" because it probably is. But the real battle of free speech is won at the individual level, not by giving more money to lawyers duking it out with another company.
Someone should start a fund to help Slashdot in case Slashdot does get sued by Microsoft, even though it's very unlikely Slashdot will win.
Slashdot is not exactly a poor business that's barely trying to stand on two feet. I don't think they need a legal defense fund from the general public, besides which, although I read slashdot, I am completely unwilling to contribute money to the legal defense fund of a for-profit company. If they're making money off of their readership, (and rest assured that they are) they don't need to have us further help them financially by paying for their lawyers should they get sued.
I'm not anti-business, and I'm not anti-slashdot, but I would no more pay for slashdot's legal defense then I would for, say, Amoco or Bell Atlantic's legal defense.
The DMCA definately sucks, but in the end, companies will do what is best for their profitability. If they're publically owned, (like Andover is) then they pretty much have to. Your dollars in their defense fund won't change their strategy, and in the end, if the "stand up for the right thing" it will be because management has decided that that's the best thing to do in terms of long term profitability (for whatever reason) not out of some strong moral conviction.
When a project is 'open source' or 'free software', the author of that project is giving you something because he wants to. It doesn't sound right to bitch about the quality of it.
I don't think it's very cool or nice to not make a CVS server available or any of the other things you seem to hate, but they're not obligated to do that. In fact, if they wanted to convert all of their source code to EBCDIC and distribute it that way, sure, it would suck, but they're still giving you something that you wouldn't have otherwise had.
What's the license? If you're so fed up with their efforts, you could just fork it. I realize that there are a lot of strong pressures not to do so, but at the same time, the right to fork was made for situations where there are large problems like you seem to say there are here.
I've always been very down on copyright assignment because I think it is antithetical to the GNU believe that "software should not have owners". It seems highly ironic to me that the FSF is very demanding that they do in fact own the code.
Actually, while it is ironic, yes, it makes a lot of sense. GNU is I guess somewhat against copyrights, hence copyleft. It is mentioned in numerous places on www.gnu.org that since copyright seems to be the rules of the game right now with respect to IP, why not use copyright to protect your work? In fact, that's probably the only feasible option.
It is ironic, but it isn't hypocritical - if they didn't do it that way, it'd be pretty much impossible to make the GPL stick.
Well, I'm the author of a utility that was recently accepted as GNU software. At the time when I was swapping emails with RMS and a great guy named Jonas Oberg, I asked about just this type of stuff.
I was told that if I chose, I could assign the copyright for the entire program to GNU, or I could retain the copyright myself. Not knowing what I was doing at the time, I chose to keep the copyright since I felt that would be safer.
As it turns out, I think the main difference between assigning the copyright to GNU and not doing it is if there is a dispute, or if company X is using your GPL'd source code in some way that is contrary to what the GPL says, if the code's copyright is held by the FSF, they'll stand up for it and litigate, whereas if the individual keeps the copyright, GNU may not have a stake enough to through their weight against the company.
Frankly, if there's anybody on earth that I TRUST to hold the copyright and make sure that the GPL is enforced, it's Stallman and the FSF.
As for signing over patches, I think it's possible that the FSF has gotten burned in the past on submissions being written by people at their jobs, incorporating the patches, and then finding out later that the employee didn't have the write to submit that code under the GPL since it was written on the company's time and hence property of the company.
Signing over patches and explicitly authorizing them for the FSF is a procedural thing to make sure that the free software we use remains pure of other types of non-free code, and presents as small of a profile as possible to litigious lawyers who might want to take someone to court over possible misappropriations of source code.
I think it makes sense to even require this of people. Why else would you be writing software for the FSF if it wasn't going to be GPL'd? If that's the case, why wouldn't you want someone larger than yourself to be able to back and protect the code? The only problem with this I could see would be if you didn't trust the FSF. If that's the case, I'd wonder what your reasons for that are, but I won't disagree with your personal feelings about the FSF.
AFAIK, this is one of the reasons Berlin started in the first place.
I'd love to see X speed up and keep up with the times, but I'm kinda afraid that the code may be too entrenched to make any serious structural modifications to this. I'm not an XFree hacker, so I don't know how much code modification what this guy is proposing would *really* take.
I do know that X works pretty well right now, and in the past, X people haven't been too willing to break the thousands of applications that are out there, even if it was The Right Thing To Do as far as architecture is concerned.
Re:Speaking of video editing, what's avail. on Lin
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iMovie For Free
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· Score: 2
There are two that come to mind - but both are for animation of 3d graphics, not for real video per se. The good parts is that they're decent packages, so sometimes you can't tell the difference.
One is called blender, and the other is called 'moonlight'. Blender is free as in beer only, and I'm not sure about moonlight.
I was pretty turned off by it.
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Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 4
I used it only briefly, and then moved to postgresql.
Part of it was the source code licensing issue, since postgres is free software (bsd license) and mysql isn't.
The other part is that while I was learning RDBMS's, I asked around about a couple of different ones, (I knew I wasn't using oracle both for the license and cost issues), and everybody seemed to have the same opinion - mysql is really fast, but it can't do this, can't do this, etc. etc. etc. and proceeded to spit out a long list of things that you had to work around with mysql in order to get the job done.
On the other hand, I've been using postgres quite happily for quite some time. For my applications, there isn't a serious speed difference between mysql and postgres, (in fact sometimes I think there is no difference) and it lets me march to the beat of my own drummer rather than building sometimes ugly constructs to get around the lack of features in mysql.
Slashdot Mirror
open-source is becoming increasingly polluted.
Right on brother. Not many people see this, but it is happening. I think one of the major points where it started was with the APSL. Sure, it's been renegotiated, and we're told everything is getting better, but in the end effect, open source is about popularity. In that respect, it's succeeding quite well.
People still wonder about why RMS is so sore about Open source - it's because they have dissimilar goals. Open source and ESR is all about "world domination" and popularity. Sure, they're fun, but if you have to bastardize what got you to that point for that popularity, it isn't worth it IMHO. I was a happy linux user before open source was popular, and I'll be a happy user whether or not it's popular. Well, I may not be so happy in a few years when linux gets flooded with pseudo-open source garbage that trades popularity for freedom.
You don't have to follow what he says. For that matter, you're free to not listen to anybody. You're free to take the source to the linux kernel and start your own OS project. You can do whatever you want to do. That's one of the whole thrusts of free software in general.
The fact that he has written more software than you and I combined will ever write suggests that you don't have to care about or follow what he says, but it might be a good idea to listen. RMS is the reason why you're here spouting this on slashdot, since this site was written by a person influenced by his software and running on Debian GNU/Linux.
He's not any "better" than you or I - but you shouldn't simply dismiss him just because it's currently en vogue in the slashdot community to put Stallman down.
The open source guidelines specify that there has to be no discrimination against a particular area or endeavor of work - the license on this motif that is masquerading as open source only lets you use it on certain platforms.
This is not free software, this is not open source, this is restrictionware.
This seems like it's for show.
:)
Well, I realize that laws can make people feel more comfortable, but there comes a point where penalizing somebody doesn't make anymore sense. For example, if they guy who wrote melissa had to pay restitution or pay a $17,000 fine for every copy of the virus he spread, he'd probably own millions upon millions of dollars which he'd never be able to repay, no matter how long he lived.
You can punish a person harshly, you can even make it so that the person will never get away from the punishment for the rest of their lives, but fining somebody $40 million is pretty much the same thing as fining them $40 billion. At least the effect is the same, and the amount of money you'll actually collect is the same.
I say this because if you make it a crime to spread a virus and make it punishable by jail, restitiution, or fines, then anybody who spreads a virus (since they go all over the world) will be liable for damages in so many damn jurisdictions that it will be the same as fining them $40 billion, and just as pointless.
Not to compare virus spreading to murder, but just as an example of over-punishment - when Jeffry Dahmer went to jail, he got *400* years in jail. 400!!!! What's the point? Of course it was arrived at by adding the amount of time he got for each murder, just like the fine would be arrived at by adding the recompensation for each victim for a virus spreader.
An effective punishment would be a $0.25 fine and no restitution, since by the time everyone on earth got finished suing the poor bastard, he'd be in for millions.
In an e-commerce world where companies are dying to know every last detail about you so that they can show you the banner ad that is most likely to get you to bite, I think it's fair to expect privacy problems if you get companies that have had previous business dealings with you to cooperate and 'share notes'. It seems like asking for your privacy to be invaded to me.
I'm not even quite sure why they would require the type of authentication that the poster is talking about. Even if it's straight credit card fraud, the company that ships the product still keeps the sale dollars, it's the credit card company (or the consumer) that eats the cost of the fraud. It seems that if companies don't have a problem with people complaining about them taking any credit card that is presented to them that they would do just that - why put extra hurdles in the way of a consumer, or make it less likely that a sale will actually be made?
As for the privacy though, I don't trust any company further than I can throw them. Companies are about profit, and when the concept of 'profit' coincides with my interests then the company will make me happy. But when somebody's idea of profit suggests that it might be a good idea to dig into my past purchases and compare consumer notes with another company in the name of "verification", it's pretty clearly not going to serve the customer's best interest.
If they HAVE to do this, it might be SLIGHTLY better to ask the credit card company for info rather than somebody else you have bought from. (i.e. when you dial up the company for card confirmation, have a way of digitally asking the question "if this purchase goes through, would it send up some weird red flag on this customer's account?" or something similar). Not that this would be good either, far from it. It seems like it might be slightly better though.
Why not just demand that they open up their source? The mistake is made, so why not crowbar their asses?
Well, I like to think that the GPL has a live and let live attitude to things. A lot of people are going to disagree with me on that. The reason tha the provision is placed there is not so we can crowbar the source code out of an author who made a simple mistake, but to prevent GPL'd source from being included in those programs. I usually tend to agree with the FSF that software probably shouldn't be owned, but until things are changed, I'd rather convince people that it's better to free their source than to take it from them forcibly by using a GPL provision. Note that I'm saying this assuming that they did it on purpose. The GPL violations we've seen thus far I really think were mistakes. Not to say that they couldn't have been WAY more careful, but I don't think they did it with malicious intent.
Also, suing costs a holy shitload of money, even if you win there's a large initial capital outlay unless you know a lawyer who will do it pro bono. (If you do, then share that name, please)
But for me, it comes down to this: I'd rather that my software simply not be incorporated. As a GPL source author, I don't really want to pry the source away from an author that made a mistake, I just want them to know what the rules are and make sure that they play by them. Suing should always be the last option IMHO since for the most part humans can be reasonable and come to an agreement if they try. It shouldn't be ruled out, it's just that I don't think it should be the first thing we jump to.
...or did the people who wrote that page constantly switch between calling it WeirdX and WiredX?
Strange...
The scary part is not the hole in PGP. That's been found, and if it hasn't been fixed already, it will be very shortly.
The scary part is things similar to this that HAVEN'T been found.
I get the feeling that the really succesful crackers are probably the types of people who spot things like this and never mention them, just exploiting them for their own use.
Speaking of the plot, I've heard quite a bit of commentary in different reviews and 'hollywood' type stuff that said that they purposely dumbed down the plot, because one of the largest weak points of the first movie was that nobody understood what the hell was going on. I admit it, after the first time I watched the first movie, I didn't have a CLUE what was going on.
This movie was not like that. You could actually understand what was going on, even though there was quite a bit of artifice in different parts.
I thought that the plot was not the greatest, but in terms of action, this was one of the most badass movies I've ever seen.
Much better than gladiator anyway, which was just an extremely bloody remake of Braveheart in Roman times. (If you've seen Braveheart, you roughly know the entire plot of Gladiator except that instead of fighting for freedom, the gladiator is fighting *for* the republic of rome after a fashion)
I know that there's a lot of people who download things off the net and through napster, and then go out and buy the album. Lots of people actually like the liner notes, and a lot of times the mp3 may not come with a proper ID3 tag to identify artist, album name, track number, track name, year, genre, etc. So people support the artist by buying the CD even though they've already got the whole album on mp3 through napster. (And let's be more general - this isn't really about napster per se, but the easy availability of the media in the first place - IMHO there isn't much difference between napster and any other file sharing protocol, just that napster is what's in the news recently)
But there are a lot of other people who just download mp3s and never buy the album. I'm not going to make a value judgement and say that they are theives, or that they are are excellent freedom fighters trying to liberate ideas from evil recording companies. What I want is for people to take responsibility for what they do. There are a lot of people out there who just take from napster, and never buy albums. That's fine, I'm sure they have a moral justification one way or the other, but I don't like hearing people say that Napster is fine, because it boosts record sales, because most people buy records after downloading things. Conversely, I don't like to hear people say that napster hurts record sales, because that ignores all of the people who bought the album when they wouldn't have otherwise done so due to "sampling" the album through napster.
Frankly, whatever you want to do with napster is cool with me. I don't use napster, but I don't think that people who do are going to starve the RIAA out anytime soon. What I wish though is that people would only speak for themselves and not make arguments for the napster community as a whole. Because guess what? There are people out there using napster who believe that the RIAA have the right to make the money, so they pay for the albums after the fact. There are also people who see themselves on napster as information gurillas. YOu can't have it both ways. Speak for yourself, and live with your rationalizations, whichever way they may be.
Nonononon...the solution to fermat's theorem was most definately not obvious - I didn't mean that one, I just meant some other proofs that I've seen. You're right - the way the guy tied everything together to prove fermat's last theorem was the genius in that proof, but any proof so long as to require several PhD's years to read the hundreds of pages it contains is not what I would call obvious. :)
Ah, and the old 0.999999999... thing. Most people don't realize that it is 1 until you tell them this:
What does it mean for one number to be equal to another number? Well, if x = y, then x - y = 0. In this case, what's 1 - 0.9999999999999...? The answer is 0.000000000000....(infinite number of 0's). Since 0.000000000.... = 0, they are indeed the same number.
Taking number theory in college and persuing math in my spare time, I've found out that sometimes the ones that look the easiest are actually the most nasty, bastardly, evil problems you've ever seen. Some may look easy, but you have to figure there's a reason why there's a $1 million prize on each question.
Some of the toughest ones are the "prove or disprove" type problems - for example, before fermat's last theorem was proven, (some people are sticklers for long periods of peer review and say that it hasn't been officially proven yet) it was pretty easy with the use of computers to prove that fermat's last theorem held for all integers up through some ungodly number. But proving through "some ungodly number" != proving through all numbers. Induction is the name of the game.
Math is always news for nerds, because programming is very much like the activity proving theorems - you go for simplicity, generality, and ABOVE ALL, conceptual elegance. The really cool part is that when you find a truly elegant, awesome proof, I almost always have that feeling of "damn! It was so OBVIOUS!" -- even though it wasn't, the elegance of the proof makes the concepts surrounding the program just gel perfectly.
I hope to see solutions like that for some of these problems. I'm not really all that great at number theory, but I really enjoy doing it and watching the big boys do it.
Unless they get sponsorship from some huge company. Not that they couldn't do it, just that mainframes are so hugely expensive, that I really doubt they could afford one, or that they own even a small one already. Possibly if some huge company "donated" an LPAR for a period of time it'd be possible, but otherwise I don't know how they'd actually get a hold of the platform to do it.
(I hope I'm wrong about that. Debian kicks ass)
This would undoubtedly be a neat hack, and nice to have, but first, I'm guessing this is going to impact roughly 0.02% of slashdot, and second, they shouldn't be doing it for business reasons, since there already is UNIX on os/390.
At my job I spend a lot of time working with IBM's Open Edition, which is a UNIX that IBM implemented on top of os/390. It is very, very strange as UNIX goes. A lot of common things you associate with unix aren't there like a password file, and other common facilities. Things are put in very strange places on the filesystem, and the way the backend works, (i.e. how it interfaces with MVS) is far weirder than weird. That said, it's a very interesting system that seems pretty stable.
Unfortunately, none of the architecture dependant GNU utilities will compile on this beast, since the hardware isn't even similar to anything unix boxes are used to running on. If suse is going to port linux, they may encounter the hardest part in porting things like gas and gcc, since AFAIK they don't know how to spit out binary for this CPU as of now.
(FYI for people who aren't familiar with OS/390 - it's IBM's mainframe OS. These types of boxes generally start in the $60,000 range for one that probably isn't worth using, and range in price up to the multi-million dollar range. On the one I work on, each individual CPU costs $200K.)
That's why I say probably most slashdot readers won't care. For the vast majority of people, they never work with a mainframe because the only people who can afford to have mainframes are large organizations. (The federal reserve has some bitchin huge mainframes)
4+ gigabytes....
that's a lot of por...I mean, that's a lot of mp....I mean, that's a lot of linux software!
Along with emacs identity as a web browser, and email client, an editor, an ftp client, and even an irc client, emacs is a windowing system.
:)
Try firing up emacs and hitting C-x 2 if you don't believe me.
Oh sure, maybe it doesn't following the WIMP paradigm per se, and maybe it's only just text, but conniseurs of lynx know the value of text. It's better than eye-clogging graphics of indescribable shapes and colors that prove nothing other than that the author had WAY too much time.
Emacs is the ultimate windowing system. I haven't gotten around to write a window manager in elisp yet, but I'm sure there's somebody out there that would do it.
Generations of Unix geeks have been thrilled with pine, elm, and mutt.
True. I'm one of them. (mutt)
Generations of Unix geeks have been thrilled with pine, elm, and mutt.
So?
My boss wants Free Agent. He loves Free Agent. He worships Free Agent. He won't read news with any *nix newsreader that isn't an exact
Free Agent clone. He boots into Windows just to read news. If I clone Free Agent, I have just done a great service to the free software
community: one less instance of Windows being loaded.
So?
Let's ask ourselves something here - what is linux about, anyway? What is free sofwtare about? Because a lot of people think that the sole reason linux exists is to steal market share from microsoft and to take over the world. If that happens, I'm fine with it, but that is not the goal of linux as I see it. (And this is an opinion, yes) The reason I use linux is not to see microsoft topple, or to see my manager using the same OS as me, I use linux because it works for me. I don't really care if company X is moving to linux or if GNOME is easy enough for your grandmother.
In that framework, sometimes writing applications that mimic microsoft applications doesn't make any sense. If I wanted to use a program with that type of look and feel and approach to things, I wouldn't be using linux. Maybe Miguel does like that type of environment. I don't know.
If you go to the evolution page and helixcode, you'll find out that there is even an effort going on to write a replacement for visual basic for GNOME. Why?????? And this coming RIGHT after the love bug problem. Visual basic is one of the reasons why microsoft products suck, and people want the same thing on linux? It doesn't make any sense. Well, it does if stealing marketshare from microsoft is your only purpose, but otherwise it doesn't.
n general, I agree. In this specific, I do not. I believe Rob, Robin, Hemos, et. al., are moral individuals. They have been given complete editorial control over /.'s content.
/.'s name into the mainstream. What better than a Free Speech battle with MS to get good press?
/. does not stand up for Free Speech now, it will never get the chance again
How is it that editorial control would extend to making decisions about lawsuits involving not just the site that a person runs, but the parent company that owns the site?
I don't necessarily disagree with you about Taco's credibility or "moralness", and I'm not entirely sure what his role is within andover, but I'm not sure he's the guy who calls the shots when it comes to lawsuits.
Plus, in this case, I believe it will be worth a court battle; it'll bring
I think it's already in the mainstream. Or the internet mainstream anyway. I bet most people who have ever heard of free software or "open source" could name slashdot. Within its realm of operation, (quasi open source) I'd be willing to bet it has better than 80% name recognition.
Besides, on the topic of getting slashdot good press, that doesn't really interest me. I get some news here, but I feel no obligation to boost this site. They seem to be doing fine.
If
I'm not going to say "This doesn't matter" or "this isn't an assault on freedom of speech" because it probably is. But the real battle of free speech is won at the individual level, not by giving more money to lawyers duking it out with another company.
Someone should start a fund to help Slashdot in case Slashdot does get sued by Microsoft, even though it's very unlikely Slashdot will win.
Slashdot is not exactly a poor business that's barely trying to stand on two feet. I don't think they need a legal defense fund from the general public, besides which, although I read slashdot, I am completely unwilling to contribute money to the legal defense fund of a for-profit company. If they're making money off of their readership, (and rest assured that they are) they don't need to have us further help them financially by paying for their lawyers should they get sued.
I'm not anti-business, and I'm not anti-slashdot, but I would no more pay for slashdot's legal defense then I would for, say, Amoco or Bell Atlantic's legal defense.
The DMCA definately sucks, but in the end, companies will do what is best for their profitability. If they're publically owned, (like Andover is) then they pretty much have to. Your dollars in their defense fund won't change their strategy, and in the end, if the "stand up for the right thing" it will be because management has decided that that's the best thing to do in terms of long term profitability (for whatever reason) not out of some strong moral conviction.
When a project is 'open source' or 'free software', the author of that project is giving you something because he wants to. It doesn't sound right to bitch about the quality of it.
I don't think it's very cool or nice to not make a CVS server available or any of the other things you seem to hate, but they're not obligated to do that. In fact, if they wanted to convert all of their source code to EBCDIC and distribute it that way, sure, it would suck, but they're still giving you something that you wouldn't have otherwise had.
What's the license? If you're so fed up with their efforts, you could just fork it. I realize that there are a lot of strong pressures not to do so, but at the same time, the right to fork was made for situations where there are large problems like you seem to say there are here.
I've always been very down on copyright assignment because I think it is antithetical to the GNU believe that "software should not have owners". It seems highly ironic to me that the FSF is very demanding that they do in fact own the code.
Actually, while it is ironic, yes, it makes a lot of sense. GNU is I guess somewhat against copyrights, hence copyleft. It is mentioned in numerous places on www.gnu.org that since copyright seems to be the rules of the game right now with respect to IP, why not use copyright to protect your work? In fact, that's probably the only feasible option.
It is ironic, but it isn't hypocritical - if they didn't do it that way, it'd be pretty much impossible to make the GPL stick.
Well, I'm the author of a utility that was recently accepted as GNU software. At the time when I was swapping emails with RMS and a great guy named Jonas Oberg, I asked about just this type of stuff.
I was told that if I chose, I could assign the copyright for the entire program to GNU, or I could retain the copyright myself. Not knowing what I was doing at the time, I chose to keep the copyright since I felt that would be safer.
As it turns out, I think the main difference between assigning the copyright to GNU and not doing it is if there is a dispute, or if company X is using your GPL'd source code in some way that is contrary to what the GPL says, if the code's copyright is held by the FSF, they'll stand up for it and litigate, whereas if the individual keeps the copyright, GNU may not have a stake enough to through their weight against the company.
Frankly, if there's anybody on earth that I TRUST to hold the copyright and make sure that the GPL is enforced, it's Stallman and the FSF.
As for signing over patches, I think it's possible that the FSF has gotten burned in the past on submissions being written by people at their jobs, incorporating the patches, and then finding out later that the employee didn't have the write to submit that code under the GPL since it was written on the company's time and hence property of the company.
Signing over patches and explicitly authorizing them for the FSF is a procedural thing to make sure that the free software we use remains pure of other types of non-free code, and presents as small of a profile as possible to litigious lawyers who might want to take someone to court over possible misappropriations of source code.
I think it makes sense to even require this of people. Why else would you be writing software for the FSF if it wasn't going to be GPL'd? If that's the case, why wouldn't you want someone larger than yourself to be able to back and protect the code? The only problem with this I could see would be if you didn't trust the FSF. If that's the case, I'd wonder what your reasons for that are, but I won't disagree with your personal feelings about the FSF.
AFAIK, this is one of the reasons Berlin started in the first place.
I'd love to see X speed up and keep up with the times, but I'm kinda afraid that the code may be too entrenched to make any serious structural modifications to this. I'm not an XFree hacker, so I don't know how much code modification what this guy is proposing would *really* take.
I do know that X works pretty well right now, and in the past, X people haven't been too willing to break the thousands of applications that are out there, even if it was The Right Thing To Do as far as architecture is concerned.
There are two that come to mind - but both are for animation of 3d graphics, not for real video per se. The good parts is that they're decent packages, so sometimes you can't tell the difference.
One is called blender, and the other is called 'moonlight'. Blender is free as in beer only, and I'm not sure about moonlight.
I used it only briefly, and then moved to postgresql.
Part of it was the source code licensing issue, since postgres is free software (bsd license) and mysql isn't.
The other part is that while I was learning RDBMS's, I asked around about a couple of different ones, (I knew I wasn't using oracle both for the license and cost issues), and everybody seemed to have the same opinion - mysql is really fast, but it can't do this, can't do this, etc. etc. etc. and proceeded to spit out a long list of things that you had to work around with mysql in order to get the job done.
On the other hand, I've been using postgres quite happily for quite some time. For my applications, there isn't a serious speed difference between mysql and postgres, (in fact sometimes I think there is no difference) and it lets me march to the beat of my own drummer rather than building sometimes ugly constructs to get around the lack of features in mysql.