The icons are not only prettier, they are more informationally rich. There is a world of difference between a cartoon drawing of a portrait with a filename ending in '.jpeg', and a thumbnail of a JPEG file.
> Then there's Debian's apt-get, which is not for the impatient but certainly has its adherents.
The impatient should probably try fiddling with their/etc/apt/sources.list... http.us.debian.org
ends up being much faster than ftp.debian.org because the former redirects to a number of different http hosts, while the latter is a single ftp server. -- $.02
Erg. No. I think you have the wrong page. And I probably didn't count right anyway. Here's the paragraph I wanted people to read. --- The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records.
> However it is important to explain to people that an activity used in religious ceremonies doesn't make it a religious activity when used out of context. I don't readily see how you could defend relaxation techniques as being particularly 'religious', but it would be a fun debate.
That's true, and I admit that certain forms of meditation may be benficial as relaxation techniques, or even simply for the spiritual benefits, but it's not TM the technique I take exception to so much as TM the institution, and their excesses - in this case, crackpot science.
> As for part II, what's that all about?
This part is a lot of fun. At one point I was also very excited about Hagelin and NLP because they had gathered a few neat ideas - and hey, when was the last time we had a president with a PhD? If he's the developer of the most successful Grand Unified Field Theory, even better, although I have more on this below. Also among his credentials is his position at MUM, the Maharishi University of Management - Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy.
The first connection that I made between Hagelin and TM was in the NLP platform on crime, where they claim that TM is scientifically proven to reduce stress, and claim that stress is the leading cause of crime, which are both possible. However, I'm the kind of guy that likes to hear from the opposition as well.
trancenet.org is the opposition. There is plenty to read here, but the only article immediately relevant to what I'm discussing is from Dr. Dennis Roark, who used to work for the Maharishi at MUM back when MUM was MIU. The following quote from Roark is especially interesting:
While Chairman of Physics at M.I.U., I was asked to develop a quantum theory, a unified field theory, which would incorporate consciousness in such a way as to explain the "flying" technique as non-ordinary and which would give to the subjective experience of meditation a fundamental role in physics.
Sound familiar? Is Hagelin still employed because he was a good scientist, or because he was a good lackey?
It's speculation until I actually see Hagelin's work, I admit, but the past insanities of TM are too much for me to do anything but distrust the Maharishi and his cohorts. I wouldn't advocate voting for John Travolta, a known Scientologist, either. At least not without evaluating the nature of his involvement with them - that's some code I'm going to want to look at before I run it on my country!
> No matter how you try and put it, a piece of code does not share any similatities to a poem, and a programmer does not share any similarities to a poet. Coding is just a process, not a work of art.
So are you saying that a poem doesn't go through a process? That it doesn't follow any rules or have any structure, is just random words strung together without serving any purpose or having any meaning? That also they never logical? Are you saying that poems can't be improved from their initial, rough-draft state into a more completely edited state, 'optimized and debugged' as it were? Are you saying that every poem is a completely unique experience, lacking any resemblance, however slight, to other poems that came before it? Are you saying that any such resemblance two poems might have is accidental rather than allegorical? Are you saying that it is not common practice among artists of any stripe to build off of each others' work?
The problem with people who don't consider coding an art usually isn't that they don't understand coding - it's that they don't understand art.
> I'm not sure where you get the idea that copryright means permission is needed for me to _read_ your book. You seem to be suggesting that if I go to my friends house and pick up a copy of your book off his coffee table and start reading it then I'm violating copyright because I didn't ask you first.
This begs another interesting question - when you read a book, what is happening to the human mind? Isn't the information in the book being copied into it, in whole or in part? Sort of puts a wedge between the spirit and the letter of copyright law...
> Oh yeah, although he'd probably wretch at my last comment, vote Hagelin.
Yeah, or you could vote for someone that doesn't seriously consider Transcendental Meditation (which are really Hindu worship ceremonies disguised as relaxation techniques) something that should be taught in schools, or someone who didn't invent a theory of quantum mechanics designed primarially to justify the Maharishi's claims about the `yogic flying' technique, which turns out on empirical observation to be hopping.
> That attitude is a lot like a car mechanic saying you are stupid for not being able to change your own timing belt.
No, more like a car mechanic saying that you are stupid for not caring what a timing belt is, how much one costs, how long it takes to replace, what might cause it to break or etc. It's like saying that if you don't care enough to make the slightest effort to learn what you need to know in order to protect yourself, you deserve whatever you get.
The auto mechanic's trade has been under fire before in the mainstream for lying about the work done on cars, but nobody knows or even cares about the parallels in PC repair.
If I have the jingle for it, I am usually much better off buying commercial software because they tend to be superior products. The super-configurable Gnome panel, with its myriad applets, has been making my life easier and desktop prettier ever since October Gnome, and is further improved in Helix Gnome. Nothing it does is 'innovative' per se, but it is the best panel I've ever seen, anywhere.
None of these things really have any new features that make you step back and go, "wow, I never expected software could do that!" Debian's APT is the slickest installer/updater/package-manager in the universe. I dread the thought of going back to RPM-based distributions (let alone Windows).
> Kernels, file systems, network stacks, etc. are just things that geeks want to argue about. Try explaining to a new user sometime, in terms of the GUI only, why the browser is so slow, the word processor crashed, and there isn't any more room for mp3s. I can just see it now: "The little glowing 'N' has to throb three times for every picture on the screen..." Even the users that would rather not know about the internals of the system will encounter it sometimes. > I wouldn't consider this to be "confusion". Something that Mac people got right is a focus on user perceptions rather than upon implementation details. So they were right to focus on marketing instead of programming? If perception of the system wasn't affected by the implementation of the system, then everyone would be running Windows 98 on cheap-ass x86 hardware. Oh, wait, they do...
> You probably didn't ground yourself and blew something out when fiddling with the motherboards.
So what you're saying is that he blew something out, ran linux for a week without incident, before windows, upon starting up, finally hit that 'something' and somehow hosed the rest of the board?
> and another thing! why is it when people say "i have the following apps for my new X," when X is a PC they list games and useful apps like photoshorp, and when X is a linux comp they list apache ??
That's a good point. Apache has been ported to Mac and Win32, but that shouldn't be a surprise. Everything that's really worth having doesn't stay platform-specific for long, too many coders will want it on platform X. Nethack is the greatest game ever made, Vi is highly prolific because of its elegance, and C/C++ compilers are ubiquitous. The Gimp is being ported. And so on.
Nice things that I have in Linux which I haven't been able to find elsewhere include the Gnome panel, really pimp terminal emulators, and lots and lots of non-interactive tools. And the uptimes, of course.
> The MS spokesperson is CORRECT. The crippling nature of the ILOVEYOU virus was NOT it's ability to wipe out graphics and mp3 files: it was the way that it spewed out hundreds of messages at once onto the mail server. This is regardless of the OS that it runs. Some mail servers run better than others, but it was just overwhelming to some corporate networks.
While what she said may be factually true based on your interpretation, what she actually meant was apparently something different than what you think she meant (or what, I agree, she should have meant), and as a result she isn't correct. This is why MS later denied that she had actually said it.
What she should have said, see, is that computers running other operating systems can be affected by other infected windows computers, not by the virus by itself. A private network consisting entirely of Unix machines could not be affected, even if ILOVEYOU were to be introduced.
You're right, I should have used a different word than valuable - saleable comes to mind. Digital copies of the Guide legally have to be bought, but you can just go to thelouvre.org or whatever and download jpegs of the Mona. But the real value of art seems to be in the information itself, which is how we get into all this trouble over mp3s.
I would say that it is possible to alter for better or for worse the value of a work through modification, though it is difficult to say how such things actually work. Translation and abridgement are commonly-inflicted transformations that sacrifice value for some other concern, like size or language.
> 3. I would sooner paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa, or something vulgar on the Sistine Chapel than alter one of Mr. Adams masterpieces.
But people use copies of the Mona Lisa as clip art all the time, doing all kinds of bizarre things to it. The only difference here is that with painting, only the content of the original is considered valuable, whereas with literature, the content of every copy, ever, anywhere, is considered valuable.
Your Holocaust example is well taken. It wouldn't be that hard to make a 'nazix' which is a fork of linux, and contains revisionism and propaganda of all kinds. But the problem with that is that it would not recieve wide acceptance, since most users don't want that crap. If a publisher is willing to print a Holocaust-revisionist history textbook, then they are probably willing to print anything that furthers the agenda.
Put simply, the responsibility of separating good books from bad books lies squarely on the shoulders of the publisher, and a publisher should be judged by its ability to do so.
From "the facts," I'm guessing. An atheist doesn't believe in God, but does believe in positive truth that God does not exist. Admitting that he is willing to entertain the possibility would make him an agnostic. That doesn't mean he can't conceive of alternatives, just that he chooses to live his life a certain way based on what he does believe.
> Posting on/., although interesting and informative at times, is not "activism". It is not "striking out at the Corporate Scum" It is soapboxing in a generally Pro Free Software forum.
The most difficult part of activism (based on my extremely limited experience), is getting people to understand how what you are doing relates to what they already believe in. The details might be very complex and subtle and difficult to grasp, especially in today's political world of intimidating legal documentation.
I agree that preaching to the choir doesn't achieve very much, but Slashdot Trolls, bless their little contrarian hearts, often provide us with an opportunity to practice advocacy, and to hear how we sound to people who not only don't agree with us, but are openly hostile and irrational, while perhaps attempting to use logical argument to prove us wrong. Having your position straight ahead of time is helpful when you have to explain to the people around you why you've decided to be such a weirdo. I think this is what Blue was getting at with the 'souding board' comment.
You're right, it's exactly the same. And while Slashdot did the right thing by releasing GPLed code which was in public use, the GPL currently fails to apply to ASPs. So really it hasn't been remedied. That was Bruce Perens' concern - that the GPL must be amended such that distribution refers to any application which is made available to the general public via the internet, or by sale over other networks (dialups, for example). And there may be other problems. Legality, for example, since at present GPL is based on copyright law, and the revision would not be. IANAL, but this was RMS's concern.
Slashdot Mirror
The icons are not only prettier, they are more informationally rich. There is a world of difference between a cartoon drawing of a portrait with a filename ending in '.jpeg', and a thumbnail of a JPEG file.
> Then there's Debian's apt-get, which is not for the impatient but certainly has its adherents.
/etc/apt/sources.list ... http.us.debian.org
The impatient should probably try fiddling with their
ends up being much faster than ftp.debian.org because the former redirects to a number of different http hosts, while the latter is a single ftp server. -- $.02
Erg. No. I think you have the wrong page. And I probably didn't count right anyway. Here's the paragraph I wanted people to read.
---
The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records.
I have some dumb questions that need a home ...
> However it is important to explain to people that an activity used in religious ceremonies doesn't make it a religious activity when used out of context. I don't readily see how you could defend relaxation techniques as being particularly 'religious', but it would be a fun debate.
That's true, and I admit that certain forms of meditation may be benficial as relaxation techniques, or even simply for the spiritual benefits, but it's not TM the technique I take exception to so much as TM the institution, and their excesses - in this case, crackpot science.
> As for part II, what's that all about?
This part is a lot of fun. At one point I was also very excited about Hagelin and NLP because they had gathered a few neat ideas - and hey, when was the last time we had a president with a PhD? If he's the developer of the most successful Grand Unified Field Theory, even better, although I have more on this below. Also among his credentials is his position at MUM, the Maharishi University of Management - Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy.
The first connection that I made between Hagelin and TM was in the NLP platform on crime, where they claim that TM is scientifically proven to reduce stress, and claim that stress is the leading cause of crime, which are both possible. However, I'm the kind of guy that likes to hear from the opposition as well.
trancenet.org is the opposition. There is plenty to read here, but the only article immediately relevant to what I'm discussing is from Dr. Dennis Roark, who used to work for the Maharishi at MUM back when MUM was MIU. The following quote from Roark is especially interesting:
While Chairman of Physics at M.I.U., I was asked to develop a quantum theory, a unified field theory, which would incorporate consciousness in such a way as to explain the "flying" technique as non-ordinary and which would give to the subjective experience of meditation a fundamental role in physics.
Sound familiar? Is Hagelin still employed because he was a good scientist, or because he was a good lackey?
It's speculation until I actually see Hagelin's work, I admit, but the past insanities of TM are too much for me to do anything but distrust the Maharishi and his cohorts. I wouldn't advocate voting for John Travolta, a known Scientologist, either. At least not without evaluating the nature of his involvement with them - that's some code I'm going to want to look at before I run it on my country!
The Skeptic's Dictionary is another good source for this kind of thing.
> I never heard of that and would like to better understand it so I can rebuff it. (if it is rebuffable, that is...)
It certainly is rebuffable, iff you know enough about Hagelin's theory and my speculations aren't accurate.
> No matter how you try and put it, a piece of code does not share any similatities to a poem, and a programmer does not share any similarities to a poet. Coding is just a process, not a work of art.
So are you saying that a poem doesn't go through a process? That it doesn't follow any rules or have any structure, is just random words strung together without serving any purpose or having any meaning? That also they never logical? Are you saying that poems can't be improved from their initial, rough-draft state into a more completely edited state, 'optimized and debugged' as it were? Are you saying that every poem is a completely unique experience, lacking any resemblance, however slight, to other poems that came before it? Are you saying that any such resemblance two poems might have is accidental rather than allegorical? Are you saying that it is not common practice among artists of any stripe to build off of each others' work?
The problem with people who don't consider coding an art usually isn't that they don't understand coding - it's that they don't understand art.
> I'm not sure where you get the idea that copryright means permission is needed for me to _read_ your book. You seem to be suggesting that if I go to my friends house and pick up a copy of your book off his coffee table and start reading it then I'm violating copyright because I didn't ask you first.
...
This begs another interesting question - when you read a book, what is happening to the human mind? Isn't the information in the book being copied into it, in whole or in part? Sort of puts a wedge between the spirit and the letter of copyright law
> Radio makes a profit, but not from broadcasting music. They do so by charging for advertising time.
Courtney Love had something to say about that awhile ago.
Look for the paragraph, the twelveth from the top, about independent radio promotion. FFT.
> Oh yeah, although he'd probably wretch at my last comment, vote Hagelin.
Yeah, or you could vote for someone that doesn't seriously consider Transcendental Meditation (which are really Hindu worship ceremonies disguised as relaxation techniques) something that should be taught in schools, or someone who didn't invent a theory of quantum mechanics designed primarially to justify the Maharishi's claims about the `yogic flying' technique, which turns out on empirical observation to be hopping.
Sources available upon request.
> That attitude is a lot like a car mechanic saying you are stupid for not being able to change your own timing belt.
No, more like a car mechanic saying that you are stupid for not caring what a timing belt is, how much one costs, how long it takes to replace, what might cause it to break or etc. It's like saying that if you don't care enough to make the slightest effort to learn what you need to know in order to protect yourself, you deserve whatever you get.
The auto mechanic's trade has been under fire before in the mainstream for lying about the work done on cars, but nobody knows or even cares about the parallels in PC repair.
If I have the jingle for it, I am usually much better off buying commercial software because they tend to be superior products.
The super-configurable Gnome panel, with its myriad applets, has been making my life easier and desktop prettier ever since October Gnome, and is further improved in Helix Gnome. Nothing it does is 'innovative' per se, but it is the best panel I've ever seen, anywhere.
None of these things really have any new features that make you step back and go, "wow, I never expected software could do that!"
Debian's APT is the slickest installer/updater/package-manager in the universe. I dread the thought of going back to RPM-based distributions (let alone Windows).
> Kernels, file systems, network stacks, etc. are just things that geeks want to argue about. Try explaining to a new user sometime, in terms of the GUI only, why the browser is so slow, the word processor crashed, and there isn't any more room for mp3s. I can just see it now: "The little glowing 'N' has to throb three times for every picture on the screen ..." Even the users that would rather not know about the internals of the system will encounter it sometimes. > I wouldn't consider this to be "confusion". Something that Mac people got right is a focus on user perceptions rather than upon implementation details. So they were right to focus on marketing instead of programming? If perception of the system wasn't affected by the implementation of the system, then everyone would be running Windows 98 on cheap-ass x86 hardware. Oh, wait, they do ...
> You probably didn't ground yourself and blew something out when fiddling with the motherboards.
...
So what you're saying is that he blew something out, ran linux for a week without incident, before windows, upon starting up, finally hit that 'something' and somehow hosed the rest of the board?
Occam's razor isn't going to help you here
> And if you ignore the monetary bit, I'd say Codewarrior is probably the best IDE for code-developing there is.
Foolish mortal! Your Integrated Development Environment cannot defeat my Graphical Debugger! My structures are beyond your imagination!
> and another thing! why is it when people say "i have the following apps for my new X," when X is a PC they list games and useful apps like photoshorp, and when X is a linux comp they list apache ??
That's a good point. Apache has been ported to Mac and Win32, but that shouldn't be a surprise. Everything that's really worth having doesn't stay platform-specific for long, too many coders will want it on platform X. Nethack is the greatest game ever made, Vi is highly prolific because of its elegance, and C/C++ compilers are ubiquitous. The Gimp is being ported. And so on.
Nice things that I have in Linux which I haven't been able to find elsewhere include the Gnome panel, really pimp terminal emulators, and lots and lots of non-interactive tools. And the uptimes, of course.
-1, Moron?
> The MS spokesperson is CORRECT. The crippling nature of the ILOVEYOU virus was NOT it's ability to wipe out graphics and mp3 files: it was the way that it spewed out hundreds of messages at once onto the mail server. This is regardless of the OS that it runs. Some mail servers run better than others, but it was just overwhelming to some corporate networks.
While what she said may be factually true based on your interpretation, what she actually meant was apparently something different than what you think she meant (or what, I agree, she should have meant), and as a result she isn't correct. This is why MS later denied that she had actually said it.
What she should have said, see, is that computers running other operating systems can be affected by other infected windows computers, not by the virus by itself. A private network consisting entirely of Unix machines could not be affected, even if ILOVEYOU were to be introduced.
There's always room for modules.
Dude, if it's that much trouble, don't do it. The Linux police will not be coming to arrest you.
You're right, I should have used a different word than valuable - saleable comes to mind. Digital copies of the Guide legally have to be bought, but you can just go to thelouvre.org or whatever and download jpegs of the Mona. But the real value of art seems to be in the information itself, which is how we get into all this trouble over mp3s.
I would say that it is possible to alter for better or for worse the value of a work through modification, though it is difficult to say how such things actually work. Translation and abridgement are commonly-inflicted transformations that sacrifice value for some other concern, like size or language.
> 3. I would sooner paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa, or something vulgar on the Sistine Chapel than alter one of Mr. Adams masterpieces.
But people use copies of the Mona Lisa as clip art all the time, doing all kinds of bizarre things to it. The only difference here is that with painting, only the content of the original is considered valuable, whereas with literature, the content of every copy, ever, anywhere, is considered valuable.
Your Holocaust example is well taken. It wouldn't be that hard to make a 'nazix' which is a fork of linux, and contains revisionism and propaganda of all kinds. But the problem with that is that it would not recieve wide acceptance, since most users don't want that crap. If a publisher is willing to print a Holocaust-revisionist history textbook, then they are probably willing to print anything that furthers the agenda.
Put simply, the responsibility of separating good books from bad books lies squarely on the shoulders of the publisher, and a publisher should be judged by its ability to do so.
> where does his basis for judgment come from?
From "the facts," I'm guessing. An atheist doesn't believe in God, but does believe in positive truth that God does not exist. Admitting that he is willing to entertain the possibility would make him an agnostic. That doesn't mean he can't conceive of alternatives, just that he chooses to live his life a certain way based on what he does believe.
> Posting on /., although interesting and informative at times, is not "activism". It is not "striking out at the Corporate Scum" It is soapboxing in a generally Pro Free Software forum.
The most difficult part of activism (based on my extremely limited experience), is getting people to understand how what you are doing relates to what they already believe in. The details might be very complex and subtle and difficult to grasp, especially in today's political world of intimidating legal documentation.
I agree that preaching to the choir doesn't achieve very much, but Slashdot Trolls, bless their little contrarian hearts, often provide us with an opportunity to practice advocacy, and to hear how we sound to people who not only don't agree with us, but are openly hostile and irrational, while perhaps attempting to use logical argument to prove us wrong. Having your position straight ahead of time is helpful when you have to explain to the people around you why you've decided to be such a weirdo. I think this is what Blue was getting at with the 'souding board' comment.
You're right, it's exactly the same. And while Slashdot did the right thing by releasing GPLed code which was in public use, the GPL currently fails to apply to ASPs. So really it hasn't been remedied. That was Bruce Perens' concern - that the GPL must be amended such that distribution refers to any application which is made available to the general public via the internet, or by sale over other networks (dialups, for example). And there may be other problems. Legality, for example, since at present GPL is based on copyright law, and the revision would not be. IANAL, but this was RMS's concern.