RMS is too wacky for words...
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Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
RMS just keeps getting wackier and wackier.
I've long considered that his notion of what "free" means is a little beyond the mainstream, but this clearly spells out that what he has in mind is something insidious. He's clearly trying to redefine what freedom means in an attempt to promote a radical, downright socialist agenda.
The claim that individual software authors don't have the freedom to choose what software license they release under is absurd. Trying to claim
that to excercise the right to decide how one's labor is exploited as "power" is absurd. That's
called freedom. Users don't have the right to
decide how the fruits of a programmers labor are
to be used. They do have the right to choose not to use the software in question.
I've long questioned the idea that the GPL promotes some kind of freedom. It clearly is an attempt to plant some kind of social virus which compels the actions of others. But as radical as that is, RMS clearly wishes he could go further and restrict the rights of others to sell the fruits of their labors in a fair and equal market system. I question whether those really interested in creating meaningful software really which to put that yoke on their shoulders and tow the plow of Stallman's vision.
The biggest problem with using a platform such as the PS2 for a project is that you generally have to figure out too many things that are only tangentially related to the task at hand, because they lack standardized APIs. It is true that using DirectX or OpenGL still requires you to learn a great deal, but at least there is significant amounts of tutorial information and documentation to fall back upon.
Games are hard to design and program (at least good ones are). They generally require tapping into the graphics and sound for your machine, they must respond in real time, there are tons of artwork to generate and in the end they have to be engaging and fun. The advantage of course is that they are fun.
If you don't think that is going to have a measurable effect on a large chunk of
water, you haven't taken any thermo or bio classes...
Puleeze. Mir is a pretty big chunk of metal as metal chunks go, but it is insignificant when compared with the mass of the ocean. Try heating a spoon to red hot, and plunking it into a glass of water. Sure, the water around it sizzles for a second, then the spoon is cold, and so for the most part is the water in the glass. Do the math comparing their mass and the delta T. If you have some thermo classes, it's pretty evident that Mir won't do squat to raise the temperature of the earth's oceans.
The problem isn't that it is experimental, it is
that it doesn't work, and can't work. It is
snake oil, just as the rumors of an "infinite compression program" are (and actually, for nearly identical reasons). The really annoying part is that EDN published it in the first place. For God's sake, doesn't anyone actually understand the simplest part of Shannon's work?
The quest for natural language interface is considerably older than Hypercard. COBOL was supposed to eliminate the need for programmers by allowing programs to be written in English. Unfortunately, it wasn't really English. The only bit of COBOL I remember from my early days of programming was it was full of idiosyncrisies. I remember a particular card deck (boy, am I dating myself) which got kicked back because it had the statement AFTER ADVANCING 1 LINE. COBOL insisted of course on the rather peculiar AFTER ADVANCING 1 LINES. Bleh.
Other examples of natural language (or near natural language interfaces) abound in the world of text adventure games. These range from the crufty (Scott Adams) to the fairly sophisticated (Zork and the like). In their limited domain they could be reasonably effective, although all to often they merely end up saying "I don't see a crowbar", or "you can't pry things with a crowbar."
Natural language is thought to be useful because humans use it to communicate with each other. This does not necessarily mean that it is the most appropriate way to interact with a computer. Ergonomically, it might just boil down to trading your carpal tunnel for laryngitis.
When one chooses to rant, it would be nice if one actually understood the subject one was ranting about.
The term "alpha" in the context of transparency originates in Tom Porter and Tom Duff's original color compositing paper that appeared in the proceedings of the 1984 Siggraph conference. They proposed a compositing algebra which augmented normal three channel color with an additional channel which they called "alpha". This algebra allowed people to take images from different sources, and composite them into a single image, with at least simple transparency effects.
Actually, alpha isn't a transparency, it is actually more appropropriately called "coverage". Geometric coverage can be used to fake transparency rather effectively, a fact which was used in several SGI workstations.
Other definitions of transparency are possible and more accurate: for instance, you could have a curve which represented the transmission coefficients at each visible wavelength. In most forms of computer graphics, such detailed models are seldom useful enough to justify the additional cost.
Now the anti-aliasing scheme solves the jaggedness by a simple yet clever solution; the squares are shaded depending on what percentage of their area is covered. That is, if a square is 95% covered by the line, it will be very dark, and if it 5% covered, it will be very light. Zoom back from this, and you have a nice smooth anti-aliased line.
This is one particular implementation of an antialiasing technique, which you might see listed in the appropriate literature as "reconstruction via box filtering" or "weighted area" sampling. It can be fairly simple and effective to implement, but it is far from the best possible results. Using box filters for reconstruction overly blurs the underlying "perfect" image that you are trying to reconstruct. In digital signal processing, you would typically use a sinc(x) filter (sinc(x) = sin(x)/x) to reconstruct, which is theoretically perfect, but expensive to evaluate. More moderate filters based upon cubic bsplines walk a pretty good line between sharpness and expense.
Note that other anti-aliasing methods exist for differrent things, but the above is mainly for simple line drawing. For example, when anti-aliasing is done on a 3d rendered scene, a typical solution is to slightly shake the camera and re-render the scene, then blend the different renderings (this is known as oversampling).
This is a type of oversampling that is currently getting alot of mileage because graphics hardware from SGI and now other graphics companies can do this in hardware, typically using an "accumulation buffer". This type of antialiasing isn't without its own share of artifacts, resulting from the correlations between subpixel locations. Oversampling in general has been around for a long time, it was part of Turner Whitted's original 1980 raytracing paper.
I'm not sure the resolution on TI's projectors, but it was at least HDTV resolution (1920x1080), and it was clearly not interlaced. I couldn't see any pixels until the credits were rolling, and you could see them on the curves of the letters where it was bright white on black. Other than that the image was nearly perfect.
Actually, the current crop of TI projectors are only 1280x1024. Done properly, each of those pixels looks really nice, and points out just how much jitter and defocus there is in traditional film.
The notorious film critic (and technophile) Roger Ebert has been tracking this for some time. When it comes to photographic images on a massive screen, film still beats the pants off current digital offerings... and better film processes been pattented that will even leave emerging digital formats in the dust, using retrofits of current projectors instead of forcing theaters to sink huge bucks into state-of-the-art digital gear.
Unfortunately, Roger Ebert is just wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I like Mr. Ebert and I can appreciate his love for the traditional medium of film. His views are just not in line with the realities.
First of all, digital projection looks gorgeous. You can argue about resolution not being high enough, you can quibble about artifacts, but when done properly (and at Pixar, we spent some time to get it done properly for our digital TS2 showings) it looks amazing. No pops, scratches, film registration. It is absolutely phenomenal.
Next, film is expensive. Prints are expensive, and wear out, and reproducing them results in generational loss.
Digital film projectors have basically no mechanical parts which need to be serviced (other than bulbs and fans). The technology that allows you to make them is only getting cheaper.
Prints get worse the more you use them. I saw the second showing of the Phantom Menace at a local theater. Scratches, dust, pops. TS2 was mineblowingly clean.
Lastly, it will soon be the case that the original material won't be film either, and that entire films will be shot, composited and delivered in a digital format. This will allow you to get the highest quality delivered to the consumer, and will be a good thing.
I have great memories of being in a flickering movie theater, watching Casablanca, munching popcorn, but the future for digital imagery looks pretty sweet. I can't wait.
We've seen rant after rant against software patents on slashdot since time began. Now we have a case where software patents are being assigned specifically for use by GPL licensees. Some people might believe this is a good thing. Bruce Perens seems to imply from his statement elsewhere that software patents are at least compatible with the idea behind the GPL.
The problem is, they are mistaken.
The League for Programming Freedom's opinion in 1991 was that overall software patents do far more harm than good. They did not seek to differentiate between patents that were held by large companies, by individuals, or by organizations. Software patents place a burden on the authors of software of all kinds to ensure that their patents are licensed properly. This makes software more difficult to write and stifles innovation merely to give patent lawyers something to do.
If you have an innovative software idea that you wish to give people, publish it. Establish prior art so companies can't establish a patent later. That's the best you can do, and promotes the freedom of ideas that the GPL is supposed to promote far better than the GPL itself does.
The GPL compels you to donate your labor back to me if you choose to use the fruits of my labor. It is a contract that requires payment in kind. It is not about freely distributing software for the public good.
If you believe that this kind of tit-for-tat "freedom" is a good thing, then the GPL is good. I think that's a questionable assumption.
I enjoyed this book, and recommended it to a number of others. Perhaps because of familiarity with the subject matter, I found the chapters on modern cryptography like PGP and quantum cryptography less interesting than the classical forms.
I took the time to solve six out of the ten contest codes. One more is about half solved. The two fun ones were cracking the 3-rotor Enigma machine (done by a hill-climbing search) and cracking a Playfair cipher by simulated annealing.
With every forward step of modern society, there are the perhaps equally troublesome steps in the wrong direction and dragging of feet.
There is little doubt that the Internet is dominated in sheer volume by crap of every description. Pornography, racism, and violence are all present in vast amounts, and we should be concerned about what access to this material does to young people.
All that aside, the Internet is a fabulous creation. Allowing people access to information and the ability to publish information of their own is remarkably enpowering. While we should be aware and concerned about the darker side of this free access, we should seek ways to come to grips with it, rather than just surpress the entire technology, which also supresses the remarkable good that the Internet can provide.
I love books. I own thousands of them. I don't believe that the Internet is a replacement for them, or that the current level of technology makes eBooks a competing technology. Until you can make an e-Book as portable and easy to use, to allow the reader to make his own annotations, and most of all to get good authors to write and publish books in this form, I think I will stick with books for most tasks.
I would have been happier with the LoC just to say that the reason they aren't going to digitize their entire collection is because of the extreme cost, or the issues of copyright law that need to be resolved. To merely say that the Internet is bad, and books are "worthy of reverence" is just silly. There is some very useful and unique stuff on the web, and there is a hell of a lot of romance novels in print. It is too bad that the LoC chose react to the Internet is the most simplistic way, rather than considering the revolution in media that is underway, and how to best use it to serve the needs of the people of the United States.
I wonder if people have lost all critical thinking skills when they pen sentences like:
The GPL has a purpose and that is to prevent those that would wish to take my freedoms away doing so
People who release code under the BSD license are essentially giving you code to do with as you see fit. It doesn't get any free-er than that. So what if someone else modifies the code, why would you think that you are entitled to their changes? You don't pay their salary. If they wish to donate their code back, terrific, I think it's a wonderful thing to do. But regardless of that, they can't remove ANY freedom that you have with the code as distributed. Make your own free software project out of it. Modify it. Sell it. Embed it. And stop bitching that you are entitled to something that you didn't write but that somehow you feel you deserve.
I had email arguments of this nature with RMS over a decade ago, there is nothing in this argument which is new. I suspect that Professor Tanenbaum understands this issue far better than you might imagine. I salute his efforts to make his excellent software available to people to use as they see fit.
Iridium had only 50k subscribers world wide. They aren't cost effective. Do you want a multi-thousand dollar phone with $6 a minute connect charges? For a phone that doesn't work indoors? Care to imagine how good coverage would be if that money was channeled into adding cell cites? I suspect pretty darned good.
People are under the totally mistaken impression that any price is worth paying to save a human life. It is a ludicrously romantic notion. Our society decides what the price of human life is, and sometimes it is pretty damned cheap.
The Iridium satellites are the source of two major bits of irritation to astronomers: light pollution, in the form of intense bright solar reflections, and radio noise pollution in bands that are used for radio astronomy. Motorola didn't play by the rules which govern deployment of such satellites, and drew the ire (and boycott) of many in the astronomy community.
Your criticism of the word "leech" isn't wrong, I find that term to be inaccurate. "Useless" is the word the marketplace has found for it. I bid it good riddance, and look forward to 66 fireballs plunging to earth, the cleanup of a bad idea, poorly implemented, by a company that just couldn't stop moving along a well laid out path to disaster.
I can't believe that this patent was granted. The scheme used by RT-Linux was is virtually identical to the MERT kernel, which was described in the same Bell Systems Journal which described the original Unix system. A brief scan of the patent itself shows that the applicant mentions this paper. The description of the patent goes on to claim that this patent simplifies the prior art of MERT because it only uses the hardware interrupt facility, and provides no other virtualization. This "innovation" merely means that RT-Linux implements a subset of the functionality described in the original MERT paper and implemented at Bell Labs.
So now we have the fun situation where a good idea that was invented over 30 years ago has now become encumbered by a patent. Charming.
My trusty Abit-BP6 box has dual celeron 400s in it. I built the whole thing for about $700 about six months ago. It's not loaded, but does have a TNT2 card and an 8gb Maxtor IDE drive.
I've got a couple of friends who bought the dual 366s and regularly overclock them. I decided not to, just because the machine is pretty darned zippy anyway. I'd rather a machine run reliably at 400 mhz than to crash even once at 550. They have had varying luck, one friends computer crashes about once a week, the others seem to be doing just fine.
Frankly, I think the whole upgradeability thing is highly overrated. Buy the computer you want now, and then buy the computer you want next year next year. Increases in memory speed, disk capacity and the like will make it really not worthwhile to pick and choose your upgrade.
There's a reason for this, and it's pretty obvious - it's precisely because they're Open Source. If you want to learn how the internals work, you can go to the ultimate description - the source code.
Don't get me wrong, though, higher level descriptions are good and neccessary. It's just that they're not essential when dealing with Open Source Operating Systems. The reason there are so many "Windows Internals" type books is because those systems are closed, and worse, those higher level descriptions are often the only ones you can get of the system.
This comes perilously close to saying "we don't need documentation, that's what the code is for!" A truly dangerous path to stray down.
The code is good at one thing: telling the machine what to do. It is often a pretty poor mechanism for documenting what you wanted it to do. It is also a poor mechanism for documenting what your concerns were, what you tried but found didn't work very well, what used to be implemented here, where your inspiration came from, etc... etc....
Unfortunately, many projects (open source projects included, but of course not exclusively) suffer from a combination of snobbery (if you really knew what you were doing you'd read the code and figure it out) or worse yet, a lack of design itself (it just works okay). It's too easy to hide lack of design and poor design in this way.
The FreeBSD VM article was exactly the kind of article that open source authors should be working toward. Document what you think. Document what you try. Document what the code does. There is more to programming than just knowing what C programs do.
Re:What goes around comes around..
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 1
What bugs me is the potential for an employee to be fired for distributing this source back to the community. Now it becomes his argument that the GPL grants him the right to do this, and they should not have fired him.
Unfortunately, the work done by an employee as part of his work for hist employer doesn't typically belong to him. It is therefore not within his rights to give that labor away. It's a violation of the contract that the programmer enters as part of drawing a paycheck.
Ultimately, the GPL cannot require that a person or corporation distribute anything. I doubt any enforceable license could be constructed that compels a user to do so. If it could, it would seem to be much a much WORSE situation than currently exists for Free Software, as proprietary companies could presumably use the same mechanism to ensure that YOU use the software that you buy in precisely the way that THEY dictate.
The bugroff license is a darned fine idea, and well motivated. If the software in question were really free instead of just GPL-brand free , we could rely on things like simple practicality to enforce software freedom: it would simply not generally be in any companies best interest to significantly fork from the freely available versions. It would also allow them to donate parts of their efforts back into free software projects without necessarily compelling them to donate ALL of their work to such a project.
None of this is new. I suspect it will only be resolved in a court of law when a company begins to think that the payoff might be great enough to risk a legal fight. Given the high valuation of Linux based properties on the NASDAQ, it might not be that far off.
If you are looking for a decently made film that pokes fun at the Trekkie/Sci-Fi crowd, you need look no further. Lots of good gags and pokes at the world of people who take TV just a LEETLE too seriously.
1. It is true that the original 386BSD was hampered somewhat by the Jolitz' attempt to control development. That was pretty much over by the time FreeBSD entered the scene though.
2. Installation of FreeBSD is quite a bit slicker than all but the most recent versions of Linux. Various Linux distributors have obviously made this a high priority, so it is improving for them.
3. Over the years, I've found FreeBSD's hardware support to lag Linux a bit, but I've had some problems with supposedly debugged support under Linux as well. I've found that FreeBSD supports virtually all the hardware I have, but your mileage may vary as your equipment does.
4. Linux certainly is easier to obtain. I used burn CDs for anyone I knew who wanted to try FreeBSD. Some FreeBSD people I know thought this was a bad idea, that if you wanted FreeBSD you should order the CDs from Walnut Creek to support the project. While I certainly urge people to do that if they find FreeBSD useful, I think it was shortsighted to insist on that. If someone doesn't try FreeBSD, they aren't going to contribute monetarilly or with their programming effort to make it better. Therefore our goal should be to get as many people to try FreeBSD as possible.
Recently ISOs of the FreeBSD distribution have begun to show up more widely, which makes it easier for people to try it. I think this is a good thing. OpenBSD has not yet adopted this mentality, which is in my opinion at least partially responsible for its rather limited popularity (it also has a relatively unkind installation process, which is another).
5. Linux does have lots of distributions. I'm not sure that this is a good thing. Most are either of poor quality or simple rehashes of other distributions. The plethora of distributions means plethoras of problems for the most part, as different kernel, config and packaging options make knowledge of one distribution less useful.
To be fair, BSD suffers from similar divergence amongst its three major distributions as well.
6. FreeBSD ships on 4 CDs. They are pretty full. Very little software available for Linux is not available on FreeBSD.
I don't think there is a huge gap. I think the various Linux vendors are a bit further down the road in creating distributions that even novice users can install and use. Given the vast amount of money raised in various Linux IPOs, I don't expect that FreeBSD will close the gap quickly.
Quake is a game. Yes, it's annoying to enter a game where someone employs one of the various descendents of Stooge-Bot to blast you from here to oblivion. But to claim that this is somehow a big problem with the Open Source methology is just silly.
As far as I know, the first client of this type was the StoogeBot stuff done by some students at Stanford with lots of time on their hand. Note: this was well before the source code for Quake was available. It's a relatively straightforward thing to make a proxy to intercept and log the conversations between the server and client, and since the original protocol was done pretty much without any kind of authentication or security, it apparently wasn't very difficult to reverse engineer the protocol.
I view the whole thing as a rather clever bit of hacking, perhaps not worthy of slashdots top 10 list, but rather good overall. Yes, it does ruin the fun for some people. But you'll find that some people will cheat at pretty much anything. I'd merely advise not to play with such people...
To me, it's pretty damned silly to play a game that you always win.
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I've long considered that his notion of what "free" means is a little beyond the mainstream, but this clearly spells out that what he has in mind is something insidious. He's clearly trying to redefine what freedom means in an attempt to promote a radical, downright socialist agenda.
The claim that individual software authors don't have the freedom to choose what software license they release under is absurd. Trying to claim that to excercise the right to decide how one's labor is exploited as "power" is absurd. That's called freedom. Users don't have the right to decide how the fruits of a programmers labor are to be used. They do have the right to choose not to use the software in question.
I've long questioned the idea that the GPL promotes some kind of freedom. It clearly is an attempt to plant some kind of social virus which compels the actions of others. But as radical as that is, RMS clearly wishes he could go further and restrict the rights of others to sell the fruits of their labors in a fair and equal market system. I question whether those really interested in creating meaningful software really which to put that yoke on their shoulders and tow the plow of Stallman's vision.
Games are hard to design and program (at least good ones are). They generally require tapping into the graphics and sound for your machine, they must respond in real time, there are tons of artwork to generate and in the end they have to be engaging and fun. The advantage of course is that they are fun.
water, you haven't taken any thermo or bio classes...
Puleeze. Mir is a pretty big chunk of metal as metal chunks go, but it is insignificant when compared with the mass of the ocean. Try heating a spoon to red hot, and plunking it into a glass of water. Sure, the water around it sizzles for a second, then the spoon is cold, and so for the most part is the water in the glass. Do the math comparing their mass and the delta T. If you have some thermo classes, it's pretty evident that Mir won't do squat to raise the temperature of the earth's oceans.
The problem isn't that it is experimental, it is
that it doesn't work, and can't work. It is
snake oil, just as the rumors of an "infinite compression program" are (and actually, for nearly identical reasons). The really annoying part is that EDN published it in the first place. For God's sake, doesn't anyone actually understand the simplest part of Shannon's work?
Gravity is a harsh mistress!
The quest for natural language interface is considerably older than Hypercard. COBOL was supposed to eliminate the need for programmers by allowing programs to be written in English. Unfortunately, it wasn't really English. The only bit of COBOL I remember from my early days of programming was it was full of idiosyncrisies. I remember a particular card deck (boy, am I dating myself) which got kicked back because it had the statement AFTER ADVANCING 1 LINE. COBOL insisted of course on the rather peculiar AFTER ADVANCING 1 LINES. Bleh.
Other examples of natural language (or near natural language interfaces) abound in the world of text adventure games. These range from the crufty (Scott Adams) to the fairly sophisticated (Zork and the like). In their limited domain they could be reasonably effective, although all to often they merely end up saying "I don't see a crowbar", or "you can't pry things with a crowbar."
Natural language is thought to be useful because humans use it to communicate with each other. This does not necessarily mean that it is the most appropriate way to interact with a computer. Ergonomically, it might just boil down to trading your carpal tunnel for laryngitis.
The term "alpha" in the context of transparency originates in Tom Porter and Tom Duff's original color compositing paper that appeared in the proceedings of the 1984 Siggraph conference. They proposed a compositing algebra which augmented normal three channel color with an additional channel which they called "alpha". This algebra allowed people to take images from different sources, and composite them into a single image, with at least simple transparency effects.
Actually, alpha isn't a transparency, it is actually more appropropriately called "coverage". Geometric coverage can be used to fake transparency rather effectively, a fact which was used in several SGI workstations.
Other definitions of transparency are possible and more accurate: for instance, you could have a curve which represented the transmission coefficients at each visible wavelength. In most forms of computer graphics, such detailed models are seldom useful enough to justify the additional cost.
This is one particular implementation of an antialiasing technique, which you might see listed in the appropriate literature as "reconstruction via box filtering" or "weighted area" sampling. It can be fairly simple and effective to implement, but it is far from the best possible results. Using box filters for reconstruction overly blurs the underlying "perfect" image that you are trying to reconstruct. In digital signal processing, you would typically use a sinc(x) filter (sinc(x) = sin(x)/x) to reconstruct, which is theoretically perfect, but expensive to evaluate. More moderate filters based upon cubic bsplines walk a pretty good line between sharpness and expense.
This is a type of oversampling that is currently getting alot of mileage because graphics hardware from SGI and now other graphics companies can do this in hardware, typically using an "accumulation buffer". This type of antialiasing isn't without its own share of artifacts, resulting from the correlations between subpixel locations. Oversampling in general has been around for a long time, it was part of Turner Whitted's original 1980 raytracing paper.
Actually, the current crop of TI projectors are only 1280x1024. Done properly, each of those pixels looks really nice, and points out just how much jitter and defocus there is in traditional film.
Unfortunately, Roger Ebert is just wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I like Mr. Ebert and I can appreciate his love for the traditional medium of film. His views are just not in line with the realities.
First of all, digital projection looks gorgeous. You can argue about resolution not being high enough, you can quibble about artifacts, but when done properly (and at Pixar, we spent some time to get it done properly for our digital TS2 showings) it looks amazing. No pops, scratches, film registration. It is absolutely phenomenal.
Next, film is expensive. Prints are expensive, and wear out, and reproducing them results in generational loss.
Digital film projectors have basically no mechanical parts which need to be serviced (other than bulbs and fans). The technology that allows you to make them is only getting cheaper.
Prints get worse the more you use them. I saw the second showing of the Phantom Menace at a local theater. Scratches, dust, pops. TS2 was mineblowingly clean.
Lastly, it will soon be the case that the original material won't be film either, and that entire films will be shot, composited and delivered in a digital format. This will allow you to get the highest quality delivered to the consumer, and will be a good thing.
I have great memories of being in a flickering movie theater, watching Casablanca, munching popcorn, but the future for digital imagery looks pretty sweet. I can't wait.
We've seen rant after rant against software patents on slashdot since time began. Now we have a case where software patents are being assigned specifically for use by GPL licensees. Some people might believe this is a good thing. Bruce Perens seems to imply from his statement elsewhere that software patents are at least compatible with the idea behind the GPL.
The problem is, they are mistaken.
The League for Programming Freedom's opinion in 1991 was that overall software patents do far more harm than good. They did not seek to differentiate between patents that were held by large companies, by individuals, or by organizations. Software patents place a burden on the authors of software of all kinds to ensure that their patents are licensed properly. This makes software more difficult to write and stifles innovation merely to give patent lawyers something to do.
If you have an innovative software idea that you wish to give people, publish it. Establish prior art so companies can't establish a patent later. That's the best you can do, and promotes the freedom of ideas that the GPL is supposed to promote far better than the GPL itself does.
The GPL compels you to donate your labor back to me if you choose to use the fruits of my labor. It is a contract that requires payment in kind. It is not about freely distributing software for the public good.
If you believe that this kind of tit-for-tat "freedom" is a good thing, then the GPL is good. I think that's a questionable assumption.
I took the time to solve six out of the ten contest codes. One more is about half solved. The two fun ones were cracking the 3-rotor Enigma machine (done by a hill-climbing search) and cracking a Playfair cipher by simulated annealing.
Anyway, highly recommended.
There is little doubt that the Internet is dominated in sheer volume by crap of every description. Pornography, racism, and violence are all present in vast amounts, and we should be concerned about what access to this material does to young people.
All that aside, the Internet is a fabulous creation. Allowing people access to information and the ability to publish information of their own is remarkably enpowering. While we should be aware and concerned about the darker side of this free access, we should seek ways to come to grips with it, rather than just surpress the entire technology, which also supresses the remarkable good that the Internet can provide.
I love books. I own thousands of them. I don't believe that the Internet is a replacement for them, or that the current level of technology makes eBooks a competing technology. Until you can make an e-Book as portable and easy to use, to allow the reader to make his own annotations, and most of all to get good authors to write and publish books in this form, I think I will stick with books for most tasks.
I would have been happier with the LoC just to say that the reason they aren't going to digitize their entire collection is because of the extreme cost, or the issues of copyright law that need to be resolved. To merely say that the Internet is bad, and books are "worthy of reverence" is just silly. There is some very useful and unique stuff on the web, and there is a hell of a lot of romance novels in print. It is too bad that the LoC chose react to the Internet is the most simplistic way, rather than considering the revolution in media that is underway, and how to best use it to serve the needs of the people of the United States.
I wonder if people have lost all critical thinking skills when they pen sentences like:
People who release code under the BSD license are essentially giving you code to do with as you see fit. It doesn't get any free-er than that. So what if someone else modifies the code, why would you think that you are entitled to their changes? You don't pay their salary. If they wish to donate their code back, terrific, I think it's a wonderful thing to do. But regardless of that, they can't remove ANY freedom that you have with the code as distributed. Make your own free software project out of it. Modify it. Sell it. Embed it. And stop bitching that you are entitled to something that you didn't write but that somehow you feel you deserve.I had email arguments of this nature with RMS over a decade ago, there is nothing in this argument which is new. I suspect that Professor Tanenbaum understands this issue far better than you might imagine. I salute his efforts to make his excellent software available to people to use as they see fit.
People are under the totally mistaken impression that any price is worth paying to save a human life. It is a ludicrously romantic notion. Our society decides what the price of human life is, and sometimes it is pretty damned cheap.
Your criticism of the word "leech" isn't wrong, I find that term to be inaccurate. "Useless" is the word the marketplace has found for it. I bid it good riddance, and look forward to 66 fireballs plunging to earth, the cleanup of a bad idea, poorly implemented, by a company that just couldn't stop moving along a well laid out path to disaster.
So now we have the fun situation where a good idea that was invented over 30 years ago has now become encumbered by a patent. Charming.
My trusty Abit-BP6 box has dual celeron 400s in it. I built the whole thing for about $700 about six months ago. It's not loaded, but does have a TNT2 card and an 8gb Maxtor IDE drive.
I've got a couple of friends who bought the dual 366s and regularly overclock them. I decided not to, just because the machine is pretty darned zippy anyway. I'd rather a machine run reliably at 400 mhz than to crash even once at 550. They have had varying luck, one friends computer crashes about once a week, the others seem to be doing just fine.
Frankly, I think the whole upgradeability thing is highly overrated. Buy the computer you want now, and then buy the computer you want next year next year. Increases in memory speed, disk capacity and the like will make it really not worthwhile to pick and choose your upgrade.
Don't get me wrong, though, higher level descriptions are good and neccessary. It's just that they're not essential when dealing with Open Source Operating Systems. The reason there are so many "Windows Internals" type books is because those systems are closed, and worse, those higher level descriptions are often the only ones you can get of the system.
This comes perilously close to saying "we don't need documentation, that's what the code is for!" A truly dangerous path to stray down.
The code is good at one thing: telling the machine what to do. It is often a pretty poor mechanism for documenting what you wanted it to do. It is also a poor mechanism for documenting what your concerns were, what you tried but found didn't work very well, what used to be implemented here, where your inspiration came from, etc... etc....
Unfortunately, many projects (open source projects included, but of course not exclusively) suffer from a combination of snobbery (if you really knew what you were doing you'd read the code and figure it out) or worse yet, a lack of design itself (it just works okay). It's too easy to hide lack of design and poor design in this way.
The FreeBSD VM article was exactly the kind of article that open source authors should be working toward. Document what you think. Document what you try. Document what the code does. There is more to programming than just knowing what C programs do.
Unfortunately, the work done by an employee as part of his work for hist employer doesn't typically belong to him. It is therefore not within his rights to give that labor away. It's a violation of the contract that the programmer enters as part of drawing a paycheck.
Ultimately, the GPL cannot require that a person or corporation distribute anything. I doubt any enforceable license could be constructed that compels a user to do so. If it could, it would seem to be much a much WORSE situation than currently exists for Free Software, as proprietary companies could presumably use the same mechanism to ensure that YOU use the software that you buy in precisely the way that THEY dictate.
The bugroff license is a darned fine idea, and well motivated. If the software in question were really free instead of just GPL-brand free , we could rely on things like simple practicality to enforce software freedom: it would simply not generally be in any companies best interest to significantly fork from the freely available versions. It would also allow them to donate parts of their efforts back into free software projects without necessarily compelling them to donate ALL of their work to such a project.
None of this is new. I suspect it will only be resolved in a court of law when a company begins to think that the payoff might be great enough to risk a legal fight. Given the high valuation of Linux based properties on the NASDAQ, it might not be that far off.
Lunar eclipses only occur during full moons.
Think about it.
Galaxy Quest.
If you are looking for a decently made film that pokes fun at the Trekkie/Sci-Fi crowd, you need look no further. Lots of good gags and pokes at the world of people who take TV just a LEETLE too seriously.
1. It is true that the original 386BSD was hampered somewhat by the Jolitz' attempt to control development. That was pretty much over by the time FreeBSD entered the scene though.
2. Installation of FreeBSD is quite a bit slicker than all but the most recent versions of Linux. Various Linux distributors have obviously made this a high priority, so it is improving for them.
3. Over the years, I've found FreeBSD's hardware support to lag Linux a bit, but I've had some problems with supposedly debugged support under Linux as well. I've found that FreeBSD supports virtually all the hardware I have, but your mileage may vary as your equipment does.
4. Linux certainly is easier to obtain. I used burn CDs for anyone I knew who wanted to try FreeBSD. Some FreeBSD people I know thought this was a bad idea, that if you wanted FreeBSD you should order the CDs from Walnut Creek to support the project. While I certainly urge people to do that if they find FreeBSD useful, I think it was shortsighted to insist on that. If someone doesn't try FreeBSD, they aren't going to contribute monetarilly or with their programming effort to make it better. Therefore our goal should be to get as many people to try FreeBSD as possible.
Recently ISOs of the FreeBSD distribution have begun to show up more widely, which makes it easier for people to try it. I think this is a good thing. OpenBSD has not yet adopted this mentality, which is in my opinion at least partially responsible for its rather limited popularity (it also has a relatively unkind installation process, which is another).
5. Linux does have lots of distributions. I'm not sure that this is a good thing. Most are either of poor quality or simple rehashes of other distributions. The plethora of distributions means plethoras of problems for the most part, as different kernel, config and packaging options make knowledge of one distribution less useful.
To be fair, BSD suffers from similar divergence amongst its three major distributions as well.
6. FreeBSD ships on 4 CDs. They are pretty full. Very little software available for Linux is not available on FreeBSD.
I don't think there is a huge gap. I think the various Linux vendors are a bit further down the road in creating distributions that even novice users can install and use. Given the vast amount of money raised in various Linux IPOs, I don't expect that FreeBSD will close the gap quickly.
C'mon people, let's show some perspective here.
Quake is a game. Yes, it's annoying to enter a game where someone employs one of the various descendents of Stooge-Bot to blast you from here to oblivion. But to claim that this is somehow a big problem with the Open Source methology is just silly.
As far as I know, the first client of this type was the StoogeBot stuff done by some students at Stanford with lots of time on their hand. Note: this was well before the source code for Quake was available. It's a relatively straightforward thing to make a proxy to intercept and log the conversations between the server and client, and since the original protocol was done pretty much without any kind of authentication or security, it apparently wasn't very difficult to reverse engineer the protocol.
I view the whole thing as a rather clever bit of hacking, perhaps not worthy of slashdots top 10 list, but rather good overall. Yes, it does ruin the fun for some people. But you'll find that some people will cheat at pretty much anything. I'd merely advise not to play with such people...
To me, it's pretty damned silly to play a game that you always win.