I thought I was the only one that got startled by that screensaver. I had to stop using it... I'd look up from what I was doing, see the error, and panic:)
I know what ANT is; I use it every day. Having looked at the linked-to announcement, where they say "don't bother upgrading unless one of the two specific bugs fixed bothers you", it seems to me that it's rather not worthwhile to post this to slashdot. It's not NEWS after all. There are websites (freshmeat, among others) dedicated to this sort of announcement.
I can understand posting to/. when some major software is released, like a kernel or apache webserver or some critical security fix, but please; this release is probably the most trivial ant release ever, and people don't rely on ant the way they rely on httpd.
What if you already own a copy of Windows from a previous computer? I'm not using any of my hardward that's > 2 years old, but I still run Windows 98, because I already had it. Luckily, I only buy clones so I don't have to buy an OS. But I'd hate it if I couldn't buy a system without Windows installed; then it really would be a tax. And for all brand-name computers you pretty much have to buy windows.
>stuff I've bought in just the last 15 months or so... it's truly frightening how much I've bought in that time...
Wow, when I read this line I thought of myself, and how I've recently bought more lego than I ever owned as a child. My wife won't let me buy any more because the computer room has run out of flat surfaces for me to put them on:)
Ok; I'll admit that a pocket-sized notebook isn't good for note-taking. Thus the normal arguements do not apply. However, a pocket-sized notebook still is very durable, and allows total freedom in data entry, while a PDA is limited; you can not mix text with pictures or date-reminders with todo items. But a PDA is much better at sorting and storing the type of info it was designed for.
Can your PDA run all day while you take notes? I used to have 5+ hours of lectures; I doubt my PDA would last that long. Does your PDA let you take notes in multiple colours? Can you put diagrams inline with text? How fast can you write in it? If you write on paper in a quick and messy fashion you can still try to decipher it later. But you have to be careful with hand-writing recognition software; it can mess up really well.
Finally, questions about memory, and rewriting don't really make sense in a notebook. just cross something out if it's not right.
Your only valid point has to do with the fact that a PDA has certain features that paper does not have. Like search, or a back-light. So what? Those features may not be useful in a lecture environment. If I'm trying to take notes and draw diagrams, paper and pen WILL be more useful. My PDA may have 128 MB ram and maybe it can play mp3s and fold my laundry and keep track of my finances and let me search my phone book AND to-do list from one dialog, but none of those things have anything to do with taking notes at school.
This has been an entire/. article before, if I recall. And I think mainly it isn't worth the trouble; it means that games won't work on the latest hardware; it means you have to reboot to play games; it means that you have to essentially single-task. no more printing, downloading, whatever.
The task of building a "game" distro would be complex; a game company would have to spend lots of time building it; otherwise, it has to be outsourced. If you're not building it, why are you shipping on only that OS? If you are concerned only with certifying on one platform, why not just pick a popular platform and say "we only support X". It's easier and keeps the users happier.
Well, unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on your point of view), we as a society don't seem to value the laws of nature anymore, so we don't let people die of stupidity. Instead we prop them up with government-assistance. So we can either prop them up with government-assitance after they split their heads open on the pavement, or we can prop them up by legislating saftey devices. It's cleaner that way.
I'm not saying I disagree with you, btw. But maybe we can look at it from a higher level: if fewer people die or are injured in accidents, maybe society is better off (somehow). That means that our society can survive, while other societies that have more problems will not. I dunno:)
I disagree. People have shown time and time again that they are incapable of making proper decisions for themselves, even when it comes to things like personal safety and survival. So, the government steps in to legislate things like seatbelts and motorcycle helmets. The good of wearing a motorcycle helmet is that it protects the rider from many types of accidents, not just the ones where the rider is at fault, or where another driver is at fault.
One rationale is that many governments provide services like welfare or social assitance or employment insurance or medicare. It costs the system money to help people with these services; if you can legislate a saftey device which will keep people healthy and working, it makes sense to do so, regardless of the private insurance costs.
You can argue about freedom of choice, etc. But I say that certain choices you don't have the right to make, you only have the priveledge. Just like we don't let children do things that they are not mature enough to handle, we don't let adults do things that they have shown to be unable to do. Making saftey decisions is one thing where the government has to step in to re-inforce our pitiful skills.
I'll second that; I've seen many a computer fan or printer clogged with brown, sticky dust that only appears in smoker's computers. Non-smoker's computers have white, fluffy dust that is much easier to clean and remove, and their printers last longer too.
I figured out how to walk through the poster too... I think if you turned on the heads-up display map you could see on the map that there was a room there. I seem to recall (when I saw it) "Hey, a secret!" but then it was the actual solution so I thought "Doh, how was I supposed to find this?!?!".
Of course, I may have imagined the whole map thing... it was a long time ago.
Actually, I was emulating the Sierra engine using nagi and freesci. But I felt that the bad karma would come from playing such old games on such a powerful box.:)
That's funny because just the other day i actually installed a 5.25" floppy in my Athlon XP 1700 w/ 512 Ram. Just so I could play games made in 1984 (Sierra * Quest games, running under Linux with emulation). I felt like there was something morally wrong with what I was doing though.:)
> Can you name a major Open Source development that has been completely discontinued by its original developer(s), and which has been taken on by a new team who have continued to fix up the bugs and add new functionality in the same spirit as the original? Can you name five? Ten?
Does it count if none of the original team is working on the project anymore? Lots of projects were started by one person, then that person lost interest and gave the project to a second-in-command. Sometimes the lead developer just disappears or takes off, and doesn't really hand control to anyone else. In these cases, other developers who have worked on the project have taken over. This isn't exactly the same as a project being totally abandonned, then resurected, but it's similar.
Finally, it's true that there are tonnes of half-done projects that never went anywhere. People are typically not interested in maintaining and old project, written by someone else, unless they have a need for the particular program, or the program was popular. If the program is popular, it probably had lots of developers to keep it going. If it wasn't popular, nobody wants it anyway, why maintain it?
The point is that you _can_ maintain it if you want. Just look at commercial stuff that was freed... some of this stuff would have disappeared because the original company was no longer supporting it (Quake, Quake2). Some of it becomes a curiousity in the history of computing (Original Unix code). But now that it's free, anyone can use it and fix it.
It makes the software a worse proposition if one of the reasons you bought the software was because you expected it to be released as open-source.
If open source is important to me, and I have the choice between the following:
1. A proprietary program 2. A proprietary program that will be escrowed 3. An open source program that isn't as good as #1 or #2 but would be sufficient
I will choose #2 if I get the source eventually. However, if the source is never released, then I would have been better off with #3.
I'm not saying that the escrow program won't work, I'm just saying that it has some hurdles to overcome before people buy into it.
That is one approach, but that approach is already available without a mandated system. My company always puts its products into escrow for our customers; they demand it. If we stop maintaining the product (to a certain level of maintenance) then they get access to the source (I'm not sure of all the details, but that's the gist). The OSTEP program needs to do more than this to have real value. I think it will be a huge challenge.
You're kidding, right? The pharmeceutical companies are bastards. They hoard and fight over every last patent and chemical formula.
They even patent the same drug multiple times if it does multiple things to your body (usually as side effects)... for example, birth control pills can help reduce acne (this is a side-effect). So a drug company can patent a birth-control pill TWICE, once as the actual invention (birth control) and once as an acne medication (accidental consequence). The birth-control example doesn't happen in the real world, but there are other drugs where this is true. In Ontario (Canada) pharmacists are required by law to sell generic brands first, rather than name-brands (unless the customer asks for a name brand). However, if a drug is patented, they are required to sell the drug made by the patent-owner (of course). So, this leads to the situation where a drug might be patented for one effect but not for another. This means that pharmacists must keep track of which patents apply to which drugs, and must make sure that they don't accidentally give the patient the cheaper version.
And we're not just talking about Viagra here, either. We're talking about anti-biotics, pain-killers, drugs to treat arthritis, diabetes, and other real illnesses.
In fact, drug companies frequently use patents to try to get more money from governments. Just recently the Canadian provincial governments ran into some issues while trying to get a drug to fight anthrax, because the drug was patented. The patent owner wasn't selling the drug at a reasonable cost, so the government had to buy it from someone else. Basically the government had to change the law for this case.
I've thought of this idea before; it seems somewhat reasonable but there are some problems. For example, what if the escrow value is set too high? What if only a few people buy it? What happens to bug-fixes and updates?
I can imagine a few things going wrong in this system where the buyer of the software is harmed. The example in the article about Corel escrowing Word Perfect is a good one: What happens if they set the escrow value at $50M but only sell $40M of software? Then the early adopters lose out, since now they are stuck with a product as proprietary as MS Word, but not as popularly supported. I think that for this reason, many products will not be purchased until they have some serious momentum. This is a catch-22.
Another issue, as another poster mentioned, is that software that begins its life as proprietary can not build upon the free software foundations. The other main problem is that some software can't be open-sourced because it includes other proprietary components that are licensed, not bought. So, for the free-software community there is still an advantage (more free code, even if it's missing bits, is still good), but for the people who bought the software in escrow there is less advantage, since they can't actually use the opened source for their production work.
Yeah... I suppose I keep forgetting just how old NT4 is. But the point still remains that it wouldn't be so hard for MS to support as many processors as they wanted to.
Um, at least until recently MS supported Windows on Alpha, but since Alpha looks like a dying processor (market-wise), it doesn't make sense for Windows to continue to support it. And Windows will run on IA64 (Itanium, right?). Guaranteed. I think it already DOES run on that. Also, Windows used to run on PPC so it could conceivably do so again, if the processor market changed somewhat (doubtful).
Exactly. And in this case, it's the copyright groups who are the chefs; they are always trying to raise the water temperature.
Personally, I'd rather pay a flat fee (i.e. levy) on my copyright infringement equipment and be given free-reign to copy whatever I want. I just don't want the copyright associactions to have it both ways: you have to pay to buy the album AND you have to pay to copy the album, which is illegal, so you can't copy the album. I don't want to pay twice, that's all. And I certainly don't want to pay (a levy) to be allowed to copy stuff, while being unable to copy stuff due to copy protection schemes that degrade my music/movie/whatever experience.
Not all religions believe this. Furthermore, most religions don't believe that lust in general is bad, just in certain situations.
Regardless, this seems to work a lot like any addiction support group. You have a web of support to help you stay on the straight and narrow. Seems reasonable to me; assuming you WANT to be "straight and narrow".
I don't think paper is a good example to back up your concerns... paper is usually very easily recycled. Paper mills have always recycled lots of waste, for years. Paper is among the most recycled products there are, really. But I agree that recycling everything is pointless. For example, plastic containers, like the milk jugs you get from corner stores, or 2 Litre pop bottles. These things are essentially big bottles of air and recycling trucks burn so much gas hauling them around that it's actually harmful to the environment. Besides, residential waste is so miniscule compared to industrial waste, it's almost pointless to spend time dealing with it. If more time were spend dealing with industrial waste, the world would be a much better place.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I was the only one that got startled by that screensaver. I had to stop using it... I'd look up from what I was doing, see the error, and panic :)
I know what ANT is; I use it every day. Having looked at the linked-to announcement, where they say "don't bother upgrading unless one of the two specific bugs fixed bothers you", it seems to me that it's rather not worthwhile to post this to slashdot. It's not NEWS after all. There are websites (freshmeat, among others) dedicated to this sort of announcement.
/. when some major software is released, like a kernel or apache webserver or some critical security fix, but please; this release is probably the most trivial ant release ever, and people don't rely on ant the way they rely on httpd.
I can understand posting to
I wonder if this is the proper site for announcements of minor releases to non-critical projects.
I agree. Do we need to have a /. article for every commercial product? Is this a big surprise that IBM is (gasp!) supporting Linux? Imagine!
What if you already own a copy of Windows from a previous computer? I'm not using any of my hardward that's > 2 years old, but I still run Windows 98, because I already had it. Luckily, I only buy clones so I don't have to buy an OS. But I'd hate it if I couldn't buy a system without Windows installed; then it really would be a tax. And for all brand-name computers you pretty much have to buy windows.
>stuff I've bought in just the last 15 months or so... it's truly frightening how much I've bought in that time...
:)
Wow, when I read this line I thought of myself, and how I've recently bought more lego than I ever owned as a child. My wife won't let me buy any more because the computer room has run out of flat surfaces for me to put them on
Ok; I'll admit that a pocket-sized notebook isn't good for note-taking. Thus the normal arguements do not apply. However, a pocket-sized notebook still is very durable, and allows total freedom in data entry, while a PDA is limited; you can not mix text with pictures or date-reminders with todo items. But a PDA is much better at sorting and storing the type of info it was designed for.
Can your PDA run all day while you take notes? I used to have 5+ hours of lectures; I doubt my PDA would last that long. Does your PDA let you take notes in multiple colours? Can you put diagrams inline with text? How fast can you write in it? If you write on paper in a quick and messy fashion you can still try to decipher it later. But you have to be careful with hand-writing recognition software; it can mess up really well.
Finally, questions about memory, and rewriting don't really make sense in a notebook. just cross something out if it's not right.
Your only valid point has to do with the fact that a PDA has certain features that paper does not have. Like search, or a back-light. So what? Those features may not be useful in a lecture environment. If I'm trying to take notes and draw diagrams, paper and pen WILL be more useful. My PDA may have 128 MB ram and maybe it can play mp3s and fold my laundry and keep track of my finances and let me search my phone book AND to-do list from one dialog, but none of those things have anything to do with taking notes at school.
This has been an entire /. article before, if I recall. And I think mainly it isn't worth the trouble; it means that games won't work on the latest hardware; it means you have to reboot to play games; it means that you have to essentially single-task. no more printing, downloading, whatever.
The task of building a "game" distro would be complex; a game company would have to spend lots of time building it; otherwise, it has to be outsourced. If you're not building it, why are you shipping on only that OS? If you are concerned only with certifying on one platform, why not just pick a popular platform and say "we only support X". It's easier and keeps the users happier.
Well, unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on your point of view), we as a society don't seem to value the laws of nature anymore, so we don't let people die of stupidity. Instead we prop them up with government-assistance. So we can either prop them up with government-assitance after they split their heads open on the pavement, or we can prop them up by legislating saftey devices. It's cleaner that way.
:)
I'm not saying I disagree with you, btw. But maybe we can look at it from a higher level: if fewer people die or are injured in accidents, maybe society is better off (somehow). That means that our society can survive, while other societies that have more problems will not. I dunno
I disagree. People have shown time and time again that they are incapable of making proper decisions for themselves, even when it comes to things like personal safety and survival. So, the government steps in to legislate things like seatbelts and motorcycle helmets. The good of wearing a motorcycle helmet is that it protects the rider from many types of accidents, not just the ones where the rider is at fault, or where another driver is at fault.
One rationale is that many governments provide services like welfare or social assitance or employment insurance or medicare. It costs the system money to help people with these services; if you can legislate a saftey device which will keep people healthy and working, it makes sense to do so, regardless of the private insurance costs.
You can argue about freedom of choice, etc. But I say that certain choices you don't have the right to make, you only have the priveledge. Just like we don't let children do things that they are not mature enough to handle, we don't let adults do things that they have shown to be unable to do. Making saftey decisions is one thing where the government has to step in to re-inforce our pitiful skills.
I'll second that; I've seen many a computer fan or printer clogged with brown, sticky dust that only appears in smoker's computers. Non-smoker's computers have white, fluffy dust that is much easier to clean and remove, and their printers last longer too.
I figured out how to walk through the poster too... I think if you turned on the heads-up display map you could see on the map that there was a room there. I seem to recall (when I saw it) "Hey, a secret!" but then it was the actual solution so I thought "Doh, how was I supposed to find this?!?!".
Of course, I may have imagined the whole map thing... it was a long time ago.
Actually, I was emulating the Sierra engine using nagi and freesci. But I felt that the bad karma would come from playing such old games on such a powerful box. :)
That's funny because just the other day i actually installed a 5.25" floppy in my Athlon XP 1700 w/ 512 Ram. Just so I could play games made in 1984 (Sierra * Quest games, running under Linux with emulation). I felt like there was something morally wrong with what I was doing though. :)
> Can you name a major Open Source development that has been completely discontinued by its original developer(s), and which has been taken on by a new team who have continued to fix up the bugs and add new functionality in the same spirit as the original? Can you name five? Ten?
Does it count if none of the original team is working on the project anymore? Lots of projects were started by one person, then that person lost interest and gave the project to a second-in-command. Sometimes the lead developer just disappears or takes off, and doesn't really hand control to anyone else. In these cases, other developers who have worked on the project have taken over. This isn't exactly the same as a project being totally abandonned, then resurected, but it's similar.
Finally, it's true that there are tonnes of half-done projects that never went anywhere. People are typically not interested in maintaining and old project, written by someone else, unless they have a need for the particular program, or the program was popular. If the program is popular, it probably had lots of developers to keep it going. If it wasn't popular, nobody wants it anyway, why maintain it?
The point is that you _can_ maintain it if you want. Just look at commercial stuff that was freed... some of this stuff would have disappeared because the original company was no longer supporting it (Quake, Quake2). Some of it becomes a curiousity in the history of computing (Original Unix code). But now that it's free, anyone can use it and fix it.
It makes the software a worse proposition if one of the reasons you bought the software was because you expected it to be released as open-source.
If open source is important to me, and I have the choice between the following:
1. A proprietary program
2. A proprietary program that will be escrowed
3. An open source program that isn't as good as #1 or #2 but would be sufficient
I will choose #2 if I get the source eventually. However, if the source is never released, then I would have been better off with #3.
I'm not saying that the escrow program won't work, I'm just saying that it has some hurdles to overcome before people buy into it.
That is one approach, but that approach is already available without a mandated system. My company always puts its products into escrow for our customers; they demand it. If we stop maintaining the product (to a certain level of maintenance) then they get access to the source (I'm not sure of all the details, but that's the gist). The OSTEP program needs to do more than this to have real value. I think it will be a huge challenge.
You're kidding, right? The pharmeceutical companies are bastards. They hoard and fight over every last patent and chemical formula.
They even patent the same drug multiple times if it does multiple things to your body (usually as side effects)... for example, birth control pills can help reduce acne (this is a side-effect). So a drug company can patent a birth-control pill TWICE, once as the actual invention (birth control) and once as an acne medication (accidental consequence). The birth-control example doesn't happen in the real world, but there are other drugs where this is true. In Ontario (Canada) pharmacists are required by law to sell generic brands first, rather than name-brands (unless the customer asks for a name brand). However, if a drug is patented, they are required to sell the drug made by the patent-owner (of course). So, this leads to the situation where a drug might be patented for one effect but not for another. This means that pharmacists must keep track of which patents apply to which drugs, and must make sure that they don't accidentally give the patient the cheaper version.
And we're not just talking about Viagra here, either. We're talking about anti-biotics, pain-killers, drugs to treat arthritis, diabetes, and other real illnesses.
In fact, drug companies frequently use patents to try to get more money from governments. Just recently the Canadian provincial governments ran into some issues while trying to get a drug to fight anthrax, because the drug was patented. The patent owner wasn't selling the drug at a reasonable cost, so the government had to buy it from someone else. Basically the government had to change the law for this case.
I've thought of this idea before; it seems somewhat reasonable but there are some problems. For example, what if the escrow value is set too high? What if only a few people buy it? What happens to bug-fixes and updates?
I can imagine a few things going wrong in this system where the buyer of the software is harmed. The example in the article about Corel escrowing Word Perfect is a good one: What happens if they set the escrow value at $50M but only sell $40M of software? Then the early adopters lose out, since now they are stuck with a product as proprietary as MS Word, but not as popularly supported. I think that for this reason, many products will not be purchased until they have some serious momentum. This is a catch-22.
Another issue, as another poster mentioned, is that software that begins its life as proprietary can not build upon the free software foundations. The other main problem is that some software can't be open-sourced because it includes other proprietary components that are licensed, not bought. So, for the free-software community there is still an advantage (more free code, even if it's missing bits, is still good), but for the people who bought the software in escrow there is less advantage, since they can't actually use the opened source for their production work.
Yeah... I suppose I keep forgetting just how old NT4 is. But the point still remains that it wouldn't be so hard for MS to support as many processors as they wanted to.
Alpha
IA64
Um, at least until recently MS supported Windows on Alpha, but since Alpha looks like a dying processor (market-wise), it doesn't make sense for Windows to continue to support it. And Windows will run on IA64 (Itanium, right?). Guaranteed. I think it already DOES run on that. Also, Windows used to run on PPC so it could conceivably do so again, if the processor market changed somewhat (doubtful).
Exactly. And in this case, it's the copyright groups who are the chefs; they are always trying to raise the water temperature.
Personally, I'd rather pay a flat fee (i.e. levy) on my copyright infringement equipment and be given free-reign to copy whatever I want. I just don't want the copyright associactions to have it both ways: you have to pay to buy the album AND you have to pay to copy the album, which is illegal, so you can't copy the album. I don't want to pay twice, that's all. And I certainly don't want to pay (a levy) to be allowed to copy stuff, while being unable to copy stuff due to copy protection schemes that degrade my music/movie/whatever experience.
the standard religious view that lust is bad
Not all religions believe this. Furthermore, most religions don't believe that lust in general is bad, just in certain situations.
Regardless, this seems to work a lot like any addiction support group. You have a web of support to help you stay on the straight and narrow. Seems reasonable to me; assuming you WANT to be "straight and narrow".
I don't think paper is a good example to back up your concerns... paper is usually very easily recycled. Paper mills have always recycled lots of waste, for years. Paper is among the most recycled products there are, really. But I agree that recycling everything is pointless. For example, plastic containers, like the milk jugs you get from corner stores, or 2 Litre pop bottles. These things are essentially big bottles of air and recycling trucks burn so much gas hauling them around that it's actually harmful to the environment. Besides, residential waste is so miniscule compared to industrial waste, it's almost pointless to spend time dealing with it. If more time were spend dealing with industrial waste, the world would be a much better place.