I have been on the broadband since 1992 and used *nix and GPLd stuff on a daily basis even before that. It is truly disappointing to me to watch these young "GPL Talebans" coming out of the woodwork and calling out for a dictatorship of software licensing.
I used to be all gung-ho for GPL since I thought that it would be necessary for software freedom. Wrong. The freedom the GPL gives you is the "freedom" of a religious cult.
Avoid it all costs and use anything else instead of it. Even closed source is better.
The argument is so simple and brilliant that I can't but wonder why no-one else has said it out loud before.
If you license your software so that the only thing you can charge for is service, then why should you make the program easy to use? That would just deprive you of the only way you could make money with it. Combine that with the elitist geek bullshit about how "real men" should only use programs that are difficult to learn and use (emacs, for instance, is an extreme example of this - a bloated 23 MB package with absolutely incomprehensible key-bindings) and you see why OS desktops are so full of crap.
Please try to concentrate on using your mathematical genius to find secret messages in newspaper articles. That's the way the Islamic terrorists are communicating in order to place a nuke in the US.
printing pretty pictures, plots, and formulaes is absolutely essential to getting your work understood
Indeed.
And this brings us to the next problem. Figures in a LaTeX manuscript. For the two last weeks I have been preparing a Phys. Rev. Lett. manuscript. In order to get the length (4 pages) just right you basically have to use the RevTex package provided by APS.
I have got two figures and LaTeX is hell-bent on misplacing them. Either it places the figure and its caption text in separate columns or leaves one third of a column after a figure empty. And there seems to be no practical way of preventing this.
Furthermore, since *nix still lacks a program like Microcal's Origin with which to produce professional quality plots (no, gnuplot or Matlab will not do) makes it even more difficult to get your figures in the manuscript.
Xfs was running all right. Exactly the same thing has happened now twice and I have no idea what's going on. It's definitely not filesystem corruption.
My Mandrake 8.1 installation has now lost the default "fixed" font for no apparent reason. An installation straight out of box, no upgrades (yet) and on a third boot gdm won't start because a "fixed" font is missing. If I comment "Unix:/-1" out of XF86Config-4, X starts but fonts and fucked up.
If you want to typeset anything, it's one of very few games in town.
If I want to typeset something I don't want to learn a damn programming language.
Yeah, I know about lyx. It and all the other GUI frontends for (La)TeX are simply pathetic and they also force your layout into a pre-set, rigid form that you cannot modify yourself (Title, Abstract, Section titles, fonts etc.).
It's open source. It's multi-platform. It has a huge following
It is damn hard to learn and use, too.
I am a scientist. I cannot afford to waste my time learning a new obscure language just to produce my manuscripts. It's so much easier with MS Word. First of all, you get a complete control over the layout. Secondly, you don't have to read tons of manuals in order to use it.
Find a good use for the freely contributed code from one country: build bombs and bomb the shit out of the original authors with it.
I refused to serve my country's military in any form (even in unarmed service) and went to prison for six months for it. It will be a cold day in hell when I accept that my code is being used in warfare.
If you don't sign onto the service NYT loses information about who is hogging the bandwidth they are paying for and who is reading the information they pay people to gather.
And where does this "right" come from? You didn't produce the content and you didn't pay to make it public?
NYT content has been made available to you for free as a courtesy. Leeches like you who deny companies any information on the people who access their content will be the end of the internet.
I installed WinXP and Linux on my laptop and guess which partition I've been using most of the time. That's right. XP.
The seamless integration of an almost perfect GUI, applications and media just leaves Linux so far behind. Ever tried watching DVDs or listen to streamed internet radiostations on Linux?
Have you not experienced an application written in Java
Yeah, at work.
Are you sure Java has gotten faster and it's not simply the hardware that's caught up with Java's performance hog.
My main application at work, Matlab 6.x, has its front-end coded in Java. Otherwise it would be a nice IDE with an editor, debugger, file history trees and everything, but it is simply too slow for hardcore use on my five year old PII 300 MHz PC. I almost downgraded back to Matlab 5, but fortunately most of the windows could be disabled. The only remaining window, the command line interface, is sluggish in comparison to Matlab 5 but at least I can work with it. It still requires several hundreds of megabytes for the Java engine, though.
I wish guys like these would stop calling their pipe-dreams computing.
It gives the public the impression that it is somehow comparable to real computing. Well, it's not. It's not really computing unless it's done on silicon.
Publishing stories like these in dubious pseudoscientific magazines like New Scientist or Science only serves to give serious research a bad name.
You mean like it's 2002 and a technologically advanced nation like the USA does not have a computerized realtime database on her citizens? Surely there must be a database on the newborn, dead, immigrated/emigrated people and people who pay taxes?
Conducting the Census (which I guess is not even a real Census but statistical) by interviewing only a sample of people sounds like a total waste of taxpayers money to me. Even if it is made a paperless process.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been on the broadband since 1992 and used *nix and GPLd stuff on a daily basis even before that. It is truly disappointing to me to watch these young "GPL Talebans" coming out of the woodwork and calling out for a dictatorship of software licensing.
I used to be all gung-ho for GPL since I thought that it would be necessary for software freedom. Wrong. The freedom the GPL gives you is the "freedom" of a religious cult.
Avoid it all costs and use anything else instead of it. Even closed source is better.
The argument is so simple and brilliant that I can't but wonder why no-one else has said it out loud before.
If you license your software so that the only thing you can charge for is service, then why should you make the program easy to use? That would just deprive you of the only way you could make money with it. Combine that with the elitist geek bullshit about how "real men" should only use programs that are difficult to learn and use (emacs, for instance, is an extreme example of this - a bloated 23 MB package with absolutely incomprehensible key-bindings) and you see why OS desktops are so full of crap.
Please try to concentrate on using your mathematical genius to find secret messages in newspaper articles. That's the way the Islamic terrorists are communicating in order to place a nuke in the US.
Your friend, Parcher
Indeed.
And this brings us to the next problem. Figures in a LaTeX manuscript. For the two last weeks I have been preparing a Phys. Rev. Lett. manuscript. In order to get the length (4 pages) just right you basically have to use the RevTex package provided by APS.
I have got two figures and LaTeX is hell-bent on misplacing them. Either it places the figure and its caption text in separate columns or leaves one third of a column after a figure empty. And there seems to be no practical way of preventing this.
Furthermore, since *nix still lacks a program like Microcal's Origin with which to produce professional quality plots (no, gnuplot or Matlab will not do) makes it even more difficult to get your figures in the manuscript.
Xfs was running all right. Exactly the same thing has happened now twice and I have no idea what's going on. It's definitely not filesystem corruption.
My Mandrake 8.1 installation has now lost the default "fixed" font for no apparent reason. An installation straight out of box, no upgrades (yet) and on a third boot gdm won't start because a "fixed" font is missing. If I comment "Unix:/-1" out of XF86Config-4, X starts but fonts and fucked up.
Why do you hate us all so much?!
Such as (for Tru64/Digital Unix)?
If I want to typeset something I don't want to learn a damn programming language.
Yeah, I know about lyx. It and all the other GUI frontends for (La)TeX are simply pathetic and they also force your layout into a pre-set, rigid form that you cannot modify yourself (Title, Abstract, Section titles, fonts etc.).
It's open source. It's multi-platform. It has a huge following
It is damn hard to learn and use, too.
I am a scientist. I cannot afford to waste my time learning a new obscure language just to produce my manuscripts. It's so much easier with MS Word. First of all, you get a complete control over the layout. Secondly, you don't have to read tons of manuals in order to use it.
Then use gs to make a pdf from ps and try viewing it with Adobe Acrobat. Again, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
I hate pdf.
Find a good use for the freely contributed code from one country: build bombs and bomb the shit out of the original authors with it.
I refused to serve my country's military in any form (even in unarmed service) and went to prison for six months for it. It will be a cold day in hell when I accept that my code is being used in warfare.
If you don't sign onto the service NYT loses information about who is hogging the bandwidth they are paying for and who is reading the information they pay people to gather.
You have to get an account and agree with its terms in order to access the net? How is this any different?
And where does this "right" come from? You didn't produce the content and you didn't pay to make it public?
NYT content has been made available to you for free as a courtesy. Leeches like you who deny companies any information on the people who access their content will be the end of the internet.
Made me look, though.
Is it really so "lame" to register for a great service that you'd rather abuse it than use it?
I installed WinXP and Linux on my laptop and guess which partition I've been using most of the time. That's right. XP.
The seamless integration of an almost perfect GUI, applications and media just leaves Linux so far behind. Ever tried watching DVDs or listen to streamed internet radiostations on Linux?
You're only licensed to listen to the music from that particular CD you bought at the store.
Yeah, at work.
Are you sure Java has gotten faster and it's not simply the hardware that's caught up with Java's performance hog.
My main application at work, Matlab 6.x, has its front-end coded in Java. Otherwise it would be a nice IDE with an editor, debugger, file history trees and everything, but it is simply too slow for hardcore use on my five year old PII 300 MHz PC. I almost downgraded back to Matlab 5, but fortunately most of the windows could be disabled. The only remaining window, the command line interface, is sluggish in comparison to Matlab 5 but at least I can work with it. It still requires several hundreds of megabytes for the Java engine, though.
It gives the public the impression that it is somehow comparable to real computing. Well, it's not. It's not really computing unless it's done on silicon.
Publishing stories like these in dubious pseudoscientific magazines like New Scientist or Science only serves to give serious research a bad name.
Well, duh. You should win the Slashdot understatement of the year award for that one...
Huh?
You mean like it's 2002 and a technologically advanced nation like the USA does not have a computerized realtime database on her citizens? Surely there must be a database on the newborn, dead, immigrated/emigrated people and people who pay taxes?
Conducting the Census (which I guess is not even a real Census but statistical) by interviewing only a sample of people sounds like a total waste of taxpayers money to me. Even if it is made a paperless process.
Like the well documented and audited quality control of the open source community?
(Ab)use the system!
- Hysterical tone. - Too long (keep it under three paragraphs). - Strawman argumentation. - Computer code (at least make it pseudo-code!).
==> trash-bin.